The Church in Function

Intro

Last week we covered a few questions that all sat under the umbrella of how the church was and is formed. To recap, we began with the question, “what is the church?”, and we answered that it is the body, bride and messenger of Christ. Next we asked who makes up the church; the people that gather and exercise their God-given gifts for the sake of others within the church, building one another up. A collection of leaders and lay-people, all servants of Christ, together in like mind and purpose to glorify God within and outside. Finally, we asked why the church exists; to bring glory to God, to equip the saints for the work of the ministry, and to proclaim the gospel to the world.

With all of that, I gave you some homework. No need to raise your hands, but who did their homework? Who even remembers the homework? If you weren’t here, this was the homework, and this will be the homework for this week too. As you prepare to come to church on Sunday, and for those that had this homework I hope you took time to think and pray through it, ask yourself this - “how might I bring glory to God through my participation in the service with this body of believers?” How has God gifted you and what calling has He put on your life to bring to this body for its glorification of God, its building up, and its mission to go into the world?

That’s a question not just for now, but for every Sunday morning as we prepare to gather. But now this leads us into today’s main question - what does the church do when it gathers? How does Scripture point us to how the church should function, which then informs us as we go through the elements of each Sunday service? Of course, if you’ve ever visited or been a part of another church, you know that every church flows differently. A different order of service, a different style of music, a different amount of prayer, a different duration. I’ve shared before that there is a church right down the road with a 3 hour service. I know a pastor in PA whose service last Sunday was just under 30 minutes. Each church is different, yet for the most part we read the same Bible. So what does the Bible tell us? What should a church do when it gathers? What must a church do when it gathers? As you can see, we added a couple Scripture verses on from last week’s reading, so let’s just read those two extra verse again real quick.

Ephesians 4:15–16 we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.

If there is a “proper working” of the individual part, then surely that will lead to a proper working of the whole. So how do we consider the proper working of the whole which leads to the growth of the whole? As we think through the questions we are asking, we will begin to see how Scripture calls the church to function “properly”.

How a church goes about these things will be different from church to church, but at their core each element of a church’s time together must be rooted in these same things that we will discuss briefly this morning. We will look at things the church does every time we gather, as well as things we observe regularly either on schedule or when the opportunity arises.

So as we recall our study last week on what the church is, let us turn to what the church does when it gathers. These are not in order of importance, but we will simply go in an order that fits the model of our own services. The first answer to our question today is, prayer.

Prayer

Obviously we understand that prayer is an important of our faith. It’s hard to develop a relationship with someone you never talk to. But it is also important for the saints to gather together to pray for one another and for other things that they agree are in need of prayer. If it is important that we have our own individual prayer life, then we should also know that it is important that we have a corporate, or communal prayer life. In our text, Paul talks about the church being equipped and built up “until we all attain the unity of the faith”. By praying together, we bring our hearts and our minds around to the same things and as a result we build unity amongst one another. As Andrea prepares for her surgery on Tuesday, we as a church are united in prayer, having the same mind toward the glory of God and our love and care for our sister.

Since the church began, it has come together to pray and seek the Lord for direction. In Acts 2, the day of pentecost, the day when the Holy Spirit came to indwell the believers, the church structured itself life this:

Acts 2:42 They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.

Part of the devotion and faith of the early church was gathering together to pray. It is helpful for us to do this together for a few reasons. As we’ve already discussed, it helps build unity amongst us. In addition, it also encourages others around us as we pray. We are reminded by one another that we are completely reliant on God’s direction for our lives. We are not strong enough to make it on our own. So when we pray together, we encourage one another by reminding each other that none of us is so much greater than the other that we can manage to make our way through life without God to aid and to guide us, not just individually, but also as a church community.

There is a well known verse where Jesus says the famous line “where two or more are gathered”, but that verse lands in the context of the model given to the church for church discipline. We will dive into that next week. But with that, there is clearly a theme in Scripture that is calling believers to be joined together and not apart from each other. And Jesus says in that passage that is two of us agree about anything, then we can ask and it shall be done. So when we come together in prayer and we plead with the Lord together with one voice and one heart, then we are trusting in the words of Jesus that he hears us and he answers us.

