Committed to the Mission of God

Today, on a special edition of Renewing Your Mind… On this Friday, I'm Lee Webb.

We're glad you've joined us. And I'd like for you to listen in on an online conversation our president and CEO Chris Larson had with three of our teaching fellows, Dr. Robert Godfrey from his home in Southern California, Dr. Derek Thomas in South Carolina, and Dr. Burke Parsons here on our campus. They talked about the certainty we have that Christ will build His Church and are calling to remain faithful to His Great Commission. These are certainly days in which the church has had to think through how to carry forward its mission in the world in perhaps challenging circumstances.

We can't even envision all the different places and circumstances into which people might be hearing this broadcast today. But we do know across the world, the church has been faced with many scenarios in which they've never really had to think through before in terms of carrying forward how to care for their people in the midst of lockdowns, government orders, or even guidance from health officials that sometimes can be frankly quite confusing. We're hoping today to help to remind God's people about the enduring nature of God's mission in the world and how that relates to the Great Commission, how we should think about the means of grace, the role of preaching, prayer, gathering, and fellowshipping with the saints, and how we should even think through the sacraments in very difficult circumstances.

And so we're just thankful to have you all with your wisdom in serving the church over the years. And Dr. Godfrey, we certainly know that there in California, there have even been perhaps more restrictions placed upon the church than perhaps in other parts of the world. And how are things going there for you, and how has the church sought to respond? And I know that you're a member of a vital local congregation there in Escondido, and how have things looked for you all? Well, things have gone well for us in our local church.

We're very blessed in Southern California to have good weather. So we're able to meet out of doors. We've been meeting out of doors really since March, and we've been wearing masks, but we're living in an environment where there's a lot of pressure, a lot of tension. Ministers often feel themselves sort of caught betwixt and between.

There are some folks saying, we shouldn't meet at all, this is so dangerous, we shouldn't get together. And then others saying, this is all a hoax, we should pay no attention to it, our rights are being violated, we have to stand up for Christ, we ought to be meeting indoors, not wearing masks. And so churches, ministers, and elders have felt a lot of pressure from different directions and have tried to find a way through it all. It has led to interesting questions about what's the difference between hearing a sermon in person and hearing a sermon online, because some churches for a time ceased face-to-face meetings of any kind, and everything was live streamed. Is that an effective use of the means of grace?

What are the liabilities of that? So we're all sort of muddling through, and my own belief is that we need to listen to our ministers and elders. We have to be obedient to our civil government to the extent we can, unless we're really in a position where we have to say we have to obey the Lord rather than obey the magistrate. I think for most of us, we're not in that position, and we ought to be careful and safe, it seems to me, if only out of love for our brothers and sisters in the church. Dr. Parsons, I know that you've also sought to shepherd and navigate these circumstances from the other side of the country here, and what does that look like for you in the midst of the congregation you serve?

Well, that's a good question, Chris, and I'm grateful for Bob's comments there. Of course, things in Florida are quite a bit different, but we have worked very hard, and I've worked very hard to make sure that all the decisions that we have made from the very beginning are made by the entirety of our elder board or our session, that we as elders are making decisions together, and thanks be to God, He has given us great unity of spirit, and the decisions that we have made have been decisions that we have made together with unanimity. So with various guidelines and restrictions and suggestions from both state, local leaders, and even national agencies, we have tried to keep things as normal as possible. We have tried to show forth a spirit of grace in all decisions, and we've also tried to make all decisions based on a certain principle of freedom and a freedom of conscience so that people in and of themselves individually can make certain decisions.

You know, for the most part in Florida, things have been very open and very free, and our schools are open, our kids are in school and have been since the beginning of the school year every day, but no shutdowns of their schools. And so, as we know, there are different views on all these matters, and we have worked very hard not to bring those up. It's not my job as a pastor to help people make these decisions and to try to discern all the different views and all the different science that is out there. But what I am very grateful for is how our elders and we as pastors have worked very hard to read everything that we possibly can to study the evidence and to strive to lead God's people carefully and patiently and graciously through this pandemic. Dr. Thomas, we know that this has been a time where many congregations have had to think through the means of grace, even as they've not been able to meet, perhaps in different parts of the world. Some churches have moved to streaming their services. In terms of what is ideal, though, what is the primary means of grace that God has given to shepherd his people?

Yes, thank you. That's a great question. And like Burke and Bob, we've had to navigate our way through this last almost a year now, and there will be several more months of it to come. We are a Presbyterian church and we are governed by ruling elders.

It's interesting if I can pick up on the mask issue. I've seen it more or less parallel to 1 Corinthians 8 and Romans 14 and the whole argument about the weaker brother. I told the congregation, you know, we are where we are and it doesn't really matter what your particular opinion is. I'm not even sure what my particular opinion is. And I've stopped reading all of the opinions because we just need to get through this and we need to get through it as unified as possible. And one of the issues, I think, for me as a pastor is that I think this season has brought out the best in folk, but it's also brought out some of the worst side of us. Everyone now seems to have an opinion about everything and wish to express that opinion and sometimes fairly loudly.

