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Introduction
Good morning, Church! Take your Bibles and turn to Hebrews 10.
We make it our practice to preach through books of the Bible during our gatherings here at FBC. But, we’re pausing that practice for a few weeks to talk about our practice of membership. What does it mean to belong to First Baptist Church and why does it matter? Those are the questions we’re answering.
This week, we’ll look at the promises we make to God and one another when we join this church.
The local church really is the primary means God uses for carrying out the Great Commission. So it’s crucial that we understand what the Bible says about belonging to a local church and what that means for every aspect of our daily lives.
We’ll begin and end with Hebrews 10. Covenanting together is an idea found all over Scripture, but even if it wasn’t I believe there’s enough here in verses 19-25 to make a solid argument about the need for Christians to enter into formal relationships to care for each other.
I’ll read Hebrews 10:19-25 out loud, then I’ll lead us in a prayer to ask God to bless our time together this morning. This is God’s Word:
Read Hebrews 10:19-25
19 Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have boldness to enter the sanctuary through the blood of Jesus— 20 he has inaugurated for us a new and living way through the curtain (that is, through his flesh)— 21 and since we have a great high priest over the house of God, 22 let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed in pure water. 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, 25 not neglecting to gather together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day approaching.
Pray
To Draw Near to God requires us to Draw Near to His People
To this point in the letter of Hebrews, the author has made one huge point: Jesus is the only true Savior, He’s the Messiah. That’s the therefore in verse 19. Based on everything the author of Hebrews has written for 10 1/2 chapters about Jesus being a better Messiah than Moses, better than the angels, better than the Law: Therefore, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed in pure water. 23 Let us hold on to the confession of our hope without wavering, since he who promised is faithful.
And the very next verse, verse 24:
24 And let us consider one another in order to provoke love and good works, 25 not neglecting to gather together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day approaching.
We surveyed the whole Bible to see this last week, so I don’t want to spend too much time here, but, church, the Bible intimately connects our with God to our walk with His people. Verses 19-25 are one sentence in the original language. Our love for God and love for His people is so connected, the writer of Hebrews mentions them in the very same breath.
If you don’t love God’s people, it’s evidence that you don’t love God. If you look around at people in your church family, or just people around you generally, and you don’t care about them it’s evidence you don’t care about God. That’s not my idea, that’s very simply a truth from Scripture.
1 John 4:
7 Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
The context here is loving one another. If you don’t love one another, you don’t love God.
The Bible compels us to take an active role in caring for one another. That’s what the writer of Hebrews was encouraging in the verses we just read.
Consider one another in order to provoke love and good works. The sense here is that we’re to be on one another’s minds constantly and the focus of our attention is to sharpen one another when it comes to Godly living. That’s what provoke means in that passage. To sharpen one another toward loving God and loving one another.
The question is, how? How do we as a local church go about stirring one another up toward love and good works? We need to answer questions like that carefully, because there is Biblical evidence that churches, yes even good, well-intentioned churches, can mess this up.
Listen to Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 11:17:
17 Now in giving this instruction I do not praise you, since you come together not for the better but for the worse.
Ouch. Corinth was a church that was growing, a church that was doing some good things, but they messed up something pretty important to hear words like that from Paul.
Because we belong to Jesus Christ, how we live matters. Because we belong to Jesus Christ, how we live together matters. Both of those statements are equally important.
So to protect the way we live together, for hundreds of years local churches have entered into covenant relationships with one another.
What is a covenant?
A covenant is a promise. Understanding covenants is important to understanding the Bible. God chose a people and entered into a covenant with them in the Old Testament. That promise was affirmed to Abraham, and Moses, and David. The seal of that covenant was the blood of animals sacrificed in worship.
The life, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ marked a new covenant between God and His people and that covenant is sealed in the blood of Christ’s sacrifice once-and-for-all.
As Christians, we’ve entered into God’s new covenant and it’s that covenant with God that drives us to make formal promises with other believers. Those formal promises take shape in our church covenant.
