Congregationalism

0:00 All right, thought experiment time. You just received an email, not really, you just received an email from the elders of Third Avenue Baptist Church that says something like this, dear so-and-so, you have been chosen to become the next senior pastor of a church plant that Third Avenue Baptist Church is sending out with 200 of its members. Now, if you're a lady, we're not going to send you that email. If you're a guy, it's very unlikely we're going to be sending you that email.

0:36 But just play with me here, right? You receive this email. You've been chosen to be the next senior pastor of a 200-person church plant. Third Avenue is sending out. And you have the job now of coming up with a system by which your new church is going to make decisions together. How they're going to adopt a budget. How they're going to bring members in. How they're going to see them out. How they're going to elect leaders and deacons and committees and all the rest of it. And you have to come up with a system by which that's going to happen. How would you do that? And let's just say that for whatever silly set of reasons, the elders deny you access to all of our systems here at 3rd Avenue.

1:13 Like you can't copy them. You have to come up with it by yourself. How are you going to do that? What principles are you going to use to develop a system by which the church makes decisions together? You know, there are hundreds of people that have to do this very thing all across the country and all around the world every single year. Hundreds of them. Hundreds of churches that are planted in our country, in other countries. And the guys who lead those churches and have to come up with those systems have to do this very thing. They have to come up with a set of principles and come up with a set of mechanisms by which the church can make decisions together.

1:48 How do they do it? Is it just random? Do you just say, well, you know what? I sort of like the idea of democratic principles, and so therefore we're going to vote on everything. Every time we want to spend any money, every time we want to elect a leader, every time we want to make a decision about a Sunday school class, we're going to get together in a members meeting, and we're going to vote on everything. And there are churches who operate like that. You want to spend $50 on goldfish for the nursery, you've got to vote on it. Or maybe somebody else says, you know what, I don't want to have to vote on everything.

2:20 Let's just say that the group of people who get elected, however that happens to be the elders or the pastors of the church, let's just give them all the authority. Let's just say we don't vote on anything. They put in a budget. They appoint other elders. They get to say who's in the church and who's out of the church. Let's just give it all to them. Or do you maybe just cast lots for everything? Oh, Lord, should we buy the goldfish? Six or above, you buy them. One through five, you don't buy them. Or if you really need the goldfish, maybe it's three through 12, you buy them.

2:54 You just cast lots for everything. And why? Or why not? Why does one system of government work better than another system of government? Is it just pragmatism? Is it just what makes sense? Is it just what comes to our minds when we think about it? Well, those are the kinds of things I want to talk to you today about as we look at the topic of what's going to sound pretty boring to you at first, but I hope will not be by the end, which is elder-led congregationalism. That's the general way that we here at 3rd Avenue and hundreds of other churches throughout the world operate.

3:28 And we do so because we think that's what's taught in the Bible by our King Jesus. So if you're new to 3rd Avenue, this is a super unusual sermon. We are actually finishing up a short series of what you might call topical sermons on the topic of the church. So normally what happens here is that we open up the Bible to a particular book and we make our way through that book a little bit at a time. Or sometimes we're moving faster than other times. And I'll just take a particular passage of Scripture, read it, explain it, try to apply it to your life.

4:00 We're not exactly doing that this week or for two weeks prior to this. What we're doing instead for these three weeks is looking really kind of at what the whole Bible, like all 66 books, teaches about one particular topic, and that topic is the church. We don't do this very often. I think we've done, maybe this is the third topical series I've done in 14 years here at Third Avenue. They're usually short, but we do do them occasionally, and this time we're talking about the church. So above all, what we've seen in the last two weeks is that the church, despite what most people think about it, despite what maybe you thought about it before we started this series, isn't just a voluntary association of Christians.

4:40 It's not just a resource center for your Christian life. It's not just a means of fellowship that you can take advantage of if you want. But if you're not feeling it today, you can put to the side. No, the church, it turns out, these little groups of people like this one right here, Third Avenue Baptist Church, Kenwood Baptist Church, the 55 or so member churches of ACME, the 40,000 member churches of the SBC, right? Every single one of those plays a unique and vital role in God's work of redemption. The whole story that's playing out from Genesis to Revelation, that's a story.

5:12 That's what we call the grand work of redemption. And the church plays a vital role in it. What's that role? Well, over the last few weeks, what we've said is that it is the embassy of the kingdom of heaven in this dark and fallen and rebellious world. The quick definition of the church that sort of encapsulates what we've talked about, it's the embassy of the kingdom of heaven in this dark and fallen and rebellious world. In other words, what we saw two weeks ago or three weeks ago and then last week is that the local church was not just an idea that a bunch of unemployed pastors came up with to get themselves paid.

5:47 It was created and constituted by King Jesus himself. It was commissioned to do a particular thing in this dark and rebellious world. And it was chartered with a particular and unique authority that no other institution or organization in the entire history of the world ever has had, it was chartered with an authority to speak in the name of the king until he comes back. So that's what Jesus meant when he said in Matthew 18, I'm giving you the keys of the kingdom. What he was saying when he said that, I'm giving you the keys of the kingdom, what he meant was that you, you as a bunch of believers who have mutually affirmed the genuineness of each other's profession of faith, who genuinely have affirmed that you're all in allegiance to me and have recognized one another as members of one church, you together as a church, as a thing that's created, have authority now to speak for me, Jesus says,

6:48 regarding the what and the who of the gospel. So you have the right to defend the gospel, to say that that is it or that's not it based on what you know from the scriptures. And you have the right to say who is rightly confessing that gospel. That's the keys of the kingdom. Well, today we're going to continue to think a little bit more about that. And what we're going to do is particularly think about how we exercise the keys of the kingdom. Keys are obviously a metaphor, right? So I don't have a drawer in my office where, you know, I received the keys from heaven when I became the pastor and I keep them locked away.

