The NXR Podcast - THE LIVESTREAM - What Do I Do If There Are No Good Churches Near Me？

00:00:00.000 Fight-by-flight is a valid and real category of Christian resistance. 0.93

00:00:07.940 Christians are not required to stay in godless states and especially not required to stay 0.96

00:00:12.460 in churches that are rapidly having their lampstand removed.

00:00:16.240 But what do you do when you cannot move?

00:00:18.560 What criteria should be used to figure out where to attend church when there are very

00:00:23.420 few good options in your area?

00:00:26.200 And when do you have to move in order to attend a church?

00:00:30.500 Tune in now as we discuss.

00:00:41.920 All right.

00:00:42.840 Well, welcome back to another White Pill Wednesday. 0.95

00:00:45.060 Hopefully we can dish out some encouragement, dish out some white pills. 0.92

00:00:48.920 We're going to be talking about what to do when you do not have a lot of good churches

00:00:52.200 to attend in your area.

00:00:53.680 And I'll be honest, like personally, this has just been from talking to friends over

00:00:56.940 the last couple of years.

00:00:58.920 It's rough out there.

00:00:59.560 um we love covenant bible we all attend some of you obviously joel you're a pastor

00:01:03.840 me and michael are members we love covenant bible but we recognize there are many churches out there

00:01:09.100 that don't measure up in terms of preaching in terms of culture in terms of the discipleship

00:01:14.300 and i've met a lot of people that maybe have come through here and visited or just where they are

00:01:18.700 and they realize the options that i have around me they pale in comparison i love jesus i love

00:01:24.780 his church i want to be a part of one uh but there's not a lot of great options and some

00:01:28.720 people really genuinely, they're stuck in an area. Maybe they can't afford the home that they bought

00:01:33.160 four years ago. They bought a home, and if they were to move, they wouldn't be able to afford the

00:01:37.140 payment on their own home as they try to sell it. So they're stuck in an area because of a home.

00:01:42.060 They're stuck in an area because of a job, a job that they couldn't find somewhere else.

00:01:45.500 Another valid category is family. If you live around generations of your immediate and extended

00:01:51.280 family, that's not nothing. To leave them, to work commanded, to honor our parents, to love them,

00:01:57.640 that's tough to do from half a country away so we'll be diving into when do you move from a church

00:02:02.600 for a church because there are times that you have to when do you stay and gut it out and the

00:02:07.200 attitude you should do that with but first of all i think we need to define what a church is right

00:02:11.260 and this got really inflated you guys can maybe share some stories but i think during the young

00:02:15.740 restless reform movement so 2010 2015 a little bit beyond that and everything centered around

00:02:22.140 the church. Social life, matchmaking, discipleship, mentorship, hospitality. And these are all good

00:02:28.620 things that Christians should be doing. But there's almost an assumption that the church

00:02:33.400 runs all these things. You have Bible study and discipleship and accountability, and that's three

00:02:37.640 nights a week. And then you have prayer meeting, and then you have the Sunday service, and you

00:02:41.200 have volunteer teams, and then you're doing outreach and things like this. These could take

00:02:44.920 up every single night of the week. And so for some of us young men like myself who really

00:02:49.240 got into Reformed theology, who deepened our walk with the Lord, we came up in this time where we

00:02:54.020 almost expected church to be the be-all, end-all. Now, those are good things for Christians, but the 0.99

00:02:59.320 church itself, by definition, is a gathering for the purpose of word and sacrament, for the preaching

00:03:06.300 of the word, the administration of the sacraments. The Puritans would argue church discipline would

00:03:10.600 be the third mark of a true church. Calvin says word and sacrament. A church, at its most basic

00:03:15.660 level is word and sacrament. Is it preaching the word? Is it preaching it faithfully? And is it

00:03:20.440 administering baptism and the Lord's Supper? So just start off the segment before we talk about

00:03:25.300 when to move, when you have to, because there are no true good churches. We have to actually define

00:03:29.620 what a good true church is. It can include, absolutely, all those items of socialization,

00:03:35.620 of community, of friendship, discipleship, mentoring. Absolutely, those are great things

00:03:38.920 to organically come out of the Sunday gathering, of the time you spend with people, but they're not

00:03:43.580 inherent to the definition of the church. The church maybe has a thin culture, would be the

00:03:48.980 way we talk about it, where people don't hang out as much during the week, or they do their own

00:03:52.400 thing. That doesn't mean it's not necessarily a church. It may still be a church and have areas

00:03:56.840 that it needs to grow, but I think in good conscience you can attend those, and we'll

00:04:00.220 talk about that more in later segments. Open it up. Thoughts on, I think, with preaching,

00:04:05.460 revelation, interpretation, application is a good example.

00:04:08.680 Yeah, so Calvin, what you're referencing, Calvin said, wherever the Word of God is rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered, there a church of God exists, even if it swarms with many faults.

00:04:20.600 So one thing that I think is helpful in setting up a couple different categories is having a distinction between, on the one hand, you have two categories that are opposites of one another.

00:04:32.180 you have false churches and true churches. On the other hand, within, this would be a subcategory,

00:04:38.760 within the true church category, you can have bad churches and good churches. There is a difference.

00:04:45.080 What I'm getting at is there is a difference between a false church and a bad church.

00:04:49.260 You can have a church, and we need to be able to speak in those categories and recognize that

00:04:54.660 not every bad church is actually a false church. There are churches, I mean, for instance,

00:05:00.920 Revelation chapter 2 and 3 is profound in that regard that Jesus is not writing to illegitimate churches or invalid churches, but he is most certainly writing to bad churches, at least six out of the seven.

00:05:16.400 And the Church of Philadelphia, I believe, if I'm remembering correctly, would be the only one that, you know, exclusively had positive, you know, commendation from Jesus.

00:05:26.300 Everybody else, there was, you know, a positive, but then a negative.

00:05:29.140 And the negative seems to, you know, in most of the cases, to outweigh the positive.

00:05:33.560 That there's more bad things going on in that particular church than there are good things.

00:05:37.520 And yet, Jesus doesn't write to the seven cults, you know.

00:05:42.860 He doesn't write to the seven synagogues of Satan.

00:05:46.060 He writes to the seven churches, and he is acknowledging, and this is the Son of God,

00:05:51.900 so whatever our standard is, it certainly shouldn't be higher than his.

00:05:55.480 But he's acknowledging these seven churches to be precisely that, that they are actually

00:06:00.560 legitimate churches.

