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The Discipline of God's Children, Part 3 A

Grace To You / John MacArthur
The Truth Network Radio
January 17, 2025 3:00 am

The Discipline of God's Children, Part 3 A

Grace To You / John MacArthur

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January 17, 2025 3:00 am

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Now if you want to take all the will of God and condense it to one statement, that's it. God wants His people holy. That's the message. And that's why Christ is moving in His church with searching eyes, with a holy presence, with judgment ready to purge and to cleanse. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Who am I to judge? Clearly, that's the world's stance with regard to how people live, the choices they make. As long as what someone else is doing doesn't seem to affect anyone else, then it's no one else's concern, right? But is that true for Christians? When a believer sins, whether or not it's an obvious public sin, is it your business?

And if so, what gives you the authority to confront that person? Well, today John MacArthur will show you the loving biblical way to respond when someone you know is disobeying God's word. And he'll show you the consequences when sin is not addressed. So here's John to continue his study called My Brother's Keeper.

Let's look together at Matthew 18, verse 15, and I'll read as you follow in your Bible. Moreover, if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone. If he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother. But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more.

Then the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established. And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church. But if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a tax collector. Verily I say unto you, whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven. Again I say unto you that if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them by my Father who is in heaven.

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. Now this particular passage speaks of the Lord's command for the holiness of His church. I believe that Jesus Christ desires that the church be pure.

And herein is His instruction as to our part in that purity. In Revelation chapter 1, we see an interesting picture of Christ. He's moving in verse 12 and 13 among the seven lampstands which represent the seven churches which represent all the church and He is clothed with the garment of the priest and the king and the prophet.

He's there in His full glory. Verse 14 says His head and His hair were white like wool and white as snow and that speaks of His purity and then His eyes like a flame of fire, His searching out to find any blemish or any unholiness and His feet like fine bronze as if they burned in a furnace and His voice as that of many waters. Now you see Him in judgment character, ready to trample out sin and speak a word of judgment that goes forth as it says later in Revelation like a two-edged sword. So you see the Lord moving in His church and He is marked out as pure by His whiteness and His eyes are penetrating, looking for sin and that sin is to be dealt with. How does the Lord deal with sin in His church?

That's a picture in Revelation 1, but how does He actually do that? I think there are three elements. Element number one is the ministry of the Word. The Word is an instrument of holiness.

Ephesians 5 talks about being washed by the water of the Word, it is a purifier. Secondly, the Holy Spirit, Romans 1, 4 is called the Spirit of holiness and the ministry of the Spirit is essential to the holiness of the church, so the ministry of the Word and the ministry of the Spirit. But thirdly, I believe you must link up Revelation 1 to Matthew 18. And I think the Lord is moving in His church with purity in mind, penetrating, searching out sin and ready to deal with it, not only through the ministry of the Word and the ministry of the Spirit, but the ministry of the people.

I think the outworking of Revelation 1 is in Matthew 18. As Christ is involved in the purging of His church through the instrumentation of those who represent Him in the world. And that's why at the close of the passage He says, when you're gathered together in My name, I'm there in the midst of you. In other words, when the church is moving to seek its purity, Christ is there in the midst, moving among the candlesticks, doing His purifying work. Let me make a statement and I'm going to say it again later on, never...never is the church more like Jesus Christ than when it is engaged in dealing with sin. Never are you as an individual more like Jesus Christ than when you are seeking the purity of His church. And yet, on a wide scale, in the church across our land today, this is not in the thinking of the people.

And I'm amazed at that. Had to go to Chicago and then had to be driven to another city for a Bible conference. I arrived at this particular place where I was to speak at the Bible conference and I had prepared a message and I was all set to speak that night and a faculty member called me and said, I don't know what you're giving tonight, but could you give a message on the holiness of God? He said, this is what we need. And he said, I've been praying for a long time that God would put that on your heart and I just thought I'd call and suggest that. Before I got out of the hotel room, I got a second phone call. Another man called and said, what in the world are you doing in a place like this?

Don't you know such and such and such and such about this place where you're going? And he got done describing and I said, it sounds exactly like a place I ought to be. I said, long ago I decided I wasn't going to spend my whole life saying things to people that already believed them, but I was going to say them to the people that maybe needed to hear them. And I explained to him that I had been asked to speak on this issue and I said, I'm going to trust that the Lord has me here for a purpose.

