The church is not a building but a universal body of believers united by faith in Jesus Christ, distinguishing it from any false professing church. True membership in this "Catholic" or worldwide church is solely through receiving Christ as Savior, a relationship that cannot be broken. The sermon emphasizes that God designs His church with purpose, making it resilient against persecution, unlike worldly organizations. It cautions against materialism and pleasure-seeking as enemies that can weaken the church, and highlights that God's measure of blessing is not by numbers but by faithfulness to His design.
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I'd like to begin by speaking to the young people here this evening. Did you know that you can't go to church? Oh, you hear that a great deal, don't you? I'm going to church. Well, according to the Bible, you can't go to church because the church is not a building. The church is not a place, not an organization. The church is made up of people. It's only the church which is Christ and the great false professing church. There are only two churches in all of the world. There's the true church and the false church. And the Bible is very clear that there's only one door to the church.
And that door is the Lord Jesus. And if you receive him by faith as your Savior, you belong to the church. And no one can take you out of it. And if you don't belong to the Lord Jesus, you can be on every church roll in the city. And it doesn't mean that much. To belong to the church means that we have received the Lord Jesus as our Savior and he has brought us into a wonderful relationship with him so that we can say, I belong to Christ and he belongs to me. Now that's when we're speaking about what we call the universal church.
We could use the term Catholic church if it hadn't been misunderstood because Catholic just means worldwide. Unfortunately, when you take Roman and Catholic, of course, that's a contradiction of terms, isn't it? Roman means Italian, and Catholic means worldwide, and you can't have something that's just Italian and also worldwide at the same time. Ironically, so is the term Plymouth Brethren. I mean, Plymouth means you come from Plymouth, and Brethren means you belong to the family of God, wherever you come from. And so we get these kinds of terms that really are not biblical terms, and we ought to think in Scripture. Isn't that right? We ought to be careful, and to think in Scripture... to see what God has to say. When it comes to the way of salvation, I don't think any Christian would be so presumptuous as to say, well, I think I can make up my own mind as to how I can get to heaven.
We want to know God's way of salvation. When it comes to the subject of the doctrine of Christ, it really doesn't matter too much what we think about that. We want to know what God has to say about it. Now, when it comes to the church, again, it's his church. And we want to know what God has to say about the church. We noticed on a previous evening the form of the church. That is the way God designed the church. Now we're learning why he designed it that way. Why does a bird have wings, feathers? Why does a fish have scales and gills? Why does a duck-billed platypus have a funny beak in the Well, because God designed it for its environment.
God designed it in such a way that it would be equipped to live in the environment designed it for. So the same is true of the Christian Church. God has designed it in a special way, and we ought to recognize that. And He didn't design it just like some architect seemingly designed buildings today. Didn't notice modern architecture? It looks like they build something, doesn't it? Sometimes, you know, they have this angular building and all of a sudden they'll put a big round window in the middle of nowhere. They don't know where does that come from? Well, it just got carried away maybe or something. But when God designed something, everything has its purpose and nothing is out of place.
When we think about the church and the way God designed it, one of the amazing things that comes to our attention is that the church is persecution proof. Now, Satan always has his counterfeit, doesn't he? And we see this in the guerrilla movements around the world today. The Red Brigade and the PLO. And in Canada, we have the FLQ, France de Liberation de Quebec. And you have the Symbienese Liberation Army or whatever, and all kinds of other groups that are called guerrillas. Now, the guerrilla groups are designed in such a way. that they are small groups that are independent of one another. They're all fighting for the same cause, but they're independent so that if you get one group, that's all you get.
It's just the one group. You can't go any further. It's interesting that if you go to Russia today, or to Red China, or to Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, any of the other communist-dominated countries, it really doesn't matter what they call themselves in their New Testament assemblies. Because the first thing the communists do when they take over a country is that they attack the religious system. And that includes the Christians. And so they confiscate their buildings. They throw their pastors in prison. They take away their Bible schools and seminaries. And what do they have left? Well, they have a group of Christians eating in a home, studying the Word of God and letting the Holy Spirit teach them.
That's what he had in mind in the first place. So it really doesn't matter what they call themselves. They are New Testament assemblies gathered for the Lord Jesus alone. It's interesting, I think, that these places, if you were to go there today, you would find hundreds of assemblies behind the Iron Curtain. I have a friend who spends a great deal of time over there, and he has a message for us from those Christians. Do not call them the underground church. They're not hiding. We are. They are standing full faith before the enemy and they are declaring the love of the Lord Jesus. They're not hiding at all. They're not ashamed of the gospel.
They're praying for us because we have been fooled by that wicked enemy called materialism. And may I say that materialism is a far more deadly enemy than communism ever was. In fact, just a few years ago, there was a communist delegation sent from Moscow to the Scandinavian countries to discover how the Scandinavian government had so thoroughly destroyed the power of the church. You know how they did it? It had left them alone. There was no persecution. They just let them have what they wanted. They fed them. They clothed them.
