161 - No Christian is an Island [B]

Hebrews Lesson 161   May 28, 2009

^NKJ Psalm 119:9 How can a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to Your word.

We'll begin near where we left off last time in Hebrews 10:24. 

Now when we come to this last part of Hebrews 10 there are these three distinct commands that are given in what is called the hortatory subjunctive which is usually a first person plural where the writer includes himself in the action. This is recognizing he has as much responsibility to fulfill these commands as those that he is addressing. He's stating this in what would be a first person imperative although you really don't have a first person imperative as such in the language.  But that's how the hortatory subjunctive works. "Let us do this" means we must do this, we should do this. So when you come to the last part of this one section of Hebrews 10:24-25 this includes the teaching section that began in 7:1. It's concluding with these three mandates. The three mandates begin: 

^NKJ Hebrews 10:22 let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith,.

Focusing on our personal fellowship, relationship with God based on being in fellowship, forgiveness.

having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water

The picture there is of that positional cleansing that takes place as a result of salvation, justification. 

Second, moving on beyond simple justification to the next command:

^NKJ Hebrews 10:23 Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful.

I said that is holding on to basic doctrine. It has amazed me. In fact I was having a conversation yesterday with my good friend Tommy Ice. We were bemoaning the fact we could not understand how so many people we have known over the years have departed from dispensationalism or free grace gospel or even the philosophy of ministry that the role of the church is to be teaching environment. They're off into all kinds of church growth gimmicks or they never even mention the word dispensationalism or prophecy or anything much beyond very basic pabulum; all for various reasons. That's what they've done. They've given up. They have not held fast to the confession that they were given. 

When I think back on my life and I think back on the teaching that I received from the pulpit at Berachah Church where I grew up, when I think of the teaching that I heard when I went to Camp Peniel,  Many of my counselors and many of speakers that came were on their way to either the pastoral ministry or the mission field. A lot of them had also come out of Berachah Church. So there was a consistency in the teaching and there was a solid emphasis. I look back to what I was taught, handed as it were, a body of doctrine from those men and the teachers I had at Dallas Seminary. Then you come along now and you look at what is taught, what is emphasized and you just wonder: what happened? 

And many people who of those same people who were teaching one thing and had one philosophy back in the 60's and 70's are no longer there. They've moved. They've got different ideas. They've changed in some way. You wonder what in the world happened to cause this? See they haven't held fast to that confession of faith.

I think in many ways we see in our world today where people don't really understand what they believe and why they believe it. Those two things really have to go together. Sometimes they're taught a "what", but they never really understand the "why." They don't understand the exegesis that underlies the position. Sometimes they don't really understand the position they've held.  In some cases they get hit with a situation in life, some kind of testing or tragedy. Sometimes they get faced with disappointment. I know that the pastors who have faced various disappointments in the ministry. They had high hopes. They had great ambitions. They had tremendous talents. Then things didn't work out and God was taking them through the wilderness. Rather than being patient in their wilderness testing, they decided they needed to somehow figure out how to bring water to the desert and how to make the desert bloom in all these other things through manmade gimmicks. So rather than waiting patiently on the Lord and teaching the Truth, they started changing, modifying, diluting in order to somehow get a greater hearing, get more people there. Maybe they thought dispensationalism is not very popular so I'm not even going to talk about that or things of that nature and so were just beginning to dumb down what came out of the pulpit. Those are some examples of those who have not held fast that confession of hope without wavering.

Then the third command is:

^NKJ Hebrews 10:24 And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works,

That's your basic command which we began to look at last time in verse 24. I just want to review the emphasis here. The word translated "consider" is the Greek word katanoeo. The kata is a preposition that intensifies the meaning of the main verb which is noeo. You've heard the Greek word nous which refers to the mind. Katanoeo has to do with an intensified form of thinking. Noeo is also thought; but when you put the kata in front of it, it intensifies the meaning.  It has that idea that we should give some intense serious focused thought to something. 

It's the old activity of brainstorming. I don't know if you ever went through that activity, but you are trying to solve a problem or face a situation. So you sit down and start cranking out ideas and sometimes if you get with a couple of other people; you are trying to work through a situation. Then there is sort of a synergism that occurs there that occurs with other people. You begin to come up with different ideas and play off each other. That's the idea here.  It's giving some serious thought and contemplation to a course of action and it involves one another. It involves the body of Christ. 

Now this idea that we're going to see a little more fully tonight on the "one another" isn't just talking about getting together with other believers down at Starbucks where you can enjoy a good cup of bitter coffee – over-roasted coffee in my opinion, unless it's iced coffee. I love their iced coffee, but their other stuff I think is a little over-roasted. You can talk to friends. You can go to a restaurant, work out together, go shooting together. You can do all kinds of things with other believers, but that's not the "one another" idea that we have from Paul. It's not just believers getting together to do things.

