Displaying God's Love through Meaningful Membership
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BLANK SLIDE TO BEGIN RECORDING (Please don’t wait for Matt to be on podium.)
SLIDE: Series Graphic
Introduction
Introduction
We live in a culture that’s increasingly leery of making commitments. More people ask, “Why get married? Why not just live together for awhile to test him/her out. Over the last five decades, the rate of cohabitation has increased by 900% [1]. Then, after living together, half of those couples abandon the pursuit of marrying. “Why put a ring on it when I may change my mind after some time.”
Similarly, many hesitate to join a church because, well, church life—while wonderful—can be hard. Committing to doing life with others, whether immediate family, in-laws, or church is hard. Why agree to membership when I can just come and go as I please? Or, why not just sign the dotted line to become a member and then just coast alone since I have my community membership, like a club house membership. After all, I want to have the freedom to pick up and leave if I don’t like something.
You get involved in serving and someone attacks you because they don’t like your perspective, even—and sometimes—especially if it’s biblical.
You try to lead a team, or ministry, and you hear all of the negative opinions about your decision-making—all-the-while no one else wants to step up and lead. It’s easy to feel defeated.
Healthy church life is hard—it takes work—a committed effort. And I agree, life in a committed local church environment is hard. It can be taxing. But it is also wonderful. In fact, one of the reasons it is so beautiful is that coming out on the other side of hard seasons shows the beauty of God’s Spirit at work, accomplishing things we’d never accomplish on our own.
ILL: Like a rock with many rough edges that gets tossed around in a river to chip off its rough edges as it collides with other stones, and has the constant pressure of a current to make it smooth and beautiful.
SLIDE
Proposition: God designed the church to display God’s beautiful love to a lost and dying world through meaningful church membership.
Proposition: God designed the church to display God’s beautiful love to a lost and dying world through meaningful church membership.
This morning we’ll look at three truths to see the reality of that statement:
SLIDE
I. An obedient Christian should commit to meaningful church membership.
II. Understand the beautiful, complicated love of God.
III. God displays His love to the world through the Church.
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I. An obedient Christian should commit to meaningful church membership.
I. An obedient Christian should commit to meaningful church membership.
A. Why isn’t membership stated explicitly in the Bible?
A. Why isn’t membership stated explicitly in the Bible?
But first you may wonder, "If church membership even required in the Bible, then why don’t we find church membership mentioned specifically in the New Testament?”
Meaningful membership is clearly implied all through the New Testament, but it didn’t need to be formalized in the way we need it today because there was only one church per city. If you were a Christian, you didn’t have options as to where to go. If you lived in Ephesus, you were a member of the church in Ephesus. Today, in North America there are usually dozens of evangelical churches in our cities. To float between several churches is to lack the key ingredient of commitment to particular people and submission to a particular group of elders who will give an account for your soul (Heb. 13:17). (Cole, Dever, Akin, Leeman)
Listen to how the writer of Hebrews describes the responsibility of church leaders toward you.
SLIDE
17 Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.
B. The church is described as having members.
B. The church is described as having members.
The Bible also represents churches as being made up of members. Pastor/Theologian Mark Dever rightly says, “Combining the collective images of families, parties, and communities with the even more integrated image of an individual body and its various parts, the Bible presents the local church as an entity made up of multiple individuals yet so highly integrated they are identifiable as a unit. They are even said to be a part of one another (Rom 12:5).
SLIDE
1 I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. 4 For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, 5 so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.
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12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.
14 For the body does not consist of one member but of many. 15 If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. 16 And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. 17 If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? 18 But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. 19 If all were a single member, where would the body be? 20 As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.
21 The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” 22 On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, 23 and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, 24 which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, 25 that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. 26 If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.
When Jesus told his followers to seek out the brother who had sinned (Matt 18:15–21), he was presupposing such an integrated conception of body membership, even before the local church began to take shape in Acts and the remainder of the NT.
If all this is true, then everyone who names the name of Jesus should...
