Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. It's one of the more memorable tales of mistaken identity. Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and other explosives, had a brother who died in 1888, and as the story goes, the newspaper published Alfred's obituary by mistake. The obituary referred to Alfred as a merchant of death who had become rich from inventions that maimed and killed people. Those words purportedly had a strong effect on Alfred, so much so that in his will, Alfred designated a large part of his fortune for the creation and endowment of the famous Nobel Prize, which rewards people for their outstanding contributions to society. Well, whether or not that false obituary was ever published, and there is some doubt about it, the story raises a good question. If you could read your own obituary, what would it say?
What would your life be known for? Well, John MacArthur is looking at some key attitudes that should characterize your life as a member of the local church. Follow along now as he continues his series, The Anatomy of a Church. I've entitled this brief series, The Anatomy of a Church. The Anatomy of a Church. We've borrowed the biblical analogy of a body, and we've said that basically we could reduce the body to four elements.
This is not clinical, this is just for the sake of analogy. A body is skeleton, internal systems, muscles, and flesh. And so is a church that is the body of Christ. We said that there are some things that frame and form the church without which it would be a shapeless blob. There are some bottom line things, some non-negotiable, some irreducible minimums, some foundations, some framework things, some form and substance realities that must be at the very center of our life as a church.
And I suggested five of them. First is a high view of God. A church to be what God wants it to be must have as its focus God Himself. And there are a lot of other possible foci, if you will, but there's only one proper focus, and that's on God. In other words, as we focus on God, everything finds its proper place. There can be no compromise when God is all in all, and all we do is for His consummate glory. Now that is essentially the meaning of whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, do it all to the glory of God.
That's the focus of everything. And then we suggested, secondly, the absolute priority of Scripture because we cannot focus on God unless we know who He is and we do not know who He is unless we understand His revelation, which is the Word of God. So we begin with a high view of God and we affirm the absolute priority of Scripture, which reveals God. Thirdly, we are committed to doctrinal clarity, looking at God through His Word, drawing truth out of His Word. And then, fourthly, to personal holiness, applying that truth to life. And then, fifthly, spiritual authority, holding people accountable for the living out of that truth. Now these are framework things, high view of God, which means we are absolutely committed to the revelation which He has given of Himself, which means that we must clarify that and give it to folks in a practical, understandable way so that they can apply it in the matter of personal holiness and then bring that all under spiritual authority. Those are framework truths. Therefore, they must be preached, they must be preached, they must be taught, they must be modeled and patterned.
And they are continually needing to be reaffirmed. Now secondly, we talked about internal systems. A body has to have internal systems. You can't just have a skeleton and muscles, flesh.
You wouldn't have life. There has to be a flowing through of all the systems of the body. And I believe that's true in the church.
You can't just affirm solid doctrinal foundations. There has to be a life flow. And I believe that life flow is proper attitudes, proper attitudes. It's a battle for the mind, folks.
It really is. It's a battle for the mind. Because as a man, what, thinks in his heart, so is he.
It's a battle for the mind. And so what we are trying to do in the ministry is to get you to have proper spiritual attitudes. To cultivate in you right kind of thinking. That you may be, to put it in Pauline terms, renewed in the spirit of your mind. That you may, as Paul said to the Philippians, think on these things. That you may have a renewed mind. That you may put on the mind of Christ. That you may be spiritually minded.
All those are biblical phrases. In other words, we want to get you thinking right. To be honest with you, it isn't a question of trying to control your behavior. It's a question of trying to get a handle on your thinking, which will produce right behavior. You may be forced to do right things with wrong thoughts and motives and reasons and attitudes and all your right things are nothing more than hypocrisy.
That's all. Just hypocrisy. And so we don't major on forcing you to conform outwardly, but on the endeavor to create within your thinking right spiritual attitudes. And when you think right, you act right. So we're not just interested in programs.
We're not just interested in activities. We're not just interested in conformity to some kind of external code, but rather in cultivating internal attitudes that honor God. So the flowing through in the body of the systems is what it ought to be and the body is whole and healthy and productive and dynamic and rightly representative of its head, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now let me just review what we said in our last study together. The first and foremost attitude that needs to be cultivated is the attitude of obedience, of obedience. That is the sine qua non of all attitudes. It is the all-pervasive attitude. It is the attitude that says I will obey God at any cost. It is the attitude of no compromise. It is the attitude that says if God says it, that settles it, I'll do it. It is the attitude that doesn't negotiate with God, that doesn't justify sin, but it seeks always and only to do the will of the Lord. It is better than sacrifice.
That is, it is better than any external act of worship. It is internal obedience. And all right spiritual attitudes start there.
If you're not willing to obey God to start with, there's nothing going to come beyond that but difficulty, trial, negative circumstance. The second attitude we talked about was humility. Humility.