So we come together each week to pray so that we might place our trust in God, we might cultivate unity by binding our hearts around these things that we pray for, and encourage one another by admitting our reliance on God and by extending love and care for one another through prayer.

Prayer is an essential and necessary element to the Christian church service and helps us to unite our minds around the person of God.

The next answer to our question of the church’s function is the worship of God.

Worship of God

This one can take a few different forms, but one thing we know for certain, as is laid out for us throughout Scripture - we were made to worship God. And while we should certainly be worshipping God as we prayer and as we dive into His Word, we most commonly understand worship of God to be our singing songs. We also see this throughout Scripture. When the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, Miriam broke out her tambourine and the people sang. We have an entire book in the Bible of singing called the Psalms. Jesus and His disciples sing at the passover feast. When Jesus is entering the city before His death, the people are praising Him and singing and the Pharisees tell Jesus to tell the people to be quiet. But then Jesus responds to them and says that if the voices of the people fell silent then even the rocks would cry out in praise. Pauls says here in the book of Ephesians, chapter 5:

Ephesians 5:19–20 speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord; always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father;

We would made to sing. We were made to worship. We must sing and we must worship. And we should encourage one another to worship as well.

This worship may look different from church to church. Traditional hymns, modern hymns, contemporary music, just singing the Psalms…there are some options. None are more right than another, and none are more wrong. The important thing is that what is sung be rooted in Scripture and true of the character and person of God. We may have our own individual preference, but the only important thing is that God is worshiped and that we are active participants in that worship for the glory of God. Do you really want a rock to take your job?

Maybe you’re one of those folks that can’t hold a tune? Maybe you’re not comfortable singing in front of others? Maybe you don’t like the song or maybe there’s another excuse. But the simple fact is that God demands worship, God created us to worship, and our whole lives are supposed to be lived in worship to God. So when we come together as the body and bride of Christ each week, then we worship together the God who has brought us together to worship.

The time of worship helps to put our focus on God, it reminds us of what is true of Him, and once again it cultivates unity amongst us as our hearts and voices join together for God’s glory.

And if the time of worship isn’t really your thing, regardless of the reasoning, I would challenge you to change that. Because there is nothing about the time of worship that is about you or how you feel about it. It is only and always about God. No one else, nothing else. It is a time set aside to bring glory to God through song, as is modeled for us throughout Scripture.

Some characterize worship in a church setting to be choir practice for heaven, and I would agree with that. You don’t want to show up to heaven out of practice, do you? Night and day, day and night, angels surround the throne of God singing, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God, Almighty, the whole earth is filled with His glory” and we will be a part of that choir. Included in eternity will be the endless and infinite worship of God and while we are here now we should be preparing for that. When we lift up our voices as a church and worship God together we are literally gaining a glimpse of what heaven will be like when the multitude lifts their voices to the Lord.

So whatever it might look like, worship is a necessary element of the church service. We are creatures created to worship the Creator.

Finally, and probably most importantly, we gather for the proclamation of the Word of God.

Proclamation of the Word

Whether it is simply Scripture reading, Sunday school, or the sermon, the proclamation of the Word of God is the most important and necessary thing that must happen in a church gathering.

Go back to the Old Testament and you have the Law of God written for a read to the people. Go to the book of Nehemiah. As they rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, they returned from their exile and the first thing that happened after the walls were complete was Ezra took out the scrolls of God’s Word and read them allowed in the public square amongst the people. The overwhelming majority of Jesus’ ministry was spent teaching people about the Word of God, both for the first time ever and at times correcting an already existing understanding. And so when we come together on Sunday mornings to pray and to worship, we also come together to follow the Biblical model of opening the Word of God together and receiving instruction from it for the building up of the saints and the church, pointing us toward the glories of God and how we should live our lives according to such glory.

If we consider Acts 2 again and we peak into the early church, it tells us something else. Let’s read that verse 42 again.

