The church has got to function in the training area. We have to train children so they'll know how to be the right kind of mates when they marry, so they'll know how to be the right kind of leaders in the church. Training.
That is taking the teaching and putting it together in a way that gives a person a track where they can move from an undeveloped to a developed place, from a minimally useful to a maximally useful place. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Ever taken a stand for some biblical principle and faced isolation or ridicule because of it? Maybe what you believe about marriage offended a coworker, or a friend rejected you after you gave him the gospel. Perhaps you told someone you believe in God-ordained roles for parenting and he called you old-fashioned or backward or narrow-minded.
When that happens, when society rejects what you know is true, where can you find joy, hope, even protection? Well, today John MacArthur is going to explain how your church should be a haven for you and what you can do to help make it a haven for your brothers and sisters in Christ. This lesson is part of his current series titled The Anatomy of a Church.
And now here's John with today's lesson. There's another function the church has to be involved in, and that is shepherding. And we could talk a lot about this, but let me just say that we're committed to the fact that you've got sheep and you've got shepherds and it basically says everybody's got to care for everybody.
We've got to be involved in mutually caring and meeting needs. Jesus said to Peter, do you love me, do you love me, do you love me? Peter says, you know I do, you know I do, you know I do. And Jesus says, feed my sheep, feed my lambs, feed my sheep. Shepherd, take care of folks. And basically it's feeding them and leading them. 1 Peter tells us that. Feed the flock, take the oversight. Acts 20-28, same thing. Feed and lead, feed and lead, feed and lead. It's like a shepherd.
And we want to do that. Because how can we say we love God when we see our brother have need and close up our compassion, right? How does the love of God dwell in you? If you don't care about people. If you don't care about their needs. And may I suggest to you that we all have to be involved in the shepherding process. I mean you're out there bumping into the sheep.
You got to find out where they hurt. Meet their needs, care for them. If you've got enough food on your plate to feed them and they don't have any, share your food. If you have enough insight to share with them and they're lost and wandering, lead them back. You see the shepherding process takes place all over. 1 Peter says the Lord is the chief shepherd. And the implication is that we are his under-shepherds. And we're all involved in caring for the sheep. It's so essential. You know we want a shepherd and it's hard sometimes. People do fall through the cracks.
There's no question about it. It always breaks my heart you know when somebody says, Well, no one called me. I was sick or I had a problem and no one called me. No one seems to care. Sometimes I get a letter from distraught people and they say, You know, such and such happened and you didn't call us and you didn't care.
And no one from the church came by and my heart just aches when I hear that. And I don't know, sometimes maybe people's expectation is beyond reality. That they expect maybe that I could be everywhere.
As much as that would be something I would love, that's not possible. But that usually isn't the case. It's usually not that I wasn't there. It's usually that nobody was there.
I mean nobody seemed to step into that time. And this very often happens when people have death in the family. And as soon as the death occurs, everybody swarms around the person.
There's tremendous reinforcement. And then after the funeral, it's back to life as usual. And there's a tremendous depression. All the strength and support has dissipated and everybody's back to normal. And the person is left alone just at the time when the real grief begins to take place.
And we lose that sensitive touch. Like the shepherd, you know who it says in John 10? He said, I am the shepherd and then he said, I am the door. What that meant was it was the shepherd who was lying down across the doorway. Every sheep that came in or went out had to go over him. And he dropped his staff when they came in and stopped every one of them and checked them over for every bruise and every nick.
And when there was a need, he took oil and he put it in. That's why it talks about my cup runneth over and the staff comforts me in Psalm 23. And the shepherd cared for his sheep. There's that shepherding responsibility. You know, and I realize too that there are some wonderful people, quiet folks, and they don't get shepherded because they're just out there and they're quiet and we don't know about it and they get minimal shepherding. And then there's some people who are always in sin and all messed up and they've got shepherds hovering around them all the time in groups trying to get them straightened out.
I mean, really. We have committee meetings on some people. Eight elders, what are we going to do with them? What are we going to do with this guy? This guy is unfaithful to his wife. This guy is in the umpteenth time. And every time we go through this process, he does it again. What are we going to do with him? So we prayerfully brought him to God. You know, we kind of give up in the human realm. But, I mean, he's going to get shepherded. He doesn't even want to be shepherded.