Those can all be great and wonderful things and we all enjoy that kind of social engagement with other believers. Sometimes it really does become Christian fellowship because we start talking about things related to the Word and the Christian life and we can encourage each other. But that isn't the idea here because when we get into the next verse (into verse 25) where there is the negative and positive presented and the negative is "not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together", we'll see the word forsake means to abandon or to give up the assembling together. 

That is from the Greek word episunagoge. Now what word do you think we speak of in English that we get from sunagoge?  Synagogue.  To whom is the writer of Hebrews speaking? To Jews. So when they hear this word, this verb episunagoge and they're going to be thinking specifically about the gathering together in the synagogue. The assembly of believers as it was in the Old Testament for the purpose of studying the Word, prayer, worship and also mutual encouragement. The use of the vocabulary here is not talking about other kinds of ways in which we get together socially with believers; but it's talking about how we get together within the specific context of the meeting of the local church, the meeting with other believers for the primary purpose of the teaching of the Word of God. 

But there are secondary objectives that are set forth for the meeting of the church as we'll see over the next couple of weeks as we go through various passages such as 1 Corinthians 12, Ephesians 4, and a couple of other places in Acts. The idea here of "considering" is stirring up one another in context of this assembling together for a particular purpose. 

That's where this is taking place. It's not taking place down at the local coffee shop or restaurant; but it's taking place within the context of the meeting of the local church and is a by-product of the study of the Word. I think it's very important because people forget that. I think every decade there are people, there are seminary professors and pastors that come up with new ideas on how to make the church more dynamic, more fun so your church can grow – things like that. There are always these kinds of renewal movements. Sometimes they're needed because the church stagnates, gets away from doctrine. Sometimes people think the church has stagnated because they're really tired of learning doctrine. They don't think doctrine works anymore so we have to do something to placate the masses out there and we have to understand what they want and give them what they want and then our church can grow.  And if it's growing that means God must be blessing. 

I can't tell you how many people believe that. That is the established presupposition of their thinking is that if a church grows from 50 people to 500 people to 5,000 people that God has blessed us. But one of the pastors that I studied under at one time and who ordained me made a comment one time. 

He said, "Anybody with personality and drive and business knowhow can build any organization to be successful. That doesn't mean that God the Holy Spirit had anything to do with it." 

So size and numbers of a local church don't have anything to do with whether God is blessing that local church. There are many people who in the energy of the flesh can go out and build huge churches. You can drive up and down the freeways in Houston or Dallas or Washington or any major city and you can see these monuments to the flesh. No doctrine is being taught there and in some cases they might get the gospel right on occasion because the stopped watch is right at least twice a day. So it just happens by chance. But it's not intentional. 

Some of the stories that I hear about what's going on in some of the larger churches around Houston are enough to make you want to think that people have lost their common sense. I heard of one church where the pastor was telling the congregation that all their energy, all their programs, everything are going to focus on younger people; on the 30's and the 40's. Basically what was communicated nonverbally was that if you're older and you don't like the kind of music and formats that appeal to those in their 20's, 30's, and 40's; then well you're just going to have to learn to adapt. That's silly. I mean the strength of any local church are the mature people and the mature people are older people. The mature believers are going to be older believers. They're going to be men and women in their 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's who in many cases have seen all these fads come and go; and they have real wisdom to understand what needs to be taught is the Word of God. 

So we see these fads and these different things come along every decade or so; and they come up with ideas on how we can be more loving. There's always new gimmicks for how to be more loving. Sometimes they operate within what they'll call anything from a mini-church to a fellowship church to a home group. Small groups are the big rage. They have been for about 30 years now. That's where the real life of the church is in the small groups whether that's Sunday school or whether that's home church meetings. 

In fact if you buy Logos with all the basic stuff in there, there are a whole bunch of books about leading small groups and developing small groups and how to teach small groups.  It's small groups this and small groups that.  It's all about methodology and gimmicks and that kind of thing rather than just teaching the Word. It's the Word that's the focus and that people need to be drawn to the Word. 

You have these other ways in which we can show that we love each other. It comes across as a phony. One of the emphasis that I learned a number of years ago as a pastor (and my philosophy of ministry) is that things of that nature need to come out of the spiritual growth of the congregation not to be imposed by the pastor or the leader saying we need to be a loving church so we're going to set up a committee and that committee is in charge of taking care of all the visitors. Or we want to make sure that all the young families recognize that we care about them so we're going to do this kind of thing. It comes across as a phony program, some sort of top-down-engineered idea in order to make people feel welcomed, make people feel loved all of these things rather than just teaching the Word and teaching people to understand what that interpersonal dynamic should be among a body of mature, growing believers who are genuinely out of their own spiritual growth loving one another, caring for one another, and taking care of one another and all those "one another" passages that we're going to look at. It's not a result of programs. It's a result of the study of the Word of God and spiritual growth under the guidance of God the Holy Spirit. That produces that sort of genuine application that is so often lost. People run around trying to capture that in one way or another and it almost always leads to some kind of a problem.