7:19 It's a metaphor. So when you talk about exercising the keys of the kingdom, you can have a metaphorical idea in your head of, you know, putting a key in a lock and either locking it or unlocking it, but that's not actually what we do at members meetings. So what we want to do today is talk about specifically kind of metaphors aside how we go about exercising this authority that Jesus has given us to speak about the what and the who of the gospel. So in other words, what we're going to be talking about today is the scintillating topic of church government. Church government. Now just to get you up to speed a little bit, the topic of church government has been a huge topic of conversation. You might even want to say argument. You might even want to say knock down, drag out fights for 500 years and longer among people who have called themselves Christians. We have been fighting about this for a long time, and we've been fighting about it on several different levels. So for example,

8:20 Some people would say, look, the Bible doesn't really speak to the question. The Bible doesn't tell us how churches are to be organized. It doesn't tell us what those systems and mechanisms of decision making are supposed to be. Basically, we're just left to pragmatism. So whatever works, whatever you think is going to work best. If you think that's democratic congregationalism, fine. If you think that's elder rule, fine. If you think that's casting lots, fine. Whatever you think is going to work best to maintain the unity of the church and help you carry out the Great Commission. That's the way you ought to set up the government of the church.

8:53 Other people, like me, would say, that's insane. The king has not left us to just do whatever we want or whatever we think best when it comes to how this organization, this embassy of his kingdom, is going to run. He's given us instructions in the Bible. So it does speak, in fact. Well, even once you get within the sort of camp of people who would say the Bible does speak, You get all kinds of arguments in there. So there are those who would say, well, look, the Bible argues for or teaches all kinds of different structures of church government.

9:27 So some people would read the Bible and they would say, well, what the Bible teaches is that we should have a structure of what's called episcopacy. Episcopacy, so like the episcopal church, right? Where you've got bishops who have absolute authority over local churches and then archbishops who have authority over those bishops. And then, you know, all the way up to, you know, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Or in the Roman Catholic Church's case, the Pope who has authority, singular authority over the entire hierarchy. Some people would argue for that. Other people would say, no, what the Bible teaches is a Presbyterian form of government.

10:01 Which just means that you have elders over each particular local church. And then certain delegates of those elder boards come together into a presbytery. Which is another sort of court that's higher than the presbyteries of the local churches. And then you have representatives from each of these presbyteries that come together into a general assembly, which is sort of the highest court of all. And they would say that structure right there is what the Bible teaches. Other people would argue for a kind of modified Presbyterianism, where there's no upper hierarchy, but each church is ruled by its group of elders, right?

10:36 So it works just like Presbyterianism, except you don't have any higher courts. But each church is just ruled by its elders. And then you've got what we are, congregationalists who would say everything that I'm going to say to you for the rest of this morning. But even then, even among congregationalists, some congregationalists would say, well, look, the way this works out is that the church is led by the pastor plus a bunch of deacons who operate together as a kind of board of directors over the church.

11:09 That's how it works. And that board of directors brings things to the church. And if nothing goes wrong, what the board of directors says goes. Other people argue for pure democracy. Other people, kind of strangely, and we'll talk more about this as the morning goes on, some people argue that a church can even be spread out in several different locations across an entire city or across an entire state or across an entire country or even all over the world and led or controlled by a centralized person or group of elders who have authority over that entire even worldwide church as they call it. So with all of that going on for the last 500 years I mean I'm just giving you the nasty waterfront of the battle but with all of that going on how do you make any sense of it? Well what I want to do today is try to make sense of it for you. I want to make the case today that the Bible does in fact speak on this topic,

12:10 and it says quite a lot, actually, about how local churches are supposed to be organized. And the reason is because King Jesus hasn't left his embassies in this world without instructions on how those embassies are to organize themselves and operate. It would be a bad king who appointed an ambassador, right, from like medieval England to medieval France and said, look, I want you to do this thing. I don't really care how you do it, right? I don't care how you do it. If you have to assassinate the king of France to do it. I don't really care. You know, whatever you got to do. That would be a bad king. The king is always going to give good instructions to an ambassador, to an embassy, to say how he wants the commission to be carried out. And King Jesus, of course, is a good king who has done just that. So I want to make the case that the instructions the king has given hold out a form of government that we best call elder-led congregationalism.

13:02 Elder-led congregationalism, which is defined as the assembled church as a whole holding and exercising the authority of the keys of the kingdom. Not the elders, but the assembled church as a whole holding and exercising the authority of the keys of the kingdom, but being led and taught in that use of authority by its elders. Does that make sense? Elder-led congregationalism. educationalism means that it's the church as a whole assembled together that holds the authority of the keys of the kingdom. They're the ones that have to exercise it. Bringing people in, seeing people out, electing leaders, all the rest. The church has got to do that because they hold the keys. But they're led and taught in the use of that authority in how to use the keys by their elders. Okay, so this sermon has a very different structure than what you're used to, certainly if what you're used to is expositional preaching, and hopefully that is what you're used to here at third avenue it's very different structure it's not just one text we're going to be jumping all

14:03 over the bible uh sometimes a few times i'm going to ask you to turn to a particular place i'll help give you time to get there and all the rest so you can see what i'm what i'm pointing at but basically what we're going to do is just start off right from the beginning and we're going to have seven points in this sermon seven points but the main idea is this king jesus has given us as a local church two things to allow us to carry out our task in the world. He's given us two things that allow us to carry out our task in the world. Number one, the keys of the kingdom.

14:40 And number two, elders to lead us and teach us in how to use them. Got it? King Jesus has given us as a church two things that allow us to carry out our task that he's given us in the world. Number one, he's given us the keys of the kingdom, which we've talked a lot about and we'll talk about more today. And second, he's given us elders to lead us and teach us in how to use them. So what you're going to notice today is that this is going to be a pretty intensely practical sermon. So in a lot of ways, it's a little bit of an FAQ about congregationalism and elder-led congregationalism and church government. So I'm going to be raising a number of questions that I've heard people ask over the years, you know, after members meetings or in our internship or wherever it is. But these questions just kind of come up and you're going to notice that I have sort of sharp, clear, undeniable biblical answers for some of those questions. And others of them, I'm going to kind of go, eh, this is how I think about it, right? So you're going to notice that as we go. But just note that it's an intensely practical sermon. And my hope is that even when I kind of have to throw

15:43 up my hands and just give you some thoughts about something that aren't particularly rooted very deeply in any kind of scriptural teaching, I hope it'll be helpful to you in understanding how the church operates. Not just as an individual Christian, right? No, that's true. I want this sermon to be helpful to you as a Christian. I want you to love Jesus more. I want you to love the church more. I want your eyes to be a little bit wide at the end of this thinking, I never knew that about the church. I just thought it was this little thing. I want you to see it's not this little thing. I want it to be helpful to you as an individual Christian. But I also want you to see how the church is central and unique to the working out of God's purpose in the world to create this new holy nation that is centered around his son the king. So seven points regarding the keys of the kingdom and how we use them. Seven points about church government. Number one, Jesus gives the keys of the kingdom and their authority. He gives the keys of the kingdom and their authority to actual assemblies of believers.