He just wants, get out of my life. And there are other dear folks who are quietly sitting somewhere saying, please come into my life, and we don't know that. And I realize that. And that's why, you see, we can't carry the load. We all have to see ourselves as sheep and shepherds, too, in a sense.
Caring for each other. I really do want us to shepherd. We have an account to give to God about this. It's your church, you know.
It's not John MacArthur's church. It's yours. It's Christ's church. He's given it into your stewardship.
It's yours and mine and all of us. And we all have to care, and we all have to give account. And shepherding is a function of mutual caring, meeting needs, making sure people are moving down the track spiritually. First thing I did at Grace Church, this first week I came to this church, over in the little office in the front of the chapel, was to develop a way that we could shepherd the people. I knew we could feed them.
We just wanted to make sure we could lead them, because the shepherd feeds and leads. And lead them to Christ's likeness. There's another function, and that's the function of building up families. Building up families. I believe that the family is God's unit for passing righteousness on from one generation to the next. I believe this is abundantly clear in Deuteronomy chapter 6, that God ordains the family as the basic unit of righteous preservation in the world, and it's to pass on its truth from one generation to the next. Now you know as well as I do that whatever God has ordained, Satan has attacked, right? Whatever God made to preserve righteousness, Satan attacks. And basically that comes down to three things, the family, the church, and the government. And where God has ordained a government for the punishment of evil doers and the good of those who are right, Satan will destroy that if he can. And wherever there is church, where Christ is exalted, and the word is proclaimed, he will attack that. And wherever there is a family to pass on righteousness, he'll do all he can to disintegrate that.
Those are the basic units of preservation in society, the family, the church, and the home. And the government. And people say, do you think there's a conspiracy to tear up our government?
Of course there is. And it's succeeding. Our society is on the way down.
Why? Because the mass of our society are godless people. And so naturally they are the pawns of Satan, and the system will collapse. And do you think he's attacking the church?
Well, of course. The church is ranked with liberalism. It's revolting. I read this week about the new non-sexist Bible with all sexist terms removed such as Christ is the son of God. He's no longer the son of God in this Bible. He's the child of God. He's non-sexist.
They have absolutely no concern with whether or not the Holy Spirit said he was the son of God. And then the family, disintegrated and blasted from pillar to post by the attacks of an immoral, lust-filled society, can hardly survive. And the church stands in a vital place of preserving that unit of society, the family. And we are committed to that as a function, aren't we? We're committed to teaching the kids and teaching the young people in the junior high, the high school, the college kids. We're committed to discipling them.
I'm so thrilled to see guys discipling one-on-one, little sixth-grade kids. I'm thrilled to see people tied into our young people because they're the ones that have to preserve this thing in the next generation. I want them to know what God's standards are of marriage and the family.
It's wonderful that we have counselors, that we have family ministries, a family center over there and many things that work toward the preservation, the building of a godly church of families. Ephesians 5, you know, says, don't be drunk with wine. And the text, of course, in 518 is talking about religious drunkenness. The cultists of the day of the Apostle Paul used to think that they could ascend to communion with the deities if they could get drunk enough. And they got drunk like the people in the Orient do on a high with drugs to commune with God, to ascend to a higher plane. And in their drunken stupor, they thought they were communing with the gods through their lustful orgies with temple prostitutes. And Paul says, if you think you want to communicate with God, it isn't going to be done through drunkenness. It's going to be done through the filling of the Spirit of God. That's how you commune with the living God. And as a result of that, one of the things that will happen is you'll submit to one another.
And how does that flesh out? Wives will submit to their husbands. Husbands will submit to their wives by loving them with a nourishing, cherishing, purifying love. Children will submit to their parents and parents will submit to the needs of their children by not provoking them to wrath but nurturing them and bringing them up in the things of Christ. All of that flows out of a Spirit-controlled kind of life.