So we are to consider one another in order to stir up love and good works.  I pointed out that the Word for stirring up is the Greek word paroxusmos where we get the English word paroxysm. It means to arouse to activity, to provoke action in some cases to provoke sharp disagreement to produce ardent incitement or to stir to action. It has a variety of meanings. The basic idea is people respond to the teaching of the Word and then they get excited from their own enthusiasm about the Word, not a manufactured excitement or emotion because that won't last long. 

Then they begin to talk to other believers within that dynamic and think about – well, what can we do? How we get involved, using our spiritual gifts, going down maybe to the hospital visiting people, setting up a Bible study with children in the neighborhood, whatever it is. But it grows out of their own response to God's Word. It's not something manufactured from the outside or from the leadership. 

Then the writer qualifies what he means in his main command to think deeply about how to stir up one another. He's going to use two participles. The first shows a negation and the other shows something positive.  

If you look at them one says:

^NKJ Hebrews 10:25 not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some,

And on the other hand:

but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.

So you see when you put them together the "assembling together" is related to exhorting one another. If you're not assembled together in the sense of the meeting of the local church; then the framework for exhorting or encouraging one another isn't there. That's why this isn't' talking about what's happening down at Starbucks or what's happening at Burger King or down at the gym or someplace such as that. 

So there's a prohibition, a warning here, because some of these Jewish believers, Jewish background believers have given it up. They've quit meeting with other believers. If you're not meeting with a local church where you're hearing the Word of God and you're being encouraged by the fact that there are other people there; then what happens is you're not in a place where you can be reminded by the Word of God, reinforced by the Holy Spirit and encouraged by relationships with other believers. 

I'm not saying that other believers are key to your spiritual grow. Your spiritual growth is determined by your volition. But God created us to be social. That doesn't mean that the church is a social institution. 

One of my little pet peeves over the years has been that when you read church pastoral ministry literature, the tendency for the last 50 years is to interpret the church as primarily a social organization that has secondary educational aspects. But when you read the Word of God especially passages like Ephesians 4 that the gift of pastor teacher and evangelist are given to equip the saints to do the work of the ministry, other passages talking about teaching, training, instruction. The focus of the local church is on education. The social aspects will take care of themselves because God created us in His image. Part of the "imageness" of God is that capacity for relationship and God existed as a social being for all eternity within the society of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. So at the very core of that relationship that 3-fold relationship when the Scripture talk about the fact that God is love; He is love unlike any other God that man manufactured such as Allah. God is eternally love because there is an eternal object for His love. The Father has an eternal object in the love of the Son. The Son has an eternal object in the love of the Father. The Holy Spirit has eternal objects in the Father and the Son. So there is this eternal dynamic of a society of a social dynamic within the trinity. 

So when God creates man, He doesn't man to be socially isolated from one another. Mankind is designed for social interaction and to encourage one another in a positive way. Of course that like anything else can be distorted and perverted. But when you are in a classroom and I argue this when I talk about the problems I see with internet learning, internet seminary classes, distance learning. That's good in some ways. There is always the inconvenience of having to pack your bags, move across the state, move to the next state, move half way across the country to go some place to be trained and get your education to be a pastor. 

So many men think, "Well, I'm married now and I've got a baby on the way." Or, "I just  married and I've got a job and  I just can't see how God is going to open the door for me to move to Albuquerque or to Washington DC area (Capital Bible Seminary)", or some other place where they can get a seminary training. So they think they can get it on the internet. 

There is an intangible, immeasurable element a necessary element that takes place in a man's education when he is sitting in a room with other men with the gift of pastor teacher and they're studying Greek that cannot be replaced when they're sitting in their office somewhere in front of their computer isolated from these other individuals. There is a dynamic that takes place when you're with these men and you leave class and say, "Man I just don't understand this." 

Some other guy says, "It's simple." And he explains it in a way that's much better than what the professor just did

Or, you get together and study. I had a group of men my first year in seminary that had lunch together every day. In those days Dallas Seminary had Lamb Auditorium, which would seat about 250. They didn't have a cafeteria or lunchroom and they had built this about 3 years before I started seminary. We would go in there and we would pull the chairs out into a circle and we would sit there with out sandwiches and our cokes and we had our 3 by 5 cards with all the notes we had taken on the reading for the assignment the night before. Now the class that came up after that had everybody in our class in there which was about 200 men. We would sit there and we would drill each other over the 30 or 40 pages of reading that was due that day because we always had a quiz on the reading before class. You would have a ten-question quiz. 

