Lawson Road CoC Teaching
Peter Horne _ WE Need A Bigger Bible
time. If you have one later, we'll get that as well. It's also a good opportunity to pick up a communion cup if you missed those on the way in. Appreciate everyone that came out to Northève's Road on Wednesday. We had a good time over there. Appreciate Arnie bringing us a lesson. There is a little change in the schedule. Actually, this coming Wednesday I'll be speaking here at Lost and Road as the following week they have their VBS, so Brother Jones will be speaking there for that event. You can do with that information what you like, but that's just a little different. Also, I want to let you know that we've been telling people that worship in the park is coming up and there's signups and we're looking for folks to do different things. One of the other things we want you to do is invite your friends and family. There are invitations downstairs that you can collect and take with you. Hopefully, don't hoard them. Hand them out. They're not collectables. Looking forward to a good day for that. If we can just go to the next slide there, please. Hopefully I'm working it now. Today, we continue this series. The church belongs to Jesus. Really, it should have the word because. Because the church belongs to Jesus, then we're going to conduct ourselves in a particular way. What are the implications of being the church of Christ or the church belonging to Christ? Churches of Christ trace our roots back to the, of course, we can trace them back to Jesus. But in more recent times, we trace our roots back to what we call the restoration movement that developed in the early 1800s. Prior to the American Civil War, this was one of the fastest growing church movements in the United States. It sought to bring unity to the church landscape of the day. In fact, there were two different movements. One in sort of Kentucky, another in a Ohio area. Eventually, they came to merge. They were able to, they said, look, we need to work together. They did just that. As I say, they came known as the restoration movement. Maybe not at that time, but that's what we refer to it now. So it looks a little something like this. You see, as not only were they did these two movements merge, but many, it wasn't uncommon for a Baptist church or a Presbyterian congregation to simply switch over and say, yeah, we want to be part of this restoration movement. And if it wasn't the churches, it was individuals. That's mostly where folks came from, but I'm sure they came from many other backgrounds as well. And so we have this one movement and it's growing rapidly. And then the Civil War takes place. And so after the Civil War, what to this point had been this movement bringing people together, it became a movement that splintered in a number of different directions. The main three splinters that didn't happen immediately took time. Were the Church of Christ, the easiest way to designate that is probably the acapella churches. There was the Christian church and they were the instrumental church churches. And then the disciples of Christ who really moved off in a much more liberal group, liberal teaching. And so we can look at this and we can say, well, why did this sort of splintering happen? And so there's several reasons. Some of the divide is urban and rural. Some of it is north and south. There's a sense that if even though the Civil War was over, if the north does something, the south doesn't want to do it, even in the church. And of course, I think there's some separation there between black and white congregations as well. Over time, each of these groups developed their own subgroups. And if we were to go down to the church office and pull out the most recent directory of churches of Christ in the United States, we would find a little code, a little key in the front that says, this church has this belief, this church has this belief. Now, some of them are helpful. Some of them will say whether it's a Spanish-speaking church, right? That'd be good to know before you turn up there one Sunday. But other designations will tell you whether they're a one cup for communion church or a multiple cup for communion church. Again, that may be important for some people, but we have these variety of subgroups within each of these ones you see on the screen. One of the early restoration mantras, so if we look back at the restoration movement, what was it that brought these people together? And they had several different simple statements that people could rally around. And one of those that you may have heard was simply stated, "No creed but the Bible." That was rather unique at the time if you were to look at the Presbyterian churches or even the Methodist churches, the Anglican Episcopal churches. A lot of other churches in the landscape at the time had specific, whether they call them a creed or statements, a belief they had perhaps different prayer books or things that you had to subscribe to to be part of that church. And so then along comes this new movement and they say, "You don't need to subscribe to that creed," which may be difficult to understand for simple people at the time living on the Western frontier. And so no creed but the Bible was one of their rallying cries. And this, as I said, considerably simplified the requirements to follow Jesus. In reality, the early frontier preachers didn't preach the whole Bible. Let me explain it. It's not that they didn't believe the whole Bible or accept it, but they focused on the parts that they believed were most important for their audience. And this is still really the normal thing to do today. It's what I do. Where's the church at? What do we need to think about and discuss? You may say, "Well, it's not good to neglect parts of the Bible, is it? It is not." But there are 1,189 chapters in the Bible. If I was to preach one sermon from each chapter and I started at Genesis 1 or whatever my system was, but without repeating, it would take me 22 years to preach through every chapter of the Bible. And that's