Listen people, we should be living in hope. And hope means that we are far greater in our commitment to invest in forever than we are in time. And so our energies and our thoughts and our prayers and our dreams and our visions and our money and all that we possess is only held as a means to invest in an eternal reality. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.
I'm Phil Johnson, your host. 163 stories, that's the height of the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. This incredible structure is taller than the Empire State Building with the Eiffel Tower stacked on top. Now you might think such an edifice needs to be rigid and unyielding to withstand natural forces. But the surprising truth is to maintain its structural integrity, the building is designed to sway as much as two meters at its highest point. Without that flexibility, the Burj Khalifa would crumble. Similarly, when it comes to your church, some flexibility is important. But in what ways should it bend?
Is it okay to accommodate trends in the culture or maybe to talk about hard truths in softer ways? Find out as John MacArthur continues his study, The Anatomy of a Church. And now here's John. Now 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, forgiveness, dependence.
Let me give you another attitude that needs to be in the church. Flexibility. Flexibility. I'm not going to talk a long time about this, but it's important.
Flexibility. That is, we need to be able to change. Somebody wrote a book, said the seven last words of the church, we've never done it that way before.
And that's really true. Some people have substituted what Jesus said in Matthew 15. You remember He confronted the Pharisees and scribes. They came to Him, they confronted Him, and they said, why do your disciples violate the commandments of men by not washing their hands?
They were eating, you know, without going through, not physically cleansing, washing, but ceremonial ritual. And He says, why do your disciples violate the commandment of men, or the tradition of men, the tradition of the elders, He says. And Jesus says, why do your traditions violate the commandments of God?
And let me tell you, we've all had experience. Churches can get piled high with tradition that becomes a block wall to what the Word of God says to do, right? Happens all time. Well, we certainly can't do that in our church.
We have this tradition, see. Churches can have an organization that's totally unbiblical. They can have a style of ministry that's utterly unbiblical. And when you try to introduce the thing that God wants under the divine mandate of a commandment from God Himself, it runs right into the stone wall of tradition. And so there must be in the attitude of the church flexibility. People say, how is your church organized? Could you send us an organizational chart? We get letters like that all the time. That's really a joke.
It would have to be a 16 millimeter film. It would have to be moving. It never stops. We can't box it and capture it. Because God works through people. And they ebb and flow.
And they're strong and weak and committed and less committed. And more people pile in somewhere and we've got to do something about it. And so there's a changing, constant kind of organic function that I think is so wonderful because it never lets us just stop and administrate.
You can't ever just sit down and crank out the papers. It's always people and it's always picking up this and strengthening this and changing that. And that's wonderful because we're never confused, hopefully, the difference between routine and reality. We don't want to be confused about that. I mean, we don't want to substitute. False for the true.
Just because we've always done it that way. My wife had an old aunt who passed away not long ago. Or distant relative, I guess.
Not really an aunt. But anyway, we used to go see her around the holiday season, take her little cookies and things. And so the last time we went to see her, it was Christmas season.
And she said, well, John, she goes to the Methodist Church. She said, do you have a Christmas Eve service? I said, no, we don't have a Christmas Eve service. She says, you don't? I said, no, we don't. We just encourage everybody to go home and be with their family and talk about the meaning of Christmas and the birth of the Lord.
But we don't have a service. She said, oh, too bad. She was very sad. She said, you know, at our church, we've always had a Christmas Eve service. I said, really?
She said, oh, yes. I said, do you go? She said, oh, no one goes. But we've always had a Christmas Eve service. No one goes? I said.
She closed the conversation by saying, oh, well, it's just too bad that you don't have a Christmas Eve service. Boy, I'll tell you, we're creatures of habit. You know that? It's both good and bad. You get good habits.
It's a good thing. You're a creature of habit. You get bad habits. They're tough to break, aren't they? You get a whole collection of people together who basically are created with the habitual tendencies and they get locked into a certain way to do things and you try to move them.
And it's amazing how resistant they are to that. But sometimes you just have to change things so people don't get confused between routine and reality. So there needs to be a little ebb and flow, a little change, a little flexibility.
We all have to be that way. And when you link that up with the prior point that we made, we have to be flexible because we depend on God and God may be doing different things. It grieves my heart when a young pastor goes into a church and he's got a great desire to teach the Word and apply the Word and he runs into a stone wall of tradition. And people won't let him move. They say, well, we'll really have problems if we try to do that because we've got this deal over here.
