We get so program oriented, we get so good at what we do, that prayer has no part except when the disaster hits. There needs to be in our hearts a sense of insufficiency to know what to do and how best to do it that drives us to dependency on God, where in the midst of our prayers we call out for that which Jesus wants done. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Self-reliance, rugged individualism, a do-it-yourself attitude. Characters with those qualities often appear in books, TV shows, movies, and they are captivating heroes who take on the hardest challenges and the toughest battles, and through it all, they remain mavericks who don't need advice or help from anyone else. Now, that sort of lone wolf hero may have its place in fictional stories, but what about in real life, particularly your spiritual life? Can you live a life that is pleasing to God without input from anyone else?
And how might that sort of I-can-take-care-of-it-myself attitude actually harm your local church? Consider those questions as John MacArthur continues his series called The Anatomy of a Church. And here's John with today's lesson. One of the most powerful and wonderful presentations of the worthy lamb, the Son of God, is given in Revelation chapter 1. And as we come to the study of the Word of God, I would like to invite you to open your Bible to Revelation chapter 1. And I want to share with you the first vision of the Lord Jesus Christ given in this great revelation. Beginning in Revelation chapter 1 verse 9, we read, I, John, who also am your brother and companion in tribulation and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was in the isle that is called Patmos for the Word of God and for the testimony of Jesus Christ.
I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day and heard behind me a great voice as of a trumpet saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last. And what thou seest, write in a book and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia unto Ephesus and unto Smyrna and unto Pergamum and unto Thyatira and unto Sardis and unto Philadelphia and unto Laodicea. And I turned to see the voice that spoke with me and being turned, I saw seven golden lampstands. And in the midst of the seven lampstands, one like the Son of Man clothed with a garment down to the foot and girded about the breasts with a golden girdle, His head and His hair were white like wool and white as snow and His eyes were like a flame of fire and His feet like fine bronze as if they burned in a furnace and His voice like the sound of many waters.
And He had in His right hand seven stars and out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword and His countenance was as the sun shineth in its strength. John has an incredible vision and what he sees is none other than the Lord Jesus Christ, the Alpha and the Omega. And he sees Christ in this vision moving among seven golden lampstands. They represent the seven churches in verse 11. The seven stars in His hand according to verse 20 are the seven ministers of those churches.
So what do you see here? You see Christ moving among His churches and the seven churches of Asia Minor listed here to which letters are written in chapters two and three are representative of all kinds of churches throughout all of church history. And here you have a picture of the Lord moving among His churches, moving among His people, caring for the church which He purchased with His own precious blood.
And that hasn't changed. I believe the Lord is as alive and active in His church today as He was then. And the vision that John has is not just a vision for that place and that time but a vision for all the time of the church, that Christ is ever alive and moving in His church. And you notice in verse 13 that He is garmented down to the foot girded with a golden girdle. If you look closely at that, you will find that that could be the garb of a prophet. It could be the garb of a priest.
It could be the garb of a king. And is it not fitting that He indeed is king and prophet and priest? Moving in His church as the sovereign, moving in His church as the one who speaks from God and who takes the people to God.
In verse 14 we see His head and His hair as white as wool, as white as snow, indicating His absolute and utter pure holiness. And so the holy Son of God, perfect King, Priest, Prophet moves in His church. And as He moves in His church, it says in verse 14, His eyes were like a flame of fire. And that is a penetrating gaze. As He moves in the church, His eyes are searching out its strengths and weaknesses.
His eyes are penetrating behind what appears on the surface to affirm and ascertain what is really going on. Oh, what a marvelous thing it is to know that Christ is alive in His church. That this is not our work, it's His work.
That it is not determined by our cleverness or left to our devices to figure out what is being done right or what should be done. But Christ is alive in His church and He searches with a penetrating gaze. And His feet are like fine bronze as if they burned in a furnace and His voice like the sound of many waters. And these are the feet of judgment and the voice of judgment. When He finds that in the church which displeases Him, He comes in judgment. He speaks in judgment to that church.
You say, why are you reading that? Because I think it's a good place to start today to remember this, that we are the church that Christ is building, right? We are the lampstand that Christ is caring for. We are the light, as it were, that Christ is trimming.
And He does so with a penetrating gaze. And He seeks to find that which in us is not right. And to bring against that the thunder of His own voice, the strength of His own chastening judgment. Because He seeks to refine us.
