Fundamental Priorities of a Good Church C

When you find a place that teaches the Word, you'll find a place where doctrine is clear. You'll find a place where holiness is pursued. You'll find a place of spiritual authority, all very, very essential in your spiritual development and to the glory of God. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Imagine yourself standing before a thousand college students trying to steer them toward spiritual growth.

What would you say? Well, John MacArthur found himself in that situation at a chapel service for the Master's University where he serves as chancellor. What topic did he choose? What message related to Christian growth did he want those young people to learn? The answer, how to choose a good church. Hard to overstate just how important that decision is to your spiritual growth.

That's certainly true for college students, but it's also true for you and your family, no matter your stage of life. So here's John now to help you know what to look for in a church. The church scene is frankly frightening. In the thousands of letters that we get at Grace to You every...well, every week, I would say that the commonest complaint that we receive is from people who cannot find a church where they feel the truth of God is honored and ministry is done in a biblical way.

This is no small frustration. It's not that there aren't many churches, there are lots of churches. It's trying to discern what is a good church, what is a right church.

And I want to help you with that. I want to talk about what a church should be. The first thing you look for in a church is a high view of God...a high view of God...a high view of God. Proverbs 9, 10 says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Everything starts with fearing God.

That's the beginning of everything. And that's crystal clear in Scripture. The holiness of God is the first and central element in the church. The glory of God, the exaltation of God. There's a second and I think equally critical focus if you are looking for a church, if you want a church to be what it should be and if you want to bring to your own church experience what is necessary, not just a high view of God but a high view of Christ...a high view of Christ.

And I don't know that I need to beg that issue or to say too much about it, it should be pretty apparent to all of us. Look for a church where Jesus Christ is exalted, not where somehow they sort of sneak Him in here and there. I remember seeing a program at a large seeker-friendly church and during this program there was...that was strange, there was music and there was even some cursing and very kind of non-Christian event and the idea...this was done in the church, people were brought to this thing and it was...there was really nothing Christian about it and at the end, a statement was made and this is a quote, in some way, shape or form, Jesus has touched all our lives.

Good night. Well I don't even know what that means, in some way, shape or form, Jesus has touched all our lives. It doesn't mean anything.

But I suppose that was some effort to, I don't know, sanctify the event. One thing you're going to find in the New Testament church is the centrality of Jesus Christ. He is not an addendum. He is not a P.S.

He is not a postscript at the end of the program. He is not sort of stuck in at the end after you have been the focus of the preacher's attention. That's why if I had my choice, I would rather preach the gospels than any other part of the New Testament because...and I think that's why the bulk of the New Testament is the gospels. And the gospels are the life of Jesus Christ, the life and work of Christ. And the Old Testament, Jesus said, are those that speak about Me. Jesus Christ is the center of all our worship.

There wouldn't be any worship without Him. And I just...I'm saddened, I listen to TV preachers who talk about all kinds of things, about people's problems and needs and I just don't sense the centrality of Christ. If you preach the gospels, it's Christ in every verse. If you preach the book of Acts, it's the work of Christ through the Holy Spirit in the church. If you go to the book of Romans, it's the great treatise on the meaning of the sacrifice of Christ. If you go to the book of Hebrews, it's the glory of the great High Priest. If you go to the book of Revelation, you're going to see the glory of the returning and exalted Christ and He is the theme of Scripture. There must be a high view of Christ.

And I don't mean that in some esoteric sense or some sense of respect. I mean that in terms of a passion on the part of the worshiper. I love to sing hymns about Christ. I love to sing songs about Christ. I love to preach about Christ. There's no greater subject than Christ to preach on.

I would...I find it almost impossible to give myself to speaking about issues that aren't related either to the greatness of God or the person of Christ, or the work, of course, of the Holy Spirit. But I'm saddened by the fact that the glory of Christ has been diminished in churches that are so focused on the people. Turn in your Bible for a minute to Philippians chapter 3 and I can comment on this briefly. And this is a familiar portion of Scripture, Philippians chapter 3, so familiar I go back and read it all the time. It's basically fallen out of my Bible here. Philippians chapter 3, well we can pick it up, you know, you know verses 3 through 6 where Paul talks about all of his accomplishments as a religious Jew.

