Good morning, church! I invite you to turn with me to Ephesians 3. I have been looking forward to this day for months. We’re beginning a sermon series on the church today. We believe the church is a body, not a building. You are this church. This is a building where the church meets, but a church isn’t bricks and church is people.
The Puritans of New England didn’t call their buildings churches. They called them meeting houses, which I love. This is the house where the church meets, but this isn’t the church.
Your relationship to your church is unlike any other relationship to any group of people in your life. It’s crucial to understand what role the local church plays in your life and what role you play in the local church if you’re going to lead a life that glorifies God.
Here’s where we’re headed over the next four weeks. Today, we’ll look at church membership and answer the question ‘Is church membership Biblical?’ Next week, we’ll examine our membership covenant and see the Biblical basis for the commitments we have made to one another.
Then, we’ll look at our church’s distinctive beliefs. We’ve covenanted together, now what do we believe and how do those beliefs shape the way we live and the way we worship?
Finally, we’ll put the ideas of local church membership, shared covenant promises and beliefs together and see how they drive our Great Commission work of evangelism and discipleship.
We have a lot to cover this morning, so we’re going to dive in. I do want to warn you, this will flow differently than our typical sermons. Ephesians 3 is the centerpiece of our time together today, but we’re going to absolutely be all over the Bible.
I encourage you to take notes (that’s a good idea every Sunday, but particularly today). We’ll get as much of the Scripture on the screens as we can, but it’ll be easy to miss something.
We’ll start with Ephesians 3:8-12, we’ll pray, and then we’ll try our best to see exactly what the Bible has to say about church membership.
Read
8 This grace was given to me—the least of all the saints—to proclaim to the Gentiles the incalculable riches of Christ, 9 and to shed light for all about the administration of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things. 10 This is so that God’s multi-faceted wisdom may now be made known through the church to the rulers and authorities in the heavens. 11 This is according to his eternal purpose accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord. 12 In him we have boldness and confident access through faith in him
Pray
On November 5, 1955 a teenager named Marty walked into Hill Valley for the first time. What he saw amazed and confused him. The marquee at the Essex theatre trumpeted a showing of The Cattle Queen of Montana starring Barbara Stanwyck alongside a handsome 40-something who had been in several pictures but starred in few named Ronald Reagan.
Outside the record store a sign proclaimed the arrival of The Ballad of Davy Crockett. The “Welcome to Hill Valley” sign dubbed the town “A Nice Place to Live” and affixed to the sign were the crests of a number of service organizations—Rotary, Jaycees, the Lions, and the Kiwanis. This was all very confusing to young Marty, but not to anyone else. Everyone else on the town square that afternoon went about business as normal. It was confusing to Marty because he had just driven a DeLorean back in time 30 years from 1985. If you hadn’t already guessed, I’m talking about Michael J. Fox’s character in Back to the Future.
That’s one of those movies that I never intend to watch but can never seem to turn if off if I catch it on TV. And the first scene when McFly stumbles into idyllic 1955 Hill Valley has always fascinated me. Culture shifts so rapidly now that the shock of going back 30 years would likely be even greater today. Can you imagine dropping a 16-year old into 1990? The era before cellphones, tablets, and the internet? They wouldn’t even know how to make a phone call!
Here's why I wanted to shift our minds to another era as we open God’s Word together this morning. We can be prone to think that church membership is more at-home in 1955 or 1990 than it is today.
I know that’s true because many churches no longer emphasize membership and many Christians have spent little time thinking about what church membership truly means.
It’s not just a problem that’s out there in the world or present in other denominations. Membership in Southern Baptist Churches dropped by over 287,000 members last year according to LifeWay Research.
(https://baptistnews.com/article/sbc-continues-downward-slide-in-membership-attendance-and-baptisms/#.X7B1bNt7nUo)
That decline signals that within our denomination (and perhaps within our own church) we fail to fully understand the importance the Bible places on membership in a local church.
It’s fair to ask why church membership is vital for living together as a healthy church.
Membership, after all, isn’t in the Bible. At least, the word membership in the way we’re using it isn’t. So, why do we get so bent out of shape about it?
Well, just because the word membership isn’t there doesn’t mean the idea isn’t. The word Trinity isn’t in Scripture, but it’s vital to a proper understanding of God. The words substitutionary atonement aren’t in Scripture, but they help us understand how salvation works. And the word membership isn’t in Scripture, but the idea of a local body of believers uniting together as one body certainly is.