They cared for them. They gave them money. And so they became rich and increased with good in this world, but poor towards God. Oh, we need to watch out for that, deadly enemy, materialism. There are other enemies, too, aren't there? Pleasure-loving, hedonism. And it sneaks in in different ways, too, into the church. There are people who measure blessing by how many people turn up. Or they measure blessing. And by the way, by the way, there are some people who work at the other end of the scale, too, don't they? Hmm, only six people out tonight. You must be doing something, right? like some kind of elitist philosophy. You know, we're right and everybody else is wrong. Thank the Lord for that. Well, it's not that small numbers are good or that big numbers are good.
It's just that numbers don't count at all with God. They don't count at all. That's not how God measures things. Now, some object by saying in the early chapters of Acts, we have the five thousand, about five thousand saved and about three thousand saved. Well, if we were to take the time, we could see that these are symbolic numbers. We saw that already one evening when we were looking at the subject of the formation of the church and saw that there were about five thousand slain. There were about five thousand faiths. And then the Lord Jesus, we recall, in the feeding of the five thousand, he said to his disciples, soon after that, you're going to do greater things than this, not just feeding with fish and bread, but with the bread of life that come down from heaven.
So we must recognize that we are not measuring the church. It's not our job to decide what a church should look like, what a church should function, how it should function. We want to know what God has to say. And we were looking at the subject of church order, and we don't have time to spend much in review, suffice it to say, that it is a great honor for the sister to be the steward of the covering, and it is a great honor for the brother to be used by the Spirit of God to bring glory to Christ, not to himself, by the use of the Word of God in prayer and in the teaching of the Word. I did have a question that had to do with, in fact I had a few questions here, one that had to do with a hair.
And the question says, if long hair is shameful to a man, do you think Christ or any of the men of that day wore long hair? Now, of course, the artist. paints the Lord Jesus with long hair, doesn't it? And yet we have no record whatsoever that the Lord Jesus had long hair. There is one source of confusion, and that is the word Nazarene and Nazarite. Sometimes they're confused and were made to think that the Lord Jesus was a Nazarite. He wasn't. A Nazarene was someone who came from Nazareth. A Nazarite was someone whose parents had taken a vow to show their gratitude to God and the separatedness of the young man, of their son.
He was not to touch wine. He was not to touch dead animals. And he was not to have his hair cut. Now the reason for that was that they were willing to suffer shame for God. And so the principle holds true. It is a shame for a man to have long hair. And they were taking this act upon themselves to show that they were willing to suffer shame for God. When we come to the New Testament, we discover that God is not interested in what we look on the outside so much as how we are on the inside. Now, how we are on the inside will show on the outside only.
And it seems to me that long hair has from the beginning been an act of rebellion. At least in our society, that's what it speaks about. And you read in the book of the Revelation, any of you who picked up the little book that I'm the head covering while they were still available, that one of the verses that speaks of long hair is found in the book of the Revelation, where we read that these who come out of the pit, these cohorts of Satan, they have the faces of men and the hair of women. And so if you want to know the source of all of this, you may wish to look at that verse. But we see again and again that this is a sign of rebellion against order.
What God is interested is in maintaining the order, in maintaining the difference. Now, there was also a question, and we're not really going to deal with it, and I hope you'll forgive me, because it doesn't have to do primarily with the church, and we're pushed for time as it is. But it had to do with men and women's clothing. That particular passage, I think the only passage that speaks of it in the book of Deuteronomy, I think it's, what is it, chapter thirty-three or something like that? I'm not sure on that. This chapter in Deuteronomy is dealing with the mixing of things. Now, there are many who would feel very strongly about a woman wearing man's clothing, but the same passage speaks about the mixing of woolen and linen.
in your gutter. And so you would never be allowed to wear a woolen tie as I have it in a linen shirt. You see, that would be forbidden as well. They were not allowed to put an ox and an ass, that is an unclean, a clean and an unclean animal together in the same yoke. And the principle now, the principle carried right through the Word of God. And that is that God requires that we maintain the distinction in the New Testament church. This is certainly contrary to the way of the world, isn't it? We see in the world that there is a breakdown in the moral order that God has set. We have what is called unisex, so that men and women are wearing the same kinds of clothes.
They are going to the same kinds of places. They are behaving in the same kinds of way. And there is a breakdown in the moral order. Now, God wants us to maintain the order, and that's why a man's hair is to be short, and a woman's hair is to be long. Now the question arises, how long is long? And the word that is used for long is a word that means to cast about as one would throw a shoulder, a cape, or a mantle over your shoulders. Now, if you can cast your hair about, they'll try it now, please. But if you can do that, that's one suggestion. That's what the word comes from. The root of the word means to throw something over your shoulders, as you would throw a cape over your shoulder.
But in the context, I think we come to realize that there is no record wherever of cubits or inches or meters or centimeters is there. You won't find it anywhere. And again, we come to another great principle in the New Testament. one of the great contrast between the Old and New Testament. In the Old Testament, God said, I took you by the hand, Israel, and I led you kicking and screaming all the way through the wilderness. Every step of the way, you busted. You complained. You rebelled against me. And you were always saying, must I. Must I. Do I have to do this? Do I have to do this?