16:49 In other words, groups of believers who do actually regularly gather together and to nobody else. He gives the keys of the kingdom to actual assemblies of believers, groups of believers that is, who actually and regularly gather together. So that, just to get intensely practical again, is why most Sundays you'll hear service leaders or me on Sunday evening stand up in the pulpit and welcome you. We don't say generally, sometimes we do, but we don't generally say, welcome to Third Avenue Baptist Church, right?

17:23 What we say is welcome to this gathering of Third Avenue Baptist Church, which for the first 10 times you heard it, you probably thought, that is really weird. Why do they do that? Why not just say welcome to Third Avenue Baptist Church? But there's a reason for it, theological reason. And it's because we're not just welcoming you into this building that has been named in Kentucky State Law's Third Avenue Baptist Church. We're welcoming you to this gathering of believers who make up Third Avenue Baptist Church. So our assembling together, the fact that we get together week in and week out on Sundays and month in and month out on Wednesday nights for members meetings.

17:59 The gathering is not incidental to our identity as a church. It is essential to it. And if we didn't have that gathering together, we would not be a church. There are several biblical reasons to think that that is, in fact, the case. Now, before I give you those biblical reasons, I'm going to explain to you. I'm going to give you four reasons why gathering together is essential to the identity of the church. But before I do, I want to just kind of show you my hand as to why this idea of gathering is in fact so important and why it's so important in our particular day and age in a unique kind of way.

18:36 It's because increasingly in our day, and especially here in the United States of America, churches and church leaders are pretty much deciding that it is not actually all that important for Christians to gather together. So what you get is a kind of singular church, this thing that calls itself a church, that declares that it's going to meet in multiple locations or sites or campuses all over the city or all over the state.

19:07 And yet they want to grab all of those different gatherings across the state together into one thing that they call a singular church. My contention is that such a thing is not a singular church at all. It's not a church. It's something different. Now, it may be multiple churches, right? So that might be a church, and that might be a church, and that might be a church, and that might be a church, and that might be a church. Each one of those might be a church. But that whole thing, all considered together, is not a church because it doesn't gather together regularly.

19:41 Okay, now let me tell you why I'm so convinced of that. I want to give you four biblical reasons for why I am so convinced of that truth. First, this idea of gathering is just what the word that we translate as church means. It just means gathering, an assembly, a group of people who have come together to act in a certain way. That's what the word means. Now, I'll take you a little bit deeper on it.

20:12 The word church itself, C-H-U-R-C-H, that word is actually a terrible word. It's an awful word, and we really should stop using it. We should just start calling this the assembly, right? Third Avenue Baptist Assembly is what we should call it. Church is a terrible word because it's an old English derivation from a Greek word, kirkon. Kirkon. So if you want to know how it works, just change the C-Hs in church to the more sort of archaic k sound, and you get kirk, right? So kirkon in the Greek literally meant the Lord's house.

20:43 So it meant literally the building or the castle that the Lord of the land lived in. If you're a peasant, you would look up on top of the mountain and be like, oh, there's the kurikon, right? It's the Lord's house. And because we have called these things right here a kurikon or a church, it's given rise to all kinds of confusion. So pastors across the country this morning will stand up in the pulpit and the very first thing that they'll say is, it is good to be with you this morning in the house of the Lord. And I just cringe because I think this is not the house of the Lord.

21:14 This is a building. It's a bunch of bricks and drywall and plaster that we've put together to keep the rain off our heads. It's not a house of the Lord. It's not like a little temple. That's not what it is. It's not a kurikon. But it's a good thing, therefore, that that word, kurikon, is never used in the Bible. It's just not there. The Greek word kurikon that we get church from is never used in the Bible. What's used in the Bible is a different word altogether, and it's the Greek word ekklesia. Ekklesia, which means assembly or gathering of people.

21:49 Now, sometimes that gathering of people, that Ekklesia, can be brought together for a purpose, right? So in Athenian democracy, for instance, when a town meeting was called to decide whether we're going to go to war against the Spartans, you would have an Ekklesia, and everybody would come together, and they'd have their white stone and their black stone, and you got to vote on stuff, and that Ekklesia was brought together for a purpose, to act as one. Other times, the word Ekklesia could just be used as a mob, right? They've just come together on the town square in order to scream about Paul casting out demons or whatever it is. But it's a mob that's gathered together.

22:20 Still, though, the basic meaning of the word is an assembly or a gathering of people. Now, what's more and even equally important is that everybody knew what the word ekklesia meant. It's the word that Jesus chose to describe us, gatherings of believers. That's the word that he picked. And he picked a word that everyone already knew the meaning of. He didn't make it up. It goes all the way back to Athenian democracy when they would gather together in an ecclesia to vote.

22:53 So because Jesus picked a well-known word and didn't just make up his own word, right? He could have. He's the king of kings, lord of lords, right? He could have said, my thing is going to be called a bleh, right? He could have made up a word. And then we'd have spent the last 2,000 years trying to define exactly what that word means and there'd be big fights about it. He didn't do that. He picked an extremely well-known word that everybody knows the meaning to. And therefore, it is particularly illegitimate to try to metaphorize that word or spiritualize it into something it doesn't actually mean.

