Church Membership
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
So, some reflections on my past week. No, not that part. I'm not going to tell you about that part because it's not good. I've been sick for most of this week and stuck in Phoenix and unable to get back here to Louisville. But I'm not going to tell you much more about that. But I do want to give you some reflections on some things that I noticed over the past week. When I finally was able to fly from Phoenix back to Louisville on Thursday, I sat down in my seat on the airplane and somebody came by and said, thank you for being here, Mr. Gilbert.
Thank you for being a member of the Mileage Plus program of United Airlines. I said, well, thank you for having me. A little bit later, when I got to wherever the, I think it was in Houston, the layover, I pulled out my credit card in order to buy some lunch. And I noticed on the back of it that it said something like, member since 2006, or whatever year it was that I joined with Visa. A little bit later, I was scrolling through, you know, financial transactions and all the rest as one does when one has a household.
and I noticed that there was one charge for a certain amount of money that said membership fee at a certain gym here in Louisville, Kentucky. And then as I was going through the mail that I haven't seen in several days, I noticed that there were about half a dozen communications from an organization called AAA telling me that my membership was about to expire. Now, what's the thread that runs through all of that? It is that without even noticing it, I am a member in one form or another of about two dozen different things that I'm not even aware of.
And my guess is you are too. If you start paying attention, if you look at the back of your credit card, if you start paying attention to your financial transactions, if you start listening a little bit more closely, you're going to realize that you're a member of a whole lot of stuff that you didn't even realize you were a member of. And it doesn't bother you one little bit. Which is ironic because a lot of people, even a lot of Christians, when you start talking about the concept of church membership, sort of cross their arms and give you a whole lot of side eye as if it is somehow evil for a church to have membership.
Aren't you being exclusive? Yes, but no more than my gym. Aren't you being mean? Yes, but no more than United is being mean to those American Airlines flyers. membership is exclusive that's the whole point of it it marks out who's in a certain thing and who's out of it if you're a member of mileage plus for united airlines then you are in with united airlines and there are certain things that come along with that if you're not a member of mileage plus you're not in with united airlines and yet people get all bent out of shape when you start talking about the church defining who's in and who's out. Well, what we're doing today is actually continuing what's going to turn out to be a very short topical study on what the Bible teaches about the church. That's unusual for us here at Third Avenue. If you're new to this church, if you've just been visiting for a couple of weeks, then you may not know that. If you've been here
for a long time, you'll know this is extremely unusual. Normally what we do is called expositional preaching, which means that I take this book right here, the Bible, and we open it up to one particular passage of Scripture, and then we read it together. And then my job, usually anyway, is to stand up here and explain what that passage of Scripture means, some of the problems in it. We try to pull out, you know, exegetical problems and interpretive problems. And then I try my best to apply that in certain ways to our lives as Christians. That's normally what we do. It's called expositional preaching. One particular passage of Scripture, and I'm preaching the main point of that passage. In these sermons, though, it's going to end up being three of them. So two weeks ago, today, and then, Lord willing, next Sunday. We're doing something different. We're doing what's called topical preaching, which means we're asking the question, what does the Bible teach kind of across the board about one particular topic? So in this case, the church. So last, well, Not last week, but two weeks ago, we talked about just sort of the church's definition and place in God's grand plan of redemption.
What role does it play and how is that unique from any other organization in the entire universe? Today, we're going to be talking about church membership. Does the Bible say anything about membership of a church? And the answer is going to be yes, it does. And we're going to talk about what that means and what some of its privileges and responsibilities are. Then next week we're going to talk about, Lord willing, sort of the flip side, you might say, of church membership, which is church discipline. So what does it mean at a members meeting here at Third Avenue when we put someone out of membership and we say that we're doing that as an act of church discipline?
Exactly what does that mean and what do we mean to be saying by it? So that's next week. But in all of these topical sermons, what we're doing is talking about what the Bible as a whole has to say about the church. Now, that's important because I think even in the minds of most Christians, the church occupies a place in the economy of the way they think about the Christian faith as just one more voluntary organization that you can be a member of or not.
You can take advantage of it if you want to or not. So you can be a member of Mileage Plus with United Airlines and your gym and AAA and your credit card. And if you want to, the church. If you find what the church offers to be helpful, you go. If you don't, you don't. If you like the music, you go to church. If you don't like the music and don't find it conducive to your worship of God, well, then you can just leave it aside like you leave aside the floppy broccoli on the buffet that you don't think is going to be very nutritious.
If you like the sermons, you go. If you don't like the sermons, you don't. But after all, above all, the way we think about it anyway, is that the church is here to serve you and your needs. Right? And what matters, finally, is your own individual spiritual growth. So the church's job is to put together the programs that are going to help you grow individually as a Christian.
Right? And if the church hasn't put together the particular program that you think is going to help you grow most as an individual Christian, you go to another one or you talk to the leadership of the church and say, I need this program that will help me grow. Because the whole thing, the whole point is for the church to provide you with what you need to grow individually. And that's how it works, right? Well, my hope is that in these series of sermons we'll be able to challenge and maybe even take apart some of that kind of thinking.
