It's the word in the mind that generates the behavior. And that's why the Bible says, be renewed in the spirit of your mind. Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. You have to have the word into your thinking so that it can start that flywheel of behavior moving. Welcome to Grace To You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. The story is told of a church whose members became sharply divided on the color of shingles for the church building. In the end, each half of the roof was covered with different colored shingles, and the congregation then picked sides, either the left side of the room or the right side, based solely on which color shingle was directly overhead.
That story might be comical, if the implications were not so tragic. Now while your church might not be divided over trivial matters, if it loses focus on its main priority, the results can be even more devastating. And what is that main priority? Find out now with John MacArthur as he continues his study, The Anatomy of a Church. The Lord has led us, I believe, into a discussion of what it is that he desires to be characteristic of his church. God has so blessed us here, and God has built here, I believe, a church that desires in the heart of its people to be all that he would have it be. And God has blessed us in unique and wonderful, wonderful ways. We are as rich in spiritual things as any church could be, and it's important for us, while we enjoy these things, to understand the foundations, to understand the causes, if you will, that bring about God's blessing, that allow us to receive from him the best that he has to give.
And so we're doing, as I've termed it, a little spiritual archaeology and digging back up our foundations to see what it is that we're committed to. Now let me say as we begin today that I rejoice in the Lord because I see the work of God in you. And when I speak like this to you, it isn't that I'm rebuking you because I don't see these things, it's because I see these things and want to see them continue and see them more.
As Paul, when he wrote and said, I know that nobody needs to teach you to love because God has taught you himself how to love, but let your love abound more and more, he says. And it's in that kind of perspective that I come to you, not to say these do not exist, but that they do and they need more and more to exist. I guess my fear is that as the church grows and we get further and further away from the foundational things that God used to bless us and upon which his spirit has built, we lose touch with those things and then we begin to decline rather than ascend in terms of his usefulness and his blessing. But I do see in the ministries of this church and the hearts and lives of you, his people, these virtues and graces and things that the Spirit of God has accomplished.
I only want to call you to a greater commitment to them than ever before. We have a great, great responsibility to these who look to us, to see in us that which they maybe have not seen somewhere else. And I believe there are reasons why God has blessed. I believe there are principles that place us in the position of maximum blessing. And it isn't just that we're large, it's the attitude that people catch.
It's the commitments that they catch. It's those things that exist in us as committed believers that they see, that they don't always see in others who name the name of Christ. So we've been going back in our series and saying, well, what is it then that makes a church all that a church can be?
I mean, what is it that we should have? And so we're going back over these things. They're very basic things. And yet we have to keep going back and putting that foundation down again, don't we? I'm reminded of Peter's words that I want to put you in remembrance of these things.
Not that you don't know them. You already know them, but I want you to be sure you remember them. You have to keep on track. You know, you start down the track and all of a sudden you go one way or you start to go another way.
You just keep laying that same track down again so we know where we're going. And so we've been looking then at the church and we've used the analogy of a body. We've said that first of all, a church, to be what God wants it to be, has to have a skeleton. In other words, foundation, which gives it form. And basically we've said that there are some non-negotiable bottom line foundational truths.
And we suggested five of them, a high view of God, the absolute priority of scripture, doctrinal clarity, personal holiness and spiritual authority. And we tied those all together and that was sort of our skeleton. Now moving on from that into the second dimension of our analogy, we said that a body has to have internal systems flowing through it. Those are the life systems.
That's what gives it its life and capability to act and react. And in the church we have to have internal systems. And those I believe are right spiritual attitudes. What is flowing through the lives of the people behind the scenes is the issue. We tell pastors all the time who come and look at our church, don't just take what you see on the surface and try to incorporate it.
Behind that, behind that flesh if you will, there's a flowing through of certain internal attitudes that have to be built into people's hearts before ministry can be what God wants it to be. And I gave you a whole list of those. Let me just remind you briefly of them. Obedience, humility, love, unity, service, joy, peace, thankfulness, self-discipline, forgiveness, dependence, flexibility, accountability, growth, faithfulness and hope. I don't expect you to write all that down.
