Who’s in Charge of the Church? (Part 1 of 2)

Think for a minute, who is in charge of your church? Is it the senior pastor? Is there a team of elders?

Is there a board of trustees? Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg explains that how we answer this question actually impacts the health and growth of the entire church. Colossians chapter 1 and verse 15, speaking of Christ, Paul says, He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities, all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church.

He is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to of all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross. Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior, but now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you wholly in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation, if you continue in your faith established and firm, not moved out from the hope held out to you in the gospel. This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant. Thanks be to God for his Word.

Now before we study the Bible together, let's ask God's help. Our God and our Father, we come now with a sense of expectation, because of all that your Word promises, that when the Bible is truly taught, that your voice will be really heard. It is this which gives significance to the moments that we now spend, which brings a crushing sense of responsibility to us, that we might pay careful attention to your Word, and which also fills us with a sense of wonder that you, the living God, should speak in such a full and final and saving way and bring it home to our waiting hearts and lives today as we seek you in Jesus' name.

Amen. My text this morning is essentially the opening phrase of Colossians 1, and he is the head of the body, the church. He is the head of the body, the church. In this brief study in the doctrine of the church upon which we have embarked, we asked last time, Who or what is the church? And we ask this time, Who is in charge of the church? It's not uncommon for people to walk into any kind of establishment and, after a moment or two, to say, Who's in charge around here? And when we think of the church as it is expressed, both in terms of its local framework, the question Who's in charge of the church is a valid question. The answer to it leaves us in no doubt whatsoever.

Any existing confusion is due to man's interference. And the clarity with which Scripture speaks is succinctly before us here in this eighteenth verse, and he—namely, Christ—is the head of the body, the church. Now, the context in which that little phrase comes is, of course, the first chapter of a letter that Paul wrote to the Colossian Christians. The church in Colossae, a fledgling church, was facing the threat of harmful teaching that was coming its way as a result of rather puffed-up instructors who were full of specious philosophy and high-sounding arguments. Paul is therefore concerned to warn these believers, whom he loves and whose faith he affirms, just in case they would be in danger of succumbing to these fine-sounding arguments, lest they would be taken up with these hollow words and with this empty philosophy. And indeed, the call of verse 8 in chapter 2 is a call most necessary for us as it was for them.

See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ. Now, how are these believers to see to it that they're not captivated by all this silly nonsense? Because, you will notice, it is an exhortation that is given to them. It is something that they are to do. They are to ensure that this doesn't happen.

They are to see to it. How, then, do believers in any generation ensure that they are not caught by that which is bogus? Well, the answer is clear—by an understanding of what is true. And that the greatest antidote to false philosophy and to human speculative thought is a thoroughgoing, experiential grasp of basic Christian doctrine. Now, it is to that end that we labor in the privilege of pastoral ministry, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ.

And this, of course, is Paul's great urgent concern with these Colossian believers. We shouldn't think, incidentally, that it was unique to the first century and then jumped twenty centuries and has now reappeared on the edge of the twenty-first. No, if you read church history, you will find that the church has faced this in every generation, just about. In the seventeenth century and in the eighteenth century, the church was in a poor-looking state.

It had lost any sense of authority. It was being buffeted by the rationalists in the seventeenth century and by the deists in the eighteenth century. And a number of the church leaders at that time said, You know, the only way that we're going to be able to show ourselves strong and authoritative is to take these people on at their own game. And we need to become far more intelligent, and we will defeat them with their rationalistic thought, and we will speak to them in that way, and their deism we will tackle.

And what we'll do is we'll have these lectures, and we'll let them lecture, and then we'll lecture, and then the people will be able to deduce for themselves. And it was a horrible mess, and it was an ensuing chaos. And what the lecturers failed to do, God did himself. And the lady had a baby, and his name was Charles, and his last name was Wesley, and God said, Here we go. And the lady had a baby, and his last name was Whitfield, and his first name was George, and God said, And here we go. And the lady had a baby, Mrs. Edwards, and her son was Jonathan, and God said, Here we go.

And what did he do? Well, he raised up men in a generation to proclaim the unsearchable riches of Christ in order that the church may bow beneath the authority of Christ. You go to the nineteenth century, both in Britain and America, you find the exact same thing—the emergence of higher criticism, people saying, The Bible doesn't mean what it says. You shouldn't treat Genesis 1 to 11 as truth.

There's no reason to believe that these numbers are correct. The prophets are all over the place. The kings, we don't know who they are. And all of this high-sounding, philosophical, speculative, superficial thought washes over the church, and the church stands up and tries to defeat it, embracing some of these ideas and reaching out into Anglo-Catholicism and saying, Well, we'll show that we're strong by virtue of our numbers and what they're unable to do by higher criticism and by the embracing of Anglo-Catholicism, God again does as he comes to revive his church in the midst of the years. And in Ulster and in Wales and across this great nation, God comes to a body threatening to become a corpse to a moribund church, and he revives it in the face of its glaring lack of authority. I ask you this morning, you're sensible people, do you think the church is authoritative at this point in the twenty-first century in America? Do you think we speak with authority?