We call that body a local church. I’m going to define a local church and church membership just for the purpose this sermon. I’m going to borrow a definition of the church from Jonathan Leeman, who serves at Cheverly Baptist Church in Maryland. He wrote a great little book on this topic entitled Church Membership.
A local church is a group of Christians who regularly gather in Christ’s name to affirm and guard one another’s membership in Jesus Christ and his kingdom through gospel preaching and gospel ordinances.
https://www.9marks.org/article/what-is-a-local-church/
Let me unpack that definition for just a minute. A local church is made up only of those who have repented of their sins and placed their only hope in life and death on the finished work of Jesus Christ. That’s what makes you a Christian.
To become a Christian, you have to respond to the truth of the gospel. Just so we're on the same page, a good way to summarize the gospel is to biblically unpack the words God, Man, Christ, and Response.
God is the creator of all things (Gen. 1:1). He is perfectly holy, worthy of all worship, and will punish sin.
God is good. God is holy. God is just. There is no fault in God.
When it comes to Man, though, we find a terrifying fault. All people, though created good, have become sinful by nature. From birth, all people are alienated from God, hostile to God, and subject to the wrath of God.
Romans 3:23
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
Enter Christ. Jesus Christ, who is fully God and fully man, lived a sinless life, died on the cross to bear God's wrath in the place of all who would believe in him, and rose from the grave in order to give his people eternal life.
2 Cor. 5:21
He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Knowledge of that truth requires a response. God calls everyone everywhere to repent of their sins and trust in Christ in order to be saved.
Romans 10:13
13 For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
(https://www.9marks.org/answer/what-gospel)
That’s the proper response to the good news of the gospel if you sit here today and aren’t a Christian. Repent of your sins, that means to turn away from them, and place your trust in Jesus Christ alone for salvation.
Christ lived the perfect life God required and, in doing so, accomplished everything that needed to be accomplished so that we can have his righteousness credited to our account. He took the punishment we earned so that we can have the blessings He deserved. We have right standing before God, and we have the gift of the Holy Spirit guiding, convicting, and growing our hearts to love God and love people.
And part of loving God and loving people means belonging to a local church.
The church is a group of Christians who meet regularly and part of why they meet is to affirm and guard one another.
Affirm and guard what? Our relationship with Christ. I acknowledge that you might not like that. If you’re like me, your first inclination is to say that I don’t need anyone to affirm me. I don’t need anyone to guard me. My relationship with God is my business. I feel you. But that attitude that I think we all share to one degree or another is exactly why God has given us the good gift of churches.
You simply can’t do this alone. You’re fooling yourself if you think you can. Thinking that we don’t need others is arrogant. You’re more sinful than you think, you’re more deceptive than you think, and you are a better actor than you think. You can fool yourself into thinking that everything is ok between you and God.
Jeremiah 17:9
The heart is more deceitful than anything else,
and incurable—who can understand it?
That’s my heart and your heart he’s talking about. We need others in our lives to help encourage us, guide us, and redirect us when we start to deceive ourselves.
Affirming one another’s faith is one of the most important things we do as a church. Baptism is the most overt expression of that, isn’t it? You come to a church, you repent of your sins, trust in Christ, share that information, and as a testimony to the body of believers agreeing that those things are true we baptize you into the family.
You become a member of the family, which brings me back to the question. Why membership?
Here’s how we’ll define church membership for the purpose of this sermon series: Church membership is a formal relationship in which a group of Christians affirm and watch over one another.
Those last two words are going to be really important as we examine what the New Testament says about your relationship to your church.
To see that, let’s start with Jesus. How many times do you think Jesus mentioned the church?
Twice. Matthew 16 & 18.
Matthew 16:
15 “But you,” he asked them, “who do you say that I am?”
16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
17 Jesus responded, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father in heaven. 18 And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. 19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven.”
That passage talks about entry into the church. The rock on which Jesus builds is Peter’s confession in verse 16. You are the Messiah.
The second time is in
Matthew 18
15 “If your brother sins against you, go tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won your brother. 16 But if he won’t listen, take one or two others with you, so that by the testimony of two or three witnesses every fact may be established. 17 If he doesn’t pay attention to them, tell the church. If he doesn’t pay attention even to the church, let him be like a Gentile and a tax collector to you. 18 Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven.
The first passage is about entry into the church, the Kingdom of the saved, and this passage is about life in the church. How do we live with one another? Specifically, how do we reconcile with one another.
Two things are present in both those passages. The church and the kingdom. That is very important for understanding the purpose of the local church today.