presuming that one sermon is enough for each chapter. So if you're just relying on the preaching to give you a biblical education, there's going to be holes in your learning. Because we're not really here to give you the whole overview of every chapter of Scripture. We ask these questions, "What's going on? What do we need to know? What message is pertinent for our times?" And so we need to make choices about this. Now, the downside of that is that if members of a church are not reading and studying on their own, that they're going to know some parts of the Bible a lot better than others. Okay? Maybe some parts we won't know at all. So one of the earliest preachers in the Restoration Movement gave this advice to young preachers at the time. And it reflects the culture that they were working in. You said this. And I'm sorry, the long quote. He says, "It is almost universally taken for granted," Campbell told them, "that the audience believes that there is God, a Savior, judgment, heaven, hell." Preachers, he added, could almost always assume that much about their congregations. They could assume it because mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts or some other benevolent being, nurse, guardian, schoolmaster or other, had planted these seas before the preacher ever addressed them from his sacred tub. Basic things like the atonement people learned from their parents and others, so much so that we address a people acknowledging all of the great cardinal facts and truths of Christianity. Young preachers should acknowledge this and focus on reformation and gospel order. I know that's a lot of words. But what he's saying is that for his young preachers, let's say early 1800s, that when they went out to preach that pretty much whatever their audience was, they could assume that the audience knew they already believed that there is a God. So don't waste your time trying to convince them there's a God. They already believe that there's a Savior and their Savior is Jesus. You don't need to convince them of that. They believe there's a judgment, they believe there's a heaven, they believe there's a hell. He could go on and say, "They believe that in the atonement, they've been taught the atonement, just like they've been taught to feed themselves." They know that this sin that Jesus died for their sins that they need to follow him. So the job then, if they were trying to, if it was an evangelistic meeting, would be to convince people to act on that knowledge, to align themselves, to give allegiance to this Savior, to this Jesus who had died for their sins so they could have forgiveness. But when they were speaking, not in an evangelistic context of people outside the church, when they're speaking to the church, he says, "The things you should focus on then are the things on reformation and gospel order." So reformation, by that he means, you're talking about, you can look at another church. This is the reformation movement. He's saying, "We want to get back to the church of the first century. We want to get back to being the church that is described in the Bible." And so there may be Baptists and everyone else out there, and he says, "What we want to do is we want to convince them, persuade them to be followers to get the church right, to reform, to get back to the first century church, because where they are now is not that." And so he says, "Focus on reformation and gospel order." And so that emphasis, from way back when, for the reason that because everybody already knew the basics of Christianity, of the Christian faith, is what they focused on in their preaching. I think in many ways what the church has focused on in the succeeding years, because that's what they've preached about. What is it that makes churches a Christ different from other churches around us? And we would say, "Well, we'll talk about the things that happen in the church." And so there are things like elders and deacons or not having a bigger structure, leadership structure, than that. We'll talk about having the Lord's Supper weekly. We'll talk about the purpose of baptism. We'll talk about the way that we sing. And these are the things that these preachers were preaching and saying, "This is what the first century church was like." They didn't need to preach salvation as such to people that didn't know Jesus, because everybody knew Jesus. They just had to convince people that knew Jesus to come and sort of unite with these people, unite with this new movement. And so these were the things that came to show up as differentiating from the church of the Christ, from denominations around them. So consider for a moment, think about those topics. So if you want to teach about leadership in the church, where would you look in the New Testament in the Bible? Be in the New Testament, right? Because it's in the church. It's going to be in the letters. We're going to look in the letters. How about what worship in the church should look like? We're going to look in the Old Testament. That's not going to help in the church, is it? So if we want to know in the church, we're going to look in the New Testament and probably in the letters. How about how does somebody become part of the church? Are we going to look in the Old Testament? No. We're going to look in the New Testament. We're going to look in the letters. Because before the letters, there wasn't a church. So if all our questions and the emphasis of our preaching is what the church should look like, we're going to spend an awful lot of time in the letters written to churches. And also in the book of Acts that describes, many would say, describes the birth and the spread of the first church. You wouldn't look in the gospels because the church didn't exist then. So what you kind of end up with, I'm afraid, is we end up with a teaching area or focus of teaching that looks something like this. And the problem with this is that we're trying to answer questions about the church. And so in a way, we become the church of the church rather than the church