Because it turns out when you look at it in the Bible, the church is not just one more voluntary organization that you can take advantage of if you want to or if you think it'll be helpful. No, if you're a Christian, then the church needs to occupy a sort of central place in your life, in your discipleship to Jesus. It's not optional, it's not something that's off to the side, it's not something that you can pick and choose from. The church is something that Jesus himself created and that Jesus himself intends for you to be involved on. It's not just, you know, one more item on the buffet of resources available to you as a Christian.
In fact, what I hope you'll have understood maybe even already from the sermon two weeks ago is that the church actually holds a unique and critical place in God's work of redemption that is not and cannot be filled by anyone or anything else or any other organization. It can't be filled by a Bible study. It can't be filled by a campus group. It can't be filled by a group of friends. It can't be filled by your iPod full of sermons and the best music in the world. And therefore, because it holds that unique and critical place, if you're a Christian, then King Jesus expects that your life is going to be focused on and centered on and burned out in service to the local church.
thank you john now what is that unique and critical role that the church plays in god's work of redemption well it's what we talked about last week i mean to put it in a in a nutshell the church is the embassy of the high king of heaven in this fallen world so if you want to write down a quick definition of the church i don't even mean that to be you know all of that all that sparkly right it's just I'm not trying to be dramatic with that when you study what the Bible says about the church it is in fact the embassy of the high king of heaven in this fallen world right that's what it is that's how it functions that's how Jesus constituted it in Matthew chapter 16 chartered it in Matthew chapter 18 and then commissioned it in Matthew 28 all of those things creation or constitution chartering or the giving of authority commissioning or telling the embassy, what you want it to do.
All of those things are precisely the steps that a king would take if he were sending an embassy from his own court to the court of another king, into the court of a foreign land. That is what Jesus does in Matthew 16, 18, and 28. So uniquely and unlike any other organization in the world, the church was constituted or created by Jesus. There's no other institution, no other organization that has that distinction that was created or constituted by Jesus. There's just not.
Your Bible study was not constituted by Jesus. Your campus group was not constituted by Jesus. Your iPod certainly wasn't constituted by Jesus. That's a unique distinctive of the local church. Not only was it constituted in that way, it was commissioned in Matthew chapter 28 to carry out a particular task in this rebellious world. If you remember from two weeks ago, that commission or those golden marching orders that Jesus gave to his church are that you're to proclaim the gospel and make disciples of the king.
That's why we're here. It's why we exist. We don't exist as a church to necessarily make the world a better place, to transform our neighborhoods and our cities and our culture. That's not why we exist. We do not exist to create a new Christendom in the world. We exist to proclaim the gospel in a fallen world and to make disciples of the king. And then above all, we said last week, or two weeks ago too, the church was uniquely chartered by Jesus. In other words, it was given authority to speak in his name about certain things.
So that's what we meant by the keys of the kingdom. That's what those are. They're a grant of authority by the king in which he said, listen, you and you alone, you believers, organized together as a church when two or three are gathered in my name there I am in the midst of you when you gather together as a church and take on the responsibilities of becoming an embassy like this you have the right to speak for me until I return so that's the unique place of the local church in in this fallen world in this world which continues in its rebellion against the king each local church that exists throughout the world whether it's you know however many dozens and hundreds here in the city of Louisville or hundreds of thousands across the United States or maybe even millions across the world, every single one of those local churches is an embassy of the empire of heaven. Those local churches are where this new holy nation that's centered on King Jesus becomes visible. If you think about that, it's a fascinating image.
Scriptures say that we as Christians are a new holy nation that has been created and it's organized and centered around King Jesus. You become a member of that nation, a part of that nation by being vitally connected to the king. That's how it happens. And so across the ages and across the world, there's this giant nation of people whose allegiance is to one single king, Jesus Christ. And that's the nation of the empire of heaven. But it's not visible, right? There's no particular place where it exists. There's no place on the map that you can point to and say that's the empire of the kingdom of heaven and there's its capital right there in that place.
It just doesn't exist. We don't have borders as a nation. That's not who we are as the kingdom of heaven. We don't have cities to call our own. It's why Peter, for instance, says that we're exiles and strangers in the world. We do have our own country. We're headed there on this pilgrimage of life, but we're not there yet. So there are no borders that we call our own. There are no cities that we call our own. We are strangers and exiles in the world. But all over the globe and throughout history, there's this borderless nation of people whose allegiance is to King Jesus, and it's growing and expanding.
It's people who have trusted in Jesus to stand in their place and die for them and rise again so that they too can have newness of life in the kingdom of heaven. And that borderless nation becomes visible in local churches when they gather together, just like this one is gathering together now. Churches just like us are embassies of the king until the king returns. And until he comes, we hold the keys of the kingdom, the right to speak and act in his name. Well, today what we're going to do is talk more about those keys of the kingdom.
So we're going to kind of unfold them a little bit more, talk a little bit more practically about what they mean and how the church carries out the authority that Jesus has given when he says to you, I'm giving the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth, we bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. We're going to talk about what all of that means. In particular, what that means is that we're going to talk about what the Bible teaches about church membership. Now, I know that immediately when you hear something like that, or maybe when you open up the bulletin this morning and you were expecting some exciting sermon from the book of Amos or something like that, and you saw that the sermon this morning is about church membership, some of your eyes started glazing over because that sounds to you as boring as the socks I've got on this morning.