You've already gotten that. But just to kind of refresh your mind, those are the attitudes that I believe we must cultivate among ourselves by our preaching and teaching and discipling and all that we do to build into ourselves those strong kinds of attitudes, spiritual attitudes. Now, when the skeleton is right and the right kind of attitudes are flowing through, we're ready to move to dimension number three and we're going to do that today. And that is function or the muscles in the body.
The body now has form and it has life. And now what is it to do? What is its function? What is the church's responsibility in the world? What are we to be about? Or in simple terms, what's our ministry? If somebody said to you, what is the church supposed to do? You've got a church that's committed to the worship of God, the authority of Scripture, doctrine, sound doctrine.
People's lives are right. They're concerned with personal holiness. They're under spiritual authority of those that God has placed over them in the Lord. They've got cultivated in their hearts the right attitudes. They've got all this power going, all this flow through of life. What are they to do?
If you were to mandate the church as to its responsibility, what would it be? That's what we want to look at now. And I call these the muscles. This is function.
This makes us move. The first one is preaching and teaching. And I combine those two because they both have to do with the proclamation of biblical truth, preaching and teaching. That, as I see it, is the primary function of the church. The church is the receiver of the revelation of God and therefore the church must be the dispenser of the revelation of God.
If God has revealed Himself to us, it is in order that we might understand Him. We are then to be the hearers of the word and the proclaimers of the word. Now I am committed to that as an absolute priority in the church. That is a function of the church.
We must be about proclaiming the word of God. I grieve in my heart over the, a lot of sermonizing that goes on. And some of it is helpful.
Some of it is good. A lot of sort of, I call it counseling from the pulpit that goes on. There are a lot of sort of ethical issues that are dealt with in the church.
There are a lot of little classes that meet together where everybody pools their ignorance because nobody knows anything. They just sort of guess what the Bible means. But the church has as a priority function the clear, understandable, direct, authoritative proclamation of the word of God. And so Grace Church will always be committed to a strong emphasis on preaching and teaching.
A strong emphasis on preaching and teaching. Now look, look with me for a moment at two epistles written by Paul to Timothy. Now these epistles were written, I think, to help us understand the ministry, both from the viewpoint of the minister and his congregation. In fact, it even tells us in 1 Timothy 3.15 that this epistle was written to teach us how to behave in the house of God, which is the church. So here is an epistle that is to tell us how we are to behave in the church. How we are to function in the church. How we are to operate in the church.
And I believe the emphasis of both 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy is that we are to operate primarily in the area of proclaiming sound doctrine, preaching the word of God. That same chapter, 1 Timothy 3, verse 16, is an interesting verse and it sums up the wonder of the incarnation of Jesus Christ. It says that without controversy, that is without any debate or argument, it's an incontrovertible fact that the mystery of godliness is a great thing. And what is the mystery of godliness? That God was manifest in the flesh.
That's just an incredible thing. No one is going to argue that that is a great truth, right? That God was manifest in the flesh. That's the heart, the core, that's the substance of our Christian faith, isn't it? We don't have anything if God didn't manifest Himself in the flesh of Jesus Christ, right?
Die and rise again. So that is at the very heart of our faith. Without any argument, that is a great, great revealed truth.
But notice what it says. He was manifest in the flesh. He was justified in the spirit. He was seen of angels.
He was believed on in the world. He was received up into glory and then tucked in the middle, preached unto the nations. And if I look at that 16th verse of 1 Timothy 3, I see some essential things in the incarnation and one of them is preaching. Preaching is an essential element in God manifesting Himself in the flesh. What happened must be preached.