Do you think that there is any sense in which the culture really looks to us? That we would take a lead? Not for a moment. So what are we going to do? Oh, well, says somebody, we'll just get a few more people elected.

Silly idea. What are we going to do? We're going to do what they had to do in Colossae, and that was bow down beneath the headship of Christ and examine ourselves to see whether we are securely attached to he who is the head of the church, and then, if we are, to ensure that we are prepared to do unequivocally what the head of the church demands of his body. Well, that is essentially the orb of what we have to say this morning. It is simply this, that the church is ruled by the headship of Christ. The Colossian believers need to understand that he is supreme and that he is sufficient. In these verses that we read, the supremacy and sufficiency of Christ just emanates from it. Look at it in verse 15 and 16 and 17. The Lord Jesus Christ, he says, is supreme in all of creation.

For by him all things were created. The world doesn't believe that. Half the Christians don't believe that, for goodness' sake. People do not believe that. But we do.

Why? Because the Bible says so. By him all things were created.

What? The things in heaven and the things on earth. The things we can see and the things we can see.

The thrones and the powers and the rulers and the authorities. All of these things were created by him, and they were created for him. What is this for? For Christ.

Who made this? Christ. What are we supposed to do with this?

Offer it up to Christ. Do you see how radically this differs from the average social studies class? Do you really see how important it is that we become students of the Bible? We cannot argue our pagan friends and neighbors into these convictions. We must be prepared to recognize that they think we're absolutely Neanderthal. That they think we're the silliest people they ever met.

That we would be prepared to raise our hands and say, you know, I believe that the world was created by the Lord Jesus Christ. And people say, Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, I was just coughing. No, you weren't coughing. You thought it was the daftest thing you ever heard.

Yes, I did. And furthermore, everything was created by him, and everything is created for him. He is supreme. He is supreme in his church, as we will see. He is sufficient in that God's fullness has dwelled in him, verse 19. He is sufficient in the work that he has done for his own, in that he has reconciled all things to himself. And it is in the context of the church that we ponder the wonder of his absolute supremacy and his absolute sufficiency. You remember now that we said last time that the church is not a human institution, thought up by a group of religious individuals who thought it would be nice to have an association, or a kind of religious club, a sort of theological or spiritual rotary club, you know. That the church is a divine institution, it is a spiritual institution, and that our attachment to the church comes as a result of being attached by grace, through faith, to Christ, who is the head of the church. Therefore, if anyone says, Paul in 2 Corinthians 5.17, is in Christ, he is a new creation.

The old is gone, the new has come. And this is the great question with which we concluded last time. Am I included in Christ? Am I attached to Christ? Have I been included in Christ as a result of hearing his word of truth, the gospel that has been proclaimed, and bowing before his greatness? Now, we move from that to the question not, Have I been included in Christ? But am I submitting to Christ who is the head? You say, Well, this is a very corporate question in that we're studying the church. Yes, of course it is, but the way that the church as an entity submits to Christ is a result of individuals submitting to Christ. And these Colossian believers were buffeted by error, and Paul needed them to know that they derived all of their growth and all of their guidance from Jesus, who is the head. They would have looked at one another fledglily in their faith and said, You know, I wish Paul would write to us or send us something, because after all, the things that people are saying seem to make quite a bit of sense to me. It's not that the things that people say sound senseless.

So much of what they say sounds actually very reasonable. And that's why it is imperative that we know our Bibles, so that we will be able to discriminate between that which is specious and bogus and that which is truth. And so Paul writes to them, and he says, Listen, I want you to understand that Jesus is absolutely supreme.

There is no one greater or higher than he, and Jesus is absolutely sufficient. Christ is the head of the body, the church. And as our heads control both our growth and our guidance, so Christ does the same for his body. Now, the little that I have learned about human anatomy—and you know that I am no scientist. My only interest in science as a schoolboy was in biology, and my only interest in biology extended to human biology, and that was merely out of a sense of self-preservation, because I actually had some of the things that were in the drawings, and I was possessed of some of the systems that were supposed to be working. So I thought, I might as well pay attention to this.

As for the way in which stems are fitted to seeds and other things like that, I had to leave to my more intelligent friends, and they told me about it when I went home. But as to the issues of the human anatomy, I had a measure of concern for that. And I remember discovering the pituitary gland.

When I say discovering it, I don't mean that I was rooting around in someone's head and I found a gland, but rather that a member of the congregation that I was serving in Edinburgh at that time began to grow. He was actually a physician at the infirmary in Edinburgh, and he began to grow. He wasn't supposed to grow, because he was fully grown. At least he was a lot bigger than me to start with, and nobody should be growing any bigger than that.

It made me feel worse than I do. So I noticed one day when I shook his hand, I said, Man, does he have big hands. And I looked again, and I said, Phew, does he have big feet. And then over a period of time, I said, you know, the distance between his nose and the top of his forehead seems to be increasing. And it wasn't because his hairline was receding. And of course, I discovered what he in turn discovered, and that was that there was a malfunction in his pituitary gland which secretes the growth hormone as well as other hormones, and it was causing him to grow at a rapid rate even though he was a man in his mid-thirties.