You're wondering why you came to church this morning to listen to those church people talk about their own bureaucratic hang-ups. Because the idea of church membership, You might as well just have been invited to a lecture by the DMV to explain the brilliant spreadsheet that they've got that tells you when your driver's license is expired. It just sounds awful, so I get it. But in some ways, it's even worse than that, too. It's worse than boring because the idea of church membership, I think even to most Christians in our society, sounds not just boring, it sounds mean.
It sounds exclusive. It sounds like you're keeping people out. And that's especially true when you turn to kind of it's, you know, the underside of church membership, so to speak, church discipline. It sounds really mean. I mean, think about it. One of those, church membership, just sounds irredeemably boring. It sounds exclusive. It sounds like there's an in and an out. It is clearly grossly modern and Western. And the church has stolen that from credit cards and gyms, obviously. We've borrowed it from LA Fitness. And therefore, it is utterly unworthy of the gospel because there's no way that in the first century A.D.
the church had anything that looked like or talked like membership. There's no way they had that. So this is clearly unworthy of the gospel. The other church discipline just sounds cold and hard and mean and therefore utterly unworthy of the gospel. But here's my hope. I hope that by the time we're finished this morning, you'll have a different understanding. And not just understanding. I want to get at your head. right? But I also, by the end of this, want you to have a different feel and impression by the time we're done today. I mean, I don't know if you can believe it or not, but when I hear the words meaningful church membership, it just fills me with this warm fuzzy. I just love it.
Like, yes, church membership. I love that. I hope that's the way you feel at the end of this sermon. I kid you not. I hope you'll see that membership and discipline, that's next week, but I hope you'll see that church membership isn't really cold and lifeless and boring at all. It's actually the very flesh and blood of how the church exercises the keys of the kingdom that God has given us. So here's the main idea. It's kind of similar to last week, but you can write it down again.
Main idea of what we're going to talk about for the rest of this morning. If you are a Christian, if your allegiance is to King Jesus, then you need to be attached to one of his embassies. You need to be a member of a local church. There it is. If you are a believer in Jesus, if you're a Christian, if your allegiance is to King Jesus, then you need, and by need, I don't just mean it would be good for you. I mean you need to be. It's a command of the king, and I hope you'll see that by the end. You need to be attached to one of his embassies.
In other words, you need to be a member of a local church. Two points that we're going to use to unfold this idea this morning. Number one, the meaning of membership. That's the first thing we're going to talk about. We're just going to explore it. Where does it come from in the Bible? Is it even in the Bible or is it just something that we kind of made up? If it is in the Bible, is it just sort of implicit and shadowy? Or can we say something more concrete about it? Where does the whole idea come from in the first place? Talk about all of that, the meaning of membership. And then second, as the old credit card company used to say it when I was a kid, membership has its privileges.
I mean, we're going to talk about some of the privileges of being a member of a church. Second part of that point, though, is membership has its privileges and responsibilities. That's what the credit card didn't tell you. That was implied. You've got to pay off the credit card, right? But membership has its privileges. It also, in the local church, has its responsibilities. So let's start unfolding it. Number one, the meaning of membership. So when you start a conversation about church membership, which I know most of you probably don't do all that often in your lives, but when you do, when you ask somebody, you know, hey, have you ever thought about becoming a member of the church?
Maybe they've been attending here for a long time and you just want to have a conversation. When you do that, people will often say something like, you know what, the whole idea of membership, I kind of get it. I mean, the pastors sort of need to keep up with what's going on and who's in the church and I sort of get that. But does that even show up in the Bible anyway? Does the idea of church membership even show up in the Bible anyway? I mean, isn't it true that membership is just this kind of bureaucratic office admin sort of mechanism that we use that's really more or less unnecessary?
I mean, why do I have to be on somebody's list somewhere? Why does my name have to be on some spreadsheet somewhere? Why do I have to agree to anything if I'm attending the church regularly? Isn't it enough for me to just show up week after week after week? And don't my pastors and the rest of you know that I'm a member of this church just because I'm attending regularly? How do you answer that? If and when you run into it, how do you answer that kind of argument? Well, the way I want to answer it this morning is, well, surprisingly, no.
Membership isn't in the Bible. Now, be careful. At least the way you typically think about it. Membership isn't in the Bible, at least in the way you typically think about it. Now, what do I mean by that? Don't misunderstand me because I think membership is in the Bible, and I'm going to show you where. But it's a kind of membership that we generally do not have as our understanding of and definition of membership. What is our typical understanding of and definition of membership? It's that you pay a fee so that you can be in a certain place or take advantage of certain privileges.
That's what our understanding of membership is. You pay some sort of a fee to some company, be it a credit card or an airline or a gym or whatever it is. And once you pay that fee, they send you some little bling, right? They send you a card or a luggage tag or something like that. And then there are certain privileges that you can take advantage of. You can be in certain places that you otherwise could not be. You can call certain phone lines that you otherwise couldn't call for roadside assistance, right? That's what we understand membership to be. It's a relatively cold and lifeless thing.
It's transactional. You pay, they give. You pay, they give. That's what membership means. And membership like that is not in the Bible. And membership in the church is nothing like that. Now membership is in the Bible, very clearly. And I'm going to lay out the case for you here in just a minute. But membership in the Bible, membership in a local church, is something utterly different.