Obedience and humility. And that basically is the attitude that thinks other people are more important than I am. You're more important than I am. Your needs are more important than my needs. Your wants are more important than my wants. Your happiness is more important than my happiness. Your joy is more important than my joy. Your place is more important than my place. Your reputation is more important than mine.
All of those things. It's the selflessness of the Lord Jesus Christ who humbled Himself, Philippians chapter 2. That is an essential attitude because pride is such a devastating thing. Thirdly, we talked about the attitude of love, and love is humility in action. Love is simply humility doing things. Humility and love are inseparable, you see, because only humble people can love. I can't give myself to you unless I care more about you than I do me.
I can't abandon myself to your needs unless I really am humble. And so humility gives a launching pad for love. If humility is selflessness, then love is selfless service, selfless giving.
And then fourthly, we talked about unity. When you have people committed to obedience and you have people committed to love, because they have hearts that are humble, you will see the result which will be unity. Humility leads to love and love leads to unity. Because where people are all giving themselves away to others, there's marvelous unity.
You meet my needs, I'll meet your needs, and it goes on and on. And that kind of interchange is what builds the true one heart, one mind, one soul unity of which the Bible speaks. But it springs out of humility.
That's such a critical matter. So we talked about those first elements. Now let me go on and talk about a few more of these attitudes. Let's call the fifth one willingness to serve. Willingness to serve. Because it flows right out of what we've just said about love and humility and so forth.
And really is another way to say the same thing. Willingness to serve. Someone said to me the other day, you know, we don't go to your church anymore. We've gone to a small church where they need us.
People say that to me often and I don't quite... That's okay. Maybe the Spirit of God led them. God bless them. They're dear people and I'm sure the Lord led them there. But it isn't that we don't need you.
I mean, look at all of these people. You think they don't have needs? It isn't that the more people you have, the less needs you have. What people seem to mean is that they got programs over there and they don't have anybody to run them. And they need folks to help them with the program. And that might be right. But ministry is not necessarily related to church designed programs.
You got that one? It isn't. I mean, you could come here and say, well, we go to the church but we don't do... I mean, we don't do anything. We don't sing in the choir or teach a class or sweep the floor or do whatever.
We don't do anything. We go there and we just don't know whether there's a need. Take a look around you. All kinds of people with need.
All over the place. It all depends on your perspective, see. Go to 1 Corinthians for a minute, chapter 4, and I want to show some scriptures to you and then make a conclusion. 1 Corinthians 4. And Paul says this, let a man sow a count of us. In other words, when it comes to rendering a judgment about me and the ones with me, when it comes to saying, well, who was this guy, when it comes to writing my epitaph, if you will, when it comes to saying my eulogy, when it comes to reciting what contribution I made, when it comes to my time to be praised, would you please say this? He was a servant of Christ.
I like that. I can think of at least a half a dozen words in the Greek language for servant of which he uses the lowest one. The word huper etes, huper means under, etes from the word to row. An under rower. They had great hulking wooden ships. They had in the hull of those ships three tiers. They were called triremes, three tiers of slaves chained to their oars and they pulled those hulking masses through the seas.
The guys in the bottom were the under rowers. Paul says, look, when it comes time to evaluate the apostle Paul, don't name cathedrals after him. Don't even name a city in Minnesota after me, he says. Don't name school after me.
Don't give me an honorary doctorate. Just say he was a third level galley slave and bless his heart, he pulled his oar. Servant.
A lot of people want to be a hot shot. God wants people who pull the oar. In verse 2 he says, the key to this whole thing is that a man be found what? Faithful. Faithful. You don't want a clever rower who's got a new way to do it and meanwhile sheers off everybody else's oars in the process. You want a faithful rower.
That's it. Who sees himself as a servant. In verse 3 he says, with me? It's a very small thing that I should be judged by you or man's judgment. What are you saying? I'm not in this deal for your opinion. I'm not doing this to get accolades. I'm not serving the Lord Jesus Christ to be judged by you. I can't accept your judgment and I understand what he's saying.
I really do. You see people don't always know what's going on inside. They may praise you and you may have corrupt motives. They may curse you and you may have the purest motives in the world and you're struggling to get through your own humanness. I mean you don't really... sometimes you preach your heart out and you know it was terrible.
You missed it. You blew it. And I've had those times and gone away with tears because I just... I didn't do what I thought should honor God and you go away and some dear soul will say, marvelous, the greatest sermon you've ever preached. And you smile and shake their hand and say, thank you.
And you know they don't know. And other times, man, you've just been flying like an eagle. And you go down and someone says, you're not feeling well today, are you?
And you say, what? Man, I never... I never felt better. No, you didn't seem like yourself.
Kind of fumbled around. Then people criticize you and evaluate you, praise you, blame you, bless you, curse you. Paul says, I'm not getting into that game.