The book that we had for that class was An Old Testament Introduction by R. K. Harrison. On most of the pages, half the page was fine print footnotes. Half the questions on the quiz would come out of the footnotes.  So you had to know every piece of minutia that was in those 30 to 40 pages of reading. The prof would only ask ten questions. So the only way to make it through was for a group of 5 or 6 guys to get together with all the notes they had taken on 3 by 5 cards and drill each other for an hour before class and ask any possible question that we could. 

That's comparable to this dynamic that the writer of Hebrews is talking about here with this interaction in the body of Christ. Like I said, this isn't the kind of thing that you'll see in some churches. There have been churches like…Ray Stedman had Peninsula Bible Church. He's with the Lord now. He had Peninsula Bible Church out in the San Francisco area through much of the 50's, 60's, and 70's. He came out with a book called Body Life. This was the new gimmick in the 70's.  

"We're going to minimize the role of the pastor and we're just going to have these meetings of the church where all the of the church with their different spiritual gifts do different things." 

But the edification comes from the Word of God. That made everybody feel important so that had it's popularity and the church was a couple of thousand. That was one of the big churches. Because he did so well, Dallas Seminary always tended to parade Ray Stedmen out as one of the great graduates of Dallas Seminary. "Look how God blessed his ministry." 

There were many good things about Stedman's ministry; but that was one of those kinds of trendy things that have come along in the past 30 years that try to take passages like this and do something different that creates this artificial type of body life. That's not at all what I'm talking about. This is a dynamic that comes as a result of people just genuinely enthused about the study of the Word. 

Some of you remember times when you were in Bible churches and doctrinal churches when it was an exciting happening place. After Bible class people got together and they would go talk about things and what they had learned in Bible class that night. And it was exciting. They couldn't wait to be back the next night. That's the kind of dynamic that's going on here where it all centers around the meeting of the local church.

Now on this slide I've got at the bottom three of the key Greek words that are here. The first word egkataleipo is the word that's translated not forsaking.  It means to leave something, to leave it behind, to forsake it, to abandon it; basically to quit getting together with other believers in the study of God's Word. That's always at the center of the understanding here. 

^NKJ Hebrews 10:25 not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some,

They had these Jews under the pressure of persecution and rejection; and it's not popular. Their Jewish family and friends would not have anything to do with them.  They were peeling off and they weren't assembling with others anymore. When you go through tough times - sometimes you don't want to be around other people. But it encourages you. Just the fact that you see other people that are there, tells you that "it's not just me." 

That's one of the problems I have with streaming video. I think it's a great thing when you have people in this town who have difficulty getting here on Tuesday night or Thursday night because sometimes it is difficult because of work schedules and other things. But sometimes it's just too convenient to not make the effort to go to Bible class two nights a week. Some of you remember going to Bible class 5 nights a weeks and three times on Sunday. Now let's just stay home this one other night during the week and live stream.  When you have a crowd of 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 people in here, the dynamic that comes from seeing a hundred people in this room as opposed to the dynamic of seeing 25 or 30 here every night has an impact on us. 

We may say, "Well, you know we really shouldn't.  That's putting eyes on people."

But that's the way man's made. We are encouraged by the fact that – look at these other people. We can't see the number of people that are out there. In the old days of cassette tapes when you had orders coming in, you could write up a nice report at the end of the year and say we sent out, we filled an average of a thousand or three thousand or 5 thousand tape orders last month. But now when everything is downloaded off the internet, we have no clue how many are listening. It's surprising. I think there are a lot out there but I have no idea of measuring that. It's probably a good thing that I don't have any idea. But we get encouraged by knowing that we're not here fighting this battle alone. 

I think that's one of the side benefits of the Chafer Seminary Pastor's Conference. All of a sudden there are people who realize that there are a lot of good solid doctrinal teaching pastors all over this country and not all of them come to that conference. This last year I think we had between 45 and 50 - that's the most we've had and I'm talking since about at least 1975. I think that's about the most we've ever had at a pastor's conference. And then were another 15 or 20 who were involved in some kind of auxiliary church ministry as a seminary professor or a missionary or something like that. They get together and these men get together and they realize there are other men who are facing some of the same challenges that they're facing in churches. And some of them are just practical challenges.

"I've got 5 teenagers in my church, but I need to have a teen class. But when you have 5 teenagers and this week they're all there. Next week there's a football game and one guy shows up." 

The dynamic is lost. The next week he doesn't want to come because he's the only guy. So three others show up, but he doesn't show up. 

They are saying, "Well, what about so and so?" 

There is a dynamic that doesn't work there. So should we have a Friday night teen class? How do we do this? These are important questions and good questions and guys get to realize that other men are struggling with those same thing. Some of these guys solve the problems.

"Hey that's a great solution.  I'm going to try that when I go back." 

