I Belong (5): Comfort in the Visible Church
Local churches are the visible expression of the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ on earth. King Jesus reigns over, rules, governs, cares for, and provides for his people in and through these churches. This is the visible church. Belonging to a local church is essential for you and me. It is a non-negotiable if you truly love Christ, because to love Christ is to love the church of Christ, and this next part is really important to think about because God uses means inside local churches to save His people from their sins and misery.
Church. Think about that word. Church. What is it? What does it mean? Does it refer to a building where people meet to worship God? Does it signify the public worship of God? Does it mean the one organized and global body of believers prior to the Reformation? Does it represent the elders or leadership of a particular body of believers? Is it a verb describing the process of teaching and discipling unbelievers? I think it’s safe to say the word church means different things in different contexts. Would you agree?
With this in mind, we need to think very carefully about the word church in the Bible and in the world today. And I hope these simple thoughts help you think rightly about Christ’s church and belonging to it. If we think rightly about Christ’s church, we can find great comfort in belonging to Christ and his beloved church.
How would you think about the difference between a true Christian worshiping God from the heart in a local church and a self-righteous hypocrite who is unregenerate, doesn’t truly believe, and is simply going through religious motions in the same church? Think about Judas. Take a look at John 13:21-30. You’ll notice that none of the disciples suspected Judas would betray Jesus or that he was the “son of destruction” (Jn. 17:12). Eleven of the disciples were truly united to Christ by faith, learning from him, and following him. One was covert fraud. And from the outside, no one could tell the difference, at least initially. So, in one sense, Judas was a disciple, and in another sense, Judas was not a disciple.
The same is true of the church. There is an external or visible and internal and invisible way to think about church. You can see a local church. In that local church are people who confess Christ together. Among those people confessing Christ are people who are truly united to Christ by faith alone. Yet, alongside them are self-righteous hypocrites who have only the appearance of godliness (2 Tim. 3:5).
Consider from Matthew 7:15 that there are false prophets in the church that look like sheep but are actually ravenous wolves. Consider that according to Matthew 7:21-23, people will confess the Lord and do works in his name but will perish on Judgment Day because they didn’t truly know Christ and were workers of lawlessness. Consider the parable of the sower and its explanation in Matthew 13. Some people receive God’s Word with joy but only endure for a little while because they have no root. Consider the parable of the weeds and its explanation in Matthew 13. The sons of the kingdom and sons of the devil coexist in the world and the church. Consider 1 John 2:19 which explains that some in the church don’t endure in the faith. Consider 1 John 4:20 which explains that some will confess “I love God” but hate their brethren thus proving their confession a lie.
It is true and sobering that there will be self-righteous hypocrites among those who confess Christ. They are part of the community of faith, part of the church, but do not actually trust in or love Christ and cannot always be identified.
So, in one sense self-righteous hypocrites belong to the church.
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Omniscience
I’d like to talk about omniscience.
What would you do if you knew absolutely everything, even things that hadn’t yet happened? I imagine many people would pop into their nearest 7-Eleven and choose the winning lottery numbers. But for me—honestly, just once in my life, I’d like to join the fastest-moving line at my local branch of Target.
Unfortunately for my plan to triumphantly reach the checkout before other people, omniscience is one of God’s so-called “incommunicable” attributes, meaning that it’s an attribute that we do not share with Him. (We looked at two other incommunicable attributes in two earlier episodes of Simply Put when we thought about God’s omnipotence and His omnipresence.)
The word omniscience comes from the Latin omnis meaning “all” and scientia meaning “knowledge.” So literally, omniscience refers to the fact that God has all knowledge. There’s nothing hidden from Him—past, present or future—so there’s nothing that would surprise or confuse Him. And as well as knowing everything about the world and everything about Himself, He also, unlike us, knows how everything appears from every possible point of view.
Psalm 139 says:
O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways…Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord.
The Lord searches every heart and understands every desire and every thought (1 Chron. 28:9).
Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account (Heb. 4:13).
What difference does this make? How does knowing that God knows everything make a radical difference to a person’s life?
Let me suggest three ways that’s God’s omniscience changes our lives for the better.
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The Grammar of Puritan Preaching
This twin focus upon God’s Word and the agent of that Word, namely Christ, was the essence of Puritan preaching. Every nuance and detail of their sermons was a mere reflection and out-working of those twin principles. Christ and His Word were the most basic facts of Puritan preaching—indeed they were the grammar of Puritan preaching.
Preaching was the heartbeat of the Puritan movement. It would be no exaggeration to say that without Puritan preaching there would have been no Puritans. To quote Irvonwy Morgan, “Puritanism in the last resort must be assessed in terms of the pulpit.”[1] And though much has changed since the 17th century, Reformed Christians today are indebted to the Puritans for their contribution to preaching.
But what exactly is Puritan preaching? How may it be properly distinguished from other forms of preaching? Why has its influence been so palatably felt by succeeding generations?
These questions can be answered in different ways, but I’d like to take an atypical approach. Most readers will be familiar with the trivium, or three-fold classical approach to learning. As a means of conveying information to the student, the classical method employed three distinct, yet progressive stages: (1) grammar; (2) dialectic; and (3) rhetoric. According to this classical model, the initial phase of learning any subject necessarily involved learning the basic facts about the particular subject (i.e. grammar). Next came the dialectic phase, which required the student to master the principles or inter-relatedness among those basic facts, thus arriving at a “whole” picture of the individual, basic parts. Lastly, in the rhetoric phase the student was expected to be able to express, either vocally or literarily, the totality of what he had learned in the first two phases.
If this seems foreign, a modern example might help. Consider how a mother might teach her four-year old son how to read. Most would agree that she should begin by having the child learn the foundational facts about our language. This will involve memorizing the alphabet and its corresponding sounds. Over time the child will eventually learn the identification and usage of verbs, nouns, and adjectives. In short, the child will learn the grammar of our language.
But grammar alone is not sufficient for knowing how to read and write. The child must eventually learn the proper relationships between nouns and verbs, between sentences and paragraphs, between words and books. In short, the child will learn the dialectics of language.
But what good is knowledge of language if one is ill-equipped to convey such knowledge to others? Not much. Therefore the child must learn how to express what he has learned. He must learn how to write and speak for himself. In short, the child must eventually learn the art of rhetoric.
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“Gender Queer” Author Suggests Book Is “Integral” For Kids
After NBC News noted that the book was banned in Florida’s Brevard Public Schools, challenged by parents in New Jersey and removed from Wake County Public Libraries in North Carolina, NBC News vilified GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and GOP South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, saying they “piled onto the outrage last month” by asking for investigations as to how “obscene” and “pornographic” books were in schools.
The author of “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” a book which has triggered harsh criticism at school boards for keeping it in school libraries, told NBC News that what NBC News called its “graphic illustrations of LGBTQ sexual experiences” are “integral” and that “we need to reduce the shame” regarding sex among teenagers.
Maia Kobabe’s book “is a de facto guide on gender identity that grapples with the hardships of coming out, the confusion of adolescent crushes and the trauma of being nonbinary in a society that largely sees gender as limited to two categories: man and woman,” NBC News gushed, adding that Kobabe “uses gender-neutral pronouns e, em and eir.”
The author of “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” a book which has triggered harsh criticism at school boards for keeping it in school libraries, told NBC News that what NBC News called its “graphic illustrations of LGBTQ sexual experiences” are “integral” and that “we need to reduce the shame” regarding sex among teenagers.
Maia Kobabe’s book “is a de facto guide on gender identity that grapples with the hardships of coming out, the confusion of adolescent crushes and the trauma of being nonbinary in a society that largely sees gender as limited to two categories: man and woman,” NBC News gushed, adding that Kobabe “uses gender-neutral pronouns e, em and eir.”
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