Why We Belong, Part 2

Today in China, even conservative estimates, there are now more evangelical Christians than members of the Communist Party that around the world, listen to this, around the world on average by conservative evangelical estimates, 510 local churches will be formally established today. Today, Jesus Christ is not finished and neither are we. The Church of Jesus Christ is growing and thriving around the world.

The work of the Gospel is advancing in powerful ways. Whenever God saves someone, wherever that takes place, that person becomes part of the universal church. We are united in faith with our brothers and sisters around the globe. And even though it may go against our individualistic culture in the United States, we're also called to belong to a local church family. Today, Stephen Davy continues a lesson he began yesterday where he looks at five reasons why it's vital that you be a member of a local church. We're in a series called Upon This Rock. Today's lesson is entitled Why We Belong.

Here's Stephen. 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'll 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, in Jesus Christ the bridegroom, a beautiful study.

That's in Ephesians chapter 5, 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 4 verse 10, Peter writes in 1 Peter chapter 2 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? This is why we belong. Thirdly, we belong to the church because we've exchanged observing for owning.

And I want to sort of address vocabulary issues for a little bit here. We're not just members, we're owners. I mean 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, you know, where in the Bible does it say, we're talking 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 chapter 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, the 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 shepherd the church of God.

Obviously, the elders were to accept the responsibility for real people, for real lives, not just some gathering. Beloved, let me tell you, there's a vast difference between a crowd and a church. There's a vast difference between an audience and a flock. The flock, by the way, also evidently in the New Testament knew who their leaders were because they're commanded to give double honor to those who work hard at preaching and teaching, 1 Timothy 5, 17. Evidently, you have to know who they are, you have to observe their lives, you have to be involved in the ministry that they are giving themselves to. This is vastly different than watching somebody on a screen or showing up for an hour. This is life on life.

This is physical, tangible, real. The apostles wrote to the church and commanded each church, listen to how these must occur locally, not ethereally. He says this, be devoted to one another, Romans 12, 5. Rejoice with one another, Romans 12, 15. Serve one another, Galatians 5, 13. Carry one another's burdens, Galatians 6, 2. Forgive one another, Ephesians 4, 32. Encourage one another, 1 Thessalonians 5, 11. Offer hospitality to one another, 1 Peter 4, 9. Pray for one another, James 5, 16. Observers will never engage in those commands, only those who sense ownership and responsibility to those in the assembly.

Let me add this. This is where I think we need to tweak our vocabulary. If anything, the church can be self-satisfied with its membership roles. How many got on your role as if that's all that matters? Many churches, membership is sort of like joining a club. And by the way, our culture in our country now simply views us as a club. You pay your dues and you show up every so often and you play and you like each other. And if you don't, there's another club you can go to.

Joining the church to our world, I fear to many Christians, is like joining the tennis club or the bowling league or the country club or the bird watchers club or whatever. In our world today, especially in this country, the word member has simply come to mean you found something you're interested in, not necessarily something to give your life for. I think it's time we change the mentality of a member for that of an owner.

This isn't a club where you're a member. This is a living body of which you are a co-owner. And by the way, when you're an owner, you think differently. Some of you own businesses. And one of the things you struggle with is that there are a lot of people that have the mentality of an employee. You have the mentality of an owner.

That's why when you pull into the parking lot, you're interested in the weeds that are growing and you might even pull them up. You're the CEO, but it doesn't matter. You own this company. You're concerned about every aspect. That's the mentality of an owner. An employee comes in and says, okay, I got to do this. This is all I'm going to do. And then I'm out of here.

And I can't wait till the weekend. See, everything's different when you're an owner. You talk differently. You don't talk about, let me tell you what the church is doing. You talk about, let me tell you what my church is doing. I mean, you're on the lookout for people that are visiting your house. This is your house.

Which means this is your mortgage. And all God's people said, well, let's not go too far. Okay, keep moving along, Steven. Okay. One of the exciting things about the day in which we live is the fact that the days of casual Christianity are perhaps going to wane, maybe even dissolve.