The goal is not to try programs or gimmicks or get more kids there. It's that somehow we need to get our teens in front of the Bible on a regular basis so that they can be strengthened and prepared to face the problems in life that come that along after you leave home.

The negative command here is not to forsake. You can't do it. You cannot consider one another to stimulate them to love and good deeds if you're forsaking the assembly of ourselves together. So you can't do it by not assembling. But you do it by assembling and encouraging one another. This is a word we'll see several times in the passages we're going to look at in a minute. 

The word here is parakaleo. It means to summon, to invite, to exhort, to encourage, to implore. It has a range of meaning. Sometimes it's a form of teaching, exhorting somebody. That's where we get our word hortatory from exhort. It has that idea of challenging people. I like that word better than I do exhort. It means to challenge people with the truth of God's Word and their responsibility as believers. And we do that in many ways with others. 

Now let me say a word of warning. As you go through this there are all these little caveats that I have to put in here because there are always people who don't know how to engage socially with other people. The more we get into our internet age and our self-absorbed narcissistic culture; we find people have to be taught how to have relationships. When I've done marriage counseling that is 90% of the problem. They don't know how to have good manners toward each other. They don't know how to listen to each other. They don't know how to talk to each other. They don't know how to have a relationship with another human being. They don't know how to handle disagreement because they've never had that kind of training. As we get more and more removed from our roots in this country with little parental discipline and all you're raising is a bunch of children who are hyper narcissists then when they get married and you get two little hyper narcissists who've never had to control their sin nature in their life, that marriage is going to last about 6 months or two years and it's going to be pretty miserable. A lot of marriage counseling is nothing more than teaching people how to be a friend, how to have good relationships, how to deal with people with good manners and basic socialization 101. 

So that's part of what's involved in a local church and pastoring. You have to warn people though not to do certain things. When you have relationships with people, when you have friendships - just think about your own life. You have three or four different what I call circles of intimacy. You have 3 or 4 close friends, maybe. Sometimes you might have one depending on a lot of different factors. But you have one person with whom you can discuss just about anything in your life. That's your most intimate level. Sometimes that's only your spouse. Sometimes it's your spouse; sometimes you have another close friend. Sometimes some of us live in places where we have friends that we have grown up with. We're still in the geographic area where we grew up and so we have some old friends and close friends that we can be very intimate with. But a lot of people don't have that. 

Then you have another circle that's not quite as intimate. These are people that you see on a fairly regular basis. You may socialize with them. You may work out with them. You may play sports with them, go golfing with them, go shopping with them, different things of that nature. And so there's another level of intimacy. 

Then there's a level of intimacy that involves people that you might see on a regular basis. You see them at church 3 or 4 times a week. You see them at the office and work almost every day. You know some things about them and their personal life. They know some things about you and your personal life; but you really don't get into a lot of each other's lives or business. And it needs to stay that way. You don't want some of those people knowing anything more about you. Maybe you don't even like them knowing as much as they do know about you. 

Then there's a level where you just barely have acquaintances. You know their names. You see them; you recognize them. Those are the levels of intimacy. 

What happens in a local church is you get into passages on "one another", admonishing one another, encouraging one another. You get one person on one side of the church who sees a person on the other side of the church and they see them say or do something that they don't think is right. So they are immediately over there leaping from a 4^th level of intimacy situation as if it's a first level intimacy level situation. All they do is irritate, aggravate, and upset somebody because they haven't built a context of trust and intimacy to talk to the other person. All of a sudden they're sticking their nose in somebody's business where it doesn't belong. It's never a good situation. We always have to be sensitive to the balance there between our friendship for someone and also respecting their privacy. 

But sometimes it's just necessary when someone is a friend and has been a friend and we've established those kinds of conversations and relationships in the past to say, "You know I've noticed this lately. I'm a little concerned." 

You make those kinds of comments and it's not invading someone's privacy if they have opened the door in the past to let us inside that circle of intimacy.  There are some people who are that way.  There are also people and we know some who have a little bit difficult time understanding the whole concept of privacy.  So, you tend to be a little resistant there. 

Also within a local church you have different personalities. You have people who are basically shy, and they want to be private. Now a lot of times people like that will go to a larger church because they can blend in and disappear in a church of 500 or 1000 and nobody is going to notice them. They're very comfortable like that. I don't necessarily think that there's anything wrong with that. 

What I think is wrong is when somebody else who is very outgoing and gregarious comes along and says, "You know you need to be more involved. You need to be coming with some events with some other people."

They're imposing their views on this other person who is just basically wants come to the church. They visit a few times. It's like sticking their toe in the water and they just kind of swish it around a little bit, pull it out. A little bit later they may dip a little more of their foot in there; but they don't want to move in real fast and get to know people. That's fine. People come from all kinds of backgrounds. A problem I see in a lot of churches and have seen (And I've been in all kinds of different churches) is that there is a tendency to create a one-size-fits-all application of Scripture like this. That's just as wrong. 