And you were giving me the bare minimum so that in Malachi's day, you were going out behind the barn where there were some three-legged sheep, all mangy and half dead, and dragging it down and giving it to me. He said, well, you want a lamb, don't you? There it is. God said, I don't like leftovers any better than you do. And I'm not going to accept that. Now, that was the principle of law. Must I. And he said, I took you by the hand, and I led you kicking and screaming through the wilderness. Now he says in the New Testament, I'm not going to do that anymore. Instead of law, it's going to be love that's going to be the presiding principle. And I'm going to take you by the heart, not the hand.
And it's not going to be must I, it's going to be may I. It's not going to be how close can I get to the world and still keep God from breathing down fire from heaven. It's going to be how far away from the world can I get and how close to Christ. Now there's a great difference there, isn't there? So he doesn't take us back to Sinai. These are the two great mountains in the last chapter of Hebrews, aren't they? Zion and Sinai. And many a Christian goes back to Sinai and says, give us a law. I hear this all the time. Well, tell us, you know, can we go to movies or not?
What movies can we go to if we can go there? Can we read this book or not? Can we do this or do not? You know, well, God has brought us into law, has He? It's not what can I get away with. It's not what's wrong with it. It's what's right with it. What good is it going to be to me? What benefit will it be in my life and in the life of others? So we've not come to Mount Sinai now. We haven't come back to the law. The law failed before Moses got to the bottom of the mountain. That's how long that lasted. And all the law was good for was to drive us to Christ, said Paul, to show us our desperate need of him. Now that we have Christ, the law is not to rule us, but this, the law of love.
You know the story about the woman who was married to this character who gave her a terrible time. Every day before he left for work, he left her a big long list of all the things she had to do before he got home. And woe besides her if she didn't have them done. And when he got home, he lash out at her if she hadn't done everything that was required her to do. It was a real bondage. And she secretly longed for the day when she'd be free of the old fellow. Finally the happy day, I want you to say that, finally the day arrived when the old boy died. And she determined she would never get married again. But, you know, time passes and she fell in love again. And she married another man and this, oh, this man was so different.
Sometime later, she was cleaning out an old drawer, and she came across one of the lists that her first husband had prepared. She started going down the list. Well, I do that for this husband, and I do that, and that, and that, and that. She got to the end of the list, and I do an awful lot more than that. And I love to do it. What was the difference? It wasn't, must I, but may I. It wasn't the law that found her. It was love that drew her. Now that's going to be the principle in the church. It is not what must I do. What's the bare minimum that I can get away with and still keep God happy? It's what can I do to bring pleasure to his heart after he's brought so much pleasure to mine.
Now we have a great added benefit in the New Testament. And that great added benefit is the indwelling Holy Spirit of God. That was not true in the Old Testament. The Spirit of God came upon a man to use him, whether he was a believer or not, in the case of Balaam, in the case of Pharaoh, in the case of Saul. These men were not believers, but the Spirit of God came upon them to manipulate them to the end that God would be glorified. It had nothing to do with their soul salvation at all. And so David could pray, take not by Holy Spirit from me, that was, He did not wish that the purposes of God be thwarted in his life and he lose the kingdom because of his sin.
But in the New Testament we learn that one of the truths of Holy Scripture that makes the New Testament different to the old is the indwelling of the Spirit of God. Every believer receives the Spirit of God and we do not receive him by measure. You know what that means. They're those who pray for the baptism of the Spirit of God. And they think of the filling of the Spirit as, you know, kind of a liquid measure thing. And I'd like more of the Spirit. Well, the Spirit doesn't come by cubic feet or metric tons. He's a person, you see. And when he comes to indwella, he comes all of him. The question is, not how much of the Spirit I have, but how much of me the Spirit has.
Not how much of the Spirit I have. but how much the Spirit has of me. That's the question when we're talking about the Spirit moving in our lives. Now, if there are some of you sisters here who don't know whether your hair is long enough or not, or some of you brethren here who wonder if your hair is too long, if you're a Christian, all you have to do is ask the Holy Spirit, say, I really want to know, is this the way it should be or not? And I tell you, If your hair is too short, sister, if your hair is too long, brother, you won't be able to correct it fast enough. You'll make you conscious of it. That's what he wants us to be. He wants us to be sensitive to his movement in our lives.
Now, the scripture speaks about the hair being shaven or shorn. You'll notice in First Corinthians chapter eleven, if a woman will not wear a head covering, let her hair be shaven or shorn. But if it's a shame for her to have her hair shaven or shorn, Let her be covered. What's he saying there? Well, he's saying that the woman may think, well, if my hair is my glory, and I cut my glory off, then I don't have to wear a covering. That solves her problem, but it doesn't solve his problem. You see, what is the woman's glory is also the man's covering? So when she takes away her glory, she takes away his covering. Then the man's glory is exposed. And so that's a shame to her because she is responsible for that.
So you see, it is a very intricate thing, and I was mentioning after the meeting. Some people say, big deal, you know, I mean, so what? Well, in the Old Testament, sometimes someone who wasn't supposed to go in went into the presence of God, and they were consumed with fire. Sometimes they would go in with strange incense, and God would judge them immediately. Remember Azad? All he did was try and keep the ark from falling off the car. And God struck him dead. And David got very upset at that. Good Lord, he was just trying to help. God said, I've got a way, and that's not the way.