00:06:02.100 So again, the first question, I think, to seek to answer when looking for a church,

00:06:08.300 or if you're already in a church, when you're debating, do we, you know, the must, may,

00:06:14.320 you know um you know um must may and you know uh well i'll just leave you there the difference

00:06:21.820 between must and may like i must leave this church versus i may leave this church like there

00:06:26.600 are times where there's christian freedom of conscience where a family a household may leave

00:06:32.200 a church but there are other times when they must leave a church and i would say that if you're in a

00:06:36.260 bad church um a bad true church you may leave that church and if it's really bad with no signs

00:06:43.620 of repentance, it could come to the point where you must leave that church. If you're in a false

00:06:47.580 church, though, you must leave. And leaving that church, the must of leaving that church,

00:06:52.500 I think includes with it whatever it takes. Meaning that if there is no true church,

00:06:57.960 legitimately no true church within a 50-mile radius, then you have to be willing to drive

00:07:04.200 over an hour on Sunday each way, or relocate. Opting out of church is not a choice that

00:07:15.140 Christians are permitted to make. Yeah, I mean, there are categories for opting out of church,

00:07:21.920 and there are, you're in jail, the reformers talked about that, you are, you know, really

00:07:26.780 legitimately long-term ill, and maybe perhaps you're on some sort of extended naval voyage,

00:07:35.160 you know, circumnavigating the globe or something like that. So the Reformers did 0.97

00:07:40.660 understand that there are times when, for a prolonged period of time, certain people would

00:07:45.180 not be going to church or attending church, but that's not the normative prescription for

00:07:51.060 Christians. Church attendance and participation is essential. I think one of the things that we

00:07:56.420 get wrong is we forget or we have forgotten in our time what happens at church, right? It's not

00:08:06.560 just the same as listening to a sermon on a podcast. It's not the same as going to a Christian 1.00

00:08:13.020 concert where they sing hymns and Christian music. It's not even the same as having a meal with

00:08:19.360 fellow Christians. There are unique things, and so under the definition of what is a church,

00:08:24.440 there are unique things that happen at the the gathering of the lord's people on the lord's day

00:08:30.060 that don't happen apart from that right and so when we when we forget that just relational things

00:08:36.820 right 100 you know some of the uh church of uh i almost said church of christ no it was uh some of

00:08:42.720 the calvary chapel guys and there is a difference uh but some of the calvary chapel guys that i

00:08:46.820 appreciate i'm grateful for i you know i would disagree with their soteriology and you know and

00:08:51.100 and their view of no church membership and things like that and their eschatology and their

00:08:54.620 hermeneutic of dispensationalism and so you have plenty of disagreements but um there were some

00:08:59.260 church of christ guys that did a heck of a lot better than a lot of reformed guys um you know

00:09:04.000 sadly like that was such that was such a missed opportunity in 2020 um to you know if if there

00:09:10.260 actually is a superior theology which i believe there is because i believe in right and wrong and

00:09:14.660 i'm not a relativist so i believe some theology is better than others uh but if there actually

00:09:19.020 was, wouldn't it have been cool if in 2020, if the guys who have said superior theology,

00:09:25.220 that that theology actually worked to cause them to make a superior choice, but they didn't.

00:09:31.820 Like, honestly, anybody who's like, I don't know if reformed theology is really it, you

00:09:35.580 know, because I'm looking at the fruit.

00:09:37.200 I'm pretty sympathetic towards that position.

00:09:40.360 Somebody who's saying, well, Calvary Chapel did better than Calvinist. 1.00

00:09:44.060 Yep, that is correct.

00:09:46.220 They did.

00:09:47.080 It's really sad, but they did.

00:09:48.740 So anyways, all that being said, you know, guys like, I don't know, Rob McCoy or trying to think of some of, you know, some of these Calvary Chapel guys that really stood their ground in Southern California on COVID.

00:10:01.680 Some of the argumentation that they used to say, well, there's things that you don't get with a live stream.

00:10:05.960 Back to your point, Michael, there's things that you only get at church.

00:10:08.420 one of the common analogies or illustrations that they use is they said it's like you know

00:10:14.200 around christmas time if you don't have a fireplace and you know you you put on the

00:10:18.160 real-time log you know on the on the tv right exactly so you have like um you have a video

00:10:23.160 on a television of you know of a fireplace of logs burning and the you know the sound effects

00:10:28.780 of the crackle you know those kinds of things they're saying you know live streaming um staying

00:10:32.680 at home and watching church is like that but being in church um is like having an actual fireplace

00:10:39.060 and so what does that mean what does that equate to well the main thing that they um you know that

00:10:44.460 they espouse is that it equates to the warmth of fellowship and relationship and i just want to be

00:10:49.400 clear that um that that's not our position um we we believe that it uh that you do gain that

00:10:56.620 by being in the flesh at church. But it's not merely that. It's not that being in church,

00:11:05.280 the difference between being in church versus live streaming somebody on Sunday morning,

00:11:09.540 that the difference is merely relational. And that's not a small thing. That is significant,

00:11:15.360 actually fellowshipping with the saints. But it's not only that. So part of my doctrine on

00:11:20.800 you know, what happens at church and the necessity for church and actually being their church,

00:11:27.360 you know, ecclesia, gathering with the saints, physically, literally gathering with them on the

00:11:31.320 Lord's day. Part of my theology for that would come from Revelation chapter one that talks about

00:11:36.100 Christ. So this is before Revelation two and three, where he writes to these seven churches,

00:11:39.880 but in Revelation chapter one, first John, the apostle exiled on the island of Patmos is caught

00:11:46.240 up in the spirit on the Lord's day. And I don't think that's a coincidence. He's caught up on the

00:11:50.920 Lord's day, which is the Christian Sabbath. It wasn't the Sabbath according to Judaism, the last

00:11:55.560 day of the week, Saturday, but it was the Lord's day, namely the same day that Christ rose from

00:12:00.200 the dead, the first day of the week, the Christian Sabbath. And so he's caught up in the spirit on

00:12:03.900 the Lord's day and he sees a picture of a glimpse of the Christian church from heaven's perspective

00:12:11.200 and what Jesus sees and also what Jesus does when the church gathers together. And what he sees is

00:12:18.320 that Jesus is walking amidst the lampstands. And these lampstands represent, there's seven

00:12:24.280 lampstands, they represent the same seven churches that Jesus is about to address, that he's about to

00:12:30.240 speak to John so that John could then write his letter and speak to them. These are the words of

00:12:34.640 Jesus to you, these seven churches. And so first we see that Jesus is present. So it's not just

00:12:40.380 that going to church as opposed to live streaming is that you're present with people. No, you're

00:12:44.580 present with Jesus. Now, that has to require a little bit of theological discourse because

00:12:49.780 people would say, well, wait a second, Jesus is God. And so, we have all these incommunicable

00:12:54.620 attributes of God. And one of them is that he is not only omniscient, all-knowing, omnipotent,

00:13:00.660 all-powerful, but he is omnipresent. David even says, where can I go from your presence? If I'm

00:13:06.240 in the belly of Sheol or if I'm in the sea or wherever I am, you are there. And that's absolutely

00:13:12.340 true. And it's not just true of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, but it is true of God the

00:13:16.860 Son, that Jesus Christ, who is forever the God-man, he has taken on flesh and he is never going to put

00:13:21.940 it off. He is in his flesh, in his human nature, his glorified human nature, he has ascended and

00:13:28.860 is physically seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. So we can actually pinpoint a

00:13:33.760 specific locale. I don't know where it is, but there is a specific locale to the physical presence

00:13:38.300 of Jesus in his human nature. However, when we speak of the spiritual presence of Christ and

00:13:43.520 the way that Calvin speaks of the Lord's Supper and these kinds of things, the spirit of the

00:13:48.880 resurrected Lord, the Lord Jesus, is manifest through the ministry of the indwelling Holy

00:13:55.820 Spirit. So technically, we can actually say, theologically speaking, that if anyone is a

00:14:01.120 new creation in Christ Jesus, that they've been born again by grace through faith in Christ,

00:14:05.020 then they are a new creature and their body, per 1 Corinthians chapter 6, is a temple of the Holy

00:14:10.960 Spirit dwelling in them. And one of the things that the Holy Spirit does in his ministry is that

00:14:16.500 he manifests and exudes the presence of the resurrected, the spiritual presence of the

00:14:21.200 resurrected Lord. So if you are saved, you have the Holy Spirit residing within you and the Holy

00:14:25.760 Spirit is exuding the spiritual presence of the Lord Jesus Christ, the resurrected Lord. So

00:14:30.920 it is theologically accurate to say that if you are a Christian, you have Jesus in your heart.

