Why We Belong, Part 1

When you came to faith in Christ, think of it this way, every one of us were photoshopped into the family. The pictures are added by the power of the Holy Spirit and you discover you're in that family. Let me just go a little further and say it isn't a picture of many families. Every local church is a picture of one family, regardless of race, standing, income.

I mean, we read it together. Do we believe it? When God saved you, he made you part of his church. All believers all over the world are part of God's universal church. But it's also God's design that we associate ourselves with a particular local church. Why is it important to attend a local church? Why is it important to join? What's the main idea behind church membership? Is it really important that you attend a church?

Or is it okay to go it alone? What are some biblical reasons for joining a church? Stay with us to find out. This is Wisdom for the Heart with pastor and author Stephen Davey. Stephen's continuing through his series on the church called Upon This Rock. Stephen's entitled today's lesson, Why We Belong.

Stay with us. As you may know, I've sort of pushed the pause button on our study through Paul's letter to the Philippians. And we've launched a series of messages on the church. And in our last session, I covered the foundation of the church. And I simply called the message who we are. We talked about the fact that we have been bought by and built upon the foundation of Jesus Christ. He is both our founder and our foundation. We are, as a church, mastered by our master. And we are messengers of his manifesto.

And that was as far as we got on that subject. Today I want to address a different subject. And I'm going to try to do all of these in one part, maybe two part, we're not sure. But I want to address the subject of why we belong, not just who we are, but why we belong. And I'm going to address this subject sort of from 35,000 feet.

We're going to fly over it and touch down every so often with a lot of different texts. I'll probably reference more than we'll actually turn to. And I want to address this subject. And in order to sort of get our hands around such a massive subject, let me give them to you in the form of five statements. Why we belong.

First, we belong because we are part of a resistance movement. Now, when I say that, you probably think of, you know, the old French resistance and German resistance movies, you're thinking in terms of, well, what Stephen probably means is we're going to start resisting the government. Now, I'm actually talking about something far more dangerous than the government to the church. In fact, the church never needs freedom to flourish.

Look around the world. I'm talking about how belonging to the church enables me to resist my own pride and this innate desire that comes naturally to want unaccountability and any authority in my life. I think of the writings of Chuck Colson, the founder of Prison Fellowship Down with the Lord, he wrote this, many Christians have been infected with the most dangerous virus of modern day American life.

He said sociologist Robert Bello referred to it as radical individualism. Christians, he wrote, thus infected act as if all that matters is Jesus and me. And so they entirely missed the point altogether for Christianity was never a solitary belief system. Now, somebody might say, you know, but I'm a Christian. And I meet with two Christian guys at Starbucks and we talk about the Lord. So we're a church or the church. Another might say, well, I attend a Bible study, you know, during the week and we're all Christians. So we are effectively the church.

A university student might say I attended gathering during the week of other college students. In fact, we sing and we even have a preacher show up. And so we constitute effectively a church. This is all the church I need. Now, the problem with that thinking is that it confuses the biblical definition of the local church.

Let me put it this way. Every believer belongs to the universal church. That is the body of Christ, which is composed of believers all around the world. Paul told the Corinthians that we were all baptized spiritually into one body, the body of Christ. And that's a reference to the church universal. If you want to turn quickly to 1 Corinthians chapter 12, he refers to that and you can read that entire chapter at your leisure. But I want to focus in on where he now shifts the metaphor to talk about a body.

And he uses language that is not ethereal, not universal, not mystical, but literally, tangibly, locally, physically present. We know the Christians today are gathering all around the world in this one body. They're gathering under a tree in Kenya.

They're gathering in a mud block building with a tin roof in Bolivia. And by the way, the local church is meeting in a gymnasium in Cary. But now Paul kind of shifts from the global universal church to the local church. Look at verse 18, but now God has placed the members, each one of them, in the body. If they were all one member, where would the body be? But now there are many members, but one body. And the eye cannot say to the hand that is in this body, I have no need of you. Or again, the head to the feet, I have no need of you.