That's what He's saying. There must be proclamation of the message. And I believe therefore at the heart of the church is the incarnation. And at the heart of the incarnation is the proclamation of that incarnation. And so preaching finds a central place in the life of the church. Now it follows then that Paul is going to emphasize to young Timothy as he moves out in his ministry that he indeed should be faithful to the preaching. And you'll notice in verse 6 of chapter 4 that right away Paul says, if you put the brethren in remembrance of these things, and he's just talked to them to him about some things. And he says, your job is to put your people in remembrance of these things. You're first of all a teacher, Timothy.
You're a teacher. Whatever you've received from God's Spirit, you give it out. And let the church be the place where things are taught. The truth of God is taught. You know how marvelous that is in a world where people are groping for truth.
Do you understand that? You know how wonderful it is in a place where people have just about given up on anything that can be guaranteed as being true? Whereas morality by majority, where it's everybody for himself and whatever opinion you want, where truth is elusive, where men are left with their own inane philosophy to try to figure out meaning in life, we can stand up and say this is truth. I mean even Pilate, the ultimate cynic of the New Testament said, what is truth? What is truth? We know the truth. We know the truth. Jesus said in John 17, to the Father, thy word is truth.
Oh, what a legacy. And that's what we must impart. That's what we must impart. And God has blessed this church, I believe, because it's primary function has always been in part to proclaim the truth, the word of God.
Not to talk about the Bible, but to talk from the Bible. And I can't tell you how many hundreds, even thousands of people through the years have spoken to us or written to us and said they come to Grace Church because they're fed the word of God. It's always what we hear. And that's our commitment. That's our function. And it isn't just my job, it's everybody's job. We're all to be those who proclaim, who preach and teach the word.
Some gifted, of course, uniquely. Verse 11, following up the same thought of chapter 4 verse 6, he says, you are a minister who is a good minister if you yourself are nourished up in the words of the faith and the sound doctrine. In other words, if you've got the truth in and you're giving it to your people, he says in verse 11, command them and teach them. In other words, teach with authority.
Teach with authority. I remember I was doing the commencement at the police academy one time and the fellow that I was sitting next to was talking to me about the various graduates who are graduating from the Los Angeles Police Academy and he said we had to flunk one fella out because of his voice. And I said, that's interesting. He said, yeah, you just can't go up behind a robber and say, stick him up, you're under arrest.
Hold him the name of the law. I mean, it just leaves something out, doesn't it? And I said, well, that's interesting. Yeah, he said there had to be a certain authority in his voice. And I began to think about the fact that his authority basically was the law, right? The law was his authority. And if I sound like I speak with authority, I do because the authority is the word of God.
I will not speak authoritatively on my opinion, but I'll speak authoritatively on the word of God. And that's what he's saying here in 1 Timothy 4.11. You don't just teach it, you command it. In other words, you call people to a mandate of responsibility. And so verse 16 he says, or verse 13 rather, he says, until I come, give your attention to reading, exhortation and doctrine. And then he tells them how to do it.
He reads the text, explains the text and applies the text. Reading, that's just read it to them. Exhortation, that's apply it. Doctrine, that's give them the doctrine or the teaching. So he says you get the text open, you read it to them, you explain it to them, that's doctrine, and you exhort them to behave. And don't neglect it, verse 14 says, don't neglect it. Meditate on it, verse 15 says.
Take heed to it, verse 16 says, and you continue in it. In other words, we are all called to obey the word and proclaim the word. Preaching, teaching, proclaiming, instructing. What a thrilling responsibility.
Now in chapter 5, verse 17, he comes to another dimension. Let the elders that rule well be counted worthy of double timay, double pay, double respect, it probably embraces all those things, but ones who do well should be doubly honored, especially those who work hard in preaching and teaching. Again, the focus of leadership in the church is on the preaching and the teaching role. That's our function. That's our function. That's our function.
We're here to proclaim God's word. I've heard people criticize Grace Church and say, well, Grace Church is overbalanced in the area of teaching. There's too much preaching, too much teaching, and not enough of this or that or the other thing. I don't see that you could ever have too much of that. I mean, unless you have mastered all of God's revelation, and that's an utter impossibility.