It's something utterly more life-filled and vital than what we normally think about when we say membership. It's not just a plastic card that you get in response to giving them a fee. It's not just the ability to be in a certain place at a certain time that other people would have to pay the same fee in order to get. It's not what membership is. It's something utterly, utterly different. And yet that's the way we tend to think about it. Why do I need to sign up in order to be able to come to church? Why do I need to be on your spreadsheet in order to come sing with you and listen to the preaching of the word?
Why do I need to be on a list in order to be recognized as somebody that belongs here? That's how we tend to think about it, and yet that's not church membership at all. And yet people think about it that way. In fact, you know, you talk to Christians these days, and they swallow that sort of plastic definition of membership as quickly as anybody else. And they say, oh, I just don't like the idea of membership. And so what you'll see a lot of churches doing in response to that is either something like getting rid of the idea of membership at all, right?
It's an idea that if you just show up here, you know, you're as much of a member as anybody else. Or they'll change the idea of membership into something that they think is, you know, warmer and more vital, like the word partner. Which I'm not sure how in the world people understand that that's any better. Why is it better to be a partner of a church? That sounds like a law firm than it is to be a member. So what we need in order to understand what the Bible says about membership is complete retooling of the idea of membership, like from the ground up.
We've got to understand it as something different than the way our minds have been trained through corporate memberships to understand it. So LA Fitness, AAA, the gym, Mileage Plus, they can all keep their dried out version of it. But that's not how the Bible talks about it. Actually, membership is the very heart of what Jesus meant when he was giving the church the power of the keys of the kingdom. So think back to two weeks ago. What were those keys? When Jesus said, I give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, whatever you bind on earth is going to be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth is going to be loosed in heaven.
What was he talking about? We talked about two things that the church has the right and authority to speak for Jesus about. Do you remember what those were? They were the what and the who of the gospel. The church has the authority and right to speak for King Jesus until he gets back about the what of the gospel and the who of the gospel. So what's the what? Well, we said last week, the what of the gospel is saying, look, this is the gospel. This thing right here, this set of teachings, this set of truths and propositions about who Jesus is and who we are and what we need from Jesus.
this is what the gospel is it's not that the local church gets to create it it's not that the local church gets to define it but they do get to say yep this is what we received this is it and it's not that and it's not that and it's not that it's this this is what's been given to us as the the good deposit from the apostles in the new testament right this is this is what it is so that's what it means for the church to speak about the what of the gospel what about the who well the who is just saying yes you're the kind of person who's rightly professing this gospel that we defend and affirm you got it right you understand it correctly and you're living the kind of life that matches up with the truths of that gospel your life looks like a Christian so when the church exercises the keys of the kingdom when when we gather together in a members meeting and we bring members into the church what we're saying two things number one what we're saying is yes you are affirming the gospel correctly the gospel that we've received from Jesus from the apostles you've got it right and second you seem to be living the kind of life that lines up with and matches with that
and so we exercise in the keys of exercise the keys of the kingdom and that person becomes a member that's what the keys are and it's in that affirmation of the gospel and those who are professing it that you get membership you get an in and an out you are professing it correctly you are not. You're living the kind of life that looks like a Christian and you are not. An in and an out. Okay, so if that's the theoretical part of it, right? If that's, you know, where it kind of comes from, the exercise of the keys of the kingdom to bind or to loose, to bring in or bring out, right? If that's where the idea comes from, does it show up more explicitly in the Bible?
Does it show up more explicitly in the Bible, or do we just have to kind of create church membership out of those implications from the keys of the kingdom? Well, it does, in fact, show up. It shows up, in fact, crystal clearly, and I want to show you that. Now, here's how it shows up. It shows up in a particular way. You know how shadows work, right? You know how shadow works, so I don't know if you can, oh, look, there's a shadow. So the lights are casting a shadow on that wall.
And if there was some kind of screen, right, for this group of people over here, and you couldn't even see me, right, but you could see that shadow and I'm waving at you, you would say, I think there's a guy behind that screen because a shadow is being cast of that guy on the wall. Shadows don't just happen, right? There's something that creates a shadow. There's a reality, there's a dude that the light is hitting that's creating a shadow on the wall, right? That's how shadows work. And so it would be by sort of good and necessary inference.
You could say, yeah, because I can see that shadow on the wall and because it's waiting at me and all this, I can surmise that there's a reality somewhere that's creating that shadow. So it is with church membership in the New Testament. there are all over the new testament shadows of church membership the people in the new testament are acting as if church membership exists as if they have been taught about it and you see that over and over again but then when you look a little bit closer in a particular place that you've already read this morning in our service you see the reality of it you see the teaching of church membership, not in shadows anymore, but in its concrete reality. So here's how I want to proceed. I want to show you first some of the shadows, right? Because I want you to see how the early Christians are operating as if there is such a thing as church membership, and as if they've been taught about it, right? As if they're very familiar with the idea of an in and out of church membership. And then I want to take you to the place where the reality shows up, where you actually
get not only the concept, but I kid you not, the word and the very image that created the idea of membership in the first place. Like the thing from which LA Fitness and Mileage Plus stole it from us. I want to show you that place because the actual word is used. But let's look at some of the shadows. I think you can see shadows of church membership immediately in the story of Acts at the very beginning of the church. So you don't have to turn to all of these places. I'm just going to show you what kind of happens but if you want to turn to Acts chapter 1 you can and I'll show you some of these places so in Acts chapter 1 verse 15 you have there the story of the believers sort of waiting on the Holy Spirit to fall in 1 15 in those days Peter stood up among the brothers the company of persons was in all, about 120.