Look down to the last part of verse 24. But God has so composed the body, giving more abundant honor to that member which lacks or that member which seems to be insignificant, so that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it. Now in a physical, literal, tangible way, we cannot play a role in the meeting of that assembly in Kenya or Bolivia. We can't care for them physically, tangibly, regularly, weekly, daily. We don't suffer physically, tangibly with them. We can serve each other in this manifestation.

We can't care for each other here. And he's referring to this local body and God intends us to. We're not a hand that doesn't have a body connected to it.

We're not random body parts just kind of floating around. We are connected to the life and the structure of the local manifestation of the body of Christ. Let me clarify an important distinction. Although every Christian is a member of the universal church, when Christians gather together, they are not necessarily a local church.

Let me put it this way. Several months ago, my wife and I gathered together with several thousand believers at a concert. That gathering was not a local church, but it was a gathering of believers. Those university students gathering and maybe even hearing preaching, that isn't a local church. To say that the church is made up of the people of God, which it is, is not the same thing as saying whenever the people of God gather, there you have a church. And I say that because I've heard people say to me over the course of my own ministry, my Bible study is my church because we're believers. Or my hike in the woods, I've actually heard that, is my worship service.

That's all I need. Not that you can't worship him there, not that you can't gather Starbucks and worship him either, but that doesn't constitute a local church. I've even had people say to me, I'm my own church.

That's convenient. I'm sure it's always unanimous in whatever it decides to do. And what we observe in the New Testament is that a church is a body of believers that has or plans to set aside qualified elders and deacons. A church defines a body of truth called a doctrinal and ethical standard to which it commits. A church develops structure and method that disciples and disciplines its members. A church is a body of believers accountable to spiritual leaders. A church administrates its ordinances of baptism and communion as a testimony to the community at large proclaiming that he's coming back and that we are identifying with his death, burial and resurrection, that we are submitting to our highest authority, our chief shepherd, the Lord Jesus. In other words, three guys studying at Starbucks or people having a Bible study in a home does not constitute a local church, although they may provide a function of the church and that they encourage each other in the word.

Can I give you some symptoms of how this is infected? Our church at large, the average Christian, especially when the church, by the way, is fast becoming simply a one-hour event on Sunday, maybe even on Saturday. John Lehman, who wrote a book simply titled Church Membership, I noticed on the back it was endorsed by Tim Keller and Mark Dever, men who have a wide influence, who pastor.

Here are some of the symptoms Lehman catalogued and I read this book recently and I want to boil it down to about these four or five observations. He said this, here's how the virus infects this individualistic, independent attitude. Christians, he writes, now think it's fine to attend a church indefinitely without joining. That's obvious. He goes on, Christians today think of getting baptized apart from the body or joining a church.

It's a little more subtle. Christians view the Lord's Supper as a private, mystical experience and not an activity of shared experience by the body. Christians, he goes on, assume they can be absent from the gathering of the church in worship without affecting their spiritual life. In other words, it doesn't matter. One more, Christians make major life decisions without considering the effects of those decisions on their relationship to a local church. That is, they buy homes, they rent apartments with scant regard for how factors such as distance and cost are going to affect their ability to serve the body. I gave a lot of symptoms.

I'll stop it at those, but let me say this, if you're slightly irritated to hearing me read those symptoms, it probably means you're infected with the virus. Jesus Christ said that he would build his church, Matthew 16, that's universal. Then he commissioned his apostles to gather disciples together and what you have then in the unfolding of the New Testament is this planting of local churches. In fact, when Paul the apostle wrote his New Testament letters, keep in mind he is either writing to local churches or to local church pastors and through them to the church like Timothy and Titus, his letters are inspired direction from God's spirit to encourage, to define, to structure these local assemblies. Beloved, God never intended for any of us to be an appendage to the church. He never intended for the church body to be sort of a supplement to us. He didn't design the Christian life as some solitary pursuit. He doesn't intend for the New Testament Christian to simply believe.