It was all right for the Philippines. They didn't know any better to put it on an ox cart. It speaks to me of new methods, you see. Well, now, I mean, that's old-fashioned to carry it with days. Don't you know we've got a new vehicle to carry it on? God said, that's not my way. My way is to carry it with stage. And if they'd been carrying it with stage, they wouldn't have had the problem in the first place. Another question that has arisen over these days is this. We look at others and we see great blessings, and they're not doing it the way we think it should be done. What's that? You know, so often there's not much blessing among us, and there's a great deal of blessing elsewhere. What's going on here? A friend of mine many years ago was out.
on the west coast of Canada at a little assembly. There was a Bible study going on. And a young fellow had a question. His question was, there's such and such a church down the road, and they are seeing great blessing. Now, we ought to be careful in measuring blessing, of course. Much that is of man, much that shows, and it's not done under the eye of God at all. It's not blessing as God measures blessing. But suppose it really was blessing. There's a great deal of blessing going on down there. And there's not hardly any blessing going on here. What's wrong? And said one of the older brethren, we have the truth, as if that explained enough. Well, my friend spoke up.
He couldn't keep quiet. He said, may I ask a question further to that? Is it better to have the truth or to have the blessing? It was a long silence and it appeared as if no one was going to answer that one. So he said, well, maybe I can answer it myself. It's best to have both, isn't it? And if you have the truth and you don't have the blessing, you better check and see if something is wrong in your personal life. Now, isn't that the truth? If we have the truth of God, if we have the light and don't have the life, there's something that has broken down. Maybe we don't have the truth after all, as we think it to be. And maybe if we have the truth, we aren't living the truth.
You know, knowing the truth isn't enough, is it? That's what we preach to the unbeliever. We say it's not enough to know it. You have to believe it in your lives. You have to show forth the truth of God. And so it is in our assemblies. And I simply speak this. I don't know your assembly. I've only been here a few days. But just as a little warning, lest we think that by knowing the truth in our head, that that is sufficient. It is not enough. It must not only come into our hearts, but by our hearts reach out into our lives, and we must live what we believe. Now, this ought to always go together. The truth of God and grace have worked in our lives.
Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. Now, we could spend a great deal more time on this subject, but I'd just like to deal with one other issue, and that is when should a woman wear a head covering. Now that's the hot stuff, isn't it? And I personally feel that as a visiting teacher of the Word of God, my responsibility is to show you the principles in the Word of God, and then it is the responsibilities of the elders in this assembly, and those in responsibility to explain or to apply the principles that we have in the Word of God. Then it is the responsibility of the flock to happily submit, as under the Lord, in this situation.
I have discovered across this country that one of the things that brings more grief to young people than anything else is their habit of assessing elders and see whether they qualify or not. I don't find any verse in Scripture that encourages that to you. I find that we are to pray for the elders, we're to encourage them, to obey them, we're to submit to them, we're to learn from them, but I don't find anywhere that we're to judge them. Isn't that belonging? to be judged, the righteous judge, in that day who will bring the hidden things out into the life? That's his responsibility. And in the days in which the Apostle Paul wrote, we discover that they had no choice as to who Caesar was, but they were to submit to him.
They had no choice as to who their parents were, but they were to submit to them. And they had no choice as to who the elders were. That was God's work. And they were to submit there, too. I would suggest when it comes to this matter of where... that we are dealing with a great principle that isn't just dealing with the women's head covering, but many other things that have to do with the divine order. And here's the principle. That God has decreed a home order and a church order and a world order. And we have to keep these clear in our mind. As to the home order, the scripture is clear.
that the husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it and see that the wife, reverend Sir Hudson, if I could take all the families in the world that were having family trouble and gave to them those two statements and they were willing to submit to them, we wouldn't have family trouble between husband and wife anymore. That's the solution, isn't it? That the husband loved his wife as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it and that the wife submit herself to her husband. As far as the children are concerned, the scripture is clear, and I always seem to get that verse to read when we are reading around the table at home. Children, honor, obey your parents in the Lord.
For this is good. It is the first commandment with promise. Even if you're selfish, it makes sense to obey your parents. Because it's a commandment with promise that your life may be long on the earth with the Lord thy God giveth thee. Now, it doesn't mean that you'll live to old age, but you'll live long enough. Long enough to please God, to fulfill His purposes, you'll live long enough. And then, as far as the world order is concerned, again, it's perfectly clear in Scripture, isn't it? Why? There's my relationship to employee and employer. Scripture's very clear there. And we don't have time to go into that, but it is clear. My relationship to unbelievers is clear. I am not to have friendship with the world, but I am... Pardon me, I can't have no fellowship with the world, but I am to make friends of them.
How? By telling them the good news of the gospel. Making friends of the world, the scripture says, with the mammon of unrighteousness. For example, baking a pie and taking it over to someone who's sick or cutting their lawn and using your gas in the lawnmower. or leaving a healthy enough tip that the person will read the tract instead of insulin, leave a few quarters and expect them to read the tract. With the mammon of unrighteousness, we make friends of the world for God, not for ourselves. Now when it comes to church order, it's just as clear that those who are in responsibility in the assembly must take that responsibility because they'll have to give an account to God in that day. And those who are to submit to those in authority must submit or God will make them submit.