Now, just right there, how do they know that it's 120? Because they counted. And how did they know who to count? Well, it was those who were in. It was the number of those who believed in Jesus Christ. And so they could say, this group of people right here is a group of people who have believed in Jesus, and there are about 120 of us here right now, right? So just right there, even before the Holy Spirit falls and the church is launched, you've got them with this understanding of an in and an out.
A well-defined group of people who know who they are. Well, through the next couple of chapters, you've got Pentecost, the Spirit falls. Peter preaches, people believes. Peter says, here's what you need to do. In the wake of all of this that's happening in the day of Pentecost, you need to be baptized. And then when they are, look at chapter 2, verse 41. chapter 2 verse 41 so those who received his word were baptized and there were added that day about 3,000 souls now a couple of questions how do they know again that it's about 3,000 people that were added because they counted them right because they knew that there was an in and an out they knew that there were people who got baptized and those got counted and then there were probably those around in the periphery watching who did not get baptized and those did not get counted.
They didn't just count anyone who was in attendance. They counted those who made a commitment to become a part of this new community. Okay, what about that word added? And there were added, that added to what? Added to a group of people that had well-defined boundaries. It wasn't just added to the geographical location. It was added to a community of people who were believers in Jesus Christ. That's what they got added to. So even right there in the first two chapters of Acts, you can see the shadow of church membership.
They know who they are. It's not just y'all come when you can and you'll be a part of us if you even just show up here. There's a defined, recognized group of people who have been baptized and are part of this community that are believers in Jesus Christ. So even more, they lived life together. You can look down at 42 to 47. they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship to the breaking of bread and prayers and awe came upon every soul and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. All who believed, there's that group again, all who believed were together.
Not everybody, not everyone in the city, but all who believed were together and they had all things in common. They were selling their possessions and belongings, distributing the proceeds to all. All? All? No, those who were part of the number. Distributing the proceeds to all as any had need. Not just everybody in the city, but in the community. And day by day, attending the temple together, breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord, here it is again, added to their number day by day those who were being saved.
Added to what? Their number. What's the number? It's the group of people who are believers in Jesus, who are sharing this life together, who are breaking bread in each other's homes. It's a well-defined group of people, and they know who's in and they know who's out. Look at chapter 4, verse 4. Chapter 4, verse 4. Many of those who had heard the word believed, not all, see that? But many of them did.
And the number of the men in the community came to about 5,000. Again, a well-defined group of people. It's not just a lifeless bureaucracy either, is it? I mean, we read chapter 2, verses 42 to 47 there. I mean, does that sound like a lifeless bureaucracy to you? Does that sound like a spreadsheet for keeping track of people? No, it's not. It's a community of people who know each other. It's a community of people who are breaking bread together in each other's homes, who are selling possessions for the good of one another, who know who the number of people are that make themselves up.
There's nothing lifeless about it. And there were 5,000 of them, just men, it says. Why does it mention that? The Bible will do that often, right? It'll often, you remember the feeding of the 4,000, feeding of the 5,000, and it only mentions the men. Why is it doing that? It's because about 5,000 men was a Roman legion. And so it's making the point to you that even aside from women and children and all the rest, just in terms of the men themselves, they had enough to make up a Roman legion. That's why that's specified like that.
It says that there were 5,000 of them. Amazingly, they continued to meet together. Chapter 5, verse 12. Chapter 5, 12. Now many signs and wonders were regularly done among the people by the hands of the apostles. And this is fascinating. They were all together in Solomon's portico. They were all together in Solomon's portico. So it's not even as if they had to break up into different, you know, house churches around the city. No, they did.
But those were more like our home groups, apparently. When they came together on the Lord's Day, it was in this ginormous place called Solomon's Portico, which we know is enormous, and they all came together according to Acts chapter 5, verse 12. Chapter 6, verse 2 tells us that they even came together there in Solomon's Portico. The 12 summoned the full number, the full number of the disciples and said, it's not right that we should give up preaching the word. So they even came together in a kind of business meeting to figure out how to distribute food well to widows in their congregation.
And through all of this, through all of this gathering together and breaking up into homes to break bread together and then coming back together in Solomon's Portico and having a business meeting in order to figure out a solution to a problem, through all of it, they called themselves a church, an assembly, a gathering. So you see the point, are you seeing these shadows of things? In the early church, even as large as it was, something like 10,000 members, 10,000 people in the number, they knew who they were. There was a number, and it had a well-defined inside and outside, and you had to be added to that number in order to be counted among it.
The dividing line, of course, was always baptism. If you wanted to be added to the number of believers, If you wanted to be added to the church, the way you do that is through this sort of watery boundary, this watery border of baptism. You become a believer. You say, yes, I believe in Jesus. And then the church exercises the keys. And it says, yep, we think you're a genuine believer. You're proclaiming the right gospel. You seem to understand it well. And you're living the kind of life that lines up with it. So, yep, you can be baptized and you can join the life of this church. You can join its joys and its pains and its sorrows and its problems and its solutions.