C. Commit to your local church through membership and consistent, ongoing ministry activity.
C. Commit to your local church through membership and consistent, ongoing ministry activity.
Friends, this is much more than joining a church, or joining this church. To commit to meaningful membership, means we give our lives to display God’s glorious love to a lost world.
But in order to work together to display God’s glorious love to the world, we must grow in our understanding of it.
When I say, God’s glorious love, we naturally think of all the wonderful aspects of the gospel—the good news of Jesus Christ—that the perfect, holy God gave His Son to come to earth through a virgin birth, live perfectly in thought and deed, and to give His life as a ransom (Mt 10:28), paying the penalty that is rightfully ours for our sins so that we might be transformed, made new, to have relationship with God our Father through repentance and faith.
D. A. Carson opens his slim but profound book called The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God. In it he observes that the doctrine of God’s love is, like the book’s title suggests, more difficult than people realize. Many people cite their favorite proof-text and think themselves done with the conversation:
16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
And of course
8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
But we often here just the last part of the veres, “God is love.”
These are true…and wonderful!
But there are other aspects of God’s love that are equally true and necessary for us to understand. And if we’re to be a church that rightly displays God’s love to the world, we must seek to understand the beautifully complex love of God.
Transition statement: Have you ever looked at a painting that required you to just stand and stare? Over time, you begin to see different aspects that didn’t stand out to you at first? We must look intensely at the love of God as the Bible describes it and believe it really is a glorious as the Lord through biblical writers describes it.
We must increasingly seek to...
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II. Understand the beautifully complex love of God.
II. Understand the beautifully complex love of God.
Carson’s book [3] highlights five different ways that the Bible speaks of God’s love.
A. The peculiar love shared between the divine Father and Son.
A. The peculiar love shared between the divine Father and Son.
30 I and the Father are one.”
31 but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father. Rise, let us go from here.
B. God’s providential love over creation
B. God’s providential love over creation
the word love is not used here, but he pronounces everything he has made as “good,” and promises to send rain on the just and unjust alike (Matthew 5:45).
C. God’s salvific love toward the fallen world:
C. God’s salvific love toward the fallen world:
16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
D. God’s particular and elective love toward a chosen people:
D. God’s particular and elective love toward a chosen people:
7 It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, 8 but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
13 As it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”
E. God’s seemingly conditional love toward his people based on obedience.
E. God’s seemingly conditional love toward his people based on obedience.
21 keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.
10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.
The main insight here is that the Bible refers to God’s love in different ways, and we should not make any one category of them absolute, as if to say all his love is providential love or salvific love or something else. God’s love is varied, and we get to spend our lives learning and growing in our understanding of God’s beautifully complex love, like the artistic brilliance meant to be taken in over long and repeated gazes.
Jonathan Leeman asks “What is Love?” and offers a tentative definition we are to strive for. In The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love [3], Leeman writes:
SLIDE (Leeman Quote)
What is love? Love is an affection for another’s good. Something in you attracts me to want your good. Furthermore, the good that I want for you has a fixed and certain content to it—God. God is the good that God lovingly wants for others, and he’s the good that we should lovingly want for others. We love our parents, friends, spouses, and enemies best when we desire for them to know the glory of God, a desire predicated on an even more ultimate desire to see his glory displayed.
God’s love is God-centered; ours should be as well.
SLIDE
III. Give your life to display God's love to the world through the Church.
III. Give your life to display God's love to the world through the Church.
Part of Oak Grove’s doctrinal statement on the local church says,
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We believe the local churches are called to be distinct from the world while in it, called to grow in Christlikeness, called to edify fellow believers to maturity, called to acclaim to the world God’s offer of everlasting life and to be the visible representation of the body of Christ in the local community. (Matt. 16:16-18, 28:19-20; John 17:6,9,11; Acts 2:46-47; Rom. 8:29-30; 1 Cor. 1:2, 12:13, 27; 14; Eph. 1:22-23; 4:11-16; Col. 1:18)