00:14:36.820 You actually, you know, you can't actually say that. So my point is, if you're a Christian,

00:14:41.560 then, you know, the idea of going to church because you want to be in the presence of Jesus

00:14:47.460 seems counterintuitive because Jesus is present with you anywhere. If you're, you know, if you're

00:14:55.000 a heretic like Bonhoeffer and you're in prison, you know, by yourself, but let's say, you know, 0.76

00:14:58.760 like, you know, assuming that he's regenerate, then he has the spirit of the risen Christ with

00:15:04.080 him, although he is deprived of the fellowship of the saints. So, what we're talking about is not

00:15:10.380 the general sense of the spiritual presence of Jesus Christ, but what I would call the special

00:15:16.480 sense with unique sense. And what we see in Revelation 1 is that on the Lord's day, and

00:15:21.620 that's significant, John's caught up on the Lord's day in the spirit, not just any day of the week,

00:15:25.400 but the Lord's day and these lampstands, the implication is that they're lit. And I take

00:15:31.520 the lighting of the lampstands, the fact that they're lit as indicative of that's when the

00:15:37.440 church gathers together. You have these lampstands all week long, but they're lit on the Lord's day

00:15:41.940 as the church ecclesias, it gathers together. And when the church ecclesias gathers together,

00:15:47.320 the lampstands are lit. And what is Jesus doing? He's walking in their midst. And then what's the

00:15:53.380 next thing, the angels of these lampstands, seven lampstands, seven angels. I take the

00:15:58.100 interpretation that the angels are gospel ministers. They represent actually the pastors

00:16:02.800 of these churches. And the pastor is being held, these angels held in the right hand of Christ

00:16:08.980 himself. And as the angel, the pastor, gospel minister, opens his mouth and begins to preach

00:16:15.000 the word of God, it's not just that merely his mouth opens, but according to Revelation 1,

00:16:19.240 the mouth of Christ himself opens and a double-edged sword proceeds from the mouth of Christ

00:16:24.040 and begins to minister and cut the hearts of men, all those who are gathered.

00:16:28.620 So my point is this, in the supper, that's just preaching Revelation 1, but then we could

00:16:34.080 argue even stronger from the Lord's Supper and the spiritual presence of Christ, the

00:16:38.100 unique spiritual presence of Christ that is there in the administering, the right administering

00:16:42.680 of the Lord's Supper, but in all these ways through the sacrament and word, word and sacrament,

00:16:46.400 which should always be coupled together, when this happens, and not just in a living room on

00:16:50.940 a Tuesday afternoon, but on the Lord's Day, the Christian Sabbath, with the whole church gathered

00:16:55.600 together, when these things happen, it's Sunday, it's the church gathered, it's preaching, and it's

00:17:02.620 sacrament. When these things happen, I believe Christ, who is always present by virtue of the

00:17:07.560 indwelling ministry of the Holy Spirit for all believers, he promises to be uniquely present

00:17:13.040 in that context with those means of grace at that time with those people. And to deprive yourself of

00:17:19.260 that is to not just deprive yourself of the relational communal fellowship of the saints,

00:17:25.480 it is to quite literally deprive yourself of the relational communal presence of the Lord Jesus

00:17:31.900 Christ. You are starving yourself and you may not do that. So if there are bad churches, but true,

00:17:38.960 in the true category but subcategories bad rather than good you want a good and true church but if

00:17:44.560 you have a true church that's not good it's it's further on the sliding scale towards bad

00:17:49.460 i would rather be in a bad true church on the lord's day than a no church on the lord's day

00:17:55.800 and if there's no true church not even bad true churches only false churches then you must plant

00:18:01.820 a church if you're qualified to do so and that's a big caveat right there if you're not just anybody

00:18:07.500 can plant a church, but you must plant a church if you're qualified to do so, or you must move.

00:18:12.940 And if it's inconvenient, I'm sorry, but you've got to do whatever it takes to be with the

00:18:19.340 excellent ones and all the earth, as David says, because without that, you are an antelope separated

00:18:26.520 from the herd. You are going to be devoured by a lion. The very means in Hebrews, which is most

00:18:31.880 likely a sermon the very means to guard against evil and unbelieving heart is one another stirring

00:18:38.360 each other up in good work so paul later on in the book of hebrews that's hebrews 3 take care

00:18:43.880 brothers lest any of you have an evil unbelieving heart that causes you to fall away from living god

00:18:48.020 but encourage one another as long as today is called today so take care that you don't have

00:18:52.440 an evil heart and encourage one another and hebrews chapter 10 he connects that to not forsaking

00:18:57.580 the gathering. So the way the antelope is kept in the herd, the way you, Christian, are kept in the 0.56

00:19:02.420 universal church made up of all saints is through the local church, keeping you accountable, 0.77

00:19:08.000 encouraging you, exhorting you when necessary, reproving and rebuking you when you're caught

00:19:13.160 up in sin and restoring you in a spirit of grace. Those are the very means that God has appointed

00:19:17.620 to keep you in the true church. It's not enough to say, I love Jesus and I go for walks on Sunday

00:19:22.360 morning in the woods and I feel so connected with him there. He has not ordained the path in the

00:19:26.100 woods behind your house as the means to keep your heart from evil, unbelief, and the deceitfulness

00:19:31.520 of sin. There's a great question in the comments that let's get to, and then we'll go to our first

00:19:35.980 commercial break. This was Chris, and he said, would it be permissible to attend two different

00:19:41.860 churches, one to be spiritually fed two hours away once a month, while the other for community

00:19:46.520 30 minutes away for the rest of the month? Welcome to chime in, but I would say no, and that's because

00:19:51.540 the pastor of each church or a pastor is going to be accountable for your soul. And if the pastor

00:19:56.960 of the church that's two hours away, for example, is accountable before God to your soul, I think

00:20:01.960 you have a responsibility not to be going and hearing from other pastors that could teach you

00:20:06.860 theology that would disagree with him. You're getting a bigger diet of it. So if you go three

00:20:11.520 times a week to the church that's local and one time a week to the other church, you're getting

00:20:15.300 three times as much teaching. That at best is by your own admission, more lackluster, you're not