Humble yourselves under the mighty hands of God, and He will exalt you in due time. But if you will exalt yourself against God's divine order, you cannot expect to be blessed. Submission is always the path of blessing. Can I say that again? Submission is always the path of blessing. So here's the question. In this particular activity, and you may have a different activity in mind than I do, but you think about some activity that's a question to you, sisters or brothers. In this activity, who would be responsible if something went wrong? Would it be the president of the United States or the governor or whatever?
Would it be your husband, the head of the home, or would it be the elders? Now, as far as I can see in Scripture, those are the only heads. responsible to God. So we have to ask ourselves that question. I use the illustration of visiting a little assembly out in Alberta. We went into the Wednesday night. It was meeting in a home. And so we came in and we sat down and there was church order. As the people came in through the door, really what happened was the brother who owned the home handed the home over as a stewardship to the elders. He couldn't stand at the door. If it was home order, house order, he could stand at the door and say, look, I want you here.
but this is church order now. So the elders are responsible for who's there. So I think this is probably what the diography's problem was. He probably owned a house where they met. And he said, John, I don't want you here. It wasn't his business. This was church order. And so the sisters were silent. That is silent as far as we were concerned. They could speak all they wanted to God. They were to wear their head covering as a testimonial to the fact that neither the man nor the woman was there to glorify themselves. They were there to glorify God. The men did not have their head coverings on as a double reminder that it was God's glory, the glory of the Lord Jesus that was to be, he was to be magnified in their midst.
And they were to speak as the Spirit of God led them. Now we had a happy time together. The next evening, I was staying at the brother's home where we had met, and so he said, why don't we have some folks over tonight? Well, they were just a small group. Everybody showed up again, see? Same building, right? Same crowd. Same furniture. Even the same topic of discussion. Instead of talking about hockey or football or recipes or whatever, they decided to talk about the Lord Jesus. And I think we ought to do that more, don't you? We find it real easy, even right after a meeting, to start talking about anything else. But as the people in Malachi's day, the small remnant, when they got together, they thought upon his name.
They talked about the Lord. Well, what's the difference? As far as the carnal mind is concerned, they say, you're splitting hairs. There's no difference at all. Well, there is a real difference there as far as God is concerned. You see, the first one was church order. And if something went wrong, the elders would have been responsible to God for it. But the next evening, it was an extension of a home ministry. It was the personal exercise of that brother to have the Christians in and to have a time of fellowship around the Lord Jesus. So he would have been responsible to God, not the elders at all. God is not impressed by real estate, is he? I've been in places where I preached the word, and of course there was church order, and then we went back to another little room back there, and then the sisters would jump in and they'd talk and so on and say, well, God isn't impressed by should he already be real estate, is he?
Does that make a difference? Some people think it does. I think we have to grasp the great principle here. What is the principle? The divine order. What was the reason for the fall? for every death, for every sin, for every failure, for every disease, for every war, for every plague. What was it? It was that someone stepped out of order. What happened in the Garden of Eden? And the same kind of calamity will come upon the church if we do not hold to the head, that is to maintain the divine order. Now, let me say very carefully here, that when we met on the next the following night it was not that there was no order it was that it was now family order well there ought to be order in the family I say in some families where there's no order present company accepted but I recognize that in the word of God there ought to be order in the family the wife is going to be marked by the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit a family order She's not going to usurp authority over her husband.
She's not going to badmouth them in front of the people who are there. She's not going to monopolize the conversation. There's going to be family order there. But if we were to turn to chapter twelve, chapter thirteen and fourteen, as we see the Spirit of God developing the principle of the body, remember chapter eleven has to do with the head, and then twelve, thirteen, fourteen has to do with the body. And when we're looking at the subject of the body, the Apostle Paul says that this order, this divine order, is maintained by the sister asking questions at home. Now, the scripture says in the King James, let the women ask their husbands at home.
Actually, the word husbands is translated about fifteen times in the passage by the simple word, the common word for men. That's the word that it is. Let the women ask the men. outside of the church order. And I think there ought to be room for that. And if a sister has a godly husband, whether she does or not, she should ask her husband first. But if her husband doesn't know the answer, perhaps they can go together and they can discuss the matter if it's of sufficient importance with the elders or with an elder or with someone else who is a teacher in the assembly, whom they have confidence in. We certainly wouldn't keep a sister from calling up someone on phone and say, I'm studying my Bible right now and I have a problem and I'd like to know the answer. You see, that's not church order.
There is church order and it ought to be maintained. Then we have another order. It's family order. And I think sometimes we bring things into the church that ought to be a personal exercise before God. We read in the New Testament, for example, that the sisters had a gospel meeting, didn't they? They had a prayer meeting. They would meet down by the laundromat, down by the river. And they would share the gospel with others and they would pray. And there was no offensive behavior there. It wasn't against church order. It was a personal exercise. That was world order, and they were being ambassadors for Christ in the midst of a wicked world. And so sometimes we bring things into the church order that really ought not to be there, and so we end up with lots of problems.