He, verse 4, talks about his confidence in the flesh, circumcised of the nation Israel, tribe of Benjamin, Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee as regards the Law, persecutor of the church which defines his zeal as to the righteousness which is in the Law, at least outwardly, certainly not inwardly, he was blameless. And all of that he had spent all his life accumulating up until his true conversion. But I just...I think it's such a powerful thing in verse 7, whatever things were gained to me, those things I have counted as a loss for the sake of Christ.

Spends his whole life accumulating all this, all this self-righteousness, all this religiosity. And then he says, I met Christ and it was nothing but loss. I had put it in my gain column, you know, like a accountant would do on the prophet side.

I put it in the gain column as if it was advantageous to me. And I met Christ and I realized it was all loss because all efforts at self-righteousness are damning efforts and they don't accumulate anything helpful. So he says it was all loss. And then in verse 8 he says, more than that I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. Now there is a statement that at some point in your Christian life you have to come to grips with. I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them but excrement is the Greek word in order that I may gain Christ. Everything in this world is in the King James, dung, manure compared to Christ. I mean, that is an incredible statement.

I don't care what it is. Your worldly accomplishments, your achievements, your material possessions, your career, whatever it is you own, all of that and even your own sense of well-being, your own confidence, your own self-esteem. Paul says, all the best about me, all that I spent all my life accumulating, a reputation. And he had a noble reputation. He was...he was a funded persecutor, funded by Jewish money to persecute and kill Christians. He was considered a noble defender of Judaism.

When it came to his religious achievements, nobody could give a more impressive list. And he said, it's all manure compared to knowing Christ. And the question that rises out of that is how important to you is it to know Christ? He says here, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. And yet in another place, you remember he said this, that I may know Him, that I may know Him. Go down to verse 10, that I may know Him. What are you talking about, Paul? You just said you know Him, now you say you want to know Him. What is he talking about here?

He's saying I know Him but the knowing is not sufficient. I want to know the power of His resurrection. I want to know the fellowship of His sufferings. I want to be conformed to His death.

What do you mean? I want to really know Him. I want to know Him better than I could ever know Him, knowing what I now know.

You ought to go to church and say the goal of going to this place is I want to know Christ better than I know Him. I want to know Him far better than I know Him. I want to know everything about Him. I want to know everything about His character, everything about His mind, the mind of Christ. I want to know everything about His attitudes.

I want to know every word He said. I want to understand it. I want to grasp it. I want to understand the depth of His compassion, the greatness of His affection, His love. I want to understand the zeal that He had for the truth and I want to understand the heart of anger that went out against sinners when He made a whip and cleaned the temple. I want to understand every nuance that the Apostle Paul unfolds in the Scriptures concerning the meaning of the death of Jesus Christ.

I want to understand that. I want to know the same power that raised Him from the dead. I want to understand that power and know it as He lives in me. I want to know the fellowship of His sufferings. What does He mean by that? He said, I want to suffer the way that He suffered.

I want to have a partner in my pain. I want to have Him understand that I am suffering for the same truths and the same realities for which He suffered, not atoning for sin, but suffering the hatred of those who resented the truth. Paul said, I want...I want to be conformed even to His death. I want to die the way He died, faithful to God for the truth. I want to know Him and I question whether in contemporary evangelicalism there's very much of this desire in the hearts of people to know Christ like this.

Can you actually look at all the stuff in your life and say it's just newer to me? What really drives me is to know Christ...to know Christ. As I said a moment ago, I particularly love to preach the gospels. It takes me a long time to go through the gospels, but I have to tell you this, slower is better than faster, folks, because I don't want to miss anything. And one of the deep regrets of my life, and it is a serious regret that I live with and I don't often talk about it, but it is one of the really deep aches in my heart and it's been there for many, many years is that I know things about Christ from my study of Scripture that I don't have the time or the opportunity to tell other people. And that's one of the...you talk about preparing a message for me, I never prepare...I never studied the Bible to make a sermon, I studied the Bible to understand it. And having understood it, I can usually think of something to say. But what comes out of that sermon might be a tenth of what I have come to understand. Sometimes it just sort of leaks out in conversations and occasionally places like this when I share those things.

But it's one of the frustrations. Somebody asked me about the book I wrote, The Battle for the Beginning. And somebody was, you know, saying they appreciated the book and they asked me how I felt about the book and I said, I'm not happy about it.

