◑Sixth indictment: Ignorance regarding the nature of the Church.
God has only one religious institution. It is the Church. It is the Church. And our ultimate goal and the ultimate product of revival will be the planting of biblical churches.
I have the greatest fear that the local church today is despised. Tell somebody you are an itinerant preacher, that you have a world wide ministry and they all bow down. Tell someone you are a pastor of a group of 30 and they make you sit in the back during the conference.
He is not the prince of itinerant preachers, he is the prince of pastors.
Several years ago Bill Clinton had a slogan during the election. “It is the economy, stupid.” My pastor, Jeff Noblett, one of the elders in our church, the primary teaching, preaching pastor, he said to me one day, he goes, “You know, I’d like to have a bunch of shirts made up.”
“What would they say, brother Jeff?”
“It’s the Church, stupid.”
Jesus gave his life for the Church, a beautiful virgin, pristine Church. If you want to give your life for something in the ministry, give it to the Church, to a church, a body of believers, a local congregation. It is the Church.
Now let me say this about the Church. I want you to listen well. There is not a remnant of believers in the Church. We all know about the remnant theology, you know, that throughout all the course of Israel there was Israel the people of God and a remnant of true believers. That is not true about the Church. There is not a remnant of believers or a small group of believers inside a larger group called the Church. The Church is the remnant.
And I want to say this. If pastors have ever come to close to blaspheming it is with regard to this. I hear theologians, itinerant teachers, pastors, this and that saying these sorts of things. “There is just as much sin in the Church as out of the Church. There is just as much divorce in the Church as out of the Church. There is just as much immorality and pornography in the Church as out of the Church.” And then preachers say, “Yes, the Church is acting like a whore.”
I want you to know this. You ought to be very careful calling the bride of Jesus Christ a whore.
I will tell you what the problem is. Pastors and preachers don’t know what the Church is. I want you to know that the Church of Jesus Christ in America is beautiful. She is frail at times. She is weak. She is buffeted. She is not perfect, but I want you to know she is broken. She is humbly walking with her God. The problem with you is you don’t know what the Church is.
Today because of the lack of biblical preaching the so called Church is filled up with carnal, wicked people identified with Christianity. And then because of all the goats in the midst of the lambs, the lambs are blamed for all the things the goats are doing and then the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of us.
Have you ever read... Let’s just.... I know we are running out of time, but just go quickly with me, just go quickly. I want to show you something. Go to Jeremiah 31, thank you. Verse 31 of Jeremiah 31. “‘Behold, days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.’”27
Now I do not want to take away anything from the people called Israel, but this text is also applied to the Church. Understand that. I don’t want to get into any battles on eschatology, but in the Bible, in the New Testament, the book of Hebrews it is applied to the people of God.
“Not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt.”28
I hear preachers saying all the time, “Well, when you look back and you see Israel, you see a bunch of godless, idolaters, people. And in the midst of them there was a tiny remnant of true believers.” That is true, but don’t apply that to the New Testament Church because he says, “I am going to do something different,
Not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them," declares the LORD. "But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days," declares the LORD, "I will put My law within them.”29
He hasn’t just given you, if you are converted, he hasn’t just given you a stone tablet of laws. He has supernaturally, through the doctrine of regeneration, written those laws in your heart. And because he has done that, “I will be their God, and they shall be My people.”30
And look what it says. “"They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,’ declares the LORD, ‘for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.’”31
Again, the doctrine of regeneration. God is doing a new work these last 2000 years. We don’t have a lot of churches in America. We have a lot of really nice brick buildings on finely manicured lawns.
Just because someone says they are of the Church or they are Christian doesn’t make it so. Look what he says. They will not even have to teach one another.
Now that doesn’t mean there won’t be teachers and preachers, but there will all be an outstanding knowledge of God among them, particularly with regard to their sins having been forgiven.
Quickly just jump. Look at 32, chapter 32 verse 38. “They shall be My people, and I will be their God.”32 He doesn’t say, “I hope so, maybe, if I get lucky, oh, if I can get enough evangelists to work with me, maybe this will all come out right.”
He says, “I am going to pull a people for me, a people that I am going to give to my Son.” And he says, “They shall be My people, and I will be their God.”33
Now, don’t be angry with me, any angrier than you already are at least. But listen to me. The 70s and 80s and all the Jesus marches and everyone weeping and crying, “The Church is so divided. The Church is not one.”
My dear friend, let me tell you something. If the Church is not one there is a prayer out there that God the Father did not answer for his Son. And this new covenant promise assailed.
So I want to redirect you a little bit. I want to submit to you, the Church is one. She has always been one.
Have you ever sat down on an airplane or maybe met someone in a marketplace you didn’t even know and you being maybe Baptist or Mennonite or this or that, but truly evangelical, truly Christian, you talk to him for no more than few minutes and you discover, “He is a believer. This is a live one.”