I think we ought to be clear in our thinking. What is church order? While we're talking about this, and I guess I'm kind of bouncing around from Dan to Beersheba, I hope you can hang on to your seats. But while we're talking about this, let's think about Acts two forty-two. Remember the scripture there says that they met together for four reasons, for prayer, for breaking of bread, for the apostle's doctrine or teaching, and for fellowship. Now some have suggested that that is an exhaustive list of what they did in the early church. And so they say we ought not to preach the gospel, for example, in the church. That's something that ought to be done there. I could more strongly disagree. Do you know that they met together and had missionary meetings, isn't it?
Remember when Paul came back with Barnabas and also with Silas? They would meet with the Christians and they would speak about the wonderful things that God had done. That's not in the list of it. Missionary meetings? No. The Apostle Paul enjoined the church at Corinth to meet together for church discipline. It was not something that was packed on to another meeting. It demanded a special meeting for discipline and they gathered together for that reason. They met together for many other reasons, not just for those four, but they did meet regularly for those four reasons. And so there are many things that we have added today. Evangelism, for example, the Sunday school. We don't read about the Sunday school in the Bible as far as I recall. But it's a valid ministry.
And so we ought to recognize that this ought to be a personal exercise before God. And many a time we plug Sunday school teachers in, and they really aren't exercised at all about it. Here we have one of the great principles of activity in the local assembly. We have replaced exercise with organized. And here's what we do. Our brother gets a verse from the Lord. But he doesn't have time to do it. So he chops it up in little pieces, his burden, in little pieces, and he hands it out to a bunch of people to go and do it. God didn't want to do that at all. I talked to a brother out in the East Coast in Canada, and he said, say I've written off to all of these organizations and they sent me all this material.
I'm really exercised about my children's age because they don't have anything for them and I'd like them to have some activity. Well, I said, now, brother, I appreciate that you wrote off to all these organizations. Why don't you just get the friends of your children together in your home and have some games and some nibbles and give them a little Bible story and take them home? And if the Lord likes it and the group grows, well, then maybe you could ask the brethren of the assembly if you could use the building and go ahead and do it. And if the burden becomes too great, well, you get down in your knees and pray, and God will pick sometimes the most unlikely person to come and help you. Not the person you would have thought of at all. But just the right person. Because, you see, if you go and ask them, they'll be working for you, won't they?
And the first little problem that comes along, they'll quit. But if they're working for the Lord, they'll go through thick and thin, won't they? For him. I talked to a young man, and you know what he said to me? He said, JV, on Monday night, I have boys clothes. On Tuesday night, I have a Bible study up at the university. On Wednesday night, we have a regular midweek meeting. On Thursday night, Friday night. He said, you know, I really feel that the Lord has laid on my heart a need for visitation in the homes of the Christians. And I don't have one night period. See what happens? Oh, you see, he was willing and he was able. Well, all Christians are willing. There are a few who are willing to work and all the rest are willing to let them. And they'll give you every job that's that you can do in the least bit.
They'll give it to you to do, see. And here was a brother, and someday I fear he would stand before the Lord, and the Lord would say, well, thanks anyway. I appreciate that you kept busy, but you never did get around to doing what I wanted you to do. So I think we need to be exercised before God. Remember what the Lord Jesus said? I have finished the work. How could you say that? I have finished the work which thou gave us me to do, not what the disciples thought I should do, not what the Jews thought I should do, but what thou gave us me to do. And some Christians we have to be careful when we come before God that we know what he wants us to do. Here are two great principles in the assembly for Christian service.
Number one, whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, doeth thy might. see a job that needs to be done. Young people, the hymn books need to be straight once in a while, don't they? Or a dirty Kleenex lying on the floor. Most places I go, it's the old timers who do all the work. Young people stand around in the back and chat. There's a place for standing around and chatting. But isn't there a place for getting in and getting to work? I believe that many a young person doesn't find out what the will of God is for their life is because they're not willing to get down and pick up dirty Kleenex. You can see somebody get down and pick that up and God says, I can use that, boy. I can use that, girl. because they're willing to do anything for me. So whatsoever thy hand finds to do.
Not what your eyes find to do. Boy, I'd really like to be way up there. I'd really like to do that. No. He says, there's something right at hand. And you know what it is. Something that needs to be done. Well, go ahead and do it. And as you minister, the Lord will bless you. And if you're faithful in a little bit, he'll give you a little bit more. Isn't that the principle? My job? My first responsibility in the assembly was that I straightened the chairs. We had chairs. We used to put them in a circle. We called it. It sure looks like a square to me, but they called it a circle. And we used to meet in a circle. And then after that, we had to disband the circle, and we put it in rows for the Sunday school. And that was my job. Not exactly a glorious job.
I don't recall ever being interviewed by Interest Magazine and my Ministry of Moving Chairs. And that's where I started. So I moved the chairs. I had to know where the thumbtack was in the linoleum where the first chair went, and how many chairs went over, and how many chairs back, and how wide between the roads. It was really quite a responsible position. But you know what the Lord was saying, I think? I'm saying, Nicholson, you start with chairs. Someday I may give you a ministry of helping to straighten out lives, but let's start with chairs, all right? If you get a crooked chair, that's all right, but if you get a crooked life, we're in a lot of trouble. See, I could learn lessons there, working with chairs, lessons about care and diligence and faithfulness, being there every week, not calling up and saying, sorry, folks, I'm off this weekend on another young people's activity.