00:20:20.180 being spiritually fed. So I would say it's not valid to attend Sunday morning service at both

00:20:25.860 of those. Maybe make the drive more frequently. I think attending less frequently, it's not ideal,

00:20:30.900 but it is an option. Now that's not to say you can't fellowship with people at that other church

00:20:35.180 or have friendships with those people. So if there's a great community of homeschool families

00:20:39.060 that you hang out with all the time, absolutely 100%. Your other church that you were a member

00:20:43.420 at, two hours away, you can't attend every time, but you have good Christians there that are

00:20:49.080 stirring you up, you're accountable to your pastor, that's absolutely permissible. But my advice would

00:20:53.840 be not to double dip. If you're going to go and be a member of that church that's two hours away,

00:20:59.260 then go as frequently as you can, supplement with the teaching from that church, have accountability

00:21:03.580 there, but don't offset the work of your pastor by attending a church that might contradict what

00:21:09.060 he's trying to teach and disciple and lead in. Thoughts? That's good. I would say if you're

00:21:16.800 committed to, in the scenario and the question, if I understand it, the better church is farther

00:21:21.420 away, right? Exactly. So I would say you also have to be realistic. Let's say you commit to

00:21:27.120 going to the one farther away more regularly, and, you know, just something happens on one

00:21:31.800 particular Sunday morning, and you're not going to make it to that other church. Okay, maybe go to

00:21:37.420 the church down the street that Sunday. Like, don't skip Sunday altogether. But to plan for

00:21:41.980 that to be your regular pattern of every other, I think you're right there, Wes. The only caveat

00:21:48.040 I would give there is maybe you're in the process of deciding if that further church is the church

00:21:54.620 that your family needs to join in membership, and you're taking a definite specified period of time

00:22:01.840 to kind of weigh out the drive, the church, the teaching, the pastor, investigate it,

00:22:08.280 but have a time limit on that so that it doesn't just become a regular pattern by lack of intention.

00:22:14.740 Yep. It's a very valid category to have a period of time when you move to a new area,

00:22:19.640 perhaps because of COVID and everything that's happened, you left your previous church.

00:22:23.220 The command that you have to belong to a true church is not,

00:22:26.400 you have two weeks to find and enroll in membership at a new church.

00:22:29.680 There's time and sometimes space as you're, where, Lord, do you want me to go?

00:22:33.800 Are we really going to make this two-hour drive?

00:22:35.580 but you have to arrive like you're saying at some point you can't be church shopping for

00:22:40.360 two and a half years you need someone that's accountable for your soul and it's for your good

00:22:44.680 yeah to have someone who will answer to god for your soul to be committed to teaching the word

00:22:48.720 to discipling you and to be accountable is for your own benefit so you're only depriving yourself

00:22:53.980 if you church shop for two and a half years two to three months at a time and never actually

00:22:58.600 arrive well now you've gone two years without having uh necessarily anybody accountable for

00:23:03.220 do. I think that one of the reasons it's important to define the church is, consider this scenario,

00:23:09.680 you're attending a church, it's a bad church, but it's a true church, and in order to kind of

00:23:15.300 bolster your own walk with the Lord, you start attending a men's Bible study where the men are

00:23:22.860 in another church, they're part of another church, and what often will happen is the pastor of the

00:23:29.020 church that you are attending will say, wait a minute, you can't do that. Because that's not a

00:23:35.300 church function. You're attending fellowship, Bible study with a different group. And it's

00:23:41.680 important to define that a church is not necessarily the midweek Bible study, right?

00:23:49.240 Like that's not necessarily in the definition. It's a lot of the cultural programs that we do

00:23:55.880 in the American church is we have a midweek Bible study

00:23:58.020 or a prayer meeting or something like that.

00:24:01.420 And so I would be less concerned 0.95

00:24:05.840 if someone is attending a Bible study with,

00:24:10.320 maybe you've got, like you said, Wes,

00:24:11.800 some homeschool families,

00:24:12.700 and most of them go to this other church

00:24:14.180 and there's a Bible study and you go to it midweek.

00:24:19.320 But I think because we've misunderstood what a church is

00:24:23.180 and we've made the church the total Christian experience throughout the week.

00:24:27.880 Total life experience.

00:24:28.740 Total life experience throughout the week.

00:24:31.000 Attending a different Bible study or a different fellowship group or event

00:24:34.400 will be seen as not submitting to or being a part of the church

00:24:41.120 that you go to on Sunday mornings.

00:24:43.520 Right. Absolutely.

00:24:45.300 All right, let's cut to a commercial and we'll come right back.

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00:26:58.980 All right. So I think we covered really well in the first segment, when you have to move,

00:27:04.000 You absolutely have to move if there is no true church within driving distance.

00:27:08.560 But I do want to speak kind of the counter side.

00:27:11.540 So maybe, but I would say the minority of us, we're truly in a space where there is

00:27:15.160 no true biblical churches within an hour and a half driving distance.

00:27:19.460 That is real for some people, and that really may be the case, and you do have to move then.

00:27:23.480 But I think most Americans, probably 95, 99% of us, we live in a very churched nation by

00:27:28.300 God's grace.

00:27:29.100 We have a rich evangelical history.

00:27:31.280 And so most of you probably live within driving distance of a good church, or at least, sorry, you live within distance of a true church, perhaps even a good church.

00:27:38.860 And I want to give the caveat and the exhortation to stability.

00:27:43.300 There's been a lot of upheaval in the past couple of years.

00:27:45.500 So COVID, Black Lives Matter, these different things.

00:27:48.320 And for a lot of us, it did reveal that the churches we did attend were not as solid as we once thought.

00:27:52.160 It's not as though COVID happened and your church was solid, and then it became less solid.

00:27:57.100 No, the cracks were already in the foundation, and these were the stress tests.

00:28:00.760 negative world, as Aaron Wren puts it, a world where Christianity is not looked so favorably

00:28:05.660 upon.

00:28:06.440 So COVID and Black Lives Matter and really this Biden presidency, it's been the stress

00:28:10.980 test of your church, the first real one that we've experienced, at least for individuals

00:28:15.240 as young as myself within our generation.

00:28:17.460 And if your church faltered, if your church is caving on women pastors, it's caving on 0.88

00:28:21.240 accepting of homosexual individuals into membership. 0.51

00:28:25.000 If it's caving on those, it's not as though it was solid until 15 minutes ago. 0.50

00:28:29.240 It's been compromised.

00:28:31.100 Your lampstand has been actively being removed.

00:28:33.320 This is the final terminal stage of it.

00:28:35.920 So maybe God is revealing to you that your church is not the church that you at all thought

00:28:40.240 it was, but there is something to be said for being stable and being grounded.

00:28:45.180 I see a lot of people moving and uprooting their families.

00:28:47.680 I think of many friends that are older and they talk about their kids and they say, well,

00:28:51.240 they're in California and they're in Colorado and they're in Texas.