And so my concern is to get through this season in one piece and out on the other side. Preaching, prayer are primary means here of grace to enable folk to grow. I'm glad it was in 2020 and not in 1980 so that we did at least have the ability and continue to have the ability to live stream. And we've more or less been able to do almost almost everything except the Lord's Supper. And that's a huge issue.

It's an immense issue. And in one sense, it has garnered within us a greater love, I think, for what the Lord's Supper does as a means of grace to grow us more into Christ-likeness. The fact that we have missed it for such a long time, and I personally can't wait for the return of the Lord's Supper, but that's where we are in Columbia.

Dr. Parsons, I want to come back to you and to have you help us think through the Great Commission. Sometimes Ligonier is reaching people who are just beginning to study God's Word in depth for the first time. They're waking up to the reality of the holiness of God and all that he has said through the scriptures and in an age in which there's so much busyness and really complication in life. And I'm just thinking in our own family life and sports activities with kids and things like that. And sadly, it seems that some churches complicate family lives better and can even complicate the Christian life. As it gets down to it and just boiling it down for us, what's the mission of God and the world and what should we be about as the church? And has the Lord given us more straightforward and rather simple commands?

Yeah, Chris, I think so. The mission of God is in one sense as expansive as the Scriptures and God's story of His mission of rescuing His people throughout history. And we could spend a great deal of time talking about the mission of God from the very beginning. I mean, the reason everything exists, the reason we exist, the reason the world exists is for God and His glory. I mean, He created us and He created a planet in which we can live for Him, for Himself, for His glory. And so the reason He has created us, the reason He has made us anew, made us to be born again in Christ is for His own glory. And so the mission of God, as you know, Chris, is really at the core of my passion as a Christian, as a pastor.

Because if you look at Scripture, it's hard to see anything not fitting into the mission of God and how He is rescuing and redeeming His people from throughout the world and every tribe, tongue, and nation. I think too often, to get at what you were talking about, Chris, and I think you're exactly right, too often we complicate the church and we complicate thus the mission of God. And too often we add to what really the church should be about and then complicate the lives of God's people. We tend to associate programming and activity and busyness with maturity in Christ, and those are not always the same thing.

Certainly, we want people to be involved and engaged. We want them to be in worship and we want them to be learning and growing and Bible study and fellowship and together as God's people. But too often, too many churches throughout history have just programmed the life out of people.

They've made their lives way too complicated and way too busy where they really don't have time just for the basic things in life, to care for their families and to care for their neighbors and their friends and widows and orphans. And so we as the church need to be very careful that we are striving to really, really keep focused on what God has called us to do as the church, namely, as Derek said, administering to God's people the means of grace, preaching and teaching and discipling and prayer and the sacraments of Lord's Supper and baptism, that we would really be consumed with that and all that comes from that. And certainly fellowship and coming together and loving one another and confessing our sins to one another, caring for one another, all of that is part of that, but you can't force people to do that.

That has to happen naturally and organically. Dr. Godfrey, on the subject of God's mission, can that mission ever fail? Why or why not? But of course, God's mission cannot fail because God cannot fail. God will accomplish His purpose. What He has set out to do, He will accomplish. You know, there are various ways of summarizing very briefly what the mission of God in the world is. Jesus summarized it, I think, when He said, I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. His mission to build His church will not fail. He's promised that He's going to gather all of His elect, and that mission will not fail.

There are so many ways in which Ligonier strives to serve the local church, and I wonder if we could just speak a word of encouragement to the local church pastor, church leader, elders who are out there. There are so many competing ideas in the world in terms of what success looks like. And of course, we hear this bantered about by the media and sports figures and celebrities, and we have an idea of what the world calls success. But what would God speak of as success for the local church? And there can be certainly the temptation to merely judge by numbers of attendees coming into a ministry. Is that success and what should we be looking for as markers of success as we seek to obey the Great Commission? Well, one aspect of success is to fulfill one of the mandates, one of the three mandates of the Great Commission to go into all the world to make disciples, to teach them, and to baptize them. And you see the ecclesial dimension of that with the reference to baptism. But what does making disciples look like? Growing Christians in the Lord, growing them in faith, growing them in the Word, growing them in prayer. And that would be successful whether you're talking about a dozen people or whether you're talking about 3,000 people.

So, the numbers don't make a difference. And I think that fulfilling what it is that the church is supposed to do in terms of faithfully administering the means of grace is at least one marker of what success looks like in the church. I was just going to say I very much agree with that, and I think of John Calvin saying, the church is where the Word is preached and heard. I really like that in Calvin because it's not enough that we preach the Word. We need to preach the Word. We want to preach the Word. We want to preach the Word even where it's not heard. But if you preach the Word and it's not heard, you don't have a church.