I really am very unhappy about that book, it bothers me a lot. And they said, why? And I said, because when I went through Genesis 1 to 3, the book should have been this big and it was this big and there's all that that nobody's going to know.

That's very frustrating to me. So as I said, you're fortunate that I don't even go slower and longer. Somebody said, my preaching is like my golf, long and to the right and always near a hazard. But I'm not running out of material, I'm running out of time...I'm running out of time.

I'll be dead before I can get to it all. And I will have...and this is interesting for a preacher, I will have so many things that I will die knowing but never having told you. Well, let me give you a third thing to think about when you're thinking about a church and where its focus should be. And by the way, a church that's consumed with the glory of God and the majesty of Christ is really going to be a wholesome, healthy, holy place. But there's another thing that is obvious and I mean, I hardly need to say it and I'll just say it in passing, you need to be in a place where the Scripture is exalted...where the Scripture is exalted, not where somebody's ideas are punctuated with Bible verses. Psalm 138 2 says, God has exalted His Word above His name. Jesus said, we live by every word that comes out of the mouth of God, quoting from Deuteronomy. You need to be in a place where the Word of God is proclaimed and explained. I have been saying the meaning of the Scripture is the Scripture and nothing is as powerful. When you understand the meaning of Scripture, you have just tapped into the most powerful truth in the universe. It doesn't make any sense to be in any place where the Word of God is not proclaimed. You know, 1 Timothy, over and over again, Timothy is instructed about the Word and about how important it is to be faithful to the Word.

And in chapter 3, there's a reason, sort of summing it up, he says, verse 15, the church of the living God which is the pillar and support of the truth. We live in a whole universe of lies. Satan is the father of lies.

He fathered them in the Garden, as we all know. The world is full of lies. There has to be some place where you can go and hear the truth.

Not man's ideas, not man's impressions, not man's insights, but the truth...the truth...the truth. It was some years ago when the publisher of the LA Times and five or six other national newspapers and the owner of a dozen network-affiliate television stations took me to lunch and asked me a question. He said, I just...you know, I've come to listen to you a few times and I just want to ask you a question. You have this audience, you have this influence, why don't you ever give your opinion on things? And we were sitting at lunch and I said, you really want another opinion?

You don't have enough? Because you really benefit by another opinion? You've got a whole opinion section in your paper every day?

You want more? Well, he said, come to think of it, it's a good point. I said, however, I would be very happy to write a column for you that's not my opinion. Well, whose opinion would it be? It wouldn't be anybody's opinion, it would be the truth of God. I'd be happy to do that. Never heard back about that.

I'm not about opinions. It's all about giving voice to God. I was sitting in one of those...they used to have these...what they called serendipity sessions. It was group therapy.

I'm not real big into group therapy. People were sitting around saying all kinds of things they shouldn't say. And so they said, you know, we want you to get in touch with your deepest inner self. And so they passed out little paper cups to everybody and they said, due to that cup, what will be a representation of how you view yourself? So I have this little cup in my hand and I'm sitting next to a guy, he's a pretty complex guy, and he's making an origami thing, you know, like the Japanese deal out of it, like the bird they make out of paper.

He's... I'm sitting there thinking, what do I do with this cup? And they give us like 45 minutes. So I just sat there and watched all these guys with the nuances, you know, trying to reflect all the complexity of their personality. Finally it struck me. I just punched the bottom out. I was done. And then they came around and they decided to ask certain people to explain themselves with their cup. This is kind of an epiphany for me at the moment.

And they picked me. So I said, well, pretty simple, I just see myself as a channel through which the truth of God can flow. Oh, brother, how boring, how one dimensional.

And that's how I see myself. Every opportunity for me, whether it's at the college, or the seminary, or Grace to You, Grace Church, is the same. It's about the truth. It's about the truth and it's about divine truth. And divine truth is what energizes me. Divine truth is what's been deposited to me. It's a treasure that I have to guard and it's a message I have to proclaim and I'm accountable to God for doing it. But it's not something I do reluctantly, it's something I do passionately. And when you choose a church, you find a church where the people who are shepherding, people who are preaching and teaching have this passion to proclaim divine truth accurately, faithfully.