People are so different and they come from so many different kinds of backgrounds and histories and personalities and everything. As we grow together and as we get to know each other as people open themselves up to us in friendships and relationships, then we can do more of these things in an intimate way without invading or violating somebody's privacy.

So we are prohibited from forsaking the assembling of ourselves together in the framework of worshipping and teaching as is the manner of some. But on the other hand we are to exhort one another.

^NKJ Hebrews 10:25 not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.

The term "the Day approaching" is realizing that we are getting closer and closer to the rapture of the church. That's not date setting. It's still immanent, but we know and the writer of Hebrews knew that: it's getting close; he thought it was close, but it really wasn't. We know now that it is. It's probably much closer than it was then so it's even more important. 

Now let me just say a few comments in terms of application and thinking through this whole issue of being involved in a local church because we come out of a tradition (more so than other churches and groups) point of being heavily dependent on electronic media whether you want to call them tapers or streamers or whatever term you want to use. We've all come out of that background and we all know that there are a lot of people who have found it in a very comfortable to not to be involved in a local church and become very isolated and sit at home watching a DVD, watching live streaming, or listening to a tape recorder or MP3 or something of that nature. As I pointed out earlier when I talked about it in a seminary class, the same thing is true in a local church. There is just a certain dynamic that occurs when we get with other believers. Furthermore there are things that can never happen when you're sitting home alone in front of a tape recorder that are necessary in the body of Christ. 

Notice all the images that the Lord used of the church have to do with a unity – like a team, a body, something like that. You can't use your spiritual gift to benefit other believers. And the purpose we were given spiritual gifts was to use them within the context of a local church, not to use them in your business, not to use them in other social groups that you're involved in; but to use your spiritual gift to minister in whatever area that is within the local church to one another. If you're not involved in a group of believers, then you can't function in your spiritual gift. 

The second thing that's important is the Lord's Table. The Lord's Table needs to be taken on a regular basis. The normative vision in the New Testament is that believers get together as a group for the teaching of the Word, the observing of the Lord's Table, praying together, and encouraging one another. But we live in an era today where because of technology believers can isolate themselves. They can become spiritual islands, which are separate independent atoms that don't ever see each other or connect to each other. So they choose because it's a little bit easier because of our hectic schedules to not do that.

Now when I talk about the importance of being involved in a local church and meeting together, I am thinking in terms of a normative situation. I recognize that there are exceptions. But you never teach in the light of exceptions; you teach in light of the normative situation in a local church. I can think of all kinds of historical exceptions. If you were living in Missouri in 1830 it was real difficult to get together with other believers. It was real difficult to get together with anybody because you lived 50 miles from the nearest person. 

There are different historical circumstances where it was very difficult for believers to get together with other believers. But we're not taking about those. You don't set your pattern on the basis of exceptions. You set them on the basis of normative mandates of Scripture. 

There are also people who for many legitimate reasons just can't attend a solid local church. Sometimes this is because of health problems. Sometimes it might be because of financial problems. Sometimes it may be because in their particular geographical locality there just isn't a church that they are comfortable with. Now that's another problem that I'll address in a minute. Sometimes they're not comfortable with it and they need to just get over it and be involved because of how God can use them not because of what they're going to get. That's the narcissistic idea that comes up again. 

"I need to go to that church and he's not teaching me anything."

Well, you're listening to Robby Dean or Bob Thieme or somebody else 50 hours a week, you can go to that church and ignore what the pastor says because he's never going to feed you anything any way. 

You're there to say, "Lord, I'm not here as a know-it-all to give everybody the answers but I'm here because God may use me in some way."

Gene Brown was over at the house the other night and Gene was talking about the fact that last spring and summer when he was living up in Plano. I guess it was the year before that when Phyllis was in her last two or three months. On Sunday morning he would get up and go to the early service at what was probably the largest Baptist church in Dallas. Gene Brown forgot more about what the Bible teaches than that pastor ever learned. But he went to the Sunday school class. They would waste half the hour just sitting out in the fellowship area drinking coffee. But people would start asking Gene questions. He would just give the answers Gene would give. 

Before you know it after three or four weeks he's got a little group of people there that are beginning to say, "You know you're saying some interesting things. I've never heard this before. This guy teaching Sunday school class doesn't do this."

I know of another case where one man went. He wasn't trying to show off his Bible knowledge or anything. He was sitting in one of these Sunday school classes where the teacher who didn't have time to prepare would go around saying, "What do you think about this passage? What do you think about this passage?"

So this guy realized what was going on and so what he did he started really studying for the passage that was supposed to come up on the Sunday school quarterly for the next week. When the guy started asking him questions, he started giving the answers. 

People would start looking and him and say, "Where in the world did he get this stuff? This is great."