I can't make it this far. Oh, and Nick one, and the week at one, well, I had to be there. I wasn't there every week, but the Lord helping me. I was there as much as I could be, and sought to be faithful in things. And the elders encouraged me in that ministry. They didn't just leave me. Encourage me. And I knew that there was going to be some place to go beyond moving chairs. And that's important in any business, isn't it? And the Lord's business too? And after a little while, I was encouraged to find another younger man to show him how to move the chairs. So he was encouraged to do that work. And then they gave me the responsibility of cleaning up him after the breaking of bread. And I took that to be a very holy ministry.
and so did my work and then moved on to something else the Sunday school class and then to something else and so the Lord led along and so here is a principle whatsoever thy hand findeth to do do with thy might and when we look at the subject of gifts and we see that in number two on the first column notice the first section elders and deacons and then the second evangelists pastors or shepherds and teachers there's a great distinction between two chapters and one chapter. Here are the two chapters. Roman twelve, First Corinthians twelve. They have to do with individual abilities that are given to every Christian in the local church. Every Christian is given an ability.
It's called a gift. And we talked about that one other evening. On the other hand, there is Ephesians four, and that's different. That's not an ability given to a Christian. That's a gifted person given to the universal church. See the difference now? In Romans twelve and first Corinthians twelve, this is a gift that is given by the Holy Spirit to every individual in the local church. And the purpose of it is for the upbuilding of the body. But there's another ministry that's different. And this is apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers, or shepherds and teachers. That's the only translation for pastor I like to put in there, shepherds and keep it consistent with the rest of the scripture.
Evangelist, shepherds and teachers. The first two were foundational, weren't they? We know that, because, first of all, the Apostle Paul said, the only apostolic succession that I can find in the Word of God, he said, after me shall enter in grievous wolves, bearing the flock. And as far as prophets were concerned, Peter said, there were false prophets when there were true prophets. You can read this second Peter, chapter on the last verse, and chapter two, the first verse. There were false prophets when there were real prophets, when the scripture was being written. But now he said, there shall also be false teachers among you.
Not prophets now, but teachers. False teachers, because the teacher has replaced the prophet. The prophet gave a new revelation of God and put it down in Holy Scripture. The teacher then takes it out and he feeds the people of God with that which the prophet put in. by the Holy Spirit. So these two have individual gifts. When we read about these gifts, and you'll notice there are nine of them, if you take Romans twelve and first Corinthians twelve and work them together, you'll find there are about nine gifts. Some make as many as twenty-two or something, but I think there are probably about nine gifts in answer, interestingly enough, to the nine full fruit of the Holy Spirit of God.
And these nine gifts are to be exercised, and there's an amazing relationship between the two if we have time to look at them. Every Christian has been commanded to do every one of the gifts. Did you know that? We've all been commanded to give, haven't we? Okay, well, don't pass the plate to me. I haven't been given the gifts of giving. Why, we've all been commanded to give. We've all been commanded to help. We've all been commanded to show mercy. We've all been commanded to evangelize. We've all been commanded to teach. Say, now, wait a minute. Listen now. The scripture says. that every one of us should be ready to give an answer for the hope that is within us.
Isn't that teaching? Somebody says, why do you believe that? Why do you sisters wear a head covering? Well, let me show you. And you open up the Word of God and you explain to them why you do what you do. That's teaching, isn't it? It's explaining what the Word of God says in a private way. I'm not speaking about public teaching. But every one of us in the world is a representative of Christ. And when we open our mouths, they're not listening to what we have to say. They want to know what God has to say. so we are to speak a word for the Lord Jesus. And then every one of us is to lead, make straight paths for your own feet, lest those who are following you are led out of the way. Everybody's following someone and everybody's leading someone. And so we have a responsibility to do each of those nine things, to have faith.
Surely no one would question that. Now, if that is true, does that mean we have all of the gifts? No. No, but as we do all of these things, We are led by God's Spirit into the ministry that we will have. We specialize. It doesn't mean that we stop doing these other things. Hey, I found out that my gift is, you know, evangelizing. Sorry, I can't help you carry the other end of the table down to the basement because, well, that's not my gift. Of course not. As we do all of these things, the Spirit of God blesses us. And the Scripture says, a man's gift makes room for him. You don't have to promote yourself, brother. If God is using you, in your sphere, sister, in your sphere, you don't have to promote yourself.
If you're being a blessing to the people of God, you will be encouraged to take responsibility in the local church. And if they don't seem to be interested, you just leave that with the Lord. The Lord knows just how to bring us along, to use us not for our glory, but for his glory. And that's the great purpose of church. Now we deal with these, excuse me, these seers, those who are responsible for government in the local assembly, the elders and the deacons. Now again, elders have other names that are given to them in the scripture, overseers or bishops.
And unfortunately, there are those who have misunderstood and thought that these three words mean three different offices. Well, they are not. speaks about his qualifications. He is not a novice. He is mature in the things of God. Now, I don't pertinently think that it has to do with age, physical age. You recall that when the Apostle Paul left Ephesus, he left it after two years and there were elders there. They'd only been saved two years, but they were ahead of anyone else. He recognized these men as elders. We sometimes think that a man has to be on the way for forty or fifty years to be an elder, don't we?