23:26 So, for example, an assembly that never assembles. Or a gathering that never gathers. Or an assembly that only assembles in heart and spirit. Or a gathering that only gathers in heart and spirit. You can't metaphorize it, you can't spiritualize it because Jesus knew what it meant. An ecclesia, an assembly of believers who come together, assemble, gather, usually to do certain things. And it's clear that that's the way Jesus used the word. Here's the second thing. So there's just the meaning of the word, that's first. Second, it turns out as you read the New Testament that the authors of the New Testament are extremely careful in their use of the word ecclesia.

24:06 So they apply it to gatherings that actually gather together and not to anything else. So for example, we saw last week how Luke in writing the book of Acts is very careful to tell us that the whole ecclesia at Jerusalem, the whole church at Jerusalem, about 10,000 members or so, as best we can tell, met all together in a place called Solomon's Colonnade. And he also tells us how the whole number of them even came together for a business meeting in Solomon's Colonnade. in order to fix a problem having to do with distribution of food to widows.

24:41 Luke tells us that even at that size, 10,000 of them, they all met together as an assembly, as an ecclesia, a church. So what that means is that contrary to a whole lot of books that just assume and assert otherwise, the earliest church in Jerusalem was not made up of a bunch of house churches that were all collectively called the church in Jerusalem. It just wasn't. And they met in homes, Acts 2 says. But they did that kind of like we do home groups, right? Those were home groups.

25:12 But when they gathered together on the Lord's Day and to do business, they met all together, all 10,000 of them, in this place called Solomon's Colonnade. The church in Jerusalem was one assembly, which assembled in a huge place, Solomon's Colonnade. And Paul, the apostle, is the same way in his care of the use of the word ecclesia. So, for example, when he's riding to a place that he knows has multiple churches that are meeting in people's houses throughout the city, he's very careful, this would be like Rome or the territory of Galatia.

25:44 He's very careful to talk about the churches, plural, in Galatia. Or, he says, to all those in Rome who are called to be saints. And at the end of the book, he'll mention several of the churches that are there in the city. So he's careful to use the plural when there are multiple churches. But when he's writing to a place where there's only one church, he says things like, to the church, singular, that is in Corinth, or to the church, singular, of the Thessalonians.

26:16 So again, even in the mind of the apostle Paul, an ecclesia, a church, meant a group of people who gather, not just a whole big group of people who are calling themselves Christians. It's an assembly. Here's the third thing. So first, there's just the meaning of the word. Second, there's the way the New Testament authors are really careful about using that word correctly. Third, the images, all of the images that the Bible uses to describe a local church, what it is, how it functions, all of those images require this kind of togetherness.

26:51 You've got to have the togetherness or the images don't make sense. You can't metaphorize these images. You can't spiritualize these images. So, for example, the church is called a building made out of living stones, right? And it's not talking about the building. It's talking about you and I have this weird image of like bricks with eyes blinking, you know, and they're all built up into this living building. That's what we are as a church. Well, to have a building that's made up of living stones means that those stones have to be assembled together, right?

27:21 If you walk up on a pile of stones over there and a pile of stones over there and one across the state and one on the other side of the country and somebody says, that's a building. You go, you're crazy. That's not a building. That's a bunch of piles of rocks. They have to be assembled into something that makes sense in order to be a building. The other image that's most sort of salient here would be what we talked about last week, that the church is a body with various members, A body that's made up, right, of various members that are all together.

28:00 I mean, I remember when the multi-site church craze sort of started to hit in the United States in the early 2000s. I was here in Louisville in seminary, and I remember seeing a church van for one of the local churches here in town. I knew a lot about this church, and it was a good church. I saw it come up and the tagline of the church all of a sudden on this one particular day was one church in two locations. And it struck me that is just weird. One assembly in two locations.

28:31 It just doesn't quite make sense. Well, as the years went on, it changed from one church in two locations to one church in multiple locations. One church in multiple locations across the city. But friends, here's what I want you to see. Given the images that Scripture uses of a church, let me tell you something that I don't think it will be too hard for you to imagine. One body in multiple locations means that something has gone horribly wrong.

29:04 Think about it. One body in multiple locations is a disaster. And you need to call it EMS. no a church is a it's an assembly it's it's members of a body that are together it's sheep and a flock that are together it's bricks in a building that are assembled together that's the third thing the image is fourth the responsibilities that Jesus gives to the church assume this togetherness the responsibilities that Jesus gives to the church assume this togetherness so I mean what's the main responsibility that Jesus has given to the church it's to exercise the keys of the kingdom. What does that mean? It means to defend the gospel, to say what the gospel is, and then to say that these are the particular people who are living lives that are in connection with the teaching of the gospel, with the truth of the gospel, right? How do you do that if you're spread out all over the state? How do you say that somebody across the state or on the other side of

30:06 the world that you've never met or have no occasion of meeting is living the kind of life that is in accord with the teachings of the gospel. You can't. The very responsibilities that Jesus gives us assume that we're going to be together. If we're going to affirm and protect and disciple one another, as Jesus says, if we're going to do that with any real knowledge of each other at all, it presumes that we're going to regularly be together in order to build the kind of knowledge that allows all that to happen. Okay, so just bringing it down, you've had enough of that, but all of that is why Third Avenue Baptist Church will never be what has come to be called a multi-site church we will never be a multi-site church in fact it's why and and maybe you can appreciate where I'm coming from here now a little bit better having heard that that whole biblical case it's why there's really no such thing there is no such thing as a multi-site church any more than there can be a multi-site building or a multi-site body.

31:09 Look, a church, a local church is not just defined by a shared name or shared leadership or a shared budget or shared offices downtown. It's a group of Christians who regularly, the Bible would say weekly, on the Lord's Day, gather together to carry out the functions of an embassy of King Jesus. I mean, remember last week, that's exactly what the first church in Jerusalem did. All 10,000 of them met in Solomon's colonnade right up until persecution forced them to scatter. And when they scattered, they didn't become franchises or arms or campuses of some multi-site church called, I don't know, Colonnade, Jerusalem, right?

31:47 They didn't do that. They became new, fully functioning embassies or churches of their own. And then letters from the apostles started to go out to them. So Jesus gives the keys of the kingdom to actual assemblies of believers. Here's number two, more specifically. Jesus gives the authority of the keys of the kingdom to the gathered congregation of each local church. He gives the keys of the kingdom to the gathered congregation and not to anybody else.