And that's what we want to see. A function of the church then is to bring families to the control of the Spirit of God where they can see submission because only in submission can relationships be meaningful and blessed. Where you have everybody fighting for their supremacy and fighting for their own rights, you disintegrate the possibility of any meaningful relationship. And so family is a function. We want to hold up each other's family. We want to help each other with kids. Pray for each other's kids. You pray for your friends. When you see some kid that's rowdy and unruly or isn't the way you ought to be, what's your reaction? You pray for them.
You call the folks and say, I'd like to help you if there's anything I can do to work with your child. Got to care for family. That's a function. Another function is training. Training. And by this I mean equipping people, equipping them for a ministry, equipping them for a task. And he gave some apostles and prophets and evangelists and teaching pastors, Ephesians 4-11 says, for the perfecting or the bringing to the perfection or the bringing to a useful place of the saints. Equipping them for the equipping of the saints, the perfecting of the saints for the work of the ministry, Ephesians 4-12. We're trying to train people for ministry.
That's our desire. Not just to give out spiritual truth in sort of general terms, but to train people so they can use that. And you take a course in evangelism and you take all those verses that are floating around in your head and you nail them all down and you get a plan as to how they work and you go out with a new holy zeal and boldness because you're confident in how the presentation should go. Or maybe you feel in your heart called to the mission field and you run to somebody and say, boy, God's calling me to the mission field.
We're not going to pick you up and ship you next week. We're going to spend a few years getting you ready so that when you go you're going to be maximally equipped. The church has got to be in an equipping ministry, a training ministry. They're constantly training people. We have courses, I don't know if you know this, in our church for training people, training them ultimately to be deacons and elders. There are courses here for training in evangelism and there are missions training courses.
We have many things. I don't know if you know it, but Lagos has a second year program for training people to work with young people. That's a full year's course in youth work. Training people in the seminary for preaching the Word of God and teaching it. Training young people for ministry in the church through Lagos.
Not just giving them generalities, but tracking them down a way that they can be trained and out the other end they're prepared and ready and equipped. The church has got to function in the training area. We have to train children so that they'll know how to be the right kind of parents, so they'll know how to be the right kind of mates when they marry, so they'll know how to be the right kind of leaders in the church. Training. That is taking the teaching and putting it together in a way that gives a person a track where they can move from an undeveloped to a developed place, from a minimally useful to a maximally useful place.
Training is essential and the equipping of the saints is all part of that. You ought to be involved in that. You ought to be being trained for some specific task consistent with your gifts.
Another, I wish I could say more about that, time is getting away. Another one is giving. Giving. That's a function of the church. Giving.
That's a function. What about giving? Macedonians gave abundantly out of their deep poverty. It's never a question of how much you have.
That has nothing to do with it. People say, if I had more, I'd give more. No, that's not true, because it's not a matter of how much you have. It's a matter of your heart, isn't it? And Paul said in 2 Corinthians 9, so sparingly reap sparingly, so bountifully reap bountifully, you give a little, you get a little back, you give a lot, you get a lot back. In other words, whatever you give, God returns to you interest. You invest with God.
You don't really give, you just invest. Jesus said, give, and it will be given to you, pressed down, shaken together, running over. And so God is trying to teach us that we can trust Him with our stuff.
Got that? You see, it's just the reverse of what He's asking you. He gives you stuff and says, can I trust you with the stuff? And you prove that He can trust you with the stuff when you can trust Him with the stuff. And you give it back. You see, the best lesson you'll ever learn in terms of stewardship is you don't own anything, nothing. Nothing you have is yours.
It's His. It's only to be managed to prove whether you're a worthy steward. That's all.
That's all. And if you can't manage that, you're not going to give you the true riches. That's what it says in Luke. You've got to learn first that it doesn't belong to you. And then once you release it, you're free.
And then you just manage it. And if somebody else needs it more than you do, it's theirs. And that's the spirit of the book of Acts.
They had all things in common. And they were selling and giving as those had need. What about giving? Some people, some of you don't give at all. You don't give at all.
Or maybe token. You don't give. I don't know why, but you don't. We don't need your money.
I don't want your money. But you're missing something wonderful because you're missing the place of obedience and the place of multiplied blessing. And some people give a little. I mean, they throw in a couple of bucks or they give minimally. Can't give more than that because they're spending it all on things that are going to burn up. And that's kind of sad.