Acts 2:42 They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.

There was a commitment in the church to the proclamation of the Word of God, but not just general proclamation, but a particular devotion to those who were teaching them particularly. Since the beginning of the church, members and those in attendance have made a commitment to the teaching of the word in their own local assembly, and this is an important thing. Outside of your own personal study, which should be happening, the Sunday morning sermon at church is and should be the primary instruction in the Word that the believer receives. And our passage in Ephesians clues us into why that should be the case. Let’s read 11 through 14 in Ephesians real quick and then we will unpack in for a moment.

Ephesians 4:11–14 And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ; until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ. As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming;

This may take us back to last week a little bit, but I’m shifting the emphasis a bit. Those who shepherd, pastor and teach are given to the church for these reasons: to equip the saints for the work of service, to build up the body, to cultivate unity, to make mature disciples and to lead the saints toward truth and away from falsehoods. In the local church setting, those who are gifted and called to such a task are particularly committed to you, and Scripture makes clear that you should be committed and devoted to receiving that teaching because that teaching is given in the particular context of you and your church. God uses the time of proclamation to build up the local church, so we should devote ourselves to it.

Now for some clarity. I am not saying you should only take in the Sunday morning sermon. There are plenty of other wonderful times and plenty of other wonderful people that can build you up and encourage you in your faith. I am not saying that you should only listen to the primary preacher in your church and nobody else, and certainly the truth of Scripture takes precedent over anything you here come out of the mouth of the one interpreting it, hopefully by the work of the Holy Spirit in them.

What I am saying is that we should not be content to miss a teaching on a Sunday and never look back. That is the teaching given with us in mind and our devotion to it should be so deep that we hunger for it when we come together and we desire it when we are not. This is not to say that church must be a mandatory every single Sunday event. If you’re away for a week here and there, enjoy the time away with friends, family, or on your own. But we shouldn’t just write off the teaching from which we are absent as if it is something that we didn’t or don’t need. Thankfully we live in the technology age where we can go back and watch or listen. But only the teachers of your church are going to search the Scripture and bring forth a word from the Lord with the context of you and your church in mind. So like I said, outside of your own study, you should consider the teaching within the body of believers that you have committed yourself to as a teaching of utmost importance for you and for the body.

Does this mean you can’t listen to other teachers? Absolutely not. But consider that those teachers are not thinking of you as they teach, they are not taking particular care of the body for which you are a part, and they have no responsibility to be concerned for your spiritual health and well-being. But their teaching can still be good. I will often listen to sermons by John Piper, Matt Chandler, and a couple others, because their teaching is an encouragement to me. I know many of you are David Jeremiah fans and there may be some others I’m just not thinking of at the moment. The more of the Word of the Lord that we can take into our lives the better. Yes and amen. But if we use those other teachers as our primary source for instruction of the Word, then we are failing to do what the church has done for 2,000 years, and that is devoting ourselves to what is happening in our own church. Anything outside of our own individual study, where we are reading the Bible on our own with no voice outside of the Holy Spirit to guide us, and outside of the Sunday morning sermon, should be supplemental. It should be in addition to. Because God has given the church people to communicate His Word with that church and those people in mind, we should be devoted to what God has given to us and for us. The only teaching that we should be devoted to is this.

Okay, let’s press on before we go for too long.

Fellowship With the Saints

In all of these things that we do when we gather, we also have fellowship with one another. This is what Hebrews 10 says;

Hebrews 10:24–25 and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near.

An important aspect of our weekly gathering is that we commit ourselves to coming together so that we might spur one another on and encourage one another as we continue to see the immanence of Christ’s return. We gather not for the sake of ourselves or to accomplish something for us, but we gather for one another out of our love and care for one another and our devotion to Christ. So in all of these necessary elements of the church service, all of them our permeated by the fellowship we have with one another. And that’s some of what we talked about last week, so we won’t go too deep this morning. But when we pray, we pray together. When we worship, we worship together. When we are instructed, we are instructed together. We don’t do any of this alone. And if we come into church with this mentality that tells us we need something for ourselves out of the service and with that we have no care for others, then we are devoted only to ourselves and have no devotion to Christ’s calling on His church.