Put a simply as I can, a church covenant is a series of promises made by a congregation to one another that state how we will live and worship together in light of Scripture.
We didn’t invent church covenants here at First Baptist Church. They’ve been in use for hundreds of years. Churches in our tradition trace our roots back to 1600s England and covenants were very much in use there.
When those folks migrated to the New World and established baptist churches in America, they brought their covenants and statements of faith along with them.
By the 1800s, baptist churches grew and spread rapidly and it became necessary to come up with a common statement of faith to help new churches and new believers understand our common convictions about Scripture.
Baptist churches in New Hampshire came together to produce a statement of faith in 1833 that laid out historic baptist doctrine.
We’ll talk more about that document next week because it served as the basis for the first Baptist Faith and Message. For our purpose this week, though, it’s important to note the The New Hampshire Baptist Confession of 1833 was primarily drawn up by a man named John Newton Brown.
He went on to oversee the American Baptist Publication Society and in 1853 that body published a work titled The Baptist Church Manual.
It contained not only the 1833 New Hampshire Confession, but a church membership covenant as well.
Brown’s baptist church manual was widely distributed in the decades following and Brown’s church covenant made its way into a significant number of baptist churches as missionaries extended their Great Commission work westward into places like Tennessee, and Kentucky, and Missouri.
Our church began in 1871 and at some point along the way we adopted a version of Brown’s church covenant. You have it in the bulletin today and we’ll put it on the screen as we go.
This document is our answer to the question: how do we go about the work of stirring one another up toward love and good works?
Our church covenant is a series of promises we make to one another and we should be thankful that the members of FBC who have gone before us were careful to craft a healthy covenant.
They didn’t just take John Newton Brown’s covenant and slap our name on it. Over the years, we have carefully revised it and made some interesting and helpful changes.
As best I can tell, and I welcome input from those of you who have been here longer than me, we last revised our church covenant sometime in the 1990s.
There are three changes we’ve made I want to point out just to emphasize how our own covenant has a distinct Centralia flavor to it. I don’t know when these changes were made, but they’re departures from Brown’s original so we had to consciously make these changes at some point in our history.
Since we’re taking about baptist things, I thought it proper to give each of these changes “B” titles.
First, a Biblical change. You might find it humorous. I did this week. We’ve updated the language, but the thoughts of our covenant still correspond to the thoughts of John Newton Brown’s original. By that, I mean that we may say something differently, but the ideas are all the same in our document when you put it side-by-side with the original. That is, except for one.
Here’s a phrase from the covenant in the 1853 Baptist Church Manual:
to abstain from the sale and use of intoxicating drinks as a beverage
Somewhere along the line we just decided to throw that phrase out altogether and make no mention of it.
Like I said, I found it funny but it is serious. Here’s why: This change reflects the heart of our church to hold to the line of Scripture. We want to be Biblical.
Drinking alcohol to the point of intoxication is sin, full stop. However, the Bible never prohibits Christians from drinking alcohol. To say it does is legalism. Legalism is sin.
On the other hand, to say the Bible is ok with you getting drunk or using alcohol as an escape is an abuse of the freedom we have in the gospel. Paul warns us against that.
Scripture establishes a line. Our teaching has to be on that line. We can’t go over and above it. That’s what the Pharisees did when they created their own laws.
We can’t go under it. That’s what mainline denominations do when they wrongly interpret Scripture to teach that homosexuality isn’t a sin. Twisting Scripture to make it say what we want it to say is sin.
It’s encouraging to sit here 150 years into a church’s history and be able to see clearly that God has led us over the decades to be a church that strives to be Biblical, no more, no less.
The second change is bold. Our church covenant says we will give the church priority over all human organizations. There’s no corresponding phrase in Brown’s covenant. I found something similar in a church covenant used by the American Baptist Convention, but it’s pretty obscure and it’s worded very differently.
I think this is an idea that grew out of our congregations commitment to a high view of life together. It’s a bold phrase and we’ll dig into it in just a few minutes. For now, I just wanted to point out that we have intentionally crafted a very bold covenant that compels bold living.