00:28:54.000 And in retirement, they're going to have to have a part-time job just to afford the RV

00:28:57.360 and the gas to be able to visit their kids and their grandkids. And that is not at all how we

00:29:02.900 thought even 50 years ago. People would stay in the same area. They would inherit homes. They

00:29:07.300 would inherit land. They would inherit farms. They would inherit jobs to be rooted and grounded in a

00:29:11.920 place. So when we're connected to a place, to a people, to a church, to a community, we're able

00:29:17.500 to do the most good. When we're transient, you live two years here, two years there, three years

00:29:22.260 in this place, you never actually develop a connection to these places. And you end up not

00:29:25.900 really caring about them. I care a lot about Georgetown. And one of the reasons I care a lot

00:29:30.220 about Georgetown is because I hope my children, my children's children live here. So the policies

00:29:35.080 that are being enacted by the city council and the things that are happening, they matter because

00:29:39.160 it's not just me that is going to feel the effects of them for the next six months. I hope by God's

00:29:43.820 grace, my grandchildren would live in this area, live on land that we own, are able to do well and

00:29:48.600 to flourish. And when people ground themselves, dig in and say, I'm here for the long haul,

00:29:54.840 It creates a totally different way of viewing things and thinking about, yes, your church,

00:29:59.540 but also the town, thinking about your family.

00:30:02.260 And I think you can engage with them the way the Bible means for us too, to develop strong

00:30:06.520 relationships that then cause it to flourish.

00:30:09.200 And so in the same way for your church, maybe you do have to move.

00:30:12.660 But I would also exhort, maybe some of you have to stay.

00:30:15.780 If it's a church that's been around for 40, 50 years and is going through a tough time,

00:30:19.620 it could be easy to want to jump ship.

00:30:21.260 Easy to see how green the grass is on the other side.

00:30:24.560 Well, this is an exciting church over there.

00:30:26.480 But maybe what it needs is people that have dug in and continue to work towards renewal

00:30:31.280 and revival for that church to last not just another 10 years, but another 50 or another

00:30:36.000 70.

00:30:36.880 So I would espouse as much as possible, if you have to do one more move for your family,

00:30:41.420 do it.

00:30:42.060 But your wife and your children, you yourself, you're going to do better and you're going

00:30:45.880 to be healthier by sticking somewhere, sticking with a job, sticking with a home, sticking

00:30:50.840 with a town sticking with the community yeah yeah that's true what what you're saying wes is

00:30:56.200 if the other two variables are good if you live in a state that is at least not totally anti-christian

00:31:05.900 right and if your family situation is one that is better for a long-term relationship between

00:31:12.880 grandparents, grandchildren, family relationships, then a bad or a false church. A bad church might

00:31:22.540 not be a reason to pick up your whole family and totally relocate. Even if it's to a church that

00:31:28.880 from the outside seems like it's doing the things that you want a church to do, even though some of

00:31:33.620 the cultural things that you want to do. Now, Joel's book was a fight by flight was about when

00:31:40.060 you live in a state, which is totally contrary to God's word. And that's a different calculus

00:31:47.800 that you have to do at that point. But what you're saying is if the living situation is tolerable

00:31:52.360 and you have a good thing with a family situation, a bad church, maybe relocate to another church in

00:32:00.460 the area, but don't necessarily pick up and move all the way to Moscow or Georgetown or Ogden

00:32:05.880 right just for that variable alone right yeah exactly yeah that may not be enough yeah as long

00:32:11.880 as you have a true church um and i i would just add that um i think the lord is far more merciful

00:32:19.360 than we sometimes uh remember uh and what i mean by that is uh so like at multiple different levels

00:32:26.580 so at the at the level of individuals um well i i saw you know i'll just i'll just address it i saw

00:32:33.600 a little bit in the comments like people talking about divorce and what do you do with this you

00:32:37.860 know um so like one example of god's mercy you know i've counseled marriages and things like

00:32:44.060 that where you know um a husband and it's usually a husband um sadly um statistically it's it's

00:32:51.640 usually the husband who is uh being abused um by an unruly wife just in our current state of

00:32:58.140 affairs our current moment i'm not saying it has always been that way for all time but that's just

00:33:02.460 that is the current landscape. And so when I'm counseling a couple, and a husband is like,

00:33:08.340 my wife, you know, she won't talk to me. She absolutely, like, she's completely egalitarian,

00:33:17.480 rejects any and all principles of headship in the home. She's turning my children against me, 0.98

00:33:25.340 all these kinds of things. What I've seen happen, more often than not,

00:33:30.880 is, you know, I've had guys ask, like, can I leave her? Can I divorce? And my answer is no,

00:33:36.900 you cannot. You need to remain with your wife. But, you know, guys sometimes will say, you know, 1.00

00:33:44.580 so is this just my lot in life in the next 50 years that I'm going to be in this, you know,

00:33:48.900 miserable marriage with a woman who hates me, who's turning, you know, poisoning my children

00:33:53.260 against me and all these things? That may be. And if so, God will give you the grace to bear that 0.66

00:34:00.040 well, in a way that brings him glory. But more often than not, in practicality,

00:34:09.540 what ends up playing out is that spouse usually, in God's providence, will produce

00:34:16.860 some kind of definitive, indisputable evidence that actually does allow you, if you choose,

00:34:26.500 at least permits you, it doesn't require, but it permits you to escape the marriage,

00:34:33.040 meaning that the unruly wife often becomes the adulterous wife, or the unruly wife

00:34:43.960 eventually often becomes the abandoning wife, thinking of 1 Corinthians 7 and also what the

00:34:50.360 Lord Jesus says about marital infidelity. In these cases, you are permitted to end the marriage.

00:34:58.340 Same thing applied at the level of church discipline. So there's been many cases where

00:35:03.780 people will say, this person is causing problems and they're doing this or they're doing that,

00:35:10.300 or I talk to so-and-so and they're being divisive. Well, we need biblical

00:35:20.080 evidence in order to deal with this. And again, God is merciful. And if it actually is a high

00:35:29.940 handed, and I would agree with the Westminster on this point, not just impenitent sin, but it's

00:35:34.380 a high handed sin, right? Like it's not insignificant that yes, the principle of

00:35:39.280 Matthew 18, all that really includes is the sin of impenitence. It could be a small initial sin

00:35:44.600 of disobedience, but double down, double down, double down. And so that is true that all is

00:35:50.060 that's technically baked into the principle when the principle is espoused in Matthew 18

00:35:55.040 is the sin of impenitence, refusal to repent. But it's not insignificant that the case studies,

00:36:00.420 when that principle is then displayed in later apostolic New Testament books, like 1 Corinthians

00:36:06.680 5, it's not, well, this person told a white lie and we called him on it and they refused to admit

00:36:14.900 that they told a white lie. No, the Apostle Paul, the example that he provides is a dude who was

00:36:19.940 sleeping with his stepmom. And so the Westminster adds that high-handed aspect to impenitence.

00:36:25.460 But my point is this, whether it be marriage, God will often, not guaranteed, but often he will

00:36:34.920 provide the necessary evidence. Either he'll produce the gift of repentance and restore the

00:36:41.460 marriage, or he'll produce the necessary evidence for the innocent party to be able to escape

00:36:48.220 that abusive marriage. Very rarely, it does happen sometimes. We're not guaranteed,

00:36:53.960 but it has been my experience that it is rare that someone for the remainder of their life

00:36:59.160 is stuck in limbo. Same thing with church discipline. It was like, I know this person,

00:37:04.100 okay, but do we have two or three witnesses? And if we don't, what we're resting in,

00:37:08.220 we're not at the mercy of this person's deceptive tactics. We're at the mercy of a sovereign God.