And boy, those people will get very upset. But why are you letting the traditions of men stand in the way of the commandments of God? You see, that's what's so wonderful about this church.
When we started years ago to discover the Word of God, we said, hey, that's in the Bible. We've got to change that. We've got to change that. We've got to get in line with this. And Grace Church has always been that way.
It's so wonderful. Sometimes we send out young men and they come back bruised and bleeding in six months saying, I've been smashing myself against this wall of tradition. I don't know if it'll ever change. But we have to be flexible.
It comes down to personal life, too. I always think about Acts 16. And Paul was a kind of a go-get-em guy, right? I don't think he ever sat down.
He just kept moving all the time. And he'd finished his ministry in Galatia and Phrygia. That's modern-day Turkey area. And he decided that we're going to go to Asia, south, down into Asia. Great place.
Boy, it's a significant place. The seven churches of Asia Minor were there, that area. And he started to go there. And the Bible says in Acts 16, 6 to 10, that the Holy Spirit prevented him. Now, I don't know how the Holy Spirit did it, but somehow put up a big roadblock and said, nope, that's not it, Paul.
What do you think Paul did? Go back and home and just sort of say, well, they don't want my ministry. There's no openings in the Asia ministry. No, he said, all right, we can't go. We've already been east. We can't go south. Let's go north. Bithynia, guys. Here we go. Let's go to Bithynia. Holy Spirit, whammo. Can't go there.
Oh, well, let's see. We already been east. Can't go south. Can't go north. West. We're going west.
Ocean. So he goes to sleep. And he must have gone to sleep probably praying about where God wanted to go because in the middle of the night he had a vision. And there was a man of Macedonian saying, come over and what?
Help us. And he went. And the gospel became more than a Middle Eastern sect. It touched the world. Flexibility.
Flexibility. Marty Wolf's one of our elders. I wrote about this in my book on God's will. And I remember when he was going to go to, he had a burden to reach Jewish people, being Jewish himself. And his burden was to go to France and reach them in Paris. And this was his great goal. And so he got involved with the Bible Christian Union, the mission serving in France. And boy, it was exciting.
He did all his training and got all his preparation. We put up a plaque in the church, it was my dad's church, and said Marty Wolf, France. And the day came when he went to Canada. That's where he went.
French-speaking Jews also live in Montreal. God had a different place. Flexibility. That's how it is in serving Christ. And the church needs that flexibility. That sense of dependence, that sense of flexibility that says, God, we depend on the way you lead us and we flex when you do. That's so important.
Let me give you another one. Growth. Attitude of growth. Attitude of growth. I guess maybe this is as important as anything that we have the flowing through us, the desire to grow. The desire to grow. To be in the process of growing. 1 Peter 2, 2 sums it up as, Babes desire the pure milk of the word that you may what?
Grow. Now that analogy is marvelous. Because it says this, it's not like milk of the word as opposed to meat.
That's a different analogy. 1 Corinthians 3. What he's saying there as in the same, Peter is saying, in the same way babies desire milk, you must desire the word to grow. Now, how much does a baby desire milk?
Had a baby around lately? Kick, scream, holler, tantrums, till you get that deal in there, right? I mean, basically, babies only care about two things.
Give them milk and deal with the consequences. That's the beginning, the end of the whole business. It's that single-minded devotion, see? It's that consuming desire for one thing that Peter's driving at. How strong is your desire for the word?
Can you take it or leave it? I mean, do you really hunger for the word? Is it some kind of an exercise in tyranny that you have to open the Bible to read it or is there something magnetic about it that draws your heart? Do you really sense you're growing? I mean, that's so important. Now, we all don't have the same capacities to grow, but whatever the capacity that we do have is, we need to grow to that extent. And we grow by feeding on the word of God. You know, we have all different abilities, but the Spirit of God works in the heart, doesn't He? To bring us to love His word and to grow at the pace that we can grow. And I guess the thing that would put the most fear in my heart would be if the church ever stopped growing.
I mean, if people just said, well, I've had enough. I've had theology all I can take. I've had so much exposition.
I really, I know more than I care to know. I mean, I can't even find places for the tapes. I got them in the garage. I got them in the trunk.