Third, there’s a benevolent change in our covenant that I believe is unique to our church.
It’s subtle, but I love its implication. Here’s Brown:
We also engage to maintain family and secret devotion; to religiously educate our children
And here’s the corresponding phrase in ours:
We will maintain private and family devotions, biblically educate the children committed to our care,
It’s really subtle. Do you see it? Not just our children, but the children committed to our care. I have no idea where this came from or when we added it, but it captures the heart our church has demonstrated over the generations for both physical and spiritual adoption.
We see it every Wednesday and those of you who work in our schools or have kids in our schools see it everyday. There’s a generation out there that needs the gospel. We have a Biblical duty to reach that generation. Whether they’re our children, our grandchildren, our nieces and nephews, our foster kids, our adopted kids, or our neighborhood kids we acknowledge our duty to evangelize and disciple them to whatever extent God makes it possible.
Those are three distinct changes our church has made over time to this covenant. Here’s how we’re going to break it down. We don’t have time to go phrase-by-phrase through the whole thing this morning. Well, let me rephrase that. We have plenty of time to go through it phrase-by-phrase. I just don’t know if my voice would make it or if you’d stay.
I do believe each phrase is rooted in Scripture and if you have questions about a particular phrase find me after church or contact me this week and we can talk about it.
The church covenant is our promise to one another and there are five Biblical foundations on which that promise is built.
First,
Our covenant is for Christians:
Is for Christians:
It begins this way:
Trusting that we have received the Lord Jesus Christ through Divine Grace, and given ourselves wholly to Him, and on professions of our faith have been buried with Him in baptism and thus united to His church, we do solemnly and joyfully covenant with each other.
To enter into this covenant, you have to be converted. You have to belong to Jesus Christ. Over the years, a biblical understanding of conversion has been held in extremely high regard by our church. On the very same page as our covenant, our church constitution lists a definition of members:
The membership of this church shall consist of such persons as confess Jesus Christ to be the Savior and Lord, and who, (1) after due examination by the Church as to their Christian Experience, and, if coming from other churches, as to their letters of dismission and recommendations or satisfactory substitutes thereof, (2) have been accepted by vote of the Church, and having been baptized by immersion, (3) enter into its covenant.
I point that out because being a Christian does not mean walking an aisle or repeating a prayer and assuming everything is good. Walking an aisle and repeating a prayer certainly can be elements of your testimony, but if that is all you can point to when it comes to your relationship with Jesus you should be very concerned.
Salvation is not treating Jesus like your dentist. I remember the first time I went to the dentist. I was young and didn’t really know what was going on, but my parents went and they made me go, too. We only went about twice a year, though. Now, I still go on very rare occasions. I usually dread it, but I feel better when it’s over. In between appointments, I don’t really think about my dentist all that much.
That’s how some people treat Jesus and the church. To be a part of the church, you have to belong to Jesus. To belong to Jesus, the Bible says you have to repent of your sins and place your trust in Jesus Christ alone for salvation.
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 created everything we see and everything we don’t see and He did it all for His own glory.
When it comes to Man, though, we find a terrifying fault. Instead of glorifying God like we were created to do, all people 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.
Once we belong to Christ, as we saw in Hebrews 10, we’re driven to belong to His people also. When we covenant together, we recognize that one of the biblical foundations of our covenant is that we can only do this in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Is spirit-empowered
By the aid of the Holy Spirit:
Never forget that your salvation is a supernatural miracle from God. The Holy Spirit took your dead heart and brought you to life. That’s a miracle. Ephesians 2 tells us we were dead in our trespasses and sins but God made us alive in Christ. Jesus Himself told us how:
John 6:63 The Spirit is the one who gives life. The flesh doesn’t help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.
It’s a miracle of the Holy Spirit that we’re Christians. It’s a miracle of the Holy Spirit that we stay Christians and it’s a miracle of the Holy Spirit that we’re able to express covenant love for one another. The same Holy Spirit who brought you to life will enable you to love the person in this room whom you dislike the most.