of Christ. Because that's what the questions we're answering. That's where our focus is. That gives us our identity. But if we're the church belonging to Jesus, if Christ is the head of the church, we must make Jesus. And therefore the gospels, the object of our faith. Can we truly suggest that we're following Jesus if we know the letter to the Ephesians better than we know the Gospel of Luke? So it's not wrong to have a favorite book. You might say, I love Philippians. Philippians is such a joyful book. I really enjoy reading that. You might say, oh, I love Psalms. Psalms are just speaks to me no matter what point in life I'm in. I just really enjoy that. You might say, my dad loved Revelation. We would just finish a Bible study on Revelation and six months later it's like, well church, what do you think we should do for our next Bible class? And how about Revelation? I can't tell you how many times we studied Revelation. But we get these favorite books and there's nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with having favorite books that speak to us. But when it comes to studying and what we know and what we're familiar with and where our faith is grounded, I want to suggest that we don't need to add the Gospels to these other books that are in the box there, so it would look something like that. Rather they stand out by themselves. That the Gospels should take center stage in the life of the church today. We read earlier from Matthew chapter 7 and probably many of you were singing along and building your houses right and wanting to clap when the storm came and I appreciate that. You grew up in church, go into VBS and you know the song. But the context, what is Jesus saying when he tells this story? And we all know what the rock is. The rock is, well we would think it's Jesus, wouldn't we? But if we have a look, he says in verse 24, "Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock." And so this is at the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus has been teaching for, I don't know, how many hours and laying out a whole lot of things and explaining, starting with the Old Testament and saying to people, "Well this is how we need to live it today. This is what the kingdom of God looks like." And there was a lot of information for them to take in and maybe their heads were spinning. And so at the end of it, Jesus tells the story that's a memorable story. Maybe he invented the song, I don't know. But he says, "Everyone that puts these words of mine, hears the words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who builds his house on the rock." So the wise man that builds his house on the rock has to pay attention to the words of Jesus, has to put them into practice and incorporate them into our lives. And so Jesus here is clearly teaching the importance of his teaching. Last week we looked at Matthew 28 and Jesus' final recorded words in the Gospel of Matthew as he gives his disciples the apostles the great co-mission. And we often focus on the baptizing part of this, okay? And I think that's important and another sermon. I would emphasize that. But in verse 20, his disciples are instructed to go into all the world. He's says, teaching. What are they teaching? Teaching everything. Oh, I'm all over the place here. Teaching everything that I have commanded you. You see, they were to take Jesus' teaching and that was to be the basis of their teaching, okay? Start with Jesus' teaching and then extrapolate that and that's the basis of the apostles' teaching. And so the church begins with Jesus and the teaching of Jesus. As followers of Christ, we need to know the life of Christ and the teaching of Jesus. Now here's an interesting thing and maybe some of you have heard this. So we say the church begins, I don't know, Acts chapter 2, right? When the Holy Spirit comes upon the apostles. And so one of the things that that has done, that I've seen some folks do, is that they say, well, because the church doesn't begin until Acts 2, then the life and the teaching of Jesus isn't necessarily completely relevant to the church, okay? Because he's preaching to a Jewish audience, to people who are worshiping the Jews and so it doesn't necessarily relate to the church, okay? And so I've got a problem with that because we're the church of Christ, not the edited church of Christ, okay? And so the teaching of Christ, the person of Christ, has to be at the foundation of what we do. We can't pick and choose the parts of Christ that we want to listen to or that we want to copy. And you might say, but Jesus didn't teach about elders and deacons, right? Maybe then that's not quite as important as the things that Jesus did teach about. You see, what we've done when we emphasize what the church is supposed to look like, as the thing that identifies us, as separates us from other people, is that we're saying this, the structure of the church, the worship of the church, that's more important than you and I or us as a group imitating Christ. That the development and the growth and the spiritual life taking place within me is less important than making sure that what's done in this hour on a Sunday morning is done correctly. Because they say, we need to be the right church. I want to say we need to be little sisters. We need to be following him. And so when we see church of Christ out the front, that's what it means, that we listen to Jesus. We follow his example because Jesus did teach about a lot of things. You see, Jesus didn't only come to die for our sins and to be raised from the dead. Sometimes we maybe want to summarize the gospels. What's the gospel? Jesus died for our sins. We can be with God and braille raises from the dead. That's the story of the gods. That's the story of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Now let's get down to business on what the church should look like. But Jesus didn't only come for that Easter story. He came to introduce us to the kingdom of God. He announced that the kingdom of God is near is here among us. He