And if we resist the refining, then He will remove His blessing. And one of the mixed passages of all scripture is Revelation 2 and 3 where you find some churches who are commended but most who are condemned. For the Lord did not find there what He sought to find. Grace Church stands in a sense in Revelation 1. And Christ moves through this church. And I believe He commends and condemns. I believe He searches out and blesses.
I believe He searches out and chastens. As He discovers things that are according to His will and things that are not. And so it is my prayer that as I stand in these days and share with you the thoughts of my own heart.
And I'm just sharing my heart. But I really believe that as I'm doing this, I stand in a place where Christ would stand. I stand in His behalf to tell you what His searching eyes wish to see. And see sometimes and do not see other times.
Now I'm not under some illusion that I am an anointed prophet of God distinct from any other. I just believe that the Spirit of God has brought us to this time in our church and the Spirit of God has prompted us to this particular series. And we've already talked about the skeleton. We've talked about if we are like a body, if we are using the analogy of a body and we're like a body, we have to have a skeleton. And we talked about those skeletal things, a high view of God, the absolute priority of scripture, doctrinal clarity, personal holiness and the idea of spiritual authority. And then we moved into the internal systems, the flowing through of the life principles.
Like in a body, the body is dependent for life on the flowing through of those systems. So we are dependent on certain spiritual attitudes. And those attitudes have to flow through the body.
And we've been suggesting to you the attitudes that are most critical. We've talked about obedience, which seems to me to be a rather supremely important attitude. The attitude of humility, of love, unity, service, joy, peace, thankfulness, self, discipline, accountability and I think last time we ended with forgiveness. Now all of these are attitudes that must be cultivated in God's people. And when the Lord moves through His church, I believe those are the things He looks for. To see a people who have an attitude of love, an attitude of peace, an attitude of discipline, an attitude of obedience, of service, of joy, of thankfulness, of peace, all of those things.
Searching out behind the exterior to see what's in the heart, for the Lord searches the heart. Number 12 in my list, not that that matters, is dependence. Dependence. If you wanted to put it in negative terms it would be the attitude of insufficiency. Or the sense that you are not sufficient.
So that there is in you a basic dependence. And this doesn't come easy to capable people. It doesn't come easy to effective God blessed churches like ours.
See our church is sort of well oiled in a sense. I mean the machinery moves, things get done. We have competent people. We have hard working people. We have creative people.
We have a past program development that says man we're doing it, see. And we can get to the point where we lose the sense of insufficiency. We lose the sense of dependence because we figured out how to do it. And what you're really doing if you're not careful is eliminating God. And you come to the point in your ministry where by virtue of the strength of your work force and your creative people and the program that's already in place you just say goodbye to God and take off. But for us who have so much, who so very much have been blessed by God like Israel of old as we mentioned who having come into the land and inherited a land we really didn't work for and partaken from wells we didn't dig we forget God. And we just move out in a flurry of activity and great ideas and bright hopes and challenging thoughts. And I guess what I'm saying people is that we really don't want to do anything ever that we don't believe is God's perfect purpose for us. And so we must maintain an attitude of dependence, dependence.
And we could talk about it from a lot of angles. Psalm 19 David says keep me back from presumptuous sins. It's so easy to just blast ahead without really being dependent on God without searching for the heart of God and the mind of God.
You can sit in a meeting and decide to do this or decide to do that. And where is the prayer and where is the patience and where is the enduring communion with God until the heart is not only free to do it but has the sense of doing the work of God. I've always throughout all my ministry been fearful that I would do something God wasn't a part of. I always want to be sure that I'm just going along at the same pace in the same direction with the same goal that He has because Christ is building His church and I don't want to compete with Him.
That's a loser. But we can so easily run into presumptuous sins. Great idea and off we go. I remember when I was in seminary in Talbot Seminary everybody had to preach in those days twice in chapel. They have more students now and I don't think everybody has to but everybody did. And when we preached the whole faculty sat on the platform behind us and they had eight and a half by seventeen criticism sheets. And the whole time you were preaching they were filling them out. Which was a good exercise for them because it kept them awake during the more boring sermons I think.
But they would sit there and you'd hear the paper shuffle and if you were ten minutes in and the guy was already flipping his paper over you knew you were really in hot water, right? But you did your best to preach. And I was assigned second Samuel chapter seven. And second Samuel chapter seven, I've never forgotten it. I mean I wanted that sermon down so pat when I preached that thing that I memorized every single thing in it. Even my pauses. I think my breathing I had figured out.