Anything else is a misrepresentation of their responsibility. I remember reading about a Puritan who...this is an American Puritan back in the east coast in the 1800s who took a church and told the people he was going to preach through the Bible and the leaders of the church were so mad, they locked the pews. Have you ever been in an old church in New England where they had a swinging door and a lock and people bought their section like box seats at the Dodger Stadium and the rich people bought the boxes up front and the poor people got the little ones in the back and a guy stood above with a little long fishing rod with a ball on the end to whack kids in the head who talked?

That's how it was. Well, these guys were so mad that this preacher was going to preach through the Scriptures that they locked the pews so that the people who wanted to hear him had to stand around the perimeter. So he preached to people standing around the perimeter through the Scriptures for nine years before they unlocked the pews. That's commitment. That's commitment. He knew what he was supposed to do and he did it.

Now I admit you can get carried away. There was another Puritan who came to a church in New England and said he was going to preach through Isaiah. He preached there over 25 years and died in chapter 8.

That's too slow. Well, you understand. When you find a place that teaches the Word, you'll find a place where doctrine is clear. You'll find a place where holiness is pursued.

You'll find a place of spiritual authority. All very, very essential in your spiritual development and to the glory of God. Father, we thank You for our time and reminding us of what is Your desire for Your church. We want to exalt You and Your Son and Your Word.

And we need to do a little inventory in our lives to find out if that's really important to us. We want to know You, O God, and Christ, and the Word. For in that knowledge comes our soul satisfaction, comes our power, comes our joy. Put us in places like that all through our lives and even use us as leaders to assure that the church is what it should be. And we thank You in our Savior's name.

Amen. That's John MacArthur speaking at the Master's University where he serves as Chancellor, showing over 1,000 students and showing you the fundamental priorities of a good church. John's lesson today on Grace to You comes from his study titled, What to Look For in a Church. Well, John, so far in this study, you've pointed out the priorities a healthy church must have—a commitment to Scripture and a commitment to true worship. And with that in mind, a practical question I have, what should a believer do if he can't find a church with those priorities? Well, you could relocate to Southern California and come to Grace Community Church. We would throw our arms open and welcome you. That is what I did.

Yeah. Well, I mean, look, you would be in a situation like the people in Asia Minor in the New Testament when the Lord wrote the seven letters to the churches. There was one church in the city, and, you know, the Lord's comment was, blessed are those who've kept their garments white. So if you can't find a church, if there's not an available church that's faithful in its commitment to Scripture and worship, you have to be faithful to Scripture and worship, and maybe your faithfulness will start a real movement, a spiritual movement, a revival of sorts. Somebody's got to do it right, and you may feel like you're kind of an isolated person and you don't have a lot of influence, but it's amazing how much God can do through a person who is committed to him totally and completely. So if that's the only option you've got, you know, then use that church as a means to minister to the people who desperately need the Word of God and need to understand true worship. But I do want to remind you, a free copy of the booklet, the title of the booklet is Your Local Church and Why It Matters, and it does matter.

Thousands, I think if not even millions of people still attend church every week, but only a small percentage join a church. That's really sad. That's part of the don't get involved mentality of our contemporary society. You need to join.

You need to be a part of it. You need to be faithful. No church is going to be perfect, because we're not perfect, but it'll be better if you add your spiritual gifts and your prayers and your ministry to those who are already there. The New Testament doesn't even understand or know anything about a Christian who's not an active member of a local church. I take a look at Scripture on this in the booklet, Your Local Church and Why It Matters, free of charge to anyone who asks.

That's right, friend. It's more important to be part of a faithful church than you may realize. This free booklet can help you see why, so ask for Your Local Church and Why It Matters when you contact us. Just call 800-55-GRACE or visit our website, gty.org. That number again, 800-55-GRACE and the website, gty.org. You can also email your request to letters at gty.org or use regular mail.

Our address there is Grace to You, Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412. And again, the booklet to ask for Your Local Church and Why It Matters. Also, just a reminder about the many ways you can listen to John's verse-by-verse teaching like you heard today. Just go to gty.org and click on the Sermons tab at the top of the page. You can download any of John's sermons in MP3 and transcript format.

That's over 3,500 messages. You'll also have access to resources including blog articles, the MacArthur Daily Bibles reading plan, and helpful daily devotionals. It's all available for you at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and our entire staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Be sure to watch Grace to You television this Sunday on DirecTV channel 378 or watch online at gty.org. And to find out why you need to love the church, tune in tomorrow for another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.