00:37:15.380 At any moment, he can reveal empirical evidence with two or three witnesses that condemn this person if God decides that he wants, for the sake of upholding the purity of his church, to remove this impenitent sinner.

00:37:32.880 And if not, if God doesn't provide that evidence, we don't exercise discipline on hunches.

00:37:39.620 We're not discernment discipliners.

00:37:42.340 That discernment discipliners is not a thing.

00:37:45.020 We only exercise church discipline for that which is external, witnessable, visible.

00:37:50.360 And God is in control of all those things under the banner of his sovereignty.

00:37:53.700 And so if God actually wants to remove, and if God doesn't, I think of where the Apostle

00:37:58.880 Paul says that, you know, that there has to be this type of person among you so that those

00:38:04.460 who are sincere would be revealed.

00:38:06.760 meaning that having people in the church who are immature, less mature, struggling with various

00:38:15.240 sins, sometimes ornery and sometimes a bit rebellious, God uses that under the banner

00:38:22.140 of his sovereignty to grow the church. And I'm talking not even numerically necessarily, but 0.99

00:38:27.640 in terms of our sanctification. He uses that to sanctify us. So all that being said,

00:38:33.500 But same kind of thing with a whole local church or a denomination.

00:38:42.920 So the last thing I'll say is I think of the United Methodists.

00:38:46.860 So what do you do if you've been in the United Methodist denomination and you've been faithful there for 20 years and you know, I mean, you've just watched it go from bad to worse, you know, worse to worser, you know, and you've been dealing with that.

00:39:01.280 but you haven't had a peace. You haven't felt permission from the Lord to leave. And so you've

00:39:07.600 been doing faithful work in your local United Methodist Church for as long as up until very

00:39:16.080 recently. And you're like, man, I wish the Lord would either produce repentance or I wish that

00:39:22.800 he would release me. Well, guess what? Every true Christian United Methodist Church has just been

00:39:28.280 released. When did that happen, Pastor Joel? That happened when the United Methodists vote and it

00:39:34.860 became their official policy that you can be a sodomite and that it's not a sin. What do you

00:39:39.680 call that? You call that Jesus walking over to the United Methodists, grabbing their lampstand

00:39:44.940 and ripping it out of their hands. And all of Jesus' faithful disciples who were previously in

00:39:50.440 the United Methodist Church have all been officially given permission by Jesus Christ

00:39:54.820 himself, hey guys, you're no longer bound. You're no longer have to be burdened by this. I have

00:40:01.240 determined to place my judgment on this synagogue of Satan. It's no longer even a church, not 0.88

00:40:09.380 anymore. It doesn't have a lampstand. It's been ripped away from their perverted little hands

00:40:15.180 and you are free. So my point is just those things happen. It may take longer than we want. It does

00:40:22.320 often require long suffering and patience but whether it be a marriage or whether it be a church

00:40:27.520 discipline case or whether it be my point is that god often does not just he guarantees in the life

00:40:34.440 to come but ordinarily even in this life as well he vindicates the righteous he does like you read

00:40:41.600 the psalms and david's not just saying hey you know when i die and stand before you like no he's

00:40:47.060 asking in real time, in human history, in his lifetime, God, would you vindicate me before my

00:40:53.260 enemies? Would you vindicate the righteous? And David's not saying that he's achieved sinless

00:41:00.160 perfection, but he's saying that I too am a sinner, but these are your enemies and they're

00:41:06.040 my enemies. And would you deliver me, oh God? The snares that they've set for me, the pit that

00:41:14.160 they dug for me, I pray that they would fall into it. Would you break the teeth of the wicked? That's

00:41:19.240 in the Psalms. Bash the heads of their children against the rocks? That's actually in the Bible.

00:41:27.040 Now, we shouldn't be careless about imprecatory Psalms and prayers and these kinds of, but this

00:41:32.260 is biblical literature, and David is not asking for a 17th dimension salvation. He's asking to

00:41:41.300 be vindicated on earth in tangible ways to be delivered from his enemies. And I have found in

00:41:47.220 my pastoral experience that God, again, it's not a guarantee. You're guaranteed to be vindicated in

00:41:53.520 heaven. But ordinarily, meaning more often than not, not 100% of the time, but over 50%,

00:41:59.760 whether it's a terrible marriage with a wicked spouse, or whether it's somebody who

00:42:06.600 who absolutely is a non-regenerate and unbeliever in the local church, but has just not yet

00:42:12.840 provided enough witnessable evidence to be church disciplined, or whether it's a church that has

00:42:20.040 just made compromise after compromise after compromise, but technically isn't yet a false

00:42:25.080 church. In all those cases, it doesn't stay in limbo forever because it can't. It's not

00:42:34.480 sustainable what happens is repentance right or judgment it's the same with the nation of israel

00:42:40.200 in the old testament it's not like israel just stayed in idolatry um for you know centuries and

00:42:46.340 said no no um they'd be there for a while but after a while what would happen uh they would

00:42:52.240 get conquered under god's judgment by a foreign nation or god would raise up a king that was

00:42:57.720 righteous in his sight and he would lead the people in repentance one or the other it didn't

00:43:01.780 just stay in limbo. And so I say that to encourage anyone who might be listening saying, man, our

00:43:08.420 church is bad, Joel, but we do know that it still has a lampstand. It's still a true church. There

00:43:13.280 is word and there is sacrament. There's not something clear enough. And so we don't feel

00:43:19.720 in our consciences released from leaving, but we are just heavy laden and burdened. This has been

00:43:25.100 such a trying season. I don't know if we can go on much longer. And I would just encourage you to

00:43:29.840 say, one, you can. You can, by God's grace, he can give you the strength to continue. And then

00:43:36.980 number two, it is very unlikely you will have to continue indefinitely. The church will repent,

00:43:43.520 or the church will actually stop being a church. That happens time and time again.

00:43:49.680 I remember for, this was a number of years ago, but me and my wife were attending a church,

00:43:53.500 and God doesn't hold us accountable for you don't know what you don't know.

00:43:56.420 right we had some weird feelings about the lead pastor especially my wife she's like just he feels

00:44:00.620 a little shady but like you said it was still the preaching of the word we took the lord's supper

00:44:05.040 every week and so we continued on it wasn't for 20 years i think something's up and it came out

00:44:10.840 that he'd been having an affair for over a year we left the church probably about six months after

00:44:15.080 to move down here um so maybe you're there i just i do not know about this pastor i don't know about

00:44:21.340 this leader i don't know about this member um everything will be revealed everything does come

00:44:26.500 out and sometimes it is like i experienced that it was an affair it came out quickly it was really

00:44:31.760 traumatic for the church but god god pulls back the veil yeah this is what's going on maybe it

00:44:37.140 does take a little bit longer and maybe that person you had suspicions about maybe they were

00:44:41.720 just awkward or something like that but exactly to your point it didn't go on forever same thing

00:44:46.860 at another church we were at where we had a bad track record. A pastor was removed just for being

00:44:51.460 overbearing, whether he was really guilty of it or not, who knows. But same thing, for a year,

00:44:56.120 like, I don't know about this church. I don't know about this pastor. That doesn't seem right.