A. The Bible explicitly gives several commands for healthy church life which display the many ways God has loves us.
A. The Bible explicitly gives several commands for healthy church life which display the many ways God has loves us.
[MOVE QUICKLY THROUGH THESE]
To love one another (John 13:34–35; 15:12–17; Rom. 12:9–10; 13:8–10; Gal. 5:14; 6:10; Eph. 1:15; 1 Pet. 1:22; 2:17; 3:8; 4:8; 1 John 3:16; 4:7–12; cf. Ps. 133)
To seek peace and unity within their congregation (Rom. 12:16; 14:19; 1 Cor. 13:7; 2 Cor. 12:20; Eph. 4:3–6; Phil. 2:3; 1 Thess. 5:13; 2 Thess. 3:11; James 3:18; 4:11)
To avoid all strife (Prov. 17:14; Matt. 5:9; 1 Cor. 10:32; 11:16; 2 Cor. 13:11; Phil. 2:1–3)
To care for one another physically and spiritually (Deut. 15:7–8, 11; Matt. 25:40; John 12:8; Acts 15:36; Rom. 12:13; 15:26; 1 Cor. 16:1–2; Gal. 2:10; 6:10; Heb. 13:16; James 1:27; 1 John 3:17)
To work to edify one another (1 Cor. 14:12–26; Eph. 2:21–22; 4:12–29; 1 Thess. 5:11; 1 Pet. 4:10; 2 Pet. 3:18)
To bear with one another (Matt. 18:21–22; Mark 11:25; Rom. 15:1; Gal. 6:2; Col. 3:12), including not suing one another (1 Cor. 6:1–7)
To pray for one another (Eph. 6:18; James 5:16)
To keep away from those who would destroy the church (Rom. 16:17; 1 Tim. 6:3–5; Titus 3:10; 2 John 10–11)
To reject evaluating people by worldly standards (Matt. 20:26–27; Rom. 12:10–16; James 2:1–13)
To contend together for the gospel (Phil. 1:27; Jude 3)
To be examples to one another (Phil. 2:1–18)
To watch over one another and hold one another accountable (Rom. 15:14; Gal. 6:1–2; Phil. 2:3–4; 2 Thess. 3:15; Heb. 12:15; cf. Lev. 19:17; Ps. 141:5)
and lastly, we are called by God
To lovingly discipline one another for their good and our healthy message of what God’s love truly is.
Can we just be honest and say we’d all rather avoid this because it’s not fun and makes us feel unloving? This is why the church is called to be God-centered in our love, because then we’ll realize that at times we must make hard decisions and trust God with the fallout.
From the earliest of times, local Christian churches were congregations of specific, identifiable people. Certain people would be known to make up (or belong to) a particular assembly, while everyone else would be known to be outside of (or not belonging to) the assembly.
So the strong disapproval Paul publicly declared in 1 Corinthians 5 sees an individual being excluded not from a political community but from a particular kind of social, Christian community.
SLIDES
1 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father’s wife. 2 And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you.
3 For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing. 4 When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, 5 you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.
6 Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? 7 Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.
B. What is this meaningful church membership we’re to give our lives to?
B. What is this meaningful church membership we’re to give our lives to?
SLIDES
Meaningful membership is a formal relationship between a church and a Christian characterized by the church’s affirmation and oversight of a Christian’s discipleship and the Christian’s submission to living out his or her discipleship in the care of the church.
Notice again the several elements that are present:
A church body formally affirms an individual’s profession of faith and baptism as credible.
It promises to give oversight to that individual’s discipleship.
The individual formally submits his or her discipleship to the service and authority of this body and its leaders
Conclusion and Transition to Communion
Conclusion and Transition to Communion
SLIDES: Proposition & Outline Summary
Restate Proposition and Outline
Restate Proposition and Outline
Since God has designed the church to display God’s beautiful love to a lost and dying world through meaningful church membership, we embrace that
1. An obedient Christian should commit to meaningful church membership.
2. Understand the beautifully complex love of God.
3. Give your life to display God's love to the world through the Church.
Transition to Communion
Transition to Communion
Closing Prayer
Closing Prayer
Sources:
[1] https://brandongaille.com/43-statistics-on-cohabitation-before-marriage/
[2] D. A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2000), 16–21.
[3] Jonathan Leeman, The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love: Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline, 9Marks. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 85.
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