32:19 He does not give the keys of the kingdom or their authority to anybody else. Pretty simple point, I think, but it's a crucial one because if you don't talk about it really clearly, people tend to let their minds sort of slide and they think, well, you know, If the keys of the kingdom have been given to the congregation, there's really not that much difference between that and the keys of the kingdom being given to our elder rule elders, right? It still kind of metaphorically works. No, it doesn't. It doesn't metaphorically work because Jesus has given the keys of the kingdom to the gathered congregation as a whole and not to anyone else. So if you get that in your head, it will actually answer a thousand questions all at once regarding how the church is supposed to be organized and how it's supposed to operate.

32:57 So Jesus doesn't give the keys of the kingdom to a group of elders. He doesn't give the keys of the kingdom to a presbytery or to a bishop or to a pope. So for everything you'll see, you start looking at Wikipedia pages about the pope in Rome, which I did when my son and I went to Rome a couple weeks ago. Looked at all the Wikipedia pages. You're going to see on all the pope's crests and coat of arms and triple crowns and blah, blah, blah, over and over again, you'll see the keys, the keys, the keys, the keys, the keys, the keys, the keys. Right? Because the Roman Catholic Church thinks that the keys belong to the pope.

33:29 Well, in my, you know, little Protestant biblical heart right here, I'm just going, stop with the keys, right? They're not yours. You're taking something that wasn't given to you. It's given to the church, not to the Pope. So, Matthew chapter 18, just turn there. I'll show you this real fast. Some of you haven't memorized by now. Matthew chapter 18, verse 15. This is the instructions of what to do when you find yourself in conflict with a believer.

34:05 So last step of that conflict resolution process is in verse 17. If the sinner refuses to listen to the witnesses that come with you, if he refuses to listen to them, then tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. what's important there is what it doesn't say. It does not say, if he will not listen to the witnesses, tell it to the elders. It does not say, if he won't listen to them, tell it to the bishop or tell it to the pope. And if he won't listen to the pope, then the pope can exercise the keys of the kingdom to make him like a Gentile. It doesn't say that. The last step is tell it to the church.

34:52 What the assembled church says goes. It's the final court of appeal underneath the king himself. You can see this also in Paul's letter to the churches of Galatia. We read this a little bit earlier in the service for our scripture reading. I don't know if you caught it. But what's going on in that book is that the churches, multiple of them, in the sort of region of Galatia have been taught and corrupted by false teachers. But if you read that book carefully, you can see that what Paul lights up is not the false teachers themselves.

35:27 He doesn't do that in that book. He does elsewhere. But in Galatians, he doesn't light up the false teachers themselves. He lights up the churches of Galatia for tolerating the false teachers. The false teachers are not the final ones held accountable. It's the churches. And that's what we mean when we say that we are congregational. It means that under the king himself, the final earthly court of appeal and matters regarding the who and the what of the gospel is the assembled congregation.

35:59 It's not the elders, it's not a presbytery, it's not me, the senior pastor, it's not a pope or a deacon board, and it's not you as an individual. It's the assembled church as a whole. So, I mean, just intensely practical again, it's why what we do at members meetings is so important. It's not just administrative stuff that doesn't matter. It's one of the most important things we do as a church because it has to do with the very makeup of who and what the church is, right? It is the exercise of the keys of the kingdom when we bring members in and see them out. We're speaking for the king on his authority as an embassy of his kingdom.

36:33 We're saying what the gospel is and we're affirming that this person is living according to that gospel when we bring them in or that this person is not living according to that gospel when we see them out through church discipline. Look, here's where this comes down into the stuff of real life. If you are a member of Third Avenue Baptist Church, one of the promises that you make in the church covenant is that we will strive together for the support of a faithful evangelical ministry among us. We will strive for the support of a faithful evangelical ministry among us.

37:05 Now part of what that's talking about is financial support. There's no doubt about that. And when we read it, that's probably what most of us are thinking about. But it's not just talking about financial responsibility. It's not just talking about financial support. We will strive together for the support of a faithful evangelical ministry among us is talking about authority and responsibility. You have an authority and you have a responsibility to ensure a faithful evangelical ministry among us until the king comes back.

37:41 Now at this point, each one of you, if you're a member of Third Avenue, you each hold 1 650th of the responsibility for making sure the gospel is faithfully preached here. Now that may not sound to you like very much, but I promise you when you stand before the king and he says, How did you exercise your one out of one 650th, he'll probably say it better than me, of your authority to ensure the faithfulness of Third Avenue Baptist Church?

38:12 How did you do that? You will think that one 650th is quite enough, thank you. And here's the thing, too. You exercise that responsibility and you exercise that authority, not just for the sake of the time that you are here. You're exercising that responsibility and authority potentially for thousands of saints over centuries, should the Lord tarry. I mean, you do realize that, I mean, this year, 2024, is the 130th anniversary of Third Avenue Baptist Church.

38:47 And the reason that there's a faithful, we trust, proclamation of the gospel going on here week after week after week is because 130 years worth of saints ensured it. friends for you. Friends, who's coming 130 years from now? Is it going to be your great, great, great, great grandchildren that are here in these very same pews that you're sitting in? Is that who it's going to be? Ensure right now that the gospel is faithfully preached. Strive for the support of a faithful evangelical ministry among us, not just for days, weeks, or years, but for centuries until the king comes back here's the third thing the power of the keys the power of the keys what we do with those keys is the authority to protect the church and its witness protect the church and its witness and to extend the reach of Jesus's kingdom we protect and we

39:48 extend that's what we do when we're exercising the keys of the kingdom now where does that come from? Where am I getting this idea of protect and extend, right? How does that work? Well, you can see it in lots of particular places in the New Testament, and we'll get there. But right now, I want you to see that this, excuse me, authority and responsibility to protect and extend, it's not just built from a few proof texts in the New Testament. That's not where it comes from. It's actually protecting and extending. It's actually the culmination of a history that's been unfolding since the Garden of Eden, since the very first few chapters of Genesis. So let me just tell you how it works. We're not going to spend long on it, but to get right to it, God gave Adam and Eve a particular job in the Garden of Eden. He gave them a certain office that they were supposed to carry out in the Garden of Eden, and that office really had two parts to it. So on the one hand, Adam was supposed to be a priest in the Garden of Eden. On the other hand, he was supposed to be a king. So you might even think of him as a priest king in the Garden of Eden. And each one of

40:52 the sides of that job had certain responsibilities to it. So as king, Adam was to have dominion over the fish of the sea, birds of the air, all the living creatures. He was supposed to multiply and expand and ultimately, God says, subdue the earth under him and therefore ultimately under God. That was his job as king. But he wasn't supposed to just extend it like that. That was his kingly work. He was also to act as a priest in protecting the garden from evil. So just like the later priests in the temple, he was supposed to protect it.