I mean, it's real sad. And I grieve not for us, but for them. I hope you're giving generously because I want you to be in the place of blessing. Don't just throw God tokens. David says, I'm not going to give God that which costs me nothing.
That's a mockery. Where are we in that? One of the guys showed me a little deal. A church that has half as many people attending as we do and gets twice as much in the offering. And he said, why do you think this is? I said, I don't know.
And as I began to think about it, I thought, well, it might be for the wrong motives. Maybe they're under a legalistic system where they have to give. And if that's the case, it doesn't matter what they give. Because if it's all given for the wrong reason, what's the difference, right?
Because it brings back to them no blessing. But on the other hand, if they're all giving out of an abundant heart of love, it's pretty exciting. But I know this, folks, an awful lot of people in this church aren't doing what they should. And week by week, it says, lay by and store the first day of the week. I have to examine my own heart because there are weeks when I don't do what I should have done either, and I'm not obedient to the Spirit of God, and I want to wrestle with that every week.
Every week. Giving is a function. And not only giving that we may have the work here go on, but giving beyond here. See, the only reason we want a ministry here is to advance the kingdom beyond here.
You got the picture? I mean, whatever comes in here goes right back out again. We're not trying to amass a fortune. And the money that we do have, we try to be good stewards of and send the rest out.
Train people to go. Reach those who have need. I mean, God gave, didn't He? Christ gave. How can God's people in Christ's church not give?
Be consistent. Finally, fellowship is a function. And I know that you believe it's an essential one. Fellowship just means a common life together.
And I guess in a way it sums up everything we've said. It's just communing, just being together, loving each other, sharing life with each other. It's sitting at a table and hearing someone unbear their heart. It's praying with someone who has a need. It's visiting in a hospital.
It's sitting in a class. It's going to a home Bible study. It's singing a hymn with somebody you never met, holding the same hymnal, and maybe talking about what Christ means to you. It's new Christians sharing their joy.
It's sharing a prayer request about a loved one that's ill. It's all kinds of things. It's common life, see? It's common life. It's having everything in common. Everything. That's fellowship.
And that's a function. Do you belong somewhere? Do you fellowship? Do you open your life up?
Do you expose yourself with all your scars and all your problems to some other folks who have scars and problems, too, so together you can minister? Fellowship. So, what are the functions?
Pretty simple, really. Preaching, teaching, evangelism, missions, worship, prayer, discipling, shepherding, family, training, giving, fellowship. Those are the essential ones. Are you involved in shepherding? Are you functioning in shepherding? Are you functioning in prayer? Are you functioning in discipling? Are you functioning in helping the family be sustained as God would have it? Are you functioning by training or being trained? Are you functioning in giving?
I ask myself that. Lord, do you want more? Am I doing what you want me to do? And I want to listen to the Spirit of God as He prompts my heart about all these things to be more faithful. I mean, I want to spend my life.
I'm not trying to keep any of it. I want to do my last gasp on the last day God has for me here. I want to end up right on target. I don't want to be full of energy and going to heaven. Like Henry Martin said, let me burn out for God.
I just want to go when I'm spent. But I want to maximize that. And I see so many Christians who just sort of tentatively play around on the surface.
And they make no major investment in the dynamics of function in ministry. And so there's no sense of accomplishment. And there will be, however, a time of accountability and a forfeiture of some things. Now listen, you say, John, we've talked about skeletons, right? Talked about internal attitudes, right?
Talked about function. What about flesh? Want to know something? It really doesn't matter.
It really doesn't matter. I mean, if I can borrow my body analogy, man looks on the outward appearance. God looks what? On the heart.
You want to know something? A church is what a church is at its heart. What I want to know about a church is what is its skeleton? Is it a church committed to a high view of God? To the absolute priority of Scripture, doctrinal clarity, personal holiness, and spiritual authority? And what are its attitudes flowing through obedience and love and service and unity and all of those things?
