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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mark Dever
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December 9 - December 30, 2020
When I ask a young man in our congregation to lead in corporate prayer, his prayer often addresses what you might term “young man” concerns. Sexual purity, difficult bosses, challenging children, trying to make a difference in the world, etc. Now, in no way are those things foreign to the life of a church member in his seventies. But repeated prayers like that tell the seventy-year-old that this has become a “young person’s church.” Not just a church that’s grown younger, but a church that’s for young people. What about praying for trust in God when children have wandered from the faith? For
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Your people need to hear God’s Word all week long, from each other.
The challenge of building a culture of discipling is a challenge of faith.
The amazing thing about God’s Word is that it doesn’t merely tell us what to do; it can create what it commands.
Christ gave the church ministers of the Word not to effect change, but to equip others to effect change. The Sunday morning sermon isn’t the finish line for Word ministry, it’s the starting line.
Not all preaching equips the flock to become minipreachers. So not all preaching cultivates lasting culture change in a congregation.
how can a husband help his wife not give way to fear (1 Pet. 3:6)? He can live with her in an understanding way (1 Pet. 3:7).
Our staff and elders open our staff meetings and elders meetings by reading through the passage for next Sunday and then take turns praising God for something we each see in the passage. It’s a good way to start a meeting.
a sermon doesn’t stop when it reaches the ears of your people. Instead, it continues its ministry through them day after day, all through the week.
If you advertise in advance what text you’ll preach on next, people can read and study it ahead of time. Then they can engage with the text while you preach rather than simply sitting back while you spoon-feed sermon application.
Suggest as sermon application conversations that members might have—perhaps over lunch after the morning service.
They suggest brainstorming application in seven different categories for each sermon point. (1) How does the teaching in this point fit into the salvation-historical progression of the biblical story line? (2) What does this text say to the non-Christian? (3) What does it say to the larger society and to policy makers? (4) What does it say about Jesus? (5) How does it apply to the individual Christian? (6) Does it say anything in particular about issues of work or family? (7) What does it say to my own local church? In a three-point sermon, this would generate twenty-one separate application
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there are almost no examples of corporate prayer in the entire Old Testament.3 Even the Psalms, intended for temple worship, generally speak in the first person singular. Prayer in the Old Testament is nearly always through a human mediator. But when Jesus teaches his disciples to pray in Matthew 6:11–12, his prayer is corporate: “Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.” So with the arrival of the church in the book of Acts, corporate prayer explodes onto the scene.
Public prayer results in public praise when God answers. And God’s overriding concern through all of history is that his glory be known publicly.
God loves to defend his reputation. When we pray together, our needs become public. When he answers, his glory becomes public.
By praying corporately, we emphasize spiritual priorities over physical circumstances. And we emphasize our life together corporately over our needs as individuals.
Thanksgiving, while important, is about God’s treatment of us. Praise is pure response to the magnificence of him.
Consider two, three, or even ten minutes of corporate prayer each week focused purely on praise.
As fallen creatures, we default to prayer for physical circumstances instead of requests with more spiritual aims. What you pray publicly will guide how your people pray privately. So take care in how you shape those requests.
1. Pray through a Reasonably Comprehensive List of Biblical Priorities
2. Develop a List of the Things You Hope Will Increasingly Characterize Your Church
3. Work to Shape the Requests That Come from Your Congregation
Just as we’re careful who provides our congregation with sermon-based teaching, we should take care selecting who provides prayer-based teaching.
A few simple practices can help a congregation recover the corporateness of corporate prayer. Pray we instead of I, just as Jesus did in the Lord’s Prayer. Pray concisely. Jesus was clear: length in prayer is not necessarily a virtue. Often, in fact, brevity helps others pray with us rather than mentally checking out. Pray loudly. It seems like a small detail, but volume can help or hinder our prayer as a body. Say amen. When the whole congregation joins in the “amen” at the end of a prayer, we formally agree: “This was my prayer too!”
Encourage leaders to pray with a passion that fits their personality and the God they’re addressing.
pictorial membership directory.
For churches that are trying to establish meaningful membership, a directory of members goes a long way to clarifying who is inside the church.
Encourage people to pray for a biblical church culture. On the cover of our church directory, I’ve included the eleven elements of our church culture I referenced earlier in this chapter. These are good things for the entire congregation to ask God for on a regular basis—with the hope that we who pray would also demonstrate them.
Focus on more and better disciples—and recognize that better disciples are your best strategy for seeing more disciples.
Select church leaders who model the type of church culture you want (1 Pet. 5:3).
given our neediness as a church, near-term crises will always crowd out longer-term training unless we deliberately push the other way. Staff should use their time and skills to “cut up” ministry into bite-sized chunks for your congregation to pursue.
even when the farmer is asleep, the seed of the Word continues to grow (Mark 4:26–29). God is always at work.
If you want music that embraces the natural diversity the gospel brings to a congregation, you’ll need to think hard about your goals for musical style. Consider the cultural backgrounds of your congregation. Consider the cultural backgrounds of the non-Christian neighbors you hope to see in your church. How difficult is it for this diversity of people to sing the songs you choose?
When you shape your musical style with the entire congregation in mind, you battle a consumerist mind-set that wants music that “appeals to me.” And you emphasize the breadth of community we should expect to find in a local church.
I tell new members at our church that I want music that helps them worship God if they got engaged the previous evening, and I want music that helps them worship God if they broke up the previous evening. When you select music with a variety of emotional starting points, you teach your congregation that God’s promises hold true no matter our emotional condition.
Essentially, the apostles tell the congregation: “This issue is too important to ignore. But it is not important enough to distract us from the ministry of the Word. Go solve it yourselves!”
have often been thankful when my elders have been willing to listen to discontented people—and consider what might be done—but wait to act until they see a tangible solution to a tangible problem.
So how should church leaders act when confronted with complaints and discontent? We should remember that threats to unity deserve our attention. That while leadership is our responsibility, it is ultimately the congregation who must address these threats.
As a guide, here are four topics that you should cover in your preaching, new members classes, and other teaching ministries.
If we’ve never taught on why unity is important, how can we expect our people to make the right decision? After all, the reasons we value unity often diverge from the reason God values unity.
Spiritual consumers commit to a congregation to the extent that commitment benefits them; spiritual providers commit because of the benefit they’ve already received in Christ.
One virtue you can talk about, pray about, and teach about in your church is transparency. Our lives should be open to each other, and we should strive to be approachable when they’re not. After all, if we hide our sin, how can any of us do what Jesus commands here? The Christian life is not one of posturing and preening; it is a life of honesty.
Church discipline requires unity—but it also threatens unity.
Titus 3:10 makes it clear that divisiveness is grounds for church discipline.
sometimes church members are actually “fierce wolves.” In such cases our job shifts from protecting them to protecting the flock from them.
it is a “no confidence” vote on his profession of faith based on the evidence of unrepentance. Thus, Jesus doesn’t tell us to declare the person an outsider, or to judge the reality of his faith. He merely tells us to treat the person as an outsider.
The nature of excommunication as described by Jesus is neither heavy-handed nor manipulative; it merely observes a discordance between profession and action.
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones was one of the most influential preachers of the twentieth century, pastoring at Westminster Chapel in London from 1939 to 1968. I remember asking his daughter what the key to her father’s long ministry was. And in typical, pointed clarity, she answered: “I don’t think he ever got over his salvation. He never stopped being surprised by it.”
I love mob evangelism because it’s so much more biblical than the evangelism we often practice.
We should teach our churches that evangelism is something they do in their day-to-day lives, not something limited to our weekly gatherings or special church events. Evangelism should be personal.