41:26 Supposed to protect the garden from impurity and evil. I mean, you know the story. When Satan comes to Adam, he should have exercised his role as king and priest and protector, right? He should have grabbed the snake by its tail and snapped him like a whip and thrown him out, right? He should have judged the serpent and protected the garden. And he didn't. He joined Satan's rebellion against God. And the rest is history. He just fails completely. So the whole story of the Bible then from that moment when Adam fails to be the priest king. To protect and extend. When he fails.

41:57 The whole story of the Bible then becomes the story of how God was going to restore those two offices of priest and king. He's going to send somebody who would act as the priest king in all the ways that Adam failed to do so. And so through Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, all the ups and downs, the hopes and despair, this promise finally comes to rest on the shoulders of Jesus. He's the king that Adam should have been, who subdues the world and puts it under his feet. He's the priest that Adam should have been, who finally kills the serpent in the lake of fire.

42:29 Crushes his head, so to speak. Okay, but here's the kicker. Here's the kicker. When you recognize your sin and repent of it, when you trust in Jesus and bow the knee to him, What happens is that you become united to him through your faith in him. You become united to Jesus, the priest king. And the Bible says then that you, as one of his followers, take on those two offices as well. You become a priest king or a priest queen because of who Jesus is.

43:00 You take on the responsibilities of protecting the place of God's dwelling and extending the reach of his kingdom. And you don't do that just, you know, by self-proclamation. You don't just get to stand up in front of the world and say, I'm a priest king now with Jesus. You don't get to do that. No, it's embassies of people who have already been affirmed as Christians who get to say, yep, you look like you're ready to take on those offices. You look like you're ready to be a member of this embassy. Today, at the end of the service, we're going to baptize two people.

43:33 And essentially, that's what's going on. And we as a church, when we baptize somebody, when we dunk them in that water, what we're saying to them is, yeah, you are ready. You've repented of your sins. You've put your faith in Jesus. You're proclaiming the correct gospel. And now we want you to join us in this work of protecting the kingdom of God and extending its boundaries as people bow their knee to Jesus. That's what's happening today. Protect and extend. That's what we do. So let's talk about it a little bit more. Number four. This one's really short. Number four, the church exercises its kingly authority to extend.

44:09 Remember, we're talking about extend and protect. So the church exercises its authority to extend the recognition and acknowledgement of Jesus' kingdom through evangelism. We exercise the authority to extend the kingdom through evangelism. That's how we do it. In other words, it's the great commission that most particularly defines that authority. Now, we talked about this at some length three weeks ago when we talked about the commission that Jesus has given us. So I'm not going to say much about it now. You can go listen to that sermon if you want to.

44:40 But for now, I just want you to notice, because it's really interesting. It's not the way we tend to think about it. I want you to notice that I called evangelism an authority, not just a responsibility. Speaking the name in the gospel of Jesus to people who don't yet know him is an authority, not just a responsibility. Now, it is a responsibility of every single person whose allegiance is to King Jesus. But it's also a right given to us by the King. I mean, think about the wording of the Great Commission.

45:11 Think about the particular wording. Jesus says it like this, all authority, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go. All authority has been given to me. therefore go. And friends, that, just to plant our flag, that is why no national border, that is why no program of persecution or program of suppression, that is why no border guard will ever stop the church in its work of proclaiming the kingdom of Jesus and making disciples. It's because that work is backed by the authority of the king of the universe. It will not be stopped. This is my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it no matter how tightly they try to lock them up.

46:02 Here's number five. The church exercises its priestly authority to protect the integrity of Jesus' kingdom and its embassies through church membership and church discipline. So we exercise our authority to extend the kingdom. That's kingly work. Put more of the world under the dominion of Jesus, right? We do that through evangelism. We exercise the priestly authority to protect Jesus' kingdom through church membership and church discipline. So we talked at great length last week about the first step in that membership. When we bring somebody into membership, we're saying, yep, you seem to understand the gospel. You seem to really believe it. You seem to be submitted and united to Jesus. So it's a kind of active protection of the embassy, right, of the kingdom. It's laying out boundaries and saying who can come in and who can't but also and you probably picked this up as we've read passages from the bible or certainly if you've just lived here with us at third avenue there's another kind of protection that we do also and that's a reactive protection it's like the immune system

47:04 of the body right the the skin is an active protection it keeps microbes from getting in tries to anyway but once they get in right then there's a reactive protection that the body does through its immune system to expel those things that are bad for the body and that's when the church has to say to one of its members, look, your life no longer looks like a Christian, and we can't let you go on living like this and calling yourself a Christian at the same time. You can't wear the jersey of the enemy and the jersey of the king all at the same time. So, in other words, the church invalidates or disaffirms that individuals claim to be a Christian, and historically, that kind of action has been called church discipline. Now, I don't need to do a whole case for you. I think you know where this is. You see it in several places. So we've looked half a dozen times, right, at Matthew 18, 15 through 20, where at the end of the process, the man is to be put out of the church. Also 1 Corinthians 5, where Paul says that what the church is to do with this wicked, unrepentant man is

48:05 remove him from the church, judge him, cleanse him out. He even uses the word purge him. In other words, amputate him from the body like a gangrenous limb. Get him off, right, because he's doing damage to the church. Okay, so all those metaphors aside, what does that, what does that mean? I mean, what's really happening? When we have a members meeting and the elders say, you know, our recommendation is that you remove so-and-so as an act of church discipline for, you know, whatever it is, what are we doing actually when we do that? Well, first of all, and really important to say, is that when we do church discipline here at Third Avenue, that is not at all the Roman Catholic idea of excommunication. That's not what it is. The Roman Catholic idea of excommunication is the belief that you're actually consigning someone to hell, right? We don't think that that's the case at all.