The ministry of Jesus Christ changed how God represents Himself on earth. He chose a family in the Old Testament. He grew that family into a nation and that nation separated itself from the world by living differently. They observed God’s Law and over-and-over again God made it clear to other nations that Israel was His people. If you mess with Israel, you mess with the one true God (See Egypt in Exodus).
Over time, though, that nation grew away from God so much that He allowed other nations to conquer them.
One of the things God promised Israel was a Messiah. Jesus Christ was born as the promised Messiah, lived a life that fulfilled God’s Law perfectly, died a submissive death as a substitute sacrifice for God’s people and was resurrected on the third day and ascended back to the Father.
Jesus’s finished work changed how God represents Himself on earth. It’s no longer an ethnic people, it’s through the church.
The Great Commission drives us to take the good news to all nations. Listen to Paul in Galatians 3:
27 For those of you who were baptized into Christ have been clothed with Christ. 28 There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; since you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to the promise.
There is no longer any difference, spiritually speaking, between an Israelite, a Roman, or an American. We’re all sinners in need of a savior.
Once we recognize our need of a savior, repent, place our faith in Jesus Christ, and are saved we become a part of God’s Church, with a big ‘C.’ All those who belong to Jesus Christ are part of the big C Church.
But, something interesting started happening after the ascension. Christians began organizing themselves into local churches, smaller local representations of the big C church.
Look at Acts 2
36 “Therefore let all the house of Israel know with certainty that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.”
37 When they heard this, they were pierced to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what should we do?”
38 Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, each of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is for you and for your children, and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call.” 40 With many other words he testified and strongly urged them, saying, “Be saved from this corrupt generation!” 41 So those who accepted his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand people were added to them.
42 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer.
You can continue reading the early chapters of Acts and see that the church at Jerusalem continued to grow and they were keeping track of who was and who wasn’t a part of the church. Three thousand were added in Acts 2 and there were five thousand by Acts 5.
Acts 2:46 tells us that they met together in smaller groups regularly and we also see them coming together as a single body in Solomon’s Colonade in Acts 5.
Persecution arose against the church, though, and these new Christians were scattered all over the known world. Wherever they landed, though, they established new local churches that functioned much like the one in Jerusalem.
Acts 11:
19 Now those who had been scattered as a result of the persecution that started because of Stephen made their way as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, speaking the word to no one except Jews. 20 But there were some of them, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, who came to Antioch and began speaking to the Greeks also, proclaiming the good news about the Lord Jesus. 21 The Lord’s hand was with them, and a large number who believed turned to the Lord.
We see the church growing, keeping account of its “members” and meeting together regularly.
In fact, most of the NT is comprised of letters to these churches and their pastors.
Why? Ephesians 3:10 provides the answer:
10 This is so that God’s multi-faceted wisdom may now be made known through the church to the rulers and authorities in the heavens. 11 This is according to his eternal purpose accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord. 12 In him we have boldness and confident access through faith in him.
The church is the institution that God is using to make His wisdom known to the nations. God uses the church to accomplish His purpose. Jesus said He was building His church and that’s what we’ve seen Him doing all throughout its history. If God’s hand wasn’t in it, the church wouldn’t exist today.
Jesus mentioned the church twice, in very significant ways. Paul mentions it at least 43 times and it’s often on the mind of other writers like Peter, John, and the author of Hebrews.
Much of the instruction for the church comes in the one-another’s. We’re going to look at three of them as an example. We could dig into these all day, but for the sake of time we will see the Biblical commands to love one another, encourage one another, and guard one another:
Love One Another
Galatians 5:13
For you were called to be free, brothers and sisters; only don’t use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but serve one another through love.
2 Thessalonians 1:3
We ought to thank God always for you, brothers and sisters, and rightly so, since your faith is flourishing and the love each one of you has for one another is increasing.
The love that Christians are called to have for one another isn’t easy, because let’s face it, we’re not always easy to love.
But, a local church should very simply be the most loving group of people on the planet.
Listen to Jesus in John 13:
34 “I give you a new command: Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you are also to love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Love is one of the things that marks us as God’s people. Remember, part of the duty of a local church is to oversee one another, right? Jesus said we’d be known by how we love one another. If we aren’t loving toward one another, it implies that we don’t belong to Jesus.
This is one of the easiest indicators of your heart you’re ever going to find. Are you a Christian? Well, do you love God’s people? Are you committed to God’s people?
Think about love in a marriage. Love without commitment doesn’t exist, does it? Loving one another is the duty of everyone who belongs to Christ.