00:44:59.880 But we looked at the marks. We didn't have, this was in a college town when we were in college,

00:45:04.080 so there wasn't really a lot of options to go to. We're like, okay, we're here. We love these

00:45:08.100 people. We've invested in them. We serve this church in this capacity. This man is not clearly

00:45:12.280 disqualified so for the time continued to leave my wife when he attended there and was eventually

00:45:17.160 revealed and brought forth um one last note before we go to commercial break too i have something to

00:45:21.500 say to you when you're okay people are barred on leaving lord is it time to leave but sometimes on

00:45:26.660 on entrance i'm going into membership the lord will give an answer as well i can think of a

00:45:30.220 brother that said they try to join a church and they said well no because you're sabbatarian we

00:45:34.800 won't allow you to be members so you commit to it i'm gonna dig in i'm gonna i'm gonna go to

00:45:39.640 this church. I see other ones out there that I maybe like to attend, but this is where I am.

00:45:42.960 This is where my family is. I'm going to dig in. The church says no. That would be another form of

00:45:46.840 releasing. God may be opening the door for you to move and say, Lord, we really did give it an

00:45:52.080 honest shot. We wanted to be near family. We wanted to keep this job. I didn't want to uproot

00:45:55.580 everyone, but we are literally not allowed to obey your command to be members in a local church.

00:46:01.740 So on the back end, God works your circumstances that you can feel and discern. It's time to leave.

00:46:07.060 But also on the front end, you might reveal that as well as you attempt to join a church.

00:46:10.320 I was just going to say, Wes, I was doing some reading today of Heinrich Bullinger, who

00:46:15.800 succeeded Zwingli in Zurich, and some of his writings about what the church is and marks

00:46:23.380 of a true church.

00:46:24.120 He actually went so far as to say that moral failure on the part of the pastor is not a

00:46:34.080 reason to leave a church.

00:46:35.180 he said the reasons to leave a church are if the gospel or the the first tier levels of theology

00:46:43.220 are being mistaught or improperly taught or argued against or if the um the sacraments

00:46:50.980 are not being administered because then you could say well my my pastor's too grumpy

00:46:55.440 and that's a moral failure and so i'm gonna leave this church and his point was i don't know how

00:47:02.100 far he would have gone if it was a case of adultery where you're going to excommunicate

00:47:06.220 the pastor. But his point was just moral failure on the part of the pastor even was not a reason

00:47:13.620 to leave the church. It was the doctrine and the ordinances being improperly taught and performed

00:47:20.880 that were, in his mind, the reason you would leave a church. That's true in the theological,

00:47:25.820 technical sense, because to say otherwise is essentially to imply that the pastor makes the

00:47:31.400 church. That's correct. So the pastor is not what makes a legitimate pastor does not constitute a

00:47:39.260 legitimate church. So to a failed pastor doesn't mean that you don't have a church. And one of

00:47:45.440 the examples that I would use scripturally to back that up would be Titus chapter 1, where Paul says

00:47:49.460 to Titus, the son of the faith, this is why I left you in Crete, that you might put what remains

00:47:55.500 into order, appointing pastors in all the churches. So I do think that it is absolutely

00:48:01.360 quite possible that a church could even precede a pastor, that you could actually have what Christ

00:48:06.700 would actually legitimately see as a validly constituted church that is at that given moment

00:48:15.420 actually pastorless. It doesn't even have a pastor. However, back to kind of how we started

00:48:19.740 the episode, there's the must category and there's the may category. And so it is,

00:48:25.500 absolutely permissible to leave a church in light of a moral failure. That doesn't mean that you

00:48:30.840 must. So the moral failure of a pastor doesn't take a church overnight from the status of true

00:48:37.780 church to false church. But I would say that that does have a heavy, a major emphasis on that church

00:48:44.840 being a good true church versus being, oh, well, it turns out we're actually pretty unhealthy,

00:48:50.100 bad true church. So even though we may still be a true church and I may stay, I also may leave.

00:48:55.000 So it's not a must-leave situation, but it certainly is a may-leave situation.

00:49:00.080 And so people, you know...

00:49:02.320 Well, I would add to that, though, too. 0.77

00:49:03.560 I side with the Puritans. 0.66

00:49:04.840 I think that discipline is one of the sacraments, the ordinances. 0.69

00:49:09.320 And so if a church, if it comes out that the church is having an affair, or the pastor is having an affair,

00:49:14.500 and then at that point, if the church will not pursue discipline,

00:49:18.340 I would say at that point the church is failing in its duty to administer discipline as one of the...

00:49:24.240 Yeah, that's the keys that the church has been given.

00:49:27.360 And so if the church will not get rid of that pastor

00:49:30.740 or won't deal with it,

00:49:31.840 will just sweeps it under the rug,

00:49:34.200 then at that point, that church has ceased.

00:49:36.400 It's one of its primary three duties.

00:49:39.880 And to your point earlier, Joel,

00:49:41.840 it has revealed itself now

00:49:43.280 as it's not because inherently of the pastor,

00:49:46.480 because they abdicated its responsibility.

00:49:48.200 But then if the church does, it comes to light.

00:49:51.020 The church deals strongly and quickly with it.

00:49:53.540 they remove that man they they are seek the lord in humility they find um a biblically qualified

00:50:01.000 man to continue that work i think you're right joel that would be a case where you may depending

00:50:06.200 on how especially how close you are to the situation it might be wise to leave still

00:50:10.520 but in that sense the church is showing itself to be a true church yes by doing the appropriate

00:50:15.820 thing in that situation weak though it may be right and the word of caution that renewal process

00:50:23.100 where there's a failure or a scandal, and it does happen even at some good churches. It happens more

00:50:27.860 in bad churches, true churches, but bad does happen in true churches that are good. That's

00:50:32.640 staying around for that process. Think long and hard for the point of being committed to it. If

00:50:36.680 you say, I love this church, there is a moral failing, there is some unhealthy things going

00:50:41.020 on here, there's a lack and reverence and fear of God, but I'm committed and I'm going to see

00:50:45.720 this through, then absolutely do so. But like you were saying, you may also say this is going

00:50:50.800 going to be a years-long process of rebuilding trust, of reevaluating how we treat the office

00:50:55.400 of elder and the office of teaching. You may also say, we want to go to this church over here that's

00:51:01.400 another 25 years older, has some older couples, has had men with a longer track record of

00:51:05.800 faithfulness. So absolutely, you can sign on for the long haul. And if so, do so. Actually stay

00:51:11.880 through it. Say, I'm committed to helping to rebuild this church and to grow so that we're

00:51:15.860 more healthy at the end of this process. But it is also the option to say, I think especially if

00:51:20.580 you have kids. If you're a single man, it's maybe different than if you're a family man and you have

00:51:24.420 five kids. Say for us and our children, I think we want to be under more mature men with a more

00:51:28.980 established track record of faithfulness. Yeah, that's good. All right, let's go ahead and go to

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00:53:06.240 The danger of centralized power is often represented by the word king.

