Sermon Tone Analysis

BLANK SLIDE TO BEGIN RECORDING (Please don’t wait for Matt to be on podium.)

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Introduction

We live in a culture that’s increasingly leery of making commitments.

More people ask, “Why get married?

Why not just live together for awhile to test him/her out.

Over the last five decades, the rate of cohabitation has increased by 900% [1].

Then, after living together, half of those couples abandon the pursuit of marrying.

“Why put a ring on it when I may change my mind after some time.”

Similarly, many hesitate to join a church because, well, church life—while wonderful—can be hard.

Committing to doing life with others, whether immediate family, in-laws, or church is hard.

Why agree to membership when I can just come and go as I please?

Or, why not just sign the dotted line to become a member and then just coast alone since I have my community membership, like a club house membership.

After all, I want to have the freedom to pick up and leave if I don’t like something.

You get involved in serving and someone attacks you because they don’t like your perspective, even—and sometimes—especially if it’s biblical.

You try to lead a team, or ministry, and you hear all of the negative opinions about your decision-making—all-the-while no one else wants to step up and lead.

It’s easy to feel defeated.

Healthy church life is hard—it takes work—a committed effort.

And I agree, life in a committed local church environment is hard.

It can be taxing.

But it is also wonderful.

In fact, one of the reasons it is so beautiful is that coming out on the other side of hard seasons shows the beauty of God’s Spirit at work, accomplishing things we’d never accomplish on our own.

ILL: Like a rock with many rough edges that gets tossed around in a river to chip off its rough edges as it collides with other stones, and has the constant pressure of a current to make it smooth and beautiful.

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Proposition: God designed the church to display God’s beautiful love to a lost and dying world through meaningful church membership.

This morning we’ll look at three truths to see the reality of that statement:

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I.

An obedient Christian should commit to meaningful church membership.

II.

Understand the beautiful, complicated love of God.

III.

God displays His love to the world through the Church.

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I.

An obedient Christian should commit to meaningful church membership.

A. Why isn’t membership stated explicitly in the Bible?

But first you may wonder, "If church membership even required in the Bible, then why don’t we find church membership mentioned specifically in the New Testament?”

Meaningful membership is clearly implied all through the New Testament, but it didn’t need to be formalized in the way we need it today because there was only one church per city.

If you were a Christian, you didn’t have options as to where to go.

If you lived in Ephesus, you were a member of the church in Ephesus.

Today, in North America there are usually dozens of evangelical churches in our cities.

To float between several churches is to lack the key ingredient of commitment to particular people and submission to a particular group of elders who will give an account for your soul (Heb.

13:17).

(Cole, Dever, Akin, Leeman)

Listen to how the writer of Hebrews describes the responsibility of church leaders toward you.

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B. The church is described as having members.

The Bible also represents churches as being made up of members.

Pastor/Theologian Mark Dever rightly says, “Combining the collective images of families, parties, and communities with the even more integrated image of an individual body and its various parts, the Bible presents the local church as an entity made up of multiple individuals yet so highly integrated they are identifiable as a unit.

They are even said to be a part of one another (Rom 12:5).

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When Jesus told his followers to seek out the brother who had sinned (Matt 18:15–21), he was presupposing such an integrated conception of body membership, even before the local church began to take shape in Acts and the remainder of the NT.

If all this is true, then everyone who names the name of Jesus should...

C. Commit to your local church through membership and consistent, ongoing ministry activity.

Friends, this is much more than joining a church, or joining this church.

To commit to meaningful membership, means we give our lives to display God’s glorious love to a lost world.

But in order to work together to display God’s glorious love to the world, we must grow in our understanding of it.

When I say, God’s glorious love, we naturally think of all the wonderful aspects of the gospel—the good news of Jesus Christ—that the perfect, holy God gave His Son to come to earth through a virgin birth, live perfectly in thought and deed, and to give His life as a ransom (Mt 10:28), paying the penalty that is rightfully ours for our sins so that we might be transformed, made new, to have relationship with God our Father through repentance and faith.

D. A. Carson opens his slim but profound book called The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God.

In it he observes that the doctrine of God’s love is, like the book’s title suggests, more difficult than people realize.

Many people cite their favorite proof-text and think themselves done with the conversation:

And of course

But we often here just the last part of the veres, “God is love.”

These are true…and wonderful!

But there are other aspects of God’s love that are equally true and necessary for us to understand.

And if we’re to be a church that rightly displays God’s love to the world, we must seek to understand the beautifully complex love of God.

Transition statement: Have you ever looked at a painting that required you to just stand and stare?

Over time, you begin to see different aspects that didn’t stand out to you at first?

We must look intensely at the love of God as the Bible describes it and believe it really is a glorious as the Lord through biblical writers describes it.

We must increasingly seek to...

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II.

Understand the beautifully complex love of God.

Carson’s book [3] highlights five different ways that the Bible speaks of God’s love.

A. The peculiar love shared between the divine Father and Son.

B. God’s providential love over creation

the word love is not used here, but he pronounces everything he has made as “good,” and promises to send rain on the just and unjust alike (Matthew 5:45).

C. God’s salvific love toward the fallen world:

D. God’s particular and elective love toward a chosen people:

E. God’s seemingly conditional love toward his people based on obedience.

The main insight here is that the Bible refers to God’s love in different ways, and we should not make any one category of them absolute, as if to say all his love is providential love or salvific love or something else.

God’s love is varied, and we get to spend our lives learning and growing in our understanding of God’s beautifully complex love, like the artistic brilliance meant to be taken in over long and repeated gazes.

Jonathan Leeman asks “What is Love?” and offers a tentative definition we are to strive for.

In The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love [3], Leeman writes:

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What is love?

Love is an affection for another’s good.

Something in you attracts me to want your good.

Furthermore, the good that I want for you has a fixed and certain content to it—God.

God is the good that God lovingly wants for others, and he’s the good that we should lovingly want for others.

We love our parents, friends, spouses, and enemies best when we desire for them to know the glory of God, a desire predicated on an even more ultimate desire to see his glory displayed.

God’s love is God-centered; ours should be as well.

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III.

Give your life to display God's love to the world through the Church.

Part of Oak Grove’s doctrinal statement on the local church says,

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We believe the local churches are called to be distinct from the world while in it, called to grow in Christlikeness, called to edify fellow believers to maturity, called to acclaim to the world God’s offer of everlasting life and to be the visible representation of the body of Christ in the local community.

(Matt.