Those who are hungry for the Word started responding.  This particular individual grew up here in Houston, was at a doctrinal church for many years, moved up to the Dallas Fort Worth area and goes to a church up there that is sort of a quasi-church growth emerging church pastored by the son of a well-known pastor here in Houston so I won't mention his name. The church doesn't teach anything. But they have these little mini churches or cell groups that meet around. So he got involved in that one. As he would be asked questions, he would tell what he knew without any sort of arrogant attitude. Now that's a problem that a lot of people have. They get upset. They get irritated; they get angry that this guy's not teaching me anything. 

"I'm going to show him." 

Well, you've already lost it. Go home; get back in front of your tape recorder. You're not going to have a ministry with anybody because they feel that arrogance. They sense that and they're not going to listen to you.  But he's just very relaxed.  After about 6 months the guy who led this little group had to go on vacation. So he asked him to take over and to teach. Now he is the guy who teaches that group all the time. They are supposed to be limited to 20 people, but they get about 40 that come and they don't want to split off to another group. They'll have pool parties and different things like that and everybody is gathered around him asking him questions about the Bible because they want to learn the Bible. 

Bill Stebbins was listening to me back around 2000. He was up in Kentucky. It wasn't Fort Campbell. He was at Fort Knox. He was teaching in the advanced armor school there. He started listening and he said, "I can find a church." 

He tried probably a couple dozen churches. He found a little Baptist church just outside of town that was fairly solid. The pastor was kind of lordship. It wasn't long before Bill visited with him.

The guy said, "Well listen, you like to teach. I need a Sunday school teacher. Why don't you teach the adult Sunday school class?" 

So for the next two years Bill taught that Sunday school class. He taught them free grace, taught them the gospel, taught them the dynamics of the spiritual life; and they had a fabulous ministry there. So you never know how God might use you.

One other story is a guy who works with Morris Proctor. I just met this guy a couple of years ago. His name is Boots. What's his first name? Art Boots - Art and his family grew up listening to doctrine, listening to tapes. He was in the military 4 or 5 years and got introduced to Bible Doctrine, teaching the Word. But he knew he needed to be a part of a local church because that's where you take communion. That's where you have a ministry with other believers. So all these years he's been involved in a local church, but he would listen to tapes everyday. Some 8 or 10 years ago he started listening to me. Although I don't play a part in this (His listening to me was just tangential); but he was wanting to know more about the original languages. 

Almost anybody who sits in a doctrinal church very long says, "I'd like to know a little Greek or Hebrew so I can study in the original languages a little bit." 

So he found out about this program that had come out, the Bible study program called logos. He bought Logos and played with it and said there seems to be some horsepower under the hood; but I don't really know how to use it. So he just sort of put it aside. A lot of people have had that experience. Then he heard about this guy named Morris Proctor who was teaching these classes on how to use Logos. So he went to one – went to two or three. Before long like most of us do started calling Morris up on the phone and getting to know Morris – he and his wife. He retired and he and his wife got to know Morris and his wife personally. 

Art said, "You know I'd love to help you – just volunteer. I'd love to help you. I'd love to use whatever God has given me to help you do this because when you teach these classes you need people out in the audience who can help."

Now Art and his wife travelled with them. One day Art and his wife one weekend were staying with Morris and Cindy. The live up in Mercury's Borough, Tennessee and Art's talking. Morris told me this. He had been talking about this pastor he had been listening to on tapes for years.  "One day I just turned to him and said, 'Morris, who do you listen to?'"  "I'm listening to this guy down in Houston named Robby Dean"

"I know Robby." 

But that's a great ministry that Art developed because he was willing to overlook the flaws and the shallowness at a local church to see how God would use him. That's important. That's one area of challenge to people.

But I also have some caveats that I need to make sure that I put out here. One caveat is that there are some people who are listening to me and they're going to think that, "Well, there isn't a church around here." 

I've given them an excuse and they're going to drive a truck through it. They may go look at one church or two churches. Looking for a church is worse than looking for a job because there are so many of them and so many of them today are just such a waste of time. 

In fact I talked to a lady the other day who called me and she said, "I haven't been to church in 3 months because it's a waste of time." 

More and more people are unfortunately feeling that way. There are many people who wont' give it a try, and they'll use any excuse to justify their own lack of effort. But then there are other people who are sensitive and they'll listen to what I've said and they'll be like a guy I mentioned a couple of weeks ago who was up in Vermont. He felt like he needed to get his kids involved in a local church and the best church in his area in a small town didn't even believe in the physical, bodily resurrection of Christ. 

After he'd gone there a month he called me up and said, "You know I'm really trying to do what you said and be involved in a local church; but they're all terrible.

I said, "Don't do it." 