00:53:11.200 As Americans, we hate the word king.

00:53:14.820 Civilian ownership of body armor is about helping people to have increased power to resist tyrants and criminals.

00:53:21.600 and so armored republic is about helping you to preserve your god-given rights to the honor of

00:53:28.720 the lord jesus christ because he is the king of kings and he governs kings and he will judge them

00:53:34.140 this is armored republic and in a republic there is no king but christ

00:53:40.500 we are free craftsmen and we are honored to be your armor spread choice

00:53:51.600 all right so a final word of encouragement you're a man you're a single man a family man

00:54:06.560 you're committed to staying in your local church you're committed to being where you are you've

00:54:10.620 already gone through the criteria when you have to leave the criteria when you may leave so you

00:54:15.360 have to attend a true church and you've committed i'm going to attend this church the exhortation

00:54:20.320 that I want to give is that godliness and faithfulness and results, they're not seen

00:54:25.060 across six months. So you could be in a church and you've taken a bottle of red pills, you've

00:54:29.760 dumped the whole thing, you listen to King's Hall season one through season three, and you're like,

00:54:34.800 man, I feel all of this stuff so deeply. I want my church to be this. I want to see God's people

00:54:39.040 do this. For one, amen to that ambition. But six months goes by and you're like, man, my pastor's

00:54:44.460 not picking up on this stuff. He doesn't really see the culture war as a problem. I feel like

00:54:48.820 preaching and fellowship and worship and all these different areas that were lacking, and I really

00:54:53.120 want to see them reformed. These things take time, and so you're at a church, and you come in, and you

00:54:58.060 can see some areas just by where God's grown you, where you happen to be mature. You see areas where

00:55:03.220 you're like, I want to see that grow. I want not just to see it grow for my own sake, but I want

00:55:07.600 to see God's people better edified, better discipled, better spurred on to maturity in Christ.

00:55:13.000 Those things take time in the magnitude of years. My exhortation would be I've never met a man

00:55:18.220 that has trained himself, both has taken care of his physical body to be strong and self-controlled

00:55:23.540 and disciplined, has trained his mind to be acute, to be educated, to be theologically precise,

00:55:29.000 that has done well in governing his affairs and his family and his home. I've never met a man

00:55:33.500 that's like that, that people don't inherently recognize. He has something to say. He has wisdom

00:55:39.480 to dispense. So you may be at a small country church of 35 people, but if you train to be

00:55:44.920 the man that God has called you to be. Like Paul exhorts Timothy to be strong in the word. Even if

00:55:50.040 you never become a pastor, there's still, I don't think, any scenario where you're in a true church

00:55:54.840 and young men don't recognize. I need to ask him a question. How did he do this? How does he lead

00:56:00.420 his family in family worship? There's things that I want to glean from him. I want him to mentor me.

00:56:05.140 And so you're in that situation. You're at a church that you would love to see grow.

00:56:08.640 Commit to the long haul of growing, not just the church, but also growing yourself.

00:56:13.340 And don't be surprised.

00:56:14.620 People sometimes think that a church is, it's a baked cake.

00:56:17.280 It's already set.

00:56:18.400 Everything's really in place.

00:56:19.320 There's no influence I can have on it.

00:56:20.980 No, you will have a ton of influence on a church that if you stay there for 20 years,

00:56:26.540 you're going to influence that church.

00:56:27.720 That church, the way it looks after that 20 years will be in part, not exclusively, but

00:56:33.100 it will be in part to the effort, the labor, the prayer, the time that you've dedicated

00:56:38.000 to it.

00:56:38.580 And so Galatians says, don't be weary in doing good.

00:56:41.360 don't be weary in training yourself and equipping yourself for godliness caring for your family

00:56:46.700 spurring on other individuals at church through exhortation against an evil and unbelieving heart

00:56:51.420 that will bear fruit and maybe you really do only truly see it in heaven but god has promised if you

00:56:57.680 even give a cup of cold water to a little child in my name you will not lose your reward how much

00:57:02.820 more so training and equipping for godliness in this life being a self-controlled disciplined

00:57:07.460 man or woman it's good i think one of the tensions that we have when we consider this question is

00:57:14.240 what about my kids what about my family um i have young kids i am not totally on board with this

00:57:20.480 church um and that gets real practical real quick when your kids start hanging out with kids and

00:57:28.300 other of other families or maybe they have some sort of midweek activity bible club or something

00:57:34.320 like that. And you start thinking, okay, wait, what's the net benefit on my family? Is this

00:57:39.380 going to actually push my kids towards righteousness or is it not? And two things I would

00:57:47.040 say there is one, that's a valid concern. We need to be thinking about our kids and their

00:57:52.980 spiritual development and growth. And whenever possible, you certainly want a church that is

00:58:00.300 going to be moving in a similar direction to what you're teaching your children at home.

00:58:07.280 But that's my second point, is that you are teaching your children. And sadly, a lot of

00:58:15.040 the totality of the church in modern Christian life has meant that a lot of times parents are

00:58:23.680 abdicating the duty, fathers in particular, of training and disciplining their children.

00:58:30.880 And so if your church is not 100%, it's a bad, true church, that does not, how do I want to say

00:58:41.520 this? Your call as a father and as a mother is still to train your own kids, to teach them and

00:58:49.100 instruct them in godliness and to catechize them. And that certainly can be done, even in adverse

00:58:56.340 conditions. If not, the church would never have grown through times of persecution and times of

00:59:04.180 liberalism and times where it really seemed that the wolves were taking over. So just an

00:59:12.640 encouragement that your, like Wes said, your labor, not just for your local church, but for

00:59:17.800 your family, to be teaching them in faithfulness and in virtue and in discipline and in godliness,

00:59:24.920 that will also not go without flourishing. God will bring that work to bear in the lives of

00:59:33.760 your children as well. And in some ways, it will be even more precious to them. And so just an

00:59:41.080 encouragement to stay at it, even if the church itself maybe is not doing as much to help your

00:59:46.480 children in the direction that you think it should be. That is primarily your responsibility, dads

00:59:52.280 and moms, helping with that. Probably quantity-wise, my children receive more instruction during the

00:59:57.780 week in prayer, in Bible reading, and all of these things than actually happens on Sunday.

01:00:01.720 Oh, 100%. Go back to the beginning, church is still important. It's not as though that replaces

01:00:04.980 church, but you have a tremendous amount of influence. And so if that's not pulling as much

01:00:09.860 weight as it should, there should still be the other 80% that is instructing them in godliness,

01:00:14.960 maturing them and making them christ-like yep okay i got nothing i feel like that's good

01:00:22.040 yeah yeah great all right cool well thank you guys for tuning in and we will

01:00:26.960 lord willing see you again next week

The NXR Podcast - May 29, 2024

THE LIVESTREAM - What Do I Do If There Are No Good Churches Near Me？

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