So I did. And I really didn't have any notes, I just took my Bible and I had my head full of all those other things about worship and about the holiness of God and the sinfulness of sin and I just poured out my heart in this regard and it was very quiet, I don't know, four or five thousand people maybe or something like that, very quiet. And it was the quietness of...I think the quietness of conviction to some extent. It may have been somewhat the quietness of where did this guy drop in?

You know, I don't know that they were too used to that approach. But it was very interesting. I poured out my heart on the matter of the holiness of God, the sinfulness of sin and talked about if ever there was to be a real renewal, if ever there was to be a real revival in the church, it would be when we again saw the holiness of God, the sinfulness of sin and brokenness fell before a holy God to worship Him.

And I finished and it took me about an hour and fifteen minutes to get to the door because we had time to talk with so many, many people. And finally there was one final person waiting and this person came up and said, I'm a student in seminary, senior, and I just have to tell you that I did not appreciate your message at all. You were totally off base. And I said, why do you say that? Well, because you lacked love. Our message is love and I didn't find any love at all in your message.

Well, it grieved my heart. So I said to this student, I said, did you understand what passages I was teaching? Yes. Were those passages about love?

Well no. Is it legitimate to teach a Bible passage and just teach it the way God wrote it or do we have to read into every passage the message of love? I mean, if we do that, then we're not really being fair to the Word of God, are we? And maybe the fact that you felt that way is only a demonstration of the overbalance or the lack of balance in your own understanding of God's holiness as over against His love. I said, I think that you probably needed this message and that's evident by your response to it. Well, I tried to be as loving as I could in saying that, but I confess that it was only a sort of a sad moment because later on a faculty member was asking me what the conversation was, saw it going on, I guess, and I said, well...I repeated some of the conversation and his reply was, well you see, the real issue wasn't that you didn't have enough love in your message, the real issue was that from that student's viewpoint you didn't have all love in your message because there's no room for anything else. Love. Nothing wrong with love and I'm the first person to be thankful for it, aren't you also? Thankful for God's love? But I think the kind of love that some people have in mind isn't even the holy love of God. I'm not sure what kind of love it is. And I really fear that if seminaries produce people that all they want to talk about is love that there never will be in the church the work of Jesus Christ and the way He wants to do it.

And I'm also interested to note that so many of the people who are like this student and like this maybe some of the influence of that institution, they all may not be like that by any means, either at that institution or others. But it's interesting to me that the same people who are always talking about this are always talking seemingly about revival and renewal and restoration in the church. And they live under an illusion that to renew the church and to revitalize the church and restore the church and bring revival and really win the lost, we just have to talk about love and love and love and love all the time on some kind of a sentimental level. And we're all talking about renewal and all of this that is wanted in the church, but it just...they don't understand that you're never going to have revival and renewal and restoration until you have a sense of the holiness of God and the sinfulness of man, out of which true brokenness comes and true revival. Tolerant kind of sentimentalism is never going to renew the church.

And all the message of love, love, love, you know, isn't going to do that. You know, you can go back to the Great Awakening in the 1700s, particularly under the ministry of Jonathan Edwards, and you will find characteristic of that revival, the first Great Awakening was a great revival and every other revival, whether biblical or after biblical times, and you will find that two things characterize those revivals, including the Great Awakening in the 1700s. One was a powerful preaching on the holiness of God, and two was powerful preaching on the sinfulness of sin. In fact, invitations hadn't even been invented in the time of Jonathan Edwards. They didn't come till Finney later, and I don't think we have a great sense of debt to what Finney did in sort of manipulating people through his invitation system. But in Edwards' time, they said that he preached and he would preach on the holiness of God and the sinfulness of sin and not only did he not have to invite people to do anything, but in the middle of his sermons, people would be screaming and crying for him to stop because they would be under so much conviction.