There can't be too much. It could be out of balance if we didn't obey the teaching, but the reason we dominate our lives with teaching is because teaching is what sets everything else in motion. We have to know what the Bible says about a certain thing before we can carry it out, and so teaching is the sine qua non of everything. We have to know what to do. We can't know how to worship unless we know what the Bible says. We can't know how to pray unless we know what the Bible says. We can't know how to evangelize. We can't know how to disciple or shepherd. We can't know how to train people.
We can't know how to help people and their families. We can't do anything unless we understand what God says, so we preach, we teach, we preach, we teach. The end of chapter 6, Paul says to Timothy, keep that which is committed. In other words, I think he's referring to the deposit of truth, the revelation of God, the faith, if you will, the content of true doctrine. Keep it and stay away from the garbage of the world, the philosophies and the errant theologies and the supposed knowledge of men who really don't know anything at all.
Hang in there with the right stuff. We don't want to get deviated away from it. We don't want to get pushed away into the thoughts of men that are far from God.
And Timothy deserves a brief look. Verse 15 of chapter 2, he says, be diligent to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needs not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. In other words, you've got the word, you're committed to it, now handle it correctly. Back in verse 13 of chapter 1, he says, hold fast the form of sound words.
So the first thing you do is you hold on to it and then you rightly dispense it. You hang on to the truth and you dish it out as it ought to be so that you may be approved of God. And again, he says in 16 and following, stay away from the garbage of the world. Stay away from their errors and heresies and philosophies and stick to the truth of God. Down in verse 24 of chapter 2, he says, anyone who leads in the church who is a servant of the Lord should be skilled in his teaching.
Skilled in his teaching. And of course that great passage in chapter 3 where it says that all scripture is inspired that we may be perfected. So you can see then as Paul instructs Timothy regarding the church, this tremendous emphasis is made on preaching and teaching.
Now go to chapter 4 and we'll draw it all together. Chapter 4 of 2 Timothy verse 1 and here is a mandate given to Timothy. One of the really great ones in the New Testament. I charge thee or I hold thee accountable or I command thee to this. Therefore, since the word of God can perfect, since the word of God can save as it says in 3 15 to 17, since the word of God can do all these things, since it can give you the salvation that you've received, since it can give you all that you need to be perfected in Christ, then I charge you before God and the Lord Jesus Christ who shall judge the living and the dead and his appearing and his kingdom. That's a very solemn charge. He says I hold you accountable before God and Jesus Christ. I hold you accountable before the Father and the Son. Verse 2 do what?
What? Preach the word. Preach the word. It is the word that makes people wise unto salvation. It is the word that perfects, that brings doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction in righteousness that makes the man of God thoroughly furnished unto all good works.
It is the word that does that. So he says Timothy sum it up simple. I hold you accountable to God the Father. I hold you accountable to God the Son, man. Preach the word. Proclaim the word and be diligent at it. Work hard at it. Hang in there and do it in season and out of season when it seems appropriate and inappropriate. When it seems like somebody might be offended or not, you keep doing it all the time. In season and out of season means all the time.
You can't be any more than either in season or out of season. And then he says this and it's interesting, isn't it? He doesn't say comfort and encourage. He says reprove, rebuke and exhort. In other words lay it on him, Timothy.
Why does he say that? Because he knows that even Christians basically have to fight with their sin, right? And so he says preaching has to be confrontive.
It has to be reproving. It has to be rebuking. It has to be exhorting. And the mildest of those words is exhortation and it means to encourage to a change of behavior and view of judgment if they don't. In other words you keep going the way you're going, God's going to have to deal with you.
So preaching has to have that element in it. It's confrontive. It pulls you up short. It's convicting. It's heart searching.
It's heartbreaking. And that's what he tells him. Preach it that way. And let the content of your ministry be that which demonstrates long suffering. So you preach with great zeal.