So they went in, and they did things in there, and while he was not able to diminish his hand size, certainly it was arrested at that point. And as a result of that, because I'm relatively intrigued by these things, I began to examine how in the secretion of this growth hormone there is an impact on the connective tissue, and upon cartilage, and upon bone. Just in the last few weeks, I had the privilege of traveling for a week with somebody who was a neurosurgeon.

I made a nuisance of myself by asking him all kinds of questions, simply, again, because I was intrigued by what he did. And I found out, for example, that it is in the cerebrum that we have the central center which controls our various body parts. Those of you who are medics know as well that it is in the cerebellum that we have the coordination and the harmonization of all of our muscular action. And those of you who sneeze almost routinely on Sunday mornings when I'm preaching should know that that has to do with the medulla, which is taking care of all of your winking, coughing, chewing, swallowing, and sneezing. Provided you are correctly attached to the head.

I'll just leave that there. Now, it is from that physical picture and metaphor that Paul then moves to say, in the same way that the physical head is in control of both the organic element of life and the rulership or guidance of the individual, so that it doesn't just walk off in all directions, so he says, you Colossian believers need to be under the headship of Christ. Indeed, you have been placed into Christ, and it is under his headship that you will grow. Incidentally—and we'll come back to this in later studies—Christ mediates his rule through a plurality of godly men whom he has given as gifts to the church, says Paul in Ephesians 4, who are themselves pastors and teachers, who have been given the responsibility of edifying the saints so that they might be enabled to do the works of ministry. God has given those who are the servants of the headship of Christ to be servants of the gospel of Christ, so that in the faithful exercising of that giftedness, the people of God may be correctly attached to the head. I'm preparing a study that I have to give entitled Martin Lloyd-Jones the Preacher.

It has kept me up at nights, fascinated and intrigued and going to bed depressed and discouraged at the vastness of his capacity and the brilliance of his mind and the sensitivity of his soul. And in the course of my research, I discovered that in 1926, when he was still twenty-six, his birthday was December the twentieth, his fiancée at that time, thinking that she's about to marry a physician from Harley Street in London, she herself, being a medical doctor, discovers that the stirrings are in the heart of Martin Lloyd-Jones, her fiancée, to become a preacher of the gospel. She has never heard him preach. Indeed, he preaches only twelve times before he is invited to preach with a view to becoming the pastor of a little mission center in Aberavon in Wales. And his fiancée Bethan says to him in the course of this journey, she says, You know that you can do medicine. How do you know that you can preach?

And do you know what his answer was? I can preach to myself. Therefore, I can preach, I think, to others. Now, here is it, my dear friends—and listen carefully to this—the only foundation and basis upon which those of us who have been called, through the teaching of the Bible by the enabling of the Spirit to mediate the role of Christ's headship among his people is as we have the Bible preached to ourselves.

And unless it comes in power to us, it cannot come in power through us. Therefore, no man can exhort you to submit to the headship of Christ with any sense of realistic integrity unless that man himself has been so beset upon by the necessity of his bowing to the headship of Christ. So it is not some monarchy that God has established, where with kings and popes and princes he has established some hierarchical structure, and in the midst of that you have the proletariat, you know, in Colossae or in Cleveland or in Corinth, and they are called upon to do what the leaders say. No, it is that together we bow beneath he who is the supreme one and the all-sufficient one, and he who alone is the head of the church. Who is in charge around here?

Christ. He has given it to no one else to be in charge, neither to a pope, nor a prince, nor a king, nor a pretender to the throne. So we stand on the common ground at the foot of the cross, a sinner saved by grace, irrespective of the function and the gifting and the place that we are given in the economy of God's purposes. The supreme and all-sufficient head of the church is Jesus. Is your church submitting to him?

Are you? You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. In today's message, Alistair stressed the importance of having a thorough grasp of the basics of Christian doctrine to ensure that we understand what is true and recognize what's false. If you'd like to learn more about the Christian faith and the Bible, we have several short series to help get you started, including a five-message study called Christian Basics.

You'll find them at truthforlife.org slash learn more. And if you'd like to know more about worshiping together with fellow believers, the book we're recommending today is titled Corporate Worship, How the Church Gathers as God's People. This is a foundational book that explains why believers gather together and what the essential elements of corporate worship should be. It's a great book to read if you're currently looking for a local church. If you're a longtime church member, this is a helpful book to read to revisit the twofold purpose of corporate worship, which is to bring glory to God and to promote evangelism.

Request your copy of the book Corporate Worship today when you give a donation online at truthforlife.org slash donate, or you can call us at 888-588-7884. By the way, if you work in pastoral ministry or serve in local church leadership, you can register now for Basics 2023. This is an annual conference hosted by Alistair at Parkside Church just outside of Cleveland, Ohio. The conference is May 8th through the 10th. Alistair will be speaking along with his guests, Colin Smith and Herschel York. You can register online to attend Basics 2023 at BasicsConference.org.

There is early bird pricing available when you register before February 1st. Again, go to BasicsConference.org. I'm Bob Lapine. We've all heard stories in the media about corrupt church leaders and cults. Tomorrow we'll find out how to recognize and prevent unbiblical leadership in your church. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.