He intends for us to belong. I came across another book in my research this summer for this series by Joshua Harris. He pastored for a number of years. He's the guy that wrote this best-selling book called Why I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Any of you ever heard of that book? I'm so glad it wasn't written when I was dating as a kid. My parents never read it.

It would have messed up everything. But at any rate, he wrote a book on the church and he entitled it Stop Dating the Church. He's obviously against the idea of dating in any way, shape, or form. But his opening comments to me were intriguing.

In fact, the entire book is an easy read and I read it all. He likened the typical Christian's attitude toward the church as a reflection of the typical dating scene. He wrote, how can you spot a church dater? First, their attitude toward the church will focus on themselves.

In other words, it will be all about what they are looking for, social interaction, programs, and maybe weekend activities. The driving question will be, what can this church do for me? He says another sign of a church dater is unwillingness to commit.

You never want to go down the altar. To get too involved, he wrote, too obligated. They don't pay attention to God's larger purpose for them as a vital part of a family that is eternal. He said they go through the motions without ever specifically investing in either money or time. Finally, he writes, church daters are short on loyalty.

The primary problem is that they have a consumer mentality. That is, they are simply looking for the best product for the price of a Sunday morning only. He says, take my friend Nathan. Josh writes, he attends two churches on Sunday morning. One because he likes the music and the other because he likes the preaching.

His involvement in both go no deeper than his own interest. At the first church, he slips out just before the last song winds down and then he drives to the other church five minutes away. He's even factored in the time to stop by McDonald's to pick up an Egg McMuffin. He walks in just in time for the sermon to begin.

Josh writes, I guess you could say that Nathan is two-timing. Interesting. Beloved we join a local church as a statement that we have joined the resistance movement that pervades our culture and our church culture. It is so easy and tempting, isn't it, to look at the church for what it does for me. What's it going to do for my family? What's it going to provide?

If I like what it will give me, I'll stick around. We resist together our own pride, our own consumer mentality, our own self-centeredness, and our own desire to exercise radical individualism by submitting and belonging. We belong to the church, secondly, because we've been included in the family portrait. Now, if you ransack the New Testament, the church is referred to a number of different ways. We looked at one in 1 Corinthians 12 as a physical body. You find the church referred to as a bride, and Jesus Christ, the bride groom, a beautiful study.

That's in Ephesians chapter five, if you want to read through that. In fact, it brings up the thought that if you really love Jesus Christ, wouldn't you love his bride? Well, I love Jesus, but I don't like his bride. You say, but the bride messes up so often.

The bride isn't like the bridegroom. In fact, it occurred to me in my study that the greatest problem in this church is that you and I are part of it. The greatest threat to this church is you and me. If anybody has the right to abandon his bride, it is Christ the bridegroom, but he has chosen to redeem us, his bride. He's chosen to faithfully love us and allow nothing to ever separate us from him. Romans 8, 39.

Aren't you glad about that? We're also told the church is a family. 1 Thessalonians chapter four verse 10, Peter writes in 1 Peter chapter two verse 17, he says, we're to love the family of believers. Most people never really think of loving anybody outside their own family, and yet you ransack the New Testament and you discover the significance, in fact the priority of your spiritual family.

Paul writes to Timothy. In fact, he informs us that we're told in the church to treat older men as fathers, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters in all purity. You happen to have joined a family and you have plenty of fathers and you have plenty of mothers and you have plenty of brothers and you have plenty of sisters. When you came to faith in Christ, think of it this way, every one of us were photoshopped into the family. The pictures are added by the power of the Holy Spirit and you discover you're in that family. Let me just go a little further and say it isn't a picture of many families. Every local church is a picture of one family. Regardless of race, status, rank, standing, income, I mean we read it together.

Do we believe it? To some people, I think if they had a drawing contest like we did for the first graders, some of whom love cats way too much, we've got to work on the curriculum, but if we ask people to draw a picture of what they think of when they think of a church, I think many Christians would draw a picture of a gas station. This is where they come and they're running a little low and need to be filled up so they go to their nearest church for service. I think others would draw a picture of a movie theater because to them, church is a place where you're entertained, where you can go for the show if the seats are nice and the climate just right. I think others would draw a picture of a pharmacy. It's a place where you go only if something ails you and you need attention. Others would draw a picture of a mall, a big one, a one stop shop for everything you could ever want and options are endless.