Now, you can be sure that those men were not watching the late-day show. They were doing double time in the Word of God. They were out doing the work of elders. And, you know, it doesn't matter what you call yourself. If you're not elding, you're not an elder, are you? I mean, if somebody calls me an elephant, that doesn't make me an elephant. And if somebody calls someone an elder, it doesn't make them an elder. an elder is not an office, it's a work. The scripture says, if you desire this office, actually what you're desiring is a good work. You need to work at it. And so there are those who are called elders. They're also called overseers. And here the emphasis is on their responsibility. And when we read about bishops, or those who are called to the episcopate, the bishops, these are Now there the emphasis is on their responsibility to God.
The assembly, as I mentioned before, is not a democracy. It is not a theocracy. Pardon me, it is not an autocracy. It is a theocracy. God rules. Remember Laodicea? It means the voice of the people. And I trust that this is not true in this assembly, that it's the voice of the people that determine the way the assembly goes. whether the people are the elders or the sheep. It's not the voice of the people at all, is it? It's the voice of the good shepherd. And these are they who follow him whithersoever he goes. There's another question that comes to mind, of course, when we deal with the subject of elders, and that is, how are elders recognized?
Now, there are some who say elders are not recognized. I hope they are. One way or another. Now, there are some who say that elders are recognized by the flock. You'll know who the elders are. And there are others who say that the elders should be officially recognized. They should be named in the assembly. Let's think about those two for a minute. And I recognize that we're not going to solve all of these issues just in a few minutes. But let's think about these for a minute or two. Again, our pattern is the New Testament. We're not interested in man's opinions, I trust. If you read in Acts, fourteen, twenty-three, or in Titus one-five, you read that the elders were ordained.
Now they were ordained of God, obviously. But the ordination was an act of public recognition. In Acts twenty and twenty-seven, pardon me, twenty in verse seventeen, they were called, and in verse thirty-two they were commended. So obviously it was known who they were. The Apostle Paul came to Ephesus and he called the elders of the church and they showed up. They know who they were. Obviously someone must take the responsibility in a local assembly. But then the question arises, how are they recognized? There are some who suggest that because apostles have passed away, there's no one really, to recognize them publicly.
Well, we do not have apostles and prophets today, do we? But we do have the scriptures. And the scriptures are the legacy of the apostles and prophets. For the apostles and prophets left on record the profile of an elder. And here we come to this second section, evangelist, shepherd, and teachers. These men were itinerant men. They were given to the whole church. And I think this is the pattern we see in the New Testament. You may differ with me if you wish, and I won't put you out of fellowship, but I would like you to see the pattern here. A man who was an evangelist, say Paulus or Philip or Paul, they would go and preach the gospel, and souls would be saved.
They would be gathered together, they would be baptized, and they would begin to meet at the local gathering of believers. But the evangelist was zealous. He was eager to move on to other places to preach the gospel, and so he would invite a teacher to come along, like Timothy or Titus. And they would come, and they would teach the word of God. And as they taught the word of God, there was the development of the gift in the local assembly. Now, as soon as this man, who was itinerant by his nature, as soon as he saw that there were recognizable elders, he would say, these are the men. From the profile that's given to us, these are the men who are now responsible here, and he would pack his bags and move on.
Now, we read that after they had ordained elders in every place, they moved on, but they would come back to visit, to confirm the saints, to encourage them, and to pass on some greeting, to build them up again. But there was the local church responsibility of the elders there in the assembly. You'll notice that elders always comes in the plural. There's no singular form of the word in the New Testament. The same is true of deacons. The deacons were to relieve the elders of temporal responsibilities that would keep them from the teaching of the Word of God. Unfortunately, many times the elders end up spending their time talking about Simonizing the bus or fixing the leak in the roof or something like that, all things that need to be done, don't they?
But sometimes, because of the obligation, the spiritual obligation, they may hand these works over to those who are godly men in the assembly who can take up that responsibility. Now, I believe you can have an assembly without deacons. We see that in the New Testament church, don't we? In those days, they didn't have a building to look after. They didn't have a Sunday school bus. They didn't have, you know, vacuuming to be done or patching roofs. And so they didn't have deacons. But then when an issue arose that required deacons, the elders were wise enough to realize that it would sap their time to be involved in it. So they handed it over to seven godly men who were to be deacons. We recognize that deacons are not elders who didn't quite make the grave.
You know, that's kind of an impression amongst us. He's a nice brother and everything, but he doesn't know his Bible. Let's make him a deacon. Well, that's not what the Bible teaches at all. These men who were deacons were godly men, Stephen, who stood before the council and preached one of the finest messages in all of the Word of God. He was a deacon. And it seems to me sometimes it takes more of the eye of faith in a deacon than an elder. Because an elder is working with, obviously, spiritual material. He's dealing with lies with the assembly. But for a deacon to be lying on his back in the cold floor working under a furnace late Saturday night, hard to see the spiritual significance of that, isn't it? So you need faith, the eye of faith, to see how physical, temporal things can be used for the glory of God and the furtherance of the kingdom.