And so that's where you see the shadow of the outline of membership. And that reality casts shadows in other places of the Bible too. So just to go through a couple real fast, you can see it in Matthew 18. We looked at that in some detail last week. Do you remember how that ends? That whole process of when you find yourself in a conflict with believers. Do you remember how that ends? It ends with tell it to the church, but then what if they won't listen to the church? What happens next? Treat them as you would a Gentile or a tax collector. in other words treat them as an outsider put them out of your number put them on the outside of the border that's what Matthew 18 says and in 18 Matthew 18 18 through 20 Jesus uses the the very language of the keys if you if you bind this thing here on earth if you speak for the king here on earth it's as if heaven has spoken if you loose something here on earth it's as if heaven has spoken. Now the king can fix that when he gets back if the church makes a mistake, but until then the local church speaks for the king about who's in and who's out. There's another shadow in 1
Corinthians 5. So in 1 Corinthians 5, Paul is talking in that book to a particular local church in a city called Corinth. We've studied it before. It has all kinds of problems. It's an insane story that's going on there in Corinth, but one of those stories, or at least one piece of the story, is that there's a man who is sunk in terrible, unrepentant sexual immorality. And Paul says that it calls into question his profession of faith. In other words, he's questioning whether that person is living a life that lives up to the gospel he professes.
So in 1 Corinthians 5, 2, Paul tells them what they ought to do in a situation like that. When you run up against somebody who's not living a life that lines up with the profession of the gospel that you know to be true, here's what you need to do. You need to remove this man from among you. Take him from being an insider to being an outsider. Now, what does that mean? It doesn't mean that they're barring the doors on the guy. It doesn't mean that he can't come to the church gathering and hear the preaching of the word.
That's not what it means. They're not going to put a bouncer at the door to say, no, Joe, you can't come in, right? That's not what they're doing. But what they're saying is that insofar as this is a well-defined group of people who know who we are as believers in Christ, you, oh man who's sunk in sexual immorality, you are not a part of that. If you were to look at that later, verses 4 to 5, Paul even uses this extremely strong language there. When you assemble, hand him over to Satan.
Now that sounds mean, but what does it mean? Well, in Paul's mind, and we've talked about this, in Paul's mind, there are two realms. You can only be a part of one of them. So before you become a Christian, you are in the realm of Satan. You're in the realm of King Adam the Fallen, right, outside the blessings of the kingdom. When you become a Christian, and you become a member of the church, you're brought into the kingdom, into the realm of the Son, whom the Father loves. So two realms, the realm of Satan and the realm of the Son. And what Paul is saying there is not be mean to him.
That's not the point. It's not throw him out there in the wilderness so the devil can stick him with his pointy tail and his fork. That's not the point of handing him over to Satan. The point of saying hand him over to Satan is saying transfer him out of the realm of the sun into the realm of the outsiders. Transfer him to the realm of Satan. That's what he means by that. But you can see it again. There's an inside and there's an outside. Fascinatingly enough, how do they do that?
Do you remember? In the books of Corinthians, how does the church actually go about transferring someone from inside to outside? How do they exercise those keys to do that? Now, you know, I think most of the time when you start thinking about that, you're like, well, this is 2,000 years ago, right? So they must have had either some lost but ingenious method of doing this, right? It must have been ritualistic. You know, they must have, like, sacrificed a goat or something in order to hand this man over to Satan, right?
It must have been amazing what they did, right? Or we think it must have been just primitive, right? They're 2,000-year-old people. They're not that smart. We're sophisticated. They're not. And so they must have done something very, very different from what we do. But if you look at 2 Corinthians 2.6, it tells you the mechanism by which they put this man out of the church. 2 Corinthians 2.6, if you want to turn there, they took this action of putting him out by majority.
By majority. I mean, it's fascinating. It's a Greek word, and when you translate it from the Greek, that word majority literally just means majority. That's what it means. And how do you calculate a majority? You vote. I mean, literally, the early church was doing exactly the same thing that we were doing. Either they were raising their hands or they were voting with their mouths, but they were coming up with a majority, and the majority put that person out of the church.
So those are the shadows. You pull them all together, and you can see what I'm trying to show you is that the Bible consistently talks about the church as having a boundary. There are people in, there are people out, and it's clear who those people are. And that boundary is defined by the church exercising the keys of the kingdom and saying, yep, that's the gospel, and you are confessing it rightly. Shadows of membership all over the place. The church understood that, and they were acting in accordance with it again and again and again and again. Okay, but what's casting the shadow?
If we're just looking at all the shadows here, what's casting the shadows? Does the Bible ever explicitly talk about church membership? Well, yes, it does, and it even uses the word. So either take your bulletin and turn to the Scripture reading for the morning, or turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 12, and I want to show this to you. Because this is where it comes from. This is where the whole idea of membership comes from. Corrupted or not, this is the fountain. So in 1 Corinthians 12, Paul is talking to a particular local church in Corinth, And he's explaining to them that instead of being divided and jealous of each other, all the rest, they ought to be united.