We don't know. As we talked about in our last session, we're heading into a day when cultural Christianity and congregational Christianity, which means nothing more than you just kind of show up and it's nice and you can pass out some business cards and you feel good about yourself. All that's going to dissolve in place of convictional Christianity. And that's because the only people who are going to be willing to wear the name Christian as it's marginalized and demeaned and shouted down, if not just ignored, are people who are truly following Christ. Can you imagine somebody today, this Lord's day in North Korea, in Turkey, in Sudan, in Iraq saying, you know, I think I'm going to adopt the name Christian because I just think it's going to be good for my business. It makes me feel good. In fact, I'm going to find a church and hang around those Christians.

Are you kidding? It's life or death. That's why in some of these countries when they baptize a Muslim, they ask him in the tank, are you prepared to die? I had a missionary tell me, he just observed one.

Are you prepared to die? Frankly, it's time that membership in the church shift to a gut level, all for nothing, self-committing, self-sacrificing, self-denying, cross-bearing, Christ-exalting ownership. This isn't a club.

This is the living demonstration in a local area of the body of Christ. And in a very real way, this family lasts forever. That's why we belong.

It leads me to add to this, number four. We belong because everybody's watching. Everybody's watching. I'm amazed at how many times on these shows they're inviting pastors, they're getting opinions from seminary presidents and professors and sometimes you want to hang your head in shame with what they say, but it's interesting, they're curious, what do you guys believe?

What do you think about this? Can I tell you that one of the reasons I'm so grateful to belong to Christ Church in this generation is because as time moves along, we have been given the opportunity to make a clear demonstration and delivery of the grace and gospel of Jesus Christ. If there was ever a day when people are watching the church and listening to people who belong to the church like you and me, it is today.

In fact, you go back to the beginning and one of the things that we often overlook is the scandal of the Jerusalem church to the Jewish community. It was entirely hated in its culture because by the time you get to Acts chapter 20, they decided to make this clear distinction and they began to move their worship from Saturday to Sunday and they began calling it the Lord's Day. It's a day belonging to the Lord. In fact, John in his revelation says, I was in the spirit on the Lord's Day.

That was actually rather scandalous. For nearly 2,000 years now, the church has dedicated this day to Christ. It's no coincidence. We can worship any day, but it is this day that is special.

Why? This is the day in which he rose from the dead. This is the day when the Spirit descended and formed the church. That's why you celebrate, by the way, your wife's birthday on her birthday. A couple of guys got it right. I mean, you can celebrate early.

I've had two daughters. It was kind of a whole week thing. Don't celebrate it a day after you missed it. If you celebrate it early, that's fine.

Just make sure you celebrate it on the day because that is the day in which she was born. Sunday is the day in which the church was born. And for 300 years plus, in our own country, it's been sympathetic to this observance.

Even back to my childhood, it reserved Sunday so that our focus could be, depending on schedules and everything else, on the Lord himself. In fact, I researched and didn't have any time, absolutely no time at all, to mention Blue Laws. But you ought to go back and just sort of read their history. It's fascinating. That's all changing. It's changing in the church.

It's certainly changing in the culture. In fact, just a few months ago, my air conditioner, our air conditioner broke and I called our provider to set up an appointment as soon as we could. And so the receptionist was looking at her calendar and she gave me a date and I checked while I was on the phone with her and that day was Sunday. And so I said, that's Sunday. And I thought she'd made a mistake. She hadn't. In fact, I could tell by the tone of her voice, she thought I was rather odd to have an issue with it. So I finally told her, like, I'm not going to be here. I passed her church. I'm going to be busy all day.

I may be home for a quick nap. I don't want anybody ringing the doorbell then, for heaven's sake. So we rescheduled. The early church called it the Lord's Day belonging to him. You know it's waning today, you know that, in the church.

In fact, Matthew Henry, who wrote a commentary in the 1700s, Charles Spurgeon would say a hundred years later, every believer ought to read it on his knees. He wrote that Sunday was the day to receive and embrace our privileges and benefits. The further along we go, beloved, what our world needs to see is this special relationship with each other and with our Lord demonstrated on what we still call, and I say it more often than I say Sunday to you, I don't know if you ever pick it up, but I talk about the Lord's Day. The Lord's Day. In fact, you might notice around here, we stuff this day with opportunities for spiritual growth and fellowship and discipleship and corporate worship. We bookend the Lord's Day most of the year with something in the morning where we corporately gather and something in the evening. We want to maximize this day, not minimize it. We can worship any day we want. We're going to follow in the precedent of the New Testament church that called this day his. Let me speak personally and transparently to you. As one of the shepherds who's going to give an accounting to Christ for your growth and development, what burdens me and it's on my prayer list causes me to be concerned, among other reasons, is the fact that this morning, I am going to preach to several thousand people and tonight I will preach to several hundred and I don't really have an answer to it other than to say I fear what it says about us. Don't misunderstand. You don't have to go to church to be a Christian.