I was really going to be careful on that one. And I got into the chapter and David looks at his palace. He says I've got this beautiful palace. And he looked at the house of God. God was living in a tent in those days you know, tabernacle.
He says it is not fitting that God should dwell in a tent while I dwell in this massive palace. He says I will build a house for God. Commendable, huh? Very commendable. And so he goes to Nathan the prophet and he says Nathan this is my desire. And Nathan says commendable. Go do whatever's in your heart David.
A great idea. And God put down the big hook and yanked Nathan over and said Nathan you didn't check in. Who told you to tell him that? He will never build my house for he is a man of bloody hands. It was Solomon who would build the house. But when God took away something he put something in its place and he gave to David a wonderful promise. So I preached on the sin of presuming on God.
Of venturing into good things that God isn't interested in. It was really a life changing experience for me because that message has stuck in my mind through the years. It's an incidental footnote however that as I was leaving Dr. Feinberg handed me his criticism sheet. He was the dean.
Folded over. And I had felt so good about that message because it spoke to my heart. And I opened it up and he hadn't bothered to check off anything.
He just wrote across the front. You missed the entire point of the passage. That was a bad day.
A very bad day. And a very good lesson. He thought I should have preached on the kingdom promise.
It was a choice. I knew the passage promised the kingdom but I felt my own heart needed to hear about presumption. Because I tend to be that kind of person who runs really fast in a new direction and maybe has a great ideas or great vision for what could be done.
And I need to back up to the point of dependence. And sense an insufficiency that drives me to seek the heart and mind of God. All you got to do is start something by yourself that God isn't in and just get out on that limb and watch it get sawed off.
A few times. And it helps to cure you. What I'm really talking about is prayer.
The church must have a spirit of dependence. People look we haven't arrived. I mean we walk. We got all this stuff. We come here. It's all for us.
Ready to go. All these wonderful programs and ministries. And we can get the idea that we just don't need to depend on God anymore but it can be gone that fast.
There must be a sustained dependence. Look at me for a moment at John 14 just to touch this concept of dependence from another angle. In John 14, you know the situation I'm sure in John 14. The Lord is leaving.
It's the upper room. The last discourse of our Lord with His disciples. And He's promising them all kinds of wonderful things because they're really afraid. They have depended on Him for everything.
Everything. They have followed Him for three years. He made food that fed them. He caught fish so they could pay their taxes. He told them everything they needed to know about the kingdom, about God, about man, about sin, about righteousness. They were utterly dependent on Him. And now He was going away and they were troubled. They were deeply troubled because they had awakened to their dependence. They needed Him desperately. I mean even when He was there, they floundered rather constantly, didn't they? And so they knew their dependence. And when He announced to them that He was going away, it was panic time.
Really panic time. But in the midst of that, He makes a promise to them that is so marvelous. It's in verse 13 and 14 of John 14. And whatever you shall ask in My name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you shall ask anything in My name, I'll do it.
You can't get a better promise than that, can you? Anything we want to ask in His name, He'll do it. You say, well what does it mean? Anything you ask?
Well, no, anything you ask in His name. You say, well what does that mean? Stick on the end of your prayer in Jesus' name, amen, and God has to do it?
Some people think that. That isn't what it means. In the Old Testament, God said, My name is I am that I am. In other words, My name is all that I am.
And the name of Christ is all that He is. So you ask anything consistent with who Jesus is, and what His work is, and what His will is, and what His desire is, and what His plan is, and what His purpose is, and He'll do it. It doesn't mean you can ask for anything and slam that on the end of your prayer and get it. It means that when you ask consistently with His will and His purpose, then He will do it. And so we need to learn as believers to live in a life of constant dependency, the prayer of which is, Oh Lord, whatever is in your will to do, do it.
Do it. So there's no bitterness if it doesn't come off, if it doesn't get done, if it doesn't happen, if we're dependent on Him to energize it and bring it to pass only if it's in line with His perfect will. And you see, this is the way the Father is glorified, because then the Father is doing what the Father wants to do for His own glory. And then the ministry that's being carried on is the ministry of God in the name of the Son. And beloved, that is what I want in this church. I don't want the ministry of clever men.
I don't want the ministry of creative people. We want the ministry of the Spirit of God in the name of the Son of God for the glory of God Himself, don't we? And I'm talking to you just in a general perspective sense, but there needs to be in our hearts a sense of insufficiency to know what to do and how best to do it that drives us to dependency on God where in the midst of our prayers we call out for that which Jesus wants done.