I’ve mentioned this book before, but I just want to read a couple lines out of it briefly. I encourage everyone to read this book if you can. You can see how small it is, and when I bought this copy it was only a $6 book, so it’s a cheap and quick read. But here is what author Tony Payne says;

Read two highlighted sections…

Church isn’t about us. It’s about Christ and it’s about the people we gather with, and everything that we must do when we gather is involved with this mindset that we set not on ourselves, but on others around us.

If we consider our two new verses again:

Ephesians 4:15–16 we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.

We are to grow individually for the sake of everyone else around us, that our proper working of ourselves might lead to proper working of the body, and therefore growth of the whole. We are, as Scripture says, held together by what every joint supplies. We are not individual joints, but joints holding the whole of the body together, and we need to be working properly, and the properly working joint realizes it’s impact on the whole body.

Other Things

Two other things the church must do:

One, as need arises, follow the command of Scripture in baptizing new believers and bringing them into the fold of the family.

Two, often remembering the sacrifice of Christ on the cross through the Lord’s supper. Churches do this differently. Some weekly, some monthly, some not nearly often enough. I would say it should never been done less than once a month as a body. But communion is a gift to the body to do together, and we should not neglect it for so long that we begin to forget.

If you want more on Baptism and Communion, you can go on YouTube or on our website and listen to the sermon from August 11 of last year. For the sake of time, we won’t dive in today.

When It’s Not Sunday

Now one final thing to think through. What about when it’s not Sunday? And no, I’m not talking about Wednesday night Bible study. But our faith doesn’t stop when the church service ends. And if it does for you, then I am thoroughly concerned for you, your spiritual health, and perhaps even the authenticity of your profession of faith. The devotion that Acts 2 outlines is not Sunday morning devotion, but daily devotion. We may come together once a week to hear the Word, but the rest of the week we should be devoted to living the Word. We may come together once a week to pray together, but we should be devoted to living a life of prayer for one another. We may come together once a week to worship together, but every moment of our lives should be devoted to worshiping God.

Sunday morning should be our launching point that starts our week off on a high note and carries us through in our longing for the next gathering. It should be a place where the encouragement we feel throughout the week is continuing and spilling over onto others as we join together.

If Sunday morning is an interruption to your weekly flow…and I don’t mean that in the sense of it being an inconvenience that you begrudgingly drag yourself through, or in the sense of doing church in place of something else you’d rather be doing or somewhere else you’d rather be…if your week is completely void of all that took place on a Sunday morning, and you come back to each Sunday morning to interrupt the flow you’ve had throughout the week, then I seriously your salvation. If your Christianity is confined to what you do at or for your church on a Sunday, because church is the “Christian” thing to do, then you are no Christian at all, or at the very least are far from being a healthy one.

This doesn’t mean that our weeks must be all about church. I don’t expect to see a single person in church all the time or every time. But our worship should never be reserved for Sunday morning. Our prayer should never be reserved for Sunday morning. Our study should never be reserved for Sunday morning. As we go throughout our weeks and the responsibilities we have, all that we do should be impacted by what we did on Sunday as we prayed, worship, studied and encouraged one another. If Sunday morning is a unique interruption in your week, then I challenge you to devote yourself more deeply to the study of Scripture and to obedience to Christ’s calling. He doesn’t want you to sit in a pew - He wants you to build up His church.

We could go on and on, but let’s stop here for now and let’s pray. But before we pray, I want you to write down these things to ask yourselves this week:

How am I gifted to bring glory to God through service to the church and it’s people? How is God calling me in my own devotion to prayer, teaching, worship and encouragement? Am I devoted to the body, or am I devoted to myself?

Homework

Your homework is getting doubled this week. Last week I told you to ask this question: how might I bring glory to God through my participation in the service with this body of believers?

This week, add those questions we just discussed.