48:58 Only King Jesus has that authority, and nowhere in the Bible is it said that any church has the authority to consign anyone to hell. That's up to the king. But it is to say, when we do it even here, It is to say, look, if you're going to persist on this path, whatever it is, of unrepentant sin, we're not going to continue to affirm your profession of faith. Your life is just simply not lining up with what it means to be a Christian. So we're not going to affirm that you are, in fact, a Christian when you're living like this.

49:31 We're not going to welcome you to the Lord's Supper to continue to affirm that you are a believer in Christ when you're continuing to live like this. So even if we're not talking about the Roman Catholic idea, that is no small thing for us as a church to do that. I mean, you would think it was kind of from the emails that we get from people when we're having to talk to them about this. It's just like, y'all do whatever you need to do. I don't even care, right? But one of the things that we tell them is, look, Jesus wouldn't have given us these keys of the kingdom to exercise in this way if he didn't intend to back it up himself.

50:06 So you may wave your hand at it, and you may send an email that, you know, declares for all the world that you don't care what the church is about to do. But it's a serious thing when a church feels that it needs to use the keys of the kingdom that Jesus has given in order to put someone out of the church. No, the church doesn't have authority to send you to hell. When it hands down that kind of considered judgment, it doesn't have the authority to do that. But friend, when the church gets to that point, after a mountain of work and conversation, when the church hands down that kind of exercise of the keys of the kingdom, it ought to make you fear that King Jesus will himself look at you and say, I never knew you.

50:50 King Jesus will back it up. He didn't give us those keys for no reason. I want you to notice, too, that the church doesn't take this action for just anything. the church does not take this action for just anything all christians sin we're all going to sin until the day we stand before jesus and we're not going to discipline you just because you had a greedy thought or said something too sharply to somebody no the church exercises this authority for serious outward unrepentant sin serious outward or visible unrepentant sin so what do you mean by that? Well, serious, because we're not going to discipline people just for sins that are common to Christians, right? And Christians struggle with all kinds of things. We're still fighting with the flesh until the day we stand before Jesus. But no, we discipline for those which really, by nature, sometimes by repeated pattern, cause you to question whether a person really is a Christian. Outward. It's not for things like pride. It's not for things internal,

51:53 but outward, visible sins. And then, most importantly, unrepentant. I mean, given that the whole goal of church discipline is repentant, we're not going to discipline somebody when a person is credibly repentant. Now, of course, I mean, repentance doesn't just mean saying sorry, right? You can't have somebody that, for example, commits adultery, and they come in and meet with a couple of elders, and the person just sits there with their arms crossed and says, sorry, right? I mean, no group of elders is going to judge that to be credible, especially if you have a long sort of pattern of deceit.

52:29 So sometimes there might be a situation where a simple verbal profession of repentance isn't immediately believable. And the church decides to discipline in order to take time to determine if repentance is genuine. But we don't discipline for just anything. Serious outward unrepentant sin. I want to say just a couple more words about this. Because I think when you start talking about church discipline, people do get confused. they start to think that, oh, church discipline, putting somebody out of the church is mean. And they think its purpose is to humiliate or embarrass.

53:01 They often use the word shun to make the point. The church shunned me, right? But that's not it at all. And the Bible actually holds out in various places a bunch of different reasons for doing church discipline. And far from being an act of meanness or hatred, The picture the Bible paints is that when the church does this kind of work, it's actually a profound act of love. Let me just sort of paint out some of the ways that it's an act of love. It's love for the individual who's getting disciplined.

53:34 And the reason it's love for that individual is because the goal is always repentance. Matthew 18, the whole goal of every one of those steps is you've won your brother. You've brought him to repentance. That's the goal. 1 Corinthians 5. Paul says that the reason we're going to amputate him like a gangrenous limb is not to hurt him or humiliate him or embarrass him. It's so that he might repent and be saved on the last day. That's the whole point, which he apparently does by the time you get to 2 Corinthians 2. It's love for the individual because it's to say, brother, sister, if you persist in this course of action, if you repent, if you persist in this course of unrepentant sin, that is spiritually dangerous.

54:17 for your soul, and we want you off that road. It's also loving for the church. It warns, and it protects the church. When you vote and say, yes, we as a church are going to put this person out of membership because of this unrepentant sin, it also ought to be getting into your heart. I don't want to go there. That's dangerous. It's love for the watching world. It lets the church speak clearly about what Christianity is and what it isn't.

54:52 And it's love for Jesus. We take his honor and his reputation seriously. You see the point, right? Though it's always a heavy and sad action, church discipline is always an action that is ultimately born of love. And it's aimed at the good of the person being disciplined and the church that's doing the disciplining action. It's not to say, we hate you. It's not to say, we don't like you or we want to be mean to you. It's quite the opposite. It's to say, we love you.

55:24 And we want you to get off this dangerous path that you're on. Here's number six. The church is led in its exercise of the keys by elders. The church is led in its exercise of the keys by elders. Now, I'm not going to take time to prove to you from the Bible that a church should have elders. Suffice it to say, it's literally everywhere. Where you have a church in the Bible, you have elders, plural, and they're supposed to lead the church. They have a specific role. They lead the church in its exercise of this authority that Jesus has given it.

55:56 Now, that's an important distinction, right? The elders don't hold the keys. The church does. But the elders lead the church as the church uses those keys. That's why you have places in the Bible like Hebrews 13, 17. Obey your leaders and submit to them. Or Acts 20, 28, when Paul calls elders overseers. Or 1 Peter 5, where Peter says to be subject to elders. There's a lot that could be said there because that kind of language of obeying and submitting and overseers and all that, it scares people.