And what are its functions? And then, folks, it really wasn't going to matter a bit what it looks like on the outside or how it fleshes out or how its programs take shape. You understand that? When God, by his wonderful grace, brought me to Grace Church, I, in my own heart, said, first of all, and then said it to the men, God, I know this, that if we are what you want us to be, there'll be no trouble ministering effectively. Because what we are is the issue. The flesh, that's just the case.
And so many times, as we said earlier in the series, when pastors come to our church, they're looking for some flesh to drag back and implement in their church. And it won't hold up. It won't stand.
It won't live. Because it doesn't have in it all these things that are its life, you see. And if all of these things are there, the flesh is really not that important. It isn't so important what it looks like on the outside. It's the beauty that it is on the inside that speaks of its reality.
The fleshing out just happens when all the stuff on the inside is right. I believe God's called our church into existence. And it's a unique place. It is a unique place. Rarely does a Sunday go by when I stand in the first-time visitor's reception and a group doesn't come by and say, oh, we're from so-and-so. Last week it was Florida or Michigan.
Last week it was Michigan and the week before it was Florida or vice versa. And they said, we're from, let's say, Michigan. Oh, how nice. Are you visiting? No, we just moved here. Oh, you did.
Why? To come to this church. Oh. And then they'll say, do you know a place where we might find somewhere to stay or a house and maybe a job? You mean you just packed up and left everything and came? Yes, we wanted to come to Grace Church. And a lot of times there's not just one or two, but there's a whole bunch of little ones. And they'll say, do you have anybody who could kind of help us find a place to stay? We just believe life centers around the church, not the job. And that happens. And I get a little lump in my throat and I say, Lord, keep us what you want us to be.
A lot of folks. A lot of folks look into that. . That's John MacArthur, chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. His current study here on Grace to You is titled The Anatomy of a Church. Now, John, some of the responsibilities of churches that you talked about today, specifically the training and equipping of believers, those are also goals of our ministry here at Grace to You. And with that in mind, it might be helpful if you explain why Grace to You is not a church, not a surrogate for the church, can't be a substitute for the local church.
Absolutely. Grace to You is not a church. It is not a substitute for a church because the people who are a part of the family of Grace to You don't meet together, that their lives aren't together, that they're not living life in a community. This is purely an additional resource to believers and hopefully even teaching the truth to unbelievers around the world, but cannot substitute for the church. We're like a book.
You could make a parallel there. People who go to a church also read a book written by somebody else. Well, we do that. We produce books.
We produce CDs and downloads and all of those kinds of things, and television as well as radio. So we are corollary to the church, cannot be the church. Listen to the purpose statement of Grace to You. One of our principal tasks is to protect believers from being tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming. We accept the God-given responsibility of speaking the truth in love and strive for the growth of the church and the glory of our Lord rather than the praise and honor of men. Our role is not to supplant the local church's ministry, but to support it by providing additional resources for those hungering for the truth of God's Word.
Media ministries can never substitute for involvement in a biblical church, a group Bible study, or interaction with a pastor or teacher. Yet we sense the need for more in-depth resources evidenced by the many Christians and Christian leaders worldwide who depend on our ministry to supplement their own study. Hey, that's why we're here and so thankful that you make it possible by your support.
Thanks, Jon. Friend, when you give to this ministry, you help believers around the world build their local churches. You make biblical resources available to those churches, and you help spread the gospel across the globe. To express your support, contact us today. You can mail your tax-deductible donation to Grace To You, Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412.
You can also donate online at gty.org. And if you're unable to give today, there are many other ways to support Grace To You. Pray for Jon and the staff, pray for this daily radio broadcast to reach people with biblical truth in communities like yours and around the world. That really is the greatest way you can stand with us.
Pray for us. In addition, there are ways to support Grace To You well into the future, opportunities that might be of interest to you. To find out how to support our ministry through your estate plan and give future generations access to Jon's verse-by-verse Bible teaching, call us at 800-55-GRACE or visit the Legacy Giving page at gty.org. And while you're online, make sure you check out the Grace To You blog, the daily devotions, and also the more than 3600 sermons free of charge in MP3 and transcript format. That's our website one more time, gty.org. Now for Jon MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Be back tomorrow when Jon helps you see exactly what your responsibility is in strengthening your church for greater ministry. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on Grace To You.