I like that one. Now the church can be all of those things by the way and there are other metaphors. Some would draw a hospital, some would draw a racetrack, whatever, but it's much more than that. Collectively, it isn't what it does for us. Jesus Christ gives us a picture of who we are. We're his bride, which means we learn to love and to serve our faithful bridegroom. It's a picture of a body where we learn to flex our individual endowment, our gifts.

We roll up our sleeves and serve. It's a picture of a family where we learn to get along, where we learn to take care of this house and adjust our needs and our personal tastes and desires for the good of the family at large and the unity of the family. This is why we belong. We belong because we're part of a resistance movement. We belong because we're included in the family portrait. Thirdly, we belong to the church because we've exchanged observing for owning.

I want to sort of address vocabulary issues for a little bit here. We're not just members, we're owners. That's one of the staggering truths to discover about even the coming kingdom. We often talk about it and I think we don't really think about it all that much. We're called co-reigners. That's another way of saying we're co-owners, that this is our inheritance, the kingdom. This isn't some place we just attend.

This is joint ownership. But let's start with the idea of membership because I've been asked many times, where in the Bible does it say or talk about church membership? Well, if you understand the Bible, the New Testament correctly you'll find the idea everywhere. In fact, you'll find that the amazing reality is this, that Christians were so closely attached to a local church that they were actually viewed as and talked about as simply the church. As if they weren't individuals, the church. For instance, we're told that Paul, before he was saved, he went by the name Saul, the Old Testament name, Hebrew name, that he began to persecute the church.

That's not some ethereal thing. That's people who were attached to it. We read in Acts 11 verse 22 that the news of what was happening reached the ears of the church.

It's interesting, again, the reference to a physical body and the people are whole ears. In Acts 14, 27, they gathered the church together. Acts 15, 3, the church commissioned these missionaries on their way, sent them on their way. Acts 15 verse 4, they were welcomed by the church.

In fact, it's interesting, we're told in Acts 12, 1, that King Herod arrested some who belonged to the church. In a very real way, biblically speaking, you could say that the church is its members. The church is its members. On a practical note, it's impossible for elders and deacons to serve the church unless they know who belongs. Peter gives the elders, in fact, a serious command to shepherd the flock of God among you. He's not saying shepherd the church universal. He's saying shepherd the church among you, that local assembly where you've been given oversight, 1 Peter 5, 2.

That isn't a suggestion for elders. That is a command. In fact, that's a command that elders lose sleep over and agonize over and pray over. Paul said effectively the same thing to the elders at the church in Ephesus. He said to them in Acts 20, 28, be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock. Does that mean all of the churches everywhere?

No. All of the flock among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Obviously, the elders were to accept the responsibility for real people, for real lives, not just some gathering. Shepherd the church of God. You likely have more questions on this topic and Stephen has more to teach, but we're just about out of time. We're going to stop right here for today and Stephen will conclude this lesson on tomorrow's broadcast. This is Wisdom for the Heart. Stephen Davey is working his way through a series on what it means for the church to be the church.

The series is entitled Upon This Rock. The lesson you heard today was part one of a lesson called Why We Belong. And again, Stephen will be back tomorrow to bring you the conclusion to this lesson.

Make sure you're with us. The church was established by Jesus Christ and is guided by His teaching. That's part of the reason why the sayings of Jesus that we find in the Gospels have a special significance for us as believers. In the daily devotionals of our Heart to Heart magazine, you'll be able to reflect on key teachings of Jesus like I am living water and I have overcome the world and I am the resurrection and the life. Christ's words demand our deepest concentration and devotion. If you don't receive Heart to Heart magazine, call us at 866-48-BIBLE and ask how you can get the next three issues. There's also a request form at wisdomonline.org and join us tomorrow for more wisdom for the hearts.