Galatians 5:22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
That same Spirit has already brought you to life, He can also bring you to love if you’ll get out of His way. The same Holy Spirit who brought you to life will enable you to love the person in this room whom you dislike the most.
Our covenant is enabled by the Holy Spirit and it
Teaches us to live in community, come together in unity, and center our lives on the Great Commission
Those are the final three foundations: to live in community, come together in unity, and center our lives on the Great Commission.
Live in community:
We will walk together with brotherly love, exercising Christian care and watchfulness over each other, participating in each other’s joys and bearing one another’s burdens and sorrows with tender sympathy.
The word community can be problematic in church. Sure, we all live in the Centralia community. . . but we don’t all necessarily live in Biblical community. This phrase we just read describes Biblical community.
Paul stressed this when he wrote, “Live in harmony with one another. . . If possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” (Romans 12:16a,18)
The encouragement to “love one another” is repeated over a dozen times in the New Testament. It’s basic to all Christian relationships. We are brothers and sisters in the same family. We are in God’s family because of our Father’s love for us.
To love someone, you have to know them. In a lot of ways, many of the people in this room should be commended for how they carry this out. Participating in each other’s joys and bearing one another’s burdens and sorrows with tender sympathy is something that a lot of you do well. But, collectively, we still have room to grow here.
If we love a person we want to be with them, talk with them, listen to them, pray with and for them, work with them, share their burdens and their blessings, etc.
At his inaugural address on January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy famously challenged Americans to ‘ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.’
(https://www.ourdocuments.gov/print_friendly.php?flash=true&page=transcript&doc=91&title=Transcript+of+President+John+F.+Kennedys+Inaugural+Address+%281961%29)
Too many times we ask what our church can do for us and not what we can do to love the people in our church.
The church is not an organization that caters to spectators. We’re not here to provide entertainment. The church is a living organism.
The Apostle Paul likened the church to a human body saying, “…we who are many are one body in Christ and individually members of one another. " (Romans 12:5; Eph. 2:19-22; 4:11-16; 5:23-33; 1 Cor. 12:12-27).
The Bible draws us to one another because we need one another, whether we realize it or not. Next, our covenant calls us to
come together in unity
We will assemble ourselves together regularly for worship services and will seek and pray for the spirituality, harmony, unity, and prosperity of this church. We will sustain its worship, ordinances, and doctrines, and will give the church priority over all human organizations.
We will cheerfully contribute of our means, as God has prospered us, for the support of faithful and evangelical ministry among us, for the relief of the poor, and for spreading the Gospel over the earth.
Living in community primarily happens outside the walls of this building. You can’t live in community with someone in one or even two hours per week. Coming together in unity is what we do in our regular weekly gathering and in our small group bible studies that happen on Sunday mornings, and at various other times throughout the week.
Very simply put, you can’t fulfill the covenant promise you made to the other people in this church body if you’re not here.
We will assemble ourselves together regularly for worship. Regular can mean a lot of things, can’t it? Halley’s Comet is on a regular schedule. It’s visible every 75 years. That’s not the kind of regular that our covenant has in mind. I love that phrase: We will sustain its worship, ordinances, and doctrines, and will give the church priority over all human organizations.
Outside of your own personal devotion and your immediate family, the commitment you have to the people in your local church should be the most important priority in your life. That’s bold, but I believe it to be biblical. Go back and look at the early church in Acts 2 and following. They met together everyday. They were together more than most of us are with our families. And God did incredible things through them.
Today, though, the priority seems to be reversed. Church, we can’t truly be united if we don’t value our commitment to one another. For way too many people all human organizations are given priority over the church.
We’ll be at church unless something better comes along. We’ll assemble ourselves together regularly except during hunting season, or basketball season, or wrestling season, or when it’s nice enough to camp or fish. We’ll assemble ourselves together regularly if a better offer doesn’t come along. We’ll assemble ourselves together regularly if we don’t have to work or if the Chiefs don’t have a noon kickoff. Have I hit everything? I’m trying to be an equal opportunity offender here, so if there’s something you skip church for just pretend I took a jab at that, too, ok?