56:33 Because authority in general and submitting to authority in particular kind of has a bad name. And rightly so, in a whole lot of cases. But throughout the Bible, authority and leadership is actually held out to us as something good and life-giving when it is used well. And that's true of the authority elders hold in the church. So the elders, when they lead, practically, that works out for us here at 3rd Avenue in the mechanism of the elders recommending and in the church voting.

57:07 The elders recommend and the church votes. If you've been to any members meetings, you know that that kind of language shows up all the time. The elders recommend this, and then we ask you to vote on it and actually act. I mean, think about it like this. The elders' role is to advise, lead, and teach the church in its use of the authority of the keys. So when we bring a member in, what I say from right there as I'm leading the members meeting, I say something like this. We as elders think you should use the keys in this way at this point.

57:39 This comes as a recommendation from the elders. You know, you've heard those words before. And what that means is we think you ought to use the authority of the keys right here and right now to bring this person in. That's our recommendation. But we can't do it for you. I mean, you as a congregation actually have to do that. I mean, it's very akin to it right now. My daughter, Juliet, is 14 years old, and I am teaching her how to drive. No, you can laugh. It's fine. Teaching her how to drive.

58:09 So she's in the driver's seat, right, of my car, and I'm sitting right next to her in the passenger seat. And we both have different roles. She has to exercise the authority of the brake, the accelerator, and the steering wheel. I advise and teach her how to do that. Because it turns out that as the father, I actually have no access to the brake. I have no access to the accelerator. I have a little bit of access to the wheel. But if the brake and accelerator aren't doing what they're supposed to, the wheel doesn't matter that much. A little bit. but my job is to teach her and advise her and lead her on how to use the authority of the brake accelerator and steering wheel, right?

58:48 I can't force it, but I can advise and lead. I mean, all I can say is something like the members meeting, this comes as a recommendation from your father. Hit the brake! Now, she can ignore me. She can do something utterly different from what I am advising her to do in the use of that authority. but there are likely to be consequences if she does that. So, sure, a congregation always has the right and authority to reject elders' recommendations.

59:19 A congregation has the authority even to remove and replace the elders if they want to. But friends, if you do that kind of thing, you need to understand and be ready to give an account to the king for it when he comes back. So the church is led by elders. That leads to this very last point. The relationship between a church and its elders should be one of trust and not skepticism. The relationship between a church and its elders should be one of trust and not skepticism.

59:50 Now that may seem to you like not that interesting a point at first glance. Of course, of course we should trust each other. Of course we trust each other. But I think it gets more interesting and more rare the more you start to think about it. See, I think sometimes people can think that the best posture for them to take as a church member is to act as a sort of check to the elders. I'm going to hold the elders' feet to the fire. I'm going to be the guy to make sure they're held accountable. And the thing is, there can even be some good theology behind all of that. I mean, after all, elders, just like every other Christian, are fallen and sinful.

1:00:24 And so the thinking often goes that sort of like in the U.S. government, we need checks and balances to keep the various branches of the government from going off the rails and getting arrogant. Therefore, we need some checks and balances to keep elders from going off the rails. But here's the thing about that. The church isn't intended to operate like the U.S. government. I mean, the U.S. government, just to give you a little political philosophy here, it was brilliantly designed to operate on mutual skepticism among fallen people, right?

1:00:55 That's why the founders designed it the way they did. They didn't want to give absolute authority to any one person because they knew that any one person is sinful and likely to abuse that authority. So what they did was that they divided power up among the three branches of government and then set those powers in opposition to one another so that they would constantly be in a three-way tug of war for power. Because they knew everybody's fallen, everybody wants more power, but if you put it all in, you know, in this kind of thing, they'll tug on each other and prevent anything from going off the rails. They did that because they knew that everybody is fallen.

1:01:28 But friends, the church is fundamentally different from that. We start with the assumption that, yes, we're fallen. We're all fallen. But we also start with the assumption, it's been the point of this whole thing, that we are also regenerate. So therefore, relationships in the church ultimately ought to be marked by trust, not checks and balances and skepticism. I mean, practically speaking, that means, just to bring it down to a very practical point, it means that it's actually good.

1:02:03 It is a good thing when a church has a long run of unanimous votes affirming the recommendations of its elders. That is a good thing. Now, I know that's frustrating to some people. It's been frustrating to various members of Third through the years because their case is that, well, that's a failure. It's a failure of the kind of robust congregationalism that we ought to have. Votes are unanimous, and the cases that, well, that's just apathy in the congregation. Or worse, the congregation is intimidated by the elders.

1:02:34 and people don't want to vote against them. It's just a rubber stamp for the elders. And I don't want to say that it couldn't be that. It could. There are cases in the world where that is in fact the case. The congregation is intimidated by its elders. It could be that. But it could also point to a congregation that's trusting its elders in just the way Jesus intended. I mean, in fact, friends, if you have too many divided votes, or the elders' recommendations getting too often regularly voted down by the congregation, you don't need to celebrate at that point that you've got a robust congregationalism.

1:03:11 You need to get a bunch of new elders who you can trust. Enough of that. The point here is that Jesus intends the relationship of elders in the church not to be one that's fraught with constant tension and conflict, but a beautiful one of trust and love. I mean, after all, the Bible says that elders are a gift to the church, given by the king from the throne of heaven. And it also says that elders are to do their work, always remembering that Jesus obtained and bought these people for himself with his own blood.

1:03:42 That he identifies with them. And that to abuse him or persecute them is to abuse him or persecute him. Do you see the picture there? If elders understand that the church is blood bought by Jesus, And if the church understands that elders are a gift from the throne of heaven, you don't wind up with tension and discord. You wind up with love and beauty in the face of the king. Let's pray. Our Lord, we thank you and praise you that you have not left us without instruction on how we ought to organize ourselves together as a church, but you have told us how we ought to do that.

1:04:22 And Lord, the picture you've painted in your word is a beautiful one. So help us, oh God, to submit ourselves to your word. Help us to love each other, even through the way we make decisions as a church. We pray all of this in Jesus' name, amen.