You preach with great conviction. You confront people. You sort of slam them to the wall and they've got to decide yes or no to what you said. You make them look at their own hearts, see the failure of their own life and realize this, that they're not going to change overnight so in the process be what? Patient.
Be patient. And then he says, not only be patient, but in this process he says, and this is such an important word, do it with all patience and doctrine. Teaching. The heart of the ministry, beloved, is patiently teaching the Word of God in a confrontive way. That pulls people up short in self-examination so that their life can be brought to an accountability before God. That's the function of the church. That's the function of the church. And when you come here, you're called to that accountability. When you go to a fellowship group, one of the things you're called to in the teaching of the Word of God is, am I responding rightly to this word? You go to a flock or a Bible study and somebody opens up the Bible and you're called by the authority of the Word of God to the place where you say, I'm doing that or I'm not doing that. And you're reproved or rebuked or exhorted. And patiently so until your life can be what God would have it to be. So as Paul bows out and Timothy steps in to take his mantle, he says, Timothy, it's all summed up in this son, preach the Word.
You say, why so? Because it's the Word in the mind that generates the behavior. It's the Word that comes into the mind that generates the behavior. And that's why the Bible says in Ephesians 4-23, be renewed in the spirit of your mind. Be renewed in the spirit of your mind. Transformation, Romans 12, be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And that's your thinking part. You have to have the Word into your thinking so that it can start that flywheel of behavior moving. And so we teach and preach the Word.
No substitute for that. You're listening to John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, as he continues his study called The Anatomy of a Church here on Grace to You. Well, as we saw today, preaching and teaching are foundational priorities of the church. And clearly, John, pastors and elders have a central role in making sure that the church they lead fulfills that serious responsibility.
So speaking as a pastor, what would you say are the best ways that our listeners can encourage and support the men who lead their churches? Yeah, just to comment on the whole idea that teaching and preaching are the priorities of the church, somehow that may be being missed in this culture. I'm afraid people think music, in some cases, is the most important thing in the church. I think there are folks who gravitate towards style, which they think is the most important thing in the church. It's always going to be the content of preaching. It's always going to be the content of teaching because no one is converted and no one is edified and sanctified by style.
No one. The church is full of sentimentality. It is full of emotionalism.
It is full of manipulation by musical forms and other artistic forms. But the only thing God blesses is the truth faithfully preached and taught. The Spirit of God saves by means of the truth.
The Spirit of God sanctifies by means of the truth. Preaching and teaching is critical, and that is preaching and teaching of the Word of God—expositional, theological preaching and teaching of Scripture. How can you encourage your pastors, encourage them to do that, and encourage them with your gratitude when they do? You need to pray for them.
But you need to speak openly to them in a loving way and remind them that it is the Word and the Word alone that has the power, it is the Word and the Word alone the Spirit uses, and that that's to be their priority so that the church can be the church that honors its head, the Lord Jesus Christ. Thanks, Jon. And friend, if Jon's study has helped you better understand your role in your church, consider telling a friend about it. And remember, you can listen to any lesson from this series that you may have missed. Just go to our website today. Our web address is gty.org. You can download all eight sermons from The Anatomy of a Church. You can also download the transcripts of those lessons. Both are free of charge.
Our website again gty.org. And while you're online, make sure you download the Grace to Use Sermons app, available for Apple and Android. The app puts the MP3s and transcripts of all Jon's sermons, that's more than 3,600 total sermons, right in the palm of your hand through your mobile device. And another app I recommend is the Study Bible app. It includes multiple translations of Scripture, and it also gives you immediate access to the resources of our website, including all of Jon MacArthur's sermons, our blog articles, devotionals, all related to whatever passage you're studying. And for a reasonable price, you can add the study notes from the MacArthur Study Bible. To learn more about the Sermons app and the Study Bible app, go to gty.org. Now for Jon MacArthur and our staff, I'm Phil Johnson with a question for you. What's your mission as a Christian and as a member of your church? Find out tomorrow when Jon returns with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