And I can't even find anybody to give them to because everybody's got them. I mean, I really don't need to know anymore. I just, I'm gonna fold up my tent and steal away into the night. But, you know, there needs to be that ongoing hunger to grow, doesn't it? I just pray, God, we never lose that attitude. You know, Peter said it in another way in the second epistle, chapter 3, verse 18, grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We're not just learning facts in a book. We're growing in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
We're not getting to know facts. We're getting to know Him, right? You see, when you're born into the family of God, 1 John 2 13 says, your little baby and you know the father, dad, dad, goo, goo, basic. And then you become a spiritual young man. The Word of God dwells in you.
You're strong. You overcome the wicked one. But it doesn't end there. First you know God in a simple way. Then you know doctrine. And then it says you become a spiritual father who knows Him who is from the beginning. We're not learning to know doctrine. We're learning to know God. And the more you know God, the more the fellowship is enriching.
Listen, think of the most wonderful person in the whole wide world, the most wonderful person you ever met and think how great it would be to just have that relationship grow and grow and grow and then compare that with knowing the infinite Holy God of the universe in a growing relationship. Growing. Feed on the Word. Do you have a hunger for it? Do you meditate on it? Do its truths run around in your mind? Is it your daily food?
Can you say with Job that you love the Word of God more than your necessary food? We ought to be growing. And you say, well, I've been here a long time. I know so much. Well, if you've gotten to the point where you think you know a lot, you're just at the point where you really don't know what you ought to know. And that is that you don't know enough. Well, you may have enough facts. But are you telling me you know God as well as you'd like to get to know Him? See, when I study a passage, I always look for what I can find out about God's character in there so I can know Him better. Growth. Let me give you two more attitudes. Faithfulness.
Faithfulness. Boy, you know, there are an awful lot of Christians that are sort of spiritual sprinters. They're done. They sign up, blast off.
It's all over. They're looking for spiritual retirement. And what God is looking for is marathoners. Long-range people. Distance runners. Moreover, brethren, 1 Corinthians 4 says it is required in stewards that a man be found what? Faithful. Something to be said for endurance.
For long-term spiritual commitment. I love it when older people say to me, you know, oh, you know, could you slow down because I have trouble getting all my notes down? And somebody said that to me recently is in their 80s. I just love that.
Eighty-year-old taking notes. Still excited. Still faithful to the Word of God, the truth of God, the life of God, the church of God, the ministry. I mean, they haven't bailed out. And there are those people who teach year after year after year after who disciple year after year after year who make long-range commitments and follow through. They're the real stalwarts of the faith. Because, you see, what they do is not based on an emotional appeal. It is not based upon immediate response. It is based upon character. And character has that enduring quality.
There are lots of people who come to Grace Church whenever they can and who might even do something whenever they can, but they usually can't because they have other things. And then there are those who just faithfully move on. Oh, how we need the spirit of faithfulness. The mark of real character is enduring commitment. Enduring commitment. Look at 2 Timothy.
Let me just kind of use Paul who, of course, is a model. And in 2 Timothy 4 verse 6 he says, For I am now ready to be offered. And he knew it was going to be a sacrifice. And the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight. I have finished the course. I have kept the faith.
Boy, what a great statement. We're already saying, God, I can die now. I'm done. I'm done. It's over. I've carried it out.
I've finished the course. I fought the fight. I've kept the faith.
Oh, you know, that's so wonderful. I guess it's kind of sad when you see a saint grow old and indifferent or one that belongs to Christ get old and bitter. And sometimes you even see preachers or teachers or whatever and Christian workers. They get old and they get kind of sour and kind of bitter and sort of self-centered and whatever.
And you just wonder what went wrong. But where you have that sweet grace of growing old in a life of faithful service is such a beautiful thing. Such a beautiful spirit. Faithfulness. Faithfulness.
You have a responsibility and you're there and you fulfill it. And when the Lord's people meet, you're there. You know, we've always said if everybody that says they go to Grace Church actually came here, it would be amazing.
It would be amazing. I mean, I meet people like that all the time. I mean, all the time no matter where. If I go to the market with my wife, I push the cart.
She buys the stuff. Somebody will come down the aisle and say, oh, I know you. You're John MacArthur. I go to your church. Oh, do you? Well, how wonderful. I haven't seen you there before.
Oh, well. Well, I come. Yeah, I come.
Oh, do you really? Were we there Sunday? Oh, no, I wasn't there Sunday.
No, it's been a while. Oh, we love it. Oh, good. Good. That's kind of sad, you know.