And at that moment you would give your life for him. You would give your life for him.
I remember one time we were in Departamento Amazonas in Peru and it was during the time of the Sendero Luminoso and the civil war that was going on there. We rode 22 hours up in the back of a grain truck under a black tarp and at about midnight we pulled the tarp off, the truck stopped and we jumped off into the jungle. We stayed the night just at the edge of the jungle and made our ways up to a place called [?]. About half way up we got lost in the dark the next day so we were praying, me and my dear friend Paco, we were praying, “Oh, God, give us some direction. We are lost. If we are found in here the terrorists own the place. The military wouldn’t even go in.” We cried out, “Oh, God, give us some direction. Help us.”
We heard a bell. And then we heard somebody talking. It was a strange conversation at first we thought. Then we realized it was a little boy coming in from the fields with his burro and he was talking to his burro. And so we got behind him and we followed him. Then we stood on the edge of the town, a little village, huts, adobe homes and I said, “Paco,” I said, “You know, if terrorists own this thing we are dead.”
“Yeah, but we have got to somewhere.”
So we got down, walked up to a man who was drunk in the dark and said, [?] “Are there brothers here?” Because everybody knows what that means in the mountains? It means a real Christian.
And he said, [?], “The old woman over there.”
33 Ibid. 34 Jeremiah 32:39
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So I went over there. There was an old Nazarene woman and I knocked on the door. I said, “I am an evangelical pastor. Please help me.”
That old woman reached out with that lantern. She grabbed me. She pulled me inside. She grabbed Paco, took us down. Her house was cut out of a kind of a cliff in the mud and took us down in the basement where there was some hay and chickens and things and she sat us there and she lit a lamp and then a little boy came in and she called to him and said, “Go get the other brothers.” And they started bringing chickens and yucca and everything else, risking their life. Why? Because we are one.
Stop saying all these silly things that you are saying, that the body of Christ is divided and it is a mess and it is full of sin. I would not talk about the bride of Christ that way if I was you.
What you have got is a bunch of goats and tares among the sheep. And because very little biblical, compassionate Church discipline is practiced, they live among the sheep, they feed on the sheep and they destroy the sheep and those of you who are leaders in the Church are going to pay a high penalty when you stand before the one who loves them because you did not have enough courage to stand up and confront the wicked.
As a matter of fact, listen to me. The average scenario in North America with regard to churches by and large, the churches are democracies. And I don’t want to get into the ifs and pros or cons of that. But here is what happens. Because the preaching of the gospel is so low, the church is basically the majority of it are carnal lost people and because it is a democracy they by and large govern the direction of the church. And because the pastor doesn’t want to lose the great number of people and because he has wrong ideas regarding evangelism and true conversion, he caters to the wicked in his church and his little group of true sheep that belong to Jesus Christ are sitting there in the midst of all the theater, in the midst of all the worldliness, in the midst of all the multimedia going, “We just want to worship Jesus and we just want someone to teach us the Bible.” And pastors are going to pay for that.
I have.... It is true. It is just true.
You are saying, “Oh, you are just angry.”
My dear friends, do you know what it costs me to say this? It is true. Trying to keep together a bunch of wicked people while a little flock in the midst of them are starving to death and are made to go in directions they don’t want to go with the carnal majority.
Listen to me. If my wife was at Walmart late one night and you walked by as a man and you aw that two men were abusing her, three, four, five, then men were abusing her and hurting her and you put your head down in the name of self preservation and you walked by, I want to tell you something, my friend. I will not only look for those 10 men, I will look for you.
It is the bride of Christ and she is precious to him. It is going to cost you to serve to Jesus. It could cost you your church, your reputation and your denomination, absolutely everything. But the bride of Jesus Christ is worth it.
Look what it says. I love this. Look, 39. “I will give them one heart and one way.”35 And what is that way? It is Christ and it is holiness.
Every true believer I have ever met spoke much of Christ and had a longing desire to be more holy than they were, more conformed to Christ. And, look. “I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear Me always, for their own good and for the good of their children after them.”36
Oh, what a text that is. But let’s just go on really quickly. “I will make an everlasting covenant with them that I will not turn away from them, to do them good.”37
Now, we just read this and so many people who are wicked, who are lost, they just go to church on Sunday. They hear this verse. “Yes, God has made an everlasting covenant with me. He will never turn away from me, never, never. I am secure because of God’s grace.” But they fail to read the second part.
And look what it says. “I will make an everlasting covenant with them that I will not turn away from them, to do them good; and I will put the fear of Me in their hearts so that they will not turn away from Me.”38
The evidence that God has made an everlasting covenant with you, sir, is that he has put the fear of God in you so that you will not turn away from him and if you turn away from him and he does not discipline you and you continue turning away from him, it is evidence that he has not put his fear in you, you have not been regenerated and you have no covenant with God at all.
Oh, it’s true.
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