Encourage One Another
Listen to Paul in 1 Thessalonians 5:
9 For God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, 10 who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him. 11 Therefore encourage one another and build each other up as you are already doing.
Hebrews 10:
23 Let us hold on to the confession of our hope without wavering, since he who promised is faithful. 24 And let us consider one another in order to provoke love and good works
Some of you do this naturally, others (like me) require working at it. But, church, whether you’re naturally an encourager or not you’re commanded here to encourage one another! It’s something that all of us are capable of doing.
Encouraging a fellow believer breathes life into their day!
Dane Ortlund wrote:
In your short life, you have a million tiny opportunities, including a hundred today, to inject a small but potent dose of life and light into another. As you consider doing this, you will immediately find a good reason presenting itself that seems to clearly mitigate your impulse to build another up. Some weakness, some fault, will arise in your mind, cancelling out your reason to encourage that person. Indeed, with some people in our lives, we honestly have difficulty finding anything encouraging to say.
Once more we remember the gospel. God did not allow our own faults to mitigate His word of gospel life to us. We have given Him every reason to withhold that precious word from us. Instead He lavishes us with assurances of undeserved love. We come alive. We breathe again.
John Owen wrote that God “loves life into us.” Will you love life into another?
(https://www.ligonier.org/blog/encourage-one-another/)
We have a couple of hundred active church members. How different would your life be if the 200 of us actively engaged in encouraging one another every week?
Committing to pour your life into other people, those who are weaker in the faith will be strengthened, our church will grow stronger, and, ultimately, God will be glorified.
We’re to love one another, encourage one another, and also:
Guard One Another
Listen to Hebrews 12
15 Make sure that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no root of bitterness springs up, causing trouble and defiling many.
That’s a strong charge. Paul’s charge in 1 Corinthians 5 is even stronger:
5 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and the kind of sexual immorality that is not even tolerated among the Gentiles—a man is sleeping with his father’s wife. 2 And you are arrogant! Shouldn’t you be filled with grief and remove from your congregation the one who did this? 3 Even though I am absent in the body, I am present in spirit. As one who is present with you in this way, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who has been doing such a thing. 4 When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus, and I am with you in spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus, 5 hand that one over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.
It sounds like that person thought of himself as a Christian. He was probably attending the church’s gatherings on the Lord’s day. He may have even been a part of something like a Sunday School class.
But, his lifestyle didn’t match his profession. He said he was a Christian. The Bible tells us what a Christian is like. So, Paul tells the church to lovingly take action.
Somehow, they had to make it clear to him, for his sake, that his life was that of a non-Christian.
That’s the loving thing to do. Sometimes, we think it’s loving to ignore wrongdoing. We think it’s loving to ignore someone’s sin. There are certainly times when it’s loving to overlook a sin or to forgive without even worrying about correcting.
But this man lived an entire lifestyle that was incompatible with Scripture. So, the loving thing to do was to bring it to his attention.
Leaving him to his sin and going about like nothing was wrong would simply be evil. He clearly didn’t think anything was wrong and he was deceived. Remember, our own hearts deceive us and Jesus pointed out in the Sermon on the Mount that not everyone who claims to be a Christian is truly saved.
Matthew 7:21
21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.
Paul didn’t want this man to stand there on the last day in that position. So he exhorted the church at Corinth to correct him.
Church, we’re going to need to be corrected. And to be corrected, you have to be in relationship with one another. To encourage, to love, and to guard one another, you have to be in a relationship and that relationship is most clearly lived out in church membership.
In fact, I’d argue you can’t live out the one another’s of the New Testament unless you’ve covenanted together with a local church. It doesn’t have to be called membership. Some churches get cute and creative with their names. Membership works fine for us.
Membership is simply how we live out the one another’s of Scripture for God’s glory. And if you’re not in relationship with God’s people, you’re not being obedient to Scripture.
I get asked questions a lot about the person who claims to be a Christian, yet doesn’t want anything to do with the church. He reads his bible, he prays, but he doesn’t go to church. I’ll simply submit to you that he isn’t reading it very much if he thinks he’s living by Scripture without being committed to other believers.
Next week, we’ll look more specifically at the commitments we’ve made to one another here at FBC in our membership covenant. They’re based on Scripture, so we’ll go to the bible to see specifically what loving, encouraging, and guarding one another looks like.
This week, recognize that God has given you the people in this room and those in our family who aren’t here today as a gift. We’re adopted into the family of God through the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Belonging to Him means belonging to one another.
If you’re here today and don’t belong to Jesus, repent and place your faith in Him and become part of God’s family and part of a local church family. Let’s pray.