And a real revival happened. Now it may have had some excesses and may have been a little too harsh in some extremes, and there was a move away as you go from the 18th century into the 19th century, there was a drift away from the firmness and the rigidity and the power of preaching about the holiness of God and the sinfulness of sin. And people began to talk more about love and they began to sort of want to mitigate that and sort of ease off of that because they feared some of the extremes. Richard Lovelace from Gordon Conwell writes, the whole church was avoiding the biblical portrait of the sovereign and holy God who is angry with the wicked every day and whose anger remains upon those who will not receive His Son. Walling off this image into an unvisited corner of its consciousness, the church substituted a new God who was the projection of grandmotherly kindness mixed with the gentleness and winsomeness of a Jesus who hardly needed to die for our sins. And many American congregations were in effect paying their ministers to protect them from the real God. And then he insightfully says, it is partially responsible not only for the general spiritual collapse of the church in this century, but also for a great deal of evangelistic weakness. For in a world in which the sovereign holy God regularly employs plagues, famines, wars, disease and death as instruments to punish sin and bring mankind to repentance, the idolatrous image of God as pure benevolence and love cannot really be believed, let alone feared and worshiped in the manner prescribed by both the Old Testament and New Testament, end quote.

Now what he's saying is this. When you just have this sort of sentimental view of love, one, it will never renew the church because it never really causes people to face their sin. It'll never really renew the church. Two, it'll never evangelize and that is the worst delusion of all. People think if you just talk about love and God's love and how God loves everybody, you're going to evangelize. But apologetically you have a tremendous problem because on the one hand you're proclaiming a God who is all love and then on the other hand you are stuck trying to define to people how such a God can allow plagues and disease and disaster and war and famine and horror to exist. And that is why we must proclaim a holy God who has a holy hatred of sin so that all of that stuff makes sense, you understand? And unless the church comes back to a message of the holiness of God and the sinfulness of sin, it will never be renewed and its evangelism will be shallow and ineffective and unable to explain what is patently obvious to an unbeliever who hears only a message of love, how can a loving God allow what He allows? Losing God's holy hatred of sin literally emasculates the church and hinders rather than helps evangelism. Now there I think are a lot of people who think there's revival when it may be little else than emotion.

Jonathan Edwards was well aware of this. In a treatise concerning religious affections which he wrote in 1746, he was very concerned to make it known that fallen human nature is fertile ground for a fleshly religiosity which is impiously spiritual but ultimately rooted in self-love. High emotional experiences, he said, effusive, gushy religious talk, even praising God and experiencing love for God and man can be self-centered and self-motivated. In contrast to this, experiences of genuine renewal from the Holy Spirit are God-centered in character based on worship, have an appreciation of God's worth and grandeur divorced from self-interest. And Edwards wanted to point out that such genuine experiences create humility in the convert rather than pride and they issue in a new creation and a new spirit of meekness, gentleness, forgiveness and mercy. They leave the believer hungering and thirsting for righteousness instead of being satisfied with self-congratulation. In other words, true revival isn't people saying we've arrived spiritually, it's people being broken over the sense that they have not arrived. So when you look at what we're seeing in our culture and you ask yourself the question, is this a genuine revival?

You can ask some further questions. Does it mark itself by an overwhelming sense of the holiness of God? By a comprehensive sense of the depth of sin?

And by a kind of spiritual experience that results in brokenness rather than self-congratulation? That's the stuff that makes for true revival. And when you have like you do in the church today this incessant talk about love and acceptance and tolerance, this desire for self-esteem and to feel good about yourselves and God wants you healthy, wealthy, happy and all of this, you are really at the very opposite pole from the elements of genuine revival. And the reason being because the church not understanding the holiness of God doesn't deal with the sinfulness of sin and it never in effect purges itself.

And as I said in the very beginning, that's what Christ wants to do in His church. Never is the church more like Jesus Christ than when it's acting out, Matthew 18, 15 to 20, dealing with sin. Lovelace also says, most congregations of professing Christians today are saturated with a kind of dead goodness and ethical respectability which has its motivational roots in the flesh rather than in the Holy Spirit. Surface righteousness which does not spring from faith and the Spirit's renewing action, but from religious pride and conditioned conformity to tradition as a form of godliness which denies its power. He goes on to call it counterfeit piety.

We have to get back to the true elements of revival. John Owen said, the vigor and power of the spiritual life depends on the mortification of sin. Sin has to be faced, exposed, dealt with. Now I believe this is what Christ wants to do in His church. I believe Christ came into the world to do one thing. He says it in John 5 19, 5 30, 6 38, 7 16 and elsewhere, and that is He said, I came to do not My will but...what?...the will of Him that sent Me, the will of My Father. He says that over and over again and the will of the Father can be reduced to one statement. Come to 1 Peter 1...1 Peter 1, but as He who called you is holy, so be ye holy in all your manner of life and everything you be holy.

