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by
Mark Dever
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January 7 - January 31, 2019
The church is the gospel made visible.
We need to know what a church is intended to be before we
can evaluate what our churches are doing and what we should do going forward.
Too often Christians today have only two gears on their theological bike: essential and unimportant. If something is not essential for salvation, it is treated as unimportant and therefore dismissable.
The first and most basic matter of church polity is, "Who is the church?" And the answer is fairly simple: the members comprise the local church. And just as the Bible determines what a congregation believes, so it also determines who has the final say on who its own members are.
In Matt 18:15–20, Jesus taught that if people do not repent of their sins they must be excluded from the local church. And he called the church to do this. In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul followed Jesus' teaching. He told the whole local church—not just the elders—to expel an unrepentant sinner from their number. In 2 Cor 2:6, Paul referred to a punishment inflicted on a straying member by "the majority." Again, he is not writing to the elders but to the congregation as a whole.
Discipline draws a circle around the membership of the church. Careful practices of membership and discipline are meant to mark off the church from the world and thereby define and display the gospel.
the New Testament gives ultimate responsibility to the congregation.
The important thing is that we should not approach such matters by arguing but by pointing to the Bible and then letting the Bible do its work. By this token the goal of this book is not so much to encourage Christians to draw lines between themselves and other Christians but to draw out clearly the path upon which we will walk.
Paul told the Corinthians that unbelievers would perceive this same God at work among them: "God is really among you" (1 Cor 14:25). Heaven appears on earth in God's assembly, the church.
The Kingdom is not identified with its subjects. They are the people of God's rule who enter it, live under it, and are governed by it. The church is the community of the Kingdom but never the Kingdom itself. Jesus' disciples belong to the Kingdom as the Kingdom belongs to them; but they are not the Kingdom. The Kingdom is the rule of God; the church is a society of man.21
God's people in Scripture are created by God's revelation of himself. His Spirit accompanies his Word and brings life.
In that sense a right understanding of God provides
the right framework for right preaching.
Right teaching about the gospel, in turn, requires a right understanding not only about God but also about humanity. If a church's teaching depicts people as merely spiritually sick, not spiritually dead, the gospel has been distorted.
If congregants are regarded as consumers rightly
expectant of a spiritual upgrade, not as rebels before a holy judge, then the gospel has probably been forgotten. Such churches build community...
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Any unity they experience is a unity based on ...
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gospel-centered church teaches the need to both turn from sin and turn to Christ. By itself a searching exposition on human sin is not enough. By itself the proclamation of God's love in Christ's atoning death is not enough. Both are necessary. A cross not taken up by repentance or affirmed by faith is a cross that does not save. The right preaching of the Word of God is central to the church and is the basis and core of it.
They must regard him as a gift from Christ sent to the church for their good.29 The minister of the Word is a steward of God's household and an undershepherd of God's flock. He serves willingly and eagerly.30 His reputation can and should be defended, his word believed, and his instructions obeyed unless Scripture is contradicted or facts are plainly distorted.31 The faithful minister should be so regarded simply because he brings God's Word to his people; he does not replace it with his own.
Church discipline done correctly might bring a sinner to repentance, but it will always faithfully represent the gospel to the surrounding community.20
Finally, church discipline should be practiced in order to bring sinners to repentance, a warning to other church members, health to the whole congregation, a distinct corporate witness to the world, and, ultimately, glory to God, as his people display his character of holy love.21
The proper ends for a local congregation's life and actions are the worship of God, the edification of the church, and the evangelization of the world.1 These three purposes in turn serve the glory of God.
"Read the Bible, preach the Bible, pray that Bible, sing the Bible and see the Bible."
"The Church is the mirror, that reflects the whole effulgence of the Divine character. It is the grand scene, in which the perfections of Jehovah are displayed to the universe."33
Christians may wonder at God's patience with the church and fear for our own poor stewardship of the church, but we cannot be anything other than confident about the church. It will succeed.16 The church is God's plan and purpose.
Christ's body and blood are "really, but spiritually, present to the faith of believers." They "really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally but spiritually, receive, and feed upon, Christ crucified, and all the benefits of his death."24
Huldrych Zwingli taught that the Lord's Supper is a re-presentation of Christ's sacrifice but only in the symbolic sense of proclaiming it again.25 Zwingli pointed to Paul's words in 1 Cor 11:24–26 as the clearest biblical testimony for how the Supper should be understood. Since Zwingli, many Protestants, including most Baptists, have adopted this memorial understanding, primarily because it is indubitably biblical, and secondarily (perhaps) because it avoids any hint of the sacramentalism of the Roman Catholic position. That said, Baptists have historically used language so rich about
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"When discipline leaves a church, Christ goes with it."19
However, as the surrounding culture has become more overtly immoral, twenty-first-century churches show some signs of recovering practices that promote the purity of the church, including the practice of corrective church discipline.
In everything from the church's obedience to its life and organization, the span of church history is a demonstration of Christ's faithfulness to his promises.
By affirming the sufficiency of Scripture and the requisite role of faith in participating in the ordinances, we can conclude that a biblically faithful church is a Protestant church.
a biblically faithful church is a gathered church.
A biblically ordered church regularly gathers the whole congregation.
Churches exist, in other words, as Christians gather together to proclaim and hear God's Word and then to affirm one another in the faith. A biblically faithful church is a gathered church.
For all of its authority, the local congregation has no authority to delegate the keys to another group. It may go outside itself for counsel and advice, but the ultimate responsibility for determining teaching or membership in the local church may not
be outsourced to any body outside of itself. Any such delegation by the congregation undermines its claims to be a biblically ordered church.7 The New Testament's teaching on the nature of the congregation and the role of its leaders clearly indicates that a biblically faithful church is a congregational church.