came to help us understand what it means to be children of God because he is the son of God. To see how we should interact with an ungodly world, he demonstrates that for us. Jesus becomes an example in the way that he lives his life. We need to know how he lived his life, not just that he was born, not just that he died, not just that he was. We don't need just the facts of what Jesus did. We need to get to know Jesus. Philippians chapter 2 and verse 5 tells us, "In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus." What's that mindset? Now you can keep reading it, it'll tell you. But even what it tells you is a summary and we're going to say that what is there in this march of Philippians, it tells us all about the mindset of Christ. When there's four gospels there, they tell us so much more about the mindset and the attitudes of Christ. Ephesians chapter 5, verse 25 tells husbands, "Love your wives just as Christ loved the church." How are our marriages going to be structured? If we don't know Christ, if we don't know Christ, then marriages are supposed to be based off Christ and his love for the church. How are we going to hope to fulfill that? 1 Corinthians 11 and verse 1, Paul writes, "Follow my example." Oh, hang on on to follow Paul's example. Next line says, "As I follow the example of Christ," which is exactly what Jesus said in Matthew 28, right? He says, "Go and take my teaching and spread it out." He says, "Take my example and spread it out," and that's what Paul is doing. He's not saying, "Follow me because I've got it right." He's saying, "Follow me as I follow Jesus." And here's the thing, if there's an inconsistency, was Paul perfect? No, he says I was the worst. He says, "Oh, that was before he met Jesus on the road to Damascus." Was Paul perfect after he met Jesus on the road to Damascus? No. So there are things in Paul's life that we don't want to copy, right? Don't follow that example of Paul? Only follow the example of Paul as he follows the example of Jesus. How can we tell? We have to know the life of Jesus. We have to know the example of Jesus so we can see what is consistent with that in the lives of those around us. And so here I think is one of the things that has been handed down to us because those early preachers in the restoration movement focused on the epistles. Hebrews was a particular favorite book of this. They also reduced the relevance of the Old Testament to the church. The church of Christ also needs to honor the Scripture of Christ. When Jesus was on earth, the only Bible available to him was what we call the Old Testament. I think it's natural. We like to take the shortcut. We say, "Well, we'll just take the New Testament mostly because that summarizes." It tells us which parts of the Old Testament are important. They've already used it and done that work for us. But when Paul told Timothy in 2 Timothy 3 and verse 16, "All Scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, training and righteousness so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." The interesting thing is that he wasn't even talking about the New Testament because there wasn't a New Testament. There were some books that the churches knew that they may have been familiar with the Gospel of Mark that may have been passed around to some of them. But when Paul says, "All Scripture is God breathed," he wasn't just saying every other letter that I've written for you. He wasn't just saying the Gospel of Mark that you've already received. He was saying the Old Testament. The first churches that were established had two things, two ways to learn about God. They had the Old Testament because that had been written, collected, and many of them may have had an actual written copy. Some of them wouldn't. And they had the oral stories about Jesus and teachings about Jesus. They had the written Old Testament and they had the oral stories that were passed down about Jesus and his teachings. And so when we say, "Oh, I've heard this phrase, we're New Testament Christians," and I think we use that phrase because we're saying, "Oh, we're restoring the New Testament church." It's like, "Well, Jesus wasn't a New Testament Christian. Jesus was an Old Testament Christian." And then he introduced the New Testament and the first Christians, the meeting in the first churches in Corinth, in Ephesus, in Philippi, they were Old Testament Christians because that was their Bible. And they found God in those scriptures. And they learned about Jesus and they incorporated that into their lives and into their teachings. And eventually the New Testament came, was collected, and they were added together. And so we need to not own, we need to look something like this, I think, in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, take center stage in the Scripture because that's really the only place we learn about Jesus directly. Lots of other people talk about him, but this is where we see what Jesus said and what Jesus did. And we're a church belonging to Jesus, a church of Christ. And then all those other books, the books in the Old Testament lead up to Jesus. They introduce God. They tell what it means to be people of God. There's so many rich stories that describe the character of God throughout it and passages that still speak to us. And then the books, after the Gospels, they tell us what does it mean to live for God now in light of Jesus and everything that he did throughout his life, throughout his time on earth. And so all of those books just amplify the message of Jesus found in the Gospels. And so this is the message for today. If the church belongs to Jesus, we need to give the Gospels center stage in our lives, in our study, in our reading, and following of Jesus. We don't get rid of the other books, all Scripture is inspired as God breathed, but we should regard these books around as building on, even the ones that come before, building on the foundation of Jesus. Jesus must be our center. Jesus is our way, Jesus is our truth, and Jesus is our life. [BLANK_AUDIO]