The church is the place where the Word is preached and heard, where the people listen to the Word, where they follow the Word. When I occasionally get to preach in our congregation, I've been preaching through Luke, and we just looked at the transfiguration, and the Word of the Father on the Mount of Glory was, listen to my Son, listen to my Son. And Jesus comes down the mountain, and people aren't listening. The disciples haven't listened to His commission that they cast out demons. The disciples haven't listened to Him that He has to give Himself to the cross to save them. The disciples haven't listened about how they're to be servants, not masters. And the great problem for the church, a foundational problem, is always are we listening to the Word?

Are we eager to hear the Word, and are we following it when we hear it? That has to be the great standard by which we evaluate success in any church. Again, I think Jesus provides a model for us in John chapter 6.

We've no doubt talked about this together before. But Jesus starts with 5,000 people and whittles it down to 11. And His message there is not that fewer is better.

His message is not small is always better than bigger. His message is better to have a few disciples that really listen to my Word than many pseudo-disciples that are doing their own thing. And so I think success has to be measured by faithfulness to God's Word.

Chris, I think the question that you're asking is so critical for the hour and has been really a very important question for a long time. But the problem is that people have not been asking that question, they've not been asking it properly, and they've not been looking really for the appropriate biblical answer. Because as we all know, success as the world defines it, we as the church will never have it. Faithfulness to God rarely ever looks like success in the eyes of the world, but it always is, if you will, success in the eyes of God. And that's what our Lord is concerned with in all of our lives as pastors, elders, deacons, Christians, all of us, that we would strive to be faithful. And that means faithful with the stewardship that He's entrusted to us. And that's all that we can be. I remember quite vividly a few years ago I was pressing Dr. Sproul on what did he want to see happening with Ligonier Ministries over the next 25 years.

I think this was in 2011 that I asked him this question. And he certainly wanted Ligonier to continue serving the church around the world and continuing to propagate Reformed theology to the church throughout the world, to be fixed on proclaiming, teaching, and defending God's holiness and all of its fullness. And then he had this parenthetical statement, if we are faithful. And that defined for me what it looks like for any Christian to continue to serve the Lord, whether our numbers grow or diminish. It's got to come back to that bedrock anchor of faithfulness to God and to His Word. And I think that gives Christians staying power, wouldn't you all say, in the midst of sometimes very changing circumstances, in terms of hostility even, that would come against the church. If we're kind of following that simple principle of faithfulness to God's Word and seeking to be obedient, don't you think that that gives Christians a great measure of courage?

Absolutely, Chris. The problem is that a lot of times Christians themselves are the ones who don't like it when we're striving to be faithful to God's Word. That's one of the problems that's facing the evangelical church today is that there is almost an antipathy towards faithfulness to God's Word because being faithful to God's Word isn't always easy.

In fact, in our rapidly changing culture, it is rarely ever easy. And what we find often in our church is that it's professing Christians that despise true, steadfast faithfulness to God's Word. And as we look at the history of the church, we're encouraged that the church has been able to be faithful and to flourish in every kind of social and economic and political circumstance. So the church survives in monarchies. It survives in democracies. It survives in dictatorships. It survives in chaos. It survives when it's a persecuted minority.

It survives maybe with more difficulty when it's a powerful majority. We should be encouraged that the present culture is not what saves Christianity. It's Christianity that saves those in every sort of culture who will listen to the Word of Christ. I think that's one of the most significant lessons, Bob, that the church needs to hear today, and I'm grateful that you've said it. It is something that I think many Christians sadly have forgotten and that they've forgotten that we are fundamentally citizens of heaven, that heaven is our home, and that in this world we will suffer and we will be persecuted. And we are beginning to see it in more and more significant ways in our country and throughout the world. And I'm reminded of what one of the early church apologists said when he said something to the effect of the world persecuting the church, that while they may kill us, they can never truly hurt us.

That's Ligonier teaching fellow Burke Parsons, who is joined by Robert Godfrey and Derek Thomas in a conversation that they had with Ligonier president Chris Larson. We're glad you've joined us today for Renewing Your Mind as we think deeply about how we're to live in these challenging times. It's important for us to be reminded daily that in the midst of lockdowns and government orders, God is still on the throne.

His plans never thwarted. This is a special edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Lee Webb, and I'm glad that you've joined us today. I want to let you know about three helpful resources that touch on the very subject our teaching fellows were addressing today. The first is Dr. R.C.

Sproul's book, How Should I Live in This World? We're offering that, along with Dr. Stephen Nichols' DVD series, A Time for Confidence, and Dr. Derek Thomas' book titled Strength for the Weary. All three of these resources are available to you for your gift of any amount. You can reach us by phone at 800-435-4343.

You can also go online to renewingyourmind.org. By the way, if you'd like to view or listen to the conversation we just heard in its entirety, it's available on Ligonier's YouTube channel. It's titled, Committed to the Mission of God. Again, thank you for being with us today, and I do hope you'll join us again Monday for Renewing Your Mind. We are the listener-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. .