Look, you don't have to go home to be married, but I recommend both, okay? We follow in the perspective more recently of the Puritans who 400 years ago called the Lord's Day, quote, the market day for the soul. I love that. The market day for the soul. I don't call it a day of rest, by the way.

It isn't. It's a market day for the soul. This isn't a day to casually check in.

It is the day to intentionally stock up. And remember, the world is watching. I'm teaching a greenhouse class, precious couple in this class who've recently come to faith and she said I live near this church and I got to tell you for years, you so irritated me.

We had to change our travel schedule, our chores, our plans around this church so that we wouldn't get near it and get caught in the traffic. She said I was often curious what in the world is going on over there. Let me add quickly to this idea of the world watching the stunning fact that the angelic hosts are watching. It's something we often don't think about, but if we had time to explore this, there's this stunning revelation from Paul to the Ephesians in chapter 3 that God is demonstrating his wisdom through the church in the face of the angelic hosts. We're told that the angelic hosts are curious. The holy angels are curious. They bend over and in to listen. They're mystified by this thing, this organism, this body. We are a spectacle to the world and to the angelic hosts of the gospel and the grace and the mercy of God. If he can pull back the blinders of our eyes, we would see the air here filled with the angelic hosts who are watching. We belong because everybody's watching and I don't want to be apart from it.

One more. We belong to the church because Jesus Christ is not finished. Aren't you glad that Jesus didn't finish building his church before you became a part of it?

Aren't you glad that that picture wasn't finished until you got photoshopped in? Isn't that great to know that he's still at work? He still is not finished. And in this greenhouse class I'm teaching now, which is the second largest I've ever taught in the history of this church, seven less than last year, which was the largest, I already told them what excites me about this class of prospective members. One of the most exciting things is what they communicate to me, that Jesus Christ is still building this local assembly. He has plans for this church. He has new disciples. He has new needs. He has new ministries bound up in their hearts. We haven't even started yet.

We see in them new participants and new leaders and new servants and new teachers who will join with us. He is not finished. And he's certainly not finished with a church around the world. Let's be careful that we don't translate what we might see happening here into and only as a part of what God is doing out there. And I tell you very quickly in Indonesia, there are so many Muslims coming to faith in Christ, believing the gospel that the government no longer will publish the statistics that show religious association because they're ashamed. Today in China, even conservative estimates are that there are now more evangelical Christians than members of the Communist Party that around the world, listen to this, around the world on average by conservative evangelical estimates, 510 local churches will be formally established today. Jesus Christ is not finished.

And neither are we. If you joined us partway through this lesson, you've been listening to Wisdom for the Heart with Stephen Davey. Stephen is the pastor of a church in Cary, North Carolina. Today's lesson is called Why We Belong, and it comes from a new series entitled Upon This Rock. Upon This Rock was a series of sermons Stephen preached to the church he pastors because the church was in the process of revising its constitution and bylaws.

With the current state of our culture, it seemed wise to revisit those documents and to clarify some things that may have been self-evident 35 years ago when they were first written. If you're a leader of a church, you might be interested in seeing a copy of the doctrinal statement constitution and bylaws of the church Stephen pastors. Give us a call at 866-482-4253. We've also heard stories from churches who've purchased the CD set to this series so that their elders and deacons could work through it together. The series is called Upon This Rock, and we have it available as a set of CDs. If this is something that you'd like to purchase either for your personal use or for your church, you can give us a call and we can help you over the phone. You'll also find this series, Upon This Rock, on our website, which is wisdomonline.org. If you're interested in studying God's design for the church, this series will help you, and I encourage you to get your copy today.

It's always a delight when we hear from our listeners. Why not write and tell us how God's using this ministry to encourage you? You can write to us if you send your email to info at wisdomonline.org. If you prefer to send us a card or letter in the mail, our address is Wisdom for the Heart, PO Box 37297, Raleigh, North Carolina, 27627. Thanks for joining us today. Be back tomorrow for our next lesson here on Wisdom for the Heart. .