And look what he says in 12.27. 1 Corinthians 12.27. Now you, O local church of Corinth, you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. So there it is. That's the word. That's the word that membership comes from. Whether it's LA Fitness or United or whatever it is, membership comes from this idea of the body.
Now, it's a little bit of a strange word, and yet when you think about it, it's not that strange a word at all. Because, you know, if somebody has a limb that is removed from their body, what is that called? It's a very common word that we use. It's to be dismembered, right? It's to take a member of the body, and it's taken away from the body. So the body is dismembered, and so this Greek word of member of a body, now you are the body of Christ, and individually members of it, just means all the little pieces that make up a body.
That's what it means, right? And that's where it comes from. Ancient peoples had used it too, for example, for politics. So when the Athenians gathered together to do their Athenian democracy, they referred to themselves gathered together in order to act in certain ways, declare war, open trade routes, whatever. They declared themselves to be the body politic because each one of them was a member of that body that was going to act for the good of Athens. So it's a common image and yet Paul repurposes it here and says you as a local church are the body of Christ because it's the spirit of Christ that unites you all together.
And each one of you is a vitally connected member of that body. It's a fascinating image, isn't it? Because you get all kinds of good stuff from it. I mean, you understand that a member of the body does not just kind of hang around on the body and do nothing, right? It's vitally connected. It has responsibilities to the body, and the body has responsibilities to it, right? The blood that runs from my heart runs down into these members of my body right here, right? And this hand has certain responsibilities to the body, right?
If the body's hurt, it does something to fix that. It fixes the hair. It does things for the good of the body. There are mutual responsibilities between each part of the body and each member of it. I mean, think about this ring, too. What's the difference, really, between that ring right there and this finger? What's the difference? Well, one of those is vitally connected to the body. When it hurts, the rest of the body is not happy about it, right?
and when it's feeling good, the rest of the body is fine with it, right? One of them is not vitally connected to the body. So, I mean, I can, you know, hit this ring on the pulpit. You know, I can hit it pretty hard. Probably hurts the ring to some degree, but it doesn't hurt my body, right? Because the ring is not vitally connected. I mean, I don't take this ring off. I mean, I shower with this ring. I sleep with this ring. It's on there like all the time. You might even say it's a regular attender of my body. But it's not my body. It's not vitally connected to the body. There's no responsibility that it's God's. Paul's, when he talks about members of the body, he's not talking about rings that just happen to be close to it. He's talking about vitally connected members of the body. Okay, so let's try to pull this together. Let me just give you a kind of definition of what church membership is. Church membership is a formal relationship.
It's a formal relationship between a Christian and a church in which the church affirms the credibility of the believer's confession. That's what we've been talking about since the beginning. yep you look like a Christian the church affirms the credibility of the believer's confession and gives oversight care and protection to that believer that's that's the church's responsibilities to the believer right and on the other hand in which the believer submits to the church's oversight care and protection let me say it again church membership is a formal relationship between a Christian and a church in which the church affirms the credibility of the believer's confession and gives oversight, care, and protection to each believer, and in which each believer submits to the church's oversight, care, and protection. So you see the point here. The point is not just signing a piece of paper or getting your name on a list or on a
spreadsheet or in a booklet. That's not the point. The point is that both Christian and church say in a way that is recognized by both of them, yep, you and I are together in this. You and I have mutual relationships and mutual responsibilities to one another. We are together in this. In other words, I'm committed to you. That's what happened when you became a member of the church. When you did the membership interview, you kind of put your hand out and said, I am committed to you as a church. And then when the church voted and said, I, on that particular Wednesday, they reached out and took your hand and said, and I am committed to you. That's what we mean by formalized membership.
It's not just something up in the air that's abstract and undefined. It's looking one another in the eye and saying, we are committed to each other. That's what membership is. So what does that mean for you? Well, it means that you need to be a member of a local church. You need to be a member of a local church where you live. And friend, if you've been in Louisville for some time and you're still a member of the local church, you know, in Nashville or in Birmingham or whatever it is, that's not enough. You need to be a vitally connected member of the church where you are you can think about that in a couple of different ways right it doesn't make sense no matter how you think about it right you can think about it as a body it doesn't make much sense for you know your formal membership to be connected to somebody in Birmingham when you're living in Louisville it may just makes a hash of the whole image of the body or if you think about it as an embassy what you ought to do at any given time that the Lord moves you to a new city is show up to a local embassy of the king and say you know here I am sir reporting for duty right as long as
the king has got me here in this particular city, I'm here and I'm ready to serve against the kingdom of darkness. That's why we're here. But you show up to the military unit in the place where you are and you say, I'm here and I'm ready for duty. But you need to be a member of the local church. You need to be vitally connected to a body of Christ in the place where you are. All right, point number two, fairly quickly. Membership has its privileges and its responsibilities. Membership has its privileges and its responsibilities. The thing is, once you make that commitment, once you sort of look the church in the eye and say, I'm committed to you and you're committed to me, once you do that, that's just the beginning. And that's just where the whole thing sort of begins. It was just like that, if you remember what we looked at in Acts, it was just like that for the first Christians who were added to the church's number in that first church in Jerusalem. Being a member of the body brought all kinds of benefits to you, and it also brought all kinds of responsibilities to you.