And here's why. And he quotes out of Leviticus 11, be ye holy for I am holy. Now if you want to take all the will of God at its broadest possible point and condense it to one statement, that's it. God wants His people holy.

That's the message. And that's why Christ is moving in His church with searching eyes, with a holy presence, with judgment ready to purge and to cleanse. In the Kingdom, Isaiah 35 8 says that God is preparing a path and the path is the way of holiness in James. You remember chapter 4 where He says in verse 8, draw near to God and He'll draw near to you, cleanse your hands, you sinners, purify your hearts, you double-minded, be afflicted and mourn and weep, let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to heaviness, humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord and He'll exalt you.

God is calling for a purging and a purifying. The will of the Father is that His people be holy. That is the work of Christ in the church. He does it through the Word, the Spirit and the work of the people.

The Word has its part as it's proclaimed. The Spirit does His part as He moves in the heart. But we are to join the Word and the Spirit in human flesh and we are to act in behalf of Christ in the presence of His church to seek its purity and the prescription for that is in verses 15 to 20. We are to be Christ, moving in His church. You're listening to Grace to You with John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary.

John's current series here on Grace to You is titled, My Brother's Keeper. John, from the concept of church discipline that we're seeing in Matthew 18 to the actual practice of church discipline in a congregation, a question some people may have is this. When you're choosing a church to join, how much of a factor should the church's obedience to Matthew 18 be? Should I look for a church that practices church discipline according to Matthew 18 and should I avoid churches that forgo that practice?

Yeah, and there's a simple reason why. A church that will not practice Matthew 18 discipline is not committed to submitting to Scripture. So they've decided that there are some Scriptures they will submit to, there are some Scriptures they will proclaim, some Scriptures they will apply, and some they won't.

That's short of what is required. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable in every way to make the believer perfect, complete. That's a real test. There's another test that comes to mind as I think about it. What does the church believe about creation? Genesis 1.

There are so many views within the realm of evangelicalism of Genesis other than accepting six-day creation. But that's a test. That's a test of your fidelity to Scripture. Matthew 18 is maybe even a tougher test. Are you willing to do what the Lord says to do in His church?

If you're not at that point, then what other things might you decide to ignore or disobey? Let me offer you a copy of a free booklet called Your Local Church and Why It Matters. Your Local Church and Why It Matters.

Free to anyone who requests it. It'll help you find a good church. That's serious business, by the way. In fact, the process can be confusing, and I know many of you have tried and struggled to find a good, faithful church. This booklet will help you to know the criteria. How do you evaluate a church?

What do you look for? What should stand out most in a church that you would want to join and should be a part of? I'll help you answer those questions in the booklet, Your Local Church and Why It Matters.

It helps you evaluate the priorities, identification with Christ, fellowship with believers, submission to church leaders, loyalty to God and His people and His word, baptism, the Lord's table, and many more. So we'll send you a copy of the booklet free of charge. Just let us know you want one, and it's free to anyone who contacts us. Do it today.

Thanks, John. And, friend, to request the booklet Your Local Church and Why It Matters, call us or go to our website. Again, it's free of charge, so get in touch with us today. The number to call is 800-554-7223. That number is easy to remember as 800-55-GRACE. You can also request Your Local Church and Why It Matters at our website, GTY.org. This booklet looks at how God designed the church and the role it needs to have in your life. It also answers questions like, what is the mission of the church? How can I serve my church, and how do I increase my love for the church? Again, to get a free copy of the booklet Your Local Church and Why It Matters, call 800-55-GRACE or go to our website, GTY.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Be sure to watch Grace To You Television this Sunday on Direct TV channel 378, or you can watch anytime at our website, GTY.org. And be back Monday as we break from our current study to bring you a special broadcast in light of Inauguration Day here in the United States. It's one that will help you keep your hope for the future where it should be, on the Lord Jesus Christ. So don't miss it, it's another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.
Whisper: medium.en / 2025-01-17 10:29:40 / 2025-01-17 10:39:34 / 10

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