It makes me feel a little bit badly. Or I hear, well, when we go, we always go to Grace. We enjoy it. Faithfulness. Faithfulness. Just being there to worship consistently, to serve consistently, to pray consistently. All these things.
And it's such a distracted society where we're all ripped umpteen directions. It's hard to keep the priorities. Alas, I wish I could say more about that when time's gone. A last attitude is hope. Hope.
Oh, what a great word. Hope. It means security for the future. It means we don't fear death. It means we actually look forward to what's ahead of us in life and death. In fact, I love the expression in Romans 12, 12, rejoicing in hope. Hey, death holds no fear for us. I mean, we have a funeral service around here and it's a celebration. And we rejoice.
And we praise God. Because one we love has passed from this veil of tears into the place where all tears are forever dried. A place of disease to a place where there's no more disease. A place of death to a place where there is no death.
A place of limitation to a place of unbounded realization. We live in hope. We are saved in hope. And we look forward to eternity, to being like Christ. We look forward to the fulfillment of the promise of Romans 8, that we'll have a redeemed body to go with our redeemed soul.
And we'll be in the image of death in the image of Jesus Christ. We live in hope. Oh people, we've got to have a hopeful attitude. And what that says to us practically is this. We don't get too bound up in what's going on here.
Right? I mean, we get the picture when Jesus said, lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, thieves break through and steal. Matthew 6 19 to 21. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust doth not corrupt, nor thieves break through and steal. For where your treasure is there will your heart be also.
So if our hearts up there hoping in eternity, our treasure is going to be up there and everything else is going to go with it. I hope you're not living for the time. I hope you're not living for the temporal.
I hope you're not living for the passing. Listen people, we should be living in hope. And hope means that we are far greater in our commitment to invest in forever than we are in time. And so our energies and our thoughts and our prayers and our dreams and our visions and our money and all that we possess is only held as a means to invest in an eternal reality. We live in hope. We live in the light of eternity. And it's a wonderful day as we look into that future. 1 John 3 3, He that this hope in himself purifies himself. Listen, if you really live for eternity, it's going to change dramatically the way you exist in time.
It really is. Oh, attitudes flowing through the church will make it what Christ wants it to be. This is Grace to You with John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Master's University and Seminary. John is continuing his study, The Anatomy of a Church. Now, John talked today about how churches need to be flexible and why they shouldn't do things just because that's how it's always been done. And of course, John, I know you would say that in some areas, a church must never be flexible. And in fact, sometimes the mark of a healthy church might be how inflexible it is. Yeah, obviously you have to be flexible on things that can change and inflexible on things that cannot change. And of course, where you're inflexible is on biblical truth.
Phil, you're talking about the need to be uncompromising when it comes to biblical truth and to the gospel. And along that line, I want to talk about a booklet that is now available titled Your Local Church and Why It Matters. Whether you live in a large city or a small town, there may be a number of churches available for you to attend, including churches from many different denominations and with certainly many different approaches to preaching and music and youth ministry and local outreach. How do you decide which church is best for you and your family?
Well, you need the criteria to make that decision. And amid all the options and competing priorities, the Bible speaks clearly on what a church should be. So I've written this booklet that spells out the purpose of the church, and it can help you identify a good local fellowship that you can call home. It's titled again, Your Local Church and Why It Matters.
It examines the biblical truth about church membership, keeping the church pure, church discipline, believers baptism, discipleship, the Lord's Supper, giving, and other important issues. And here is the good news. We'll send you a copy of this booklet free of charge. Just let us know you want a copy when you contact us today.
That's right. Contact us today. And thank you, John. Friend, it's vital to be part of a healthy, doctrinally sound church. To help you evaluate your church or any church, ask for a free copy of Your Local Church and Why It Matters when you contact us today. Email your request to lettersatgty.org.
That's our email address, lettersatgty.org. You can also ask for a free copy of Your Local Church and Why It Matters by calling us at 800-55-GRACE. Keep in mind also, there are thousands of free resources available at our website, gty.org. We can help you identify a faithful church. You can listen and review the lessons from John's current study, The Anatomy of a Church. That's part of our free archive of more than 3,600 sermons. Or another suggestion, check out the series of blog articles titled, When the Church Becomes Like the World.
It's a helpful supplement to the lesson you heard today. You'll find all of that and more at gty.org. Again, that's our website. One more time, gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and our entire 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 shows you some sure ways to split a church and how you can help keep your church unified under the priorities that God has designed for it. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