You can see those in that definition I gave you. Church membership is a formal relationship between a Christian and a church, and here they come. Here are benefits and privileges. The church affirms the credibility of a believer's profession and gives oversight, care, and protection to that believer. Benefits and privileges, right? And the believer submits to the church's oversight, care, and protection and commits to giving those benefits to other members as well. Let's unpack that a little bit. First benefit that you get from being a member of a church is that the church, and we've said this so many times, but I want you to understand what a huge benefit it is.
The church around you affirms that yes, from everything we can tell from your words and your life, you are in fact a Christian. Now, I don't know if you've ever struggled with any kind of assurance of your salvation, but it is an enormous benefit to you to have other people looking at your life and saying, yeah, from everything I can tell, brother, you look like a Christian. I know, we know that you're struggling with that sin, but we can see the fight.
We can see the smoke of battle coming up from that battlefield. And from everything we can tell, you look like you're fighting like a Christian. There's a huge benefit in that. I mean, a lot of times what happens with people is that when it comes to questions of assurance, they sink down into this vortex of self-referential navel-gazing. You just stare at yourself, and before you know it, you're lost down in this vortex of doubt. Am I a Christian? Is my faith strong enough? Am I fighting sin enough? Is my life showing enough fruit?
And it's an enormous benefit at the end of the day to have a church looking at you and saying, yeah, brother, sister, it looks good to us. Yes, there are struggles, but it looks good to us. You realize that's what happens? That's what happens every time we gather together, especially when we gather together for the Lord's Supper. That's what we're doing. We gather together for the Lord's Supper, and that is not just an individual quiet time between you and Jesus. That's us as a church looking around, right? We're looking at each other, and we're saying, yes, this is the group of people in this place who profess faith in Christ, and from everything we can tell, we all may be in all kinds of battles, but it's looking good to us.
And so we take the Lord's Supper together. Now, one of my pastoral mentors used to talk about it. You've seen the old, like, 1980s Top Gun movies or whatever, when the radar will swing by every few seconds, and it'll sort of paint the, you know, paint the bogeys or whatever, and every time that thing will come across, it goes, whoosh, and you see that that's where the planes are, right? It's similar to what happens here month after month as we take the Lord's Supper. It's like a radar once a month swinging through here at 3rd Avenue and going, there's the people of God.
There they are again, right? It's a beautiful thing to have somebody be able to tell you, yeah, yeah, these are the people of the king in this place. Another benefit from that definition is to have the oversight, care, and protection of the church. To have the oversight, care, and protection of the church. And one of the promises of our church covenant that we say over and over again here is that by God's grace, we will exercise a Christian care and watchfulness over each other and faithfully warn, rebuke, and encourage as the case shall require.
Here's another one. We will participate in each other's joys and endeavor with tenderness and sympathy to bear each other's burdens and sorrows. In other words, we'll give oversight and care and protection to one another. And you don't have to be a Christian for very long at all to know that it is easy for an individual Christian to stray off the path and head off into the wilderness. It happens, and it happens far too easily.
but imagine if you were on that path alone but as it is you're a member of a church and we've promised to give you oversight and care and protection which means often when you start doing this thing right here and headed off toward the things of the world our job as a church is to go hey come back you're headed toward death friends if you were called to live this Christian life all by yourself.
You'd stray off the past faster than you can imagine. But you're locked arms with other brothers and sisters in Christ who have looked you in the eye and said, we're in this together and we're getting each other to heaven. What a beautiful, beautiful thing that is. But there's responsibility too. You have a responsibility not just to receive that oversight, care, and protection, but to submit to it. So when the church yells out to you, hey, come back, you have a responsibility not to get mad at that.
Because you asked for it. You looked us in the eye when you became a member and you said, watch out for me. And sometimes that's a matter of, yeah, sometimes it's a matter of just yelling at you and you come to your senses and you come back. Other times, yelling at you is not enough and we've got to come get you. Sometimes we've got to just sort of get in your face and get a little loud with you and say, you have to stop this. but friend when you became a member you asked us to do that work you asked us to come after you when you're straying you asked us to do whatever's necessary to get you back on the path and headed toward heaven and you know what else you promised to do that for other believers too you promised to be a part of doing that for other believers too so friend look when the elders or when your home group leader or when another brother and sister in Christ comes after you and says I think you're straying and you need to get back on the path
don't send us an ugly email telling us that we're out of line for coming to get you we're not we're just doing what you asked us to do in the first place even if you've forgotten it since then listen to the voice of shepherds Listen to the voice of fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, fellow soldiers in Christ who are on the same road. And when you hear their voice, listen. And then thank the Lord that they're there. Friends, we are on a hard road to heaven.
But we're not on that road alone. We've been called together by our Lord, by our Savior Jesus Christ, and we have been made a body of the Lord Jesus Christ. Each of us vitally connected to all the others. Let's live in such a way that we bring glory to our King even as we're headed home. Let's pray. Our Lord Jesus, we thank you for this great privilege that you give us of being members of the church.
not just in a cold, lifeless, plastic way that so many organizations talk about it in our society, but in a vital and life-giving way of being connected to one another because our allegiance is to you. Father, help us to live up to those privileges, help us to live up to those responsibilities, and help us to help one another as we make our way home to you in heaven. We pray all of this in the name of Jesus, our Savior and Redeemer. Amen.