I just want to pull my oar. That's all. And I'm really not interested in what people say. He says they don't know the facts and I like this at the end of verse 3, and I'm not even judging my own self.
You know that? I can't even trust my own judgment. I'm so biased in my own favor. He says in verse 4, even when I don't know anything against myself, that doesn't justify me. I may not be uncovering all the rocks in my life.
I may think I'm doing good. That doesn't justify me. He that judges me is what? The Lord. The Lord. And so I'm going to judge nothing before that day when He comes and manifests the attitudes of the heart, the motives of the heart.
And when He sees their servant's heart, that's what I want. So He's called us to be third-level galley slaves, pull our oar, be faithful, not try to make a reputation, not even evaluate our own selves favorably, just pull our oar and let the Lord judge. That's why in Acts 20 He says, serving the Lord with all humility of mind. And we're right back to that humility.
These things are inextricably woven together. In fact, you could just about take any one of these attitudes and if you cultivated that one attitude in your life, the spin-off would be every one of these other attitudes would have to occur. You couldn't have love without humility. You couldn't have humility without love. You couldn't have true unity in the fellowship without love and humility. You can't truly serve with a servant's heart without love and you can't be a servant with a servant's heart without humility. It's all interwoven. It's as if the Lord is coming at the same issue from all different angles and if He could just get us to grab on to one, lock into it and concentrate on that, everything else would find its proper place. You say, well, what do you mean by a willingness to serve? I simply mean this.
I'm not talking about church program. Go with me to Romans chapter 12 for a moment. We've talked about motive. Now let's talk about function. In Romans chapter 12 verse 4, we pick up this body analogy again and it says, as we have many members in one body and all members have not the same function, so we being many are one body in Christ and every one members one of another, having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us.
You can stop there. So we have this body, right? The body has all different members like a human body and the church is the same way and every one of us has different gifts. And then He demands of us, if you have gifts of prophesying, then prophesy of ministry, then let us minister, teaching then teach, exhorting then exhort, giving then give, ruling, do it with diligence, showing mercy, do it with cheerfulness. In other words, He says, get on with it, man.
You don't need a program. If you're a believer, you have a God-given ability to minister and it needs to flow out of your life. It may be within a structure. Bless God, that's a wonderful way. It may be very, very personally, but a believer who's not ministering is a contradiction in terms because a believer is one indwelt by the Spirit of God, empowered by the Spirit of God for service and not to serve is to somewhere create a bottleneck. And to come to a church and say, well I came there but they've got all these people and I don't really know where I could serve. Listen man, if you're filled with the Spirit of God, He wants to cultivate through you a ministry that is absolutely essential.
Now it says here the word prophecy and then it talks about ministry. Those are very broad terms, teaching, very broad, exhorting, giving, ruling, showing mercy, very broad. Those are really not just narrow little tiny isolated things, but those are categories. Within the category of giving there's all kinds of ways to give.
Within the category of showing mercy, multitude of ways to show mercy. And the category of preaching and teaching, myriad ways to preach and teach and styles and so forth and so on. The point is this, these are categories of giftedness. And in your life and mine, the Lord has blended from those various categories a perfect blend and given us a gift that is ours alone that is the perfect blending together of those categories of giftedness. There are others listed in 1 Corinthians 12 also. So I see them as categories and out of them the Lord picks a dimension and mixes it with another and another and another. I look at my own life and I say obviously God has called me to preach and to teach and to lead and to exhort and to demonstrate the gift of knowledge perhaps. So He's picked this and that and this and He blends it so that every one of us becomes a spiritual snowflake, no two alike. And if you don't function, if you don't serve in whatever simple way you can, it's not the attitude that God would have.
And it's so easy to generate a spectator sort of thing. That's not it. This church has never been content with it. I remember years ago when Moody Monthly came out and wanted to do an article on our church. We were still over in the chapel, but we had people busting out all over the place and they wanted to do a thing on us and I didn't really know them in those days. It was long before I had written books for Moody Press and things. They came out and Lowell Saunders did an article on our church and after studying it and surveying it and interviewing folks, the title they gave to the article was The Church with 900 Ministers, because we had 900 people in those days and he said everybody's serving.
We had less program then than we do now in terms of formal programming, but everybody was after it. They were doing it. They were just doing it, ministering their gifts.
People were calling up and saying, is there anybody in the hospital I could go see? Can I help in the nursery? Can I go over there and help those dear ladies who are chasing those little guys all over the carpet? Can I move chairs? Can I clean restrooms?
Can I wash windows? I just want to use the gift of helps. Is there a place you could use somebody who wants to teach?