Don't sacrifice basic key doctrines just to fit some legalistic idea of being involved in a local church.  But if you can, you should.  Someone who can attend - I'm really addressing this to people who can attend a solid local church; but they won't or they don't because for some reason they don't want to get up and drive 5 miles because that's not my favorite pastor. My favorite pastor lives three states over. Well if that's your favorite pastor, move three states over. If that's where you need to be then one of you is out of God's geographical will. You need to be there or that pastor needs to be here. But God put you here to have a ministry in the body of Christ in Houston, not to just sit at your butt at home staring at a computer screen or listening to an MP3 player and not having any contact with any other believers and think you're fulfilling these mandates of "one another" in the Bible because it's you and your Sony tape recorder or you and your Olympus MP3 player or you and your IPOD. Me and my IPOD….We could make a little song like that. But people think that's it. That just doesn't help you resolve these mandates related to the body of Christ. 

You can't use distance as an example. I had 4 or 5 people when I was in Preston City who drove. I love being able to say this. They drove from 2 states away to come to Bible class.  They had to drive all the way through an intervening state to get to Preston City Bible Church - each way. Of course up there Rhode Island isn't even the size of Houston so they came from Massachusetts and cut through Rhode Island. We were just on the other side of Rhode Island. But it was a 45 to 50 mile drive each way; and they rarely missed class. You can't use distance as an excuse. 

Now it can be under certain circumstances if you're living someplace on the west side of Houston like I did when I first moved back after college and I lived less than 100 yards from where I live now and I taught in Channelview. I would have to leave at 6 o'clock in the morning and drive all the way down to Channelview. Then when I got home about 6 o'clock at night, I still had to go to the grocery store and laundry and everything else. There was no way I could execute life chores and go to Bible class every night. So I'm going to listen to a tape recorder. I still got involved in a local church because I lived just around the corner from one and that way I was involved with a group of believers; but I was getting all of my doctrine from where I could really get fed doctrine. That's the key. We need open ourselves up to different opportunities of ministry and not isolate ourselves as believers.  

That's one thing that I think has happened is we've got a certain number of believers in the doctrinal movement who know a lot more than 95% of the other pastors that are out there. But they would rather keep their light under a bush, hide in their room with their tape recorder than go out and have an impact on a local church.

I've given you these little anecdotes from Gene Brown and from Art Boot and several other people who have done different things. God has used them in great ways and because of their love for the Word it becomes contagious and infectious. There are people in all of these churches that want to know something about the Bible. They are so frustrated because they don't know where to go to find out anything about the Bible. You can be a little Jonah (I use that intentionally because they are resistant to join us) and go to some mega church in your area and you never know God's going to use you because you're not there to think he's going to be your pastor.

That was another question. Somebody said, "Well, you said I need to be involved in a local church. Does that mean I have to quit listening to you and go join this other church and not listen to you any more?"

I said, "No. If you've got a local church you can be involved in then go there on Sundays and Wednesdays. Get to know people. But you're not going to get fed by them. You know that going in. You're going to get fed from the same source you've been getting fed. But you can go to that church and you can have an opportunity there." 

Sometimes one of the little caveats sometimes it's just your maturity. I know that there were times in my life when I knew that was the right thing I ought to do but I didn't have the maturity to do it. That wasn't a wise thing for me to go because I came off as being too arrogant or too irritated or too upset with the shallowness of superficiality of whatever the Sunday school teacher was doing. 

That's a lot of unusual little stories and ideas, but these questions keep coming up again and again. Pastors ask these questions. People in different locations ask these questions. We have to realize that we are all products of a narcissistic self-oriented culture. The thing that feels most comfortable to us is to do that which is more self-oriented than other oriented. 

When you look at the Scriptures while the emphasis is on the need for you to grow spiritual, your spiritual growth is not the end.  It is the means to an end. You look at passages like Ephesians 4:10 or 11 that God has given these gifts (apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors teachers) to equip the saints so that they can have a good spiritual life…. Is that what that said? No, it is to equip the saints to do the work of ministry. 

I think one of the things I hate is say this is my minister. No you are my ministries. I am the equipper; and I'm training you to have a ministry. That's the role of the pastor to equip the saints (the believers in the congregation) to do the work of the ministry. Your spiritual growth is important. It's vital. It is the training focus so you can then go out and have that ministry. But part of your ministry is in the local church toward one another. 

So next time we will get into the Doctrine of One Another and the Scripture says a lot about what we are to do for one another and these are all commands. But there is a lot of distortion. I'm going to have to explain some of these verses because there are a lot of people who take some of these out of context easily. Some are easily distorted. So we have to understand this that there is a ministry that we are to have because as the Scripture says we are members one of another. We're not just a bunch of isolated people on different desert islands. We are unified as a team in the body of Christ for a mission. We have to understand that. So we'll come back next time to continue to understand the role of "one another."