Here’s the main reason we’ve camped on this point: gathering together as the body of Christ is the most important thing on your calendar every week. It’s the one weekly corporate appointment every Christian is commanded to make in Scripture. And we simply don’t value it like we should.
Parents, I’m especially talking to you. Understand that when you choose practice or a game or a day trip over gathering with your church on Sunday, you are teaching your children that those activities are more important. You might say they’re not, but your kids see right through it. And when they have kids, every church study ever conducted on this topic tells us that they’re not going to have their kids in church. If it’s not a priority for you, it’s highly unlikely it’ll be a priority for them.
Now, let me make three caveats. What I don’t mean is that you need to be here every single time the doors are open. To simplify what we mean by life together here at First Baptist we use the shorthand: Gather together, Grow together, Go together. You need to regularly attend on Sunday mornings, you need to be connected with a group of people you’re regularly growing with (a Sunday School class or small group Bible study), and you need to be going together with other believers to evangelize and make disciples. Some of that happens in this building, but most of it happens out there. Those are the commitments we ask you to make.
Second, this teaching isn’t meant to discourage those who want to be here but can’t. We have a lot of dear saints in this church who would absolutely be here today if their bodies would allow it. God knows that. And it’s on the rest of us to make sure we’re still living in community with you even though you’re not here.
Third, COVID complicates this, doesn’t it. Some of you need to be staying home right now in order to keep yourself and others safe. That’s simply the new reality we live in and I encourage you to keep open lines of communication with the rest of the church so that we know and can pray for you.
Some of you probably should stay home, but you’re here anyway. We love you and we’re taking as many measures as we can to try to keep our worship gatherings safe for you.
Some of you, though, and I want to say this lovingly. Some of you are pretty much back to normal life except for church. You’re back to work, you’re back to going to the grocery store, you’re back to eating in restaurants. If going to church wasn’t a priority for you pre-COVID, it’s easy to let COVID be your excuse for not being here now. I want to lovingly say to you it’s probably time to get back to worshipping with the family of God again. Online church isn’t church. It has its place and can be helpful, but it can never replace fellowship with the body of Christ.
The third and final foundation our covenant lays for us is that it helps us
center our lives on Great Commission work
We will maintain private and family devotions, biblically educate the children committed to our care, and will endeavor to follow the disciplines and teachings of the Bible. We will seek to win souls to the Savior and hold fast our profession till He shall come and receive us unto Himself.
This is the Great Commission:
18 Jesus came near and said to them, “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. 19 Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Jesus has authority and He has commanded His church to make disciples, baptize them, and teach them everything he has commanded us.
That means that we need first to know what He has commanded us. So, we have private devotions. We study God’s Word, because without it we wouldn’t know who God is or how He has called us to live.
We study and teach God’s Word as a family, because it keeps us centered on the truth in a world where truth is more and more elusive. We make disciples first at home of our own families, but we don’t stop there.
We seek to win souls. I love the phrasing because it reminds us what is at stake. To make disciples we have to start with evangelism—telling the good news of the gospel to lost people and asking them to trust in Jesus Christ as their savior.
Then, a beautiful thing happens. The Holy Spirit miraculously brings dead hearts to life and those new creations join together with other new creations in a local church and we carry on the Great Commission work together.
Our church covenant teaches us to live in community, come together in unity, and center our lives on the Great Commission. We’re not a perfect church. If you were, you blew it almost three years ago when you called an imperfect pastor. None of us are perfect in our covenant commitment to one another. But, by the grace of God we’ll strive to be a healthier church tomorrow than we were yesterday.
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, 25 not neglecting to gather together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day approaching.
Our covenant lays out what it looks like to provoke love and good works in one another. Church, let’s take seriously our commitment to the people in this body. As we do, God will be faithful, and we’ll be changed.