I'd love to learn if you train me. Is there a place you could put somebody who wants to reach people with the gospel, what we'd like to help? Or else we'd hear, hey, we've got a ministry going over here and it's marvelous and God's blessing it. We're using our gifts, glory to His name and all this. That's the way it ought to be in the church. And maybe when it gets big everybody thinks somebody else is going to do it, but the bigger it gets the greater the need is and we just need more folks being involved. But it isn't just that. It isn't that we need to do something to build the church, you know, quote, unquote, or to accomplish some program goal.
If you're a Christian and you're in the body of Christ, you've got to be doing your part. If you want to know joy, if you want to know blessing, if you want to be obedient, so many needs. Just start using your gifts.
It doesn't matter. You don't have to analyze your gift. You may never know what it is.
I don't know what my gift is other than I know I preach, I teach, I do a few things. I don't need to catalog the thing. You don't need a computer deal. You can send away. You get a deal, they'll send a computer printout on what your gift is. Yeah.
But that's ridiculous. Computer doesn't know. I've been watching myself for a long time and I'm not sure that I know the way God's blended it all together. I basically know what I don't do well, probably better than I know what I do. But the way I understand my gift is when I start to minister, I just turn around and look back and say, so that's what I do.
And when you get into flow of ministry and the power of the Spirit of God, you'll see what God will do through you. You know, there's no end to the need. I just heard the other day that 70% of the people over 18 in the San Fernando Valley are single.
Is that incredible? A lot of homes are just flying apart, aren't they? 70%. This is the swinger's age. Divorcees, single parents. Talk about needs. People, we have needs. Needs everywhere.
Needs all around our fellowship. I'll say another thing about single people while I'm talking about it. I think sometimes single people think the only thing in life for them is to get married.
Let me tell you, you have an alternative, a better thing than that. Read 1 Corinthians 7. Paul says, only get married if you have to.
I mean, if you can't get out of it. And if you don't have the gift of singleness and you just burn and you just got to get married, get married. But man, if you can stay single, stay single. I believe in our church, single people provide probably the greatest resource for spiritual ministry because they're not encumbered. It says in 1 Corinthians 7, 35, 36, that whole thing from 32 on, that single people care for the things of the Lord. Married people care for the family, their wives, their spouse, and all the needful things they care for. That's not wrong.
It's just that if you can be single, enjoy it and think about all the single people we need to reach. Listen, there are a myriad of things. Just cultivate whatever ministry God has put in your heart, God has gifted you for. This is Grace to You with John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. John calls his current study here on Grace to You, the anatomy of a church. John, I think we all know that we're never going to find a perfect church. There really is no such thing.
But for many people, it's hard to find any kind of faithful church. We got a call on our Q&A line that relates to that, so take a listen and then you can respond. My name is Bob. My question is this. I know we're supposed to fellowship, but what if churches in the area, you have problems, the messages you hear are not always in accordance with the Scriptures, and you feel uncomfortable listening to them, but there's nowhere to go except to move out of town? What do you do?
Thank you. Bob, that is a great question, and you're asking a question for hundreds of thousands of people. Let me give you a scenario. You're living in one of the seven churches in the book of Revelation, one of the defective churches, a church like Ephesus that had left its first love, a church that had compromised with the world, a church that had tolerated immorality, a church like Laodicea that was lukewarm, a church like Smyrna that was dead. And you're in town, and there is only one church. There are not two churches.
There's only one. What do you do? Well, our Lord said, blessed are those who have not stained their garments. Blessed are you who have been faithful. Hey, you stay, and you're faithful, and you pray, and you become a shining light for the truth, and you love those people, and you reach out to them, and you don't treat them with disdain, and you try in a gracious way to help the pastors and leaders. But mostly you are faithful to the Lord Jesus Christ, and who knows? Maybe the Lord uses you to change that church.
You don't want to become abrasive or rebellious, you don't want to overturn a thing, cause a revolution. Just be faithful and ask the Lord to change that church, and in His time and in His way, He may use you to do that. Thanks, John. And of course, friend, the more you know Scripture, the more opportunities you will have to influence your church. To help you grow in the Word, John's New Testament commentaries are excellent tools. To order yours, contact us today. Call 800-55-GRACE or log on to our website at GTY.org. And let me mention, if you order the complete MacArthur New Testament commentary series, you'll get a discount on each volume. So to order a volume or two, or the entire set, call us at 800-55-GRACE or go to GTY.org.
And while you're online, make sure you download the Grace to You Sermons app, which gives you immediate access to all of John's more than 3600 sermons right from your mobile device. Our website again, GTY.org. And friend, if, like Bob, you've got a question for John, call us on our Q&A line. The number is 661-295-6288. You can leave us a message with your question, and you might hear John's answer on a future broadcast. Again, the number for the Q&A line, 661-295-6288. Now for John MacArthur and our staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Remember to watch Grace to You television this Sunday on DirecTV channel 378, and then be here Monday as John helps you avoid simply going through the motions at church and shows you how to help your church be a place of genuine worship. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
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