So important. It's the heart of the disciples' prayer. When they came to Jesus and said, teach us to pray, He said, pray like this. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. In other words, glorious be your name, holy be your name, set apart be your name, unique be your name. In other words, Lord, all we really want is for you to be glorified, for your name to be exalted, for all that you are and all that you will and all that you desire to come to pass. Then thy kingdom come. You do your work, your way and your kingdom.
Thy will be what? Done on earth as it is in heaven. And so that prayer begins not with give us, give us, give us, but hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done. And until we've gotten that perspective in place, we have no right to ask for anything. And so we are taught I believe there to pray in a dependent way, in a sense of insufficiency that cries out for God to do His work in His way. And that's always been our desire here. That's always been our goal is that Christ would be building His church and that we would just be being part of that. And I worry sometimes that we get so program oriented, we get so good at what we do, we get so far down the line with our plans that prayer has no part except when the disaster hits. It's after the fact.
Whoops! Get us out of this one, Lord, and we probably wouldn't be in it if we'd have asked. I don't know about you, but I don't want anything from me that God doesn't want from me, do you?
Nothing. And so I think there has to be an attitude of dependence. And bless God there has been, and I only encourage you that there be that attitude more and more. We have depended on God. We have depended on His Word. We have depended on prayer.
But we need more. I think maybe we're caught up in the sort of the maylou of contemporary Christianity where we work a whole lot and pray very little. There's nothing more wonderful than having spent time in prayer to enter into something and sense that tremendous freedom that comes to the heart that knows it's walking down a path side by side with a Savior whose will is being expressed.
You're listening to Grace to You with John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. John's current study is titled The Anatomy of a Church. Today John talked about depending on Christ, relying on Him to build the church, and certainly Christ is the head of the church, but he delegates responsibility. And with that in mind, John, I'm wondering, how can a congregation know who should be doing what? Well, can I just say a word about Christ as the head of the church?
That just is so foundational, so obvious. That's repeated by the Apostle Paul in a number of passages in the New Testament that Christ is the head of the church. The Bible even says that Christ, who is the head of all things, all things, everything that exists, is given to the church as its head. So the one who is the head of all things has been given as the head of the church.
Unparalleled authority over everything, and certainly over the church. What that means is the church must operate under his leadership, under his commands, under his will, under his mandates. No man is the head of the church. No pope is the head of the church. No council is the head of the church.
No group of elders is the head of the church. No self-appointed pastor is the head of the church. Jesus Christ is the head of the church.
How does he exercise his headship? By proclaiming his word. And so when we think of the church, we think of one thing. What is the master's plan for the church? What is Christ's plan for the church? I've written a book by that title, The Master's Plan for the Church. That book is the result of decades of studying the New Testament to discern what the Lord of the church, the head of the church, wants for his church. It includes an appendix on why I love the church and why you should love the church. It's really an invaluable resource for pastors and elders, and by the way, every Christian, because we should all understand our responsibility under the master's plan for the church. The title again of the book, The Master's Plan for the Church. We have copies available. It's a good-sized book.
I mean, it's loaded, and you'll use it not only to read through and find it wonderfully beneficial, but as a resource. So you can order a copy today at Grace To You, reasonably priced, The Master's Plan for the Church. Thanks John, and friend, you've probably heard plenty of opinions about how churches should function or how big they should be or who should lead them, but what does the Bible say? To find out, get a copy of The Master's Plan for the Church for yourself and maybe one for your church's library when you contact us today. The Master's Plan for the Church is available for $13 and shipping is free. To order, call 800-55-GRACE or go online to gty.org.
The title of this book again, The Master's Plan for the Church. Call to order yours 800-55-GRACE, and that number translates to 800-554-7223, or go to our website, gty.org. And remember, there are thousands of free resources available on our website.
Again, it's gty.org. You'll find articles from John and the staff on the Grace To You blog. There are video clips from John's conference appearances, including the Truth Matters Conference and Shepherds Conference, and more than 3,600 sermons that are available to download free of charge in MP3 and transcript format. That includes the eight lessons from John's current radio study titled, The Anatomy of a Church. Our website one more time, gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace To You staff, I'm Phil Johnson with a question for you. While flexibility can be very important in your relationships with family and friends, how flexible should your church be when it comes to doctrine and other priorities? Find out when John returns with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on tomorrow's Grace To You.
