Dr David Jeremiah — In a Hurting World Why must Church Planting Remain Our Focus — #RMC2020

well thank you and thank you for letting me have a part in this incredible conference I don't know where all the people are who are going to participate in this but I'm I'm grateful that I have a chance to speak into your lives and talk to you a little bit about something that's very very close to my heart I've been trying to figure out ways to tell people that I'm experienced without telling them how old I am but that's pretty hard to do so let me just tell you straight out I have been a pastor for 51 years I started out in Fort Wayne Indiana I actually planted a church there in 1969 with seven families and then I came to San Diego and became the pastor of this church which at the time was one church in three locations long before there were any venues or anything like that my predecessor dr. Tim LaHaye had realized that he could reach more people if he had three locations so there was a location in Solana Beach one in downtown San Diego and the facility that we're in right now here in El Cajon that proved to be very difficult and after a period of time we spun the other two off and we became the Shadow Mountain Church changed our name so we wouldn't be confused with the other two entities and I've been here ever since 1981 soon to be 40 years of teaching and preaching in one church so I'm saying all that because I don't need any awards for that but I'm saying that just to tell you that I'm committed to the church I love the church and I've had many opportunities all over the years to go do things aren't the church that are involved in ministry people say oh if you good to go do this you could reach way more people you could have a much greater impact but I I keep telling them the only place that I can go when that question comes up is that one verse where Jesus said I will build my church and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it a long time ago I learned the lesson to try to stay where the blessing of God is and I know that the blessing of God is on the church so the church is in my heart the church is my target that is where I live and move and breathe and one of the things that's challenging to me at this time is that there are those out there who are trying to redefine the church to give it broad perspective so that just about anything you do that's religious you can call it a church there are all kinds of people who go into the church to try to find and believe in a not a shelter for what they're doing on radio and television because the rules for the church are much less stringent than they are for a separate 501 C 3 the church has become an anomaly to many people they don't know what it is what is the church is this the church or isn't it we have benevolent organizations all over the world that are doing great work I applaud them for what they do they're digging wells and they're sending doctors to the different places around the world and I applaud it I think it's the greatest thing I approve it I send people there but that's not the church it's just not and if we lose sight of what the church is we lose our way because the church is God's idea it's God's plan it's his purpose for reaching the world with the gospel there is no plan B or C there's only one plan it's the church and what I'd like to do is kind of go back and forth with what is the church and why are some of the things we see today not the church I have no desire to be critical of any of them but it's very important that we guard the definition of the church and that we don't call something the church that's not the church so these few verses describe the New Testament church as it was intended to be and in these verses I want to show you six things that make the church a great place I want to tell you that this is a great weekend for me because we have been quote outside of the church buildings now for 15 weeks and as I stand here today we're planning to have our first church service tomorrow on this campus and I cannot tell you how excited I am about that but in the process of that here's another illustration of how misunderstanding can happen concerning the church during this time when we haven't been able to go to church as a group I have been teaching online and just this last week we had 56,000 sites that watched it so they tell us over a hundred thousand people watched me teach now that's a pretty special thing and I've actually had brothers in Christ who do what I do pastors recently this week what I'm say you know I'm thinking about not going back until I have to I said what do you mean well the church is great the church is great look at all this our offerings are up people are sending their money in and so many people are watching and I just said yeah but that's not the church online services are not the church they're services they're important they're the next best thing to being in church at least you can hear a message and some some worship music but I just think it's important in this juncture to say online services are not the church they don't qualify they hardly qualify under any of the six qualifications that are given to us in the book of Acts so the first qualification that you you discover when you read what what is written in this passage is that church is a place where you find Christ church is a place where you can get saved here's what it says and with many other words he testified and exhorted them saying be saved from this perverse generation then those who gladly received his word were baptized and that day about three thousand souls were added to them as a result of Peters preaching and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit three thousand people got saved in one day and it was Peters preaching like he had preached before with the addition of the infilling of the Holy Spirit Church is a place where people find Christ if I were preaching to a congregation today especially it was a it was a mixed in terms of age I would ask this question I would ask you how many of you became Christians because of your church and you would see about half of the people in the auditorium raised their hands they came to at an invitation which is still given in some churches though not many anymore Billy Graham's use of the invitation caused many people to use that as a way to invite people to Jesus Christ I must be old-fashioned because I still give an invitation quite often in our services they're saved through Sunday school classes they're saved through Vacation Bible School they're saved through all of the extra parts of the church church ought to be a place where people get saved there's a there's an argument out there that you don't you don't get people saved at church you bring people to church you train them so that they can go and reach others with the gospel all of that is very true but it's not a either-or it's a both end you bring them to church you preach the gospel they hear the gospel and they get saved and it's life changing that happens in the church that doesn't happen out in the wilderness where you're helping people socially or helping them physically can they get saved yes but they get saved at the church church is a great place to get saved and it's a great place to follow Christ the church was designed by the Lord God as a place for people to get born and then to grow in the verse that I just read it says those who gladly received his word were baptized and that day 3,000 souls were added to them those who came to Christ follow Christ in Baptism their baptism wasn't the result of a years probation there was no catechism these believers were baptized immediately the baptisms at Cornelius home illustrate how that happened can anyone forbid water that these should not be baptized who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have and he commanded them to be baptized in the name of the Lord the next time someone who isn't in a church tries to make you believe they're a church ask them when they had their last baptism service baptism is a church ordinance it's one of the two it's to be administrated under the leadership of the elders or the leaders of the church and the Bible teaches us that part of the church is to be baptized into the body of Christ and baptism is a picture of what happens to us when we become Christians some have argued that when all those people were saved in Jerusalem that that first time 3,000 souls were saved than they all had to be baptized one writer that I read said the 120 disciples divided these converts in and so they went to all the pools in Jerusalem and they had all these simultaneous baptismal services that's all true but it was all part of the church in Jerusalem we have always at shadow Mountain had a little thing about people having random baptisms we always have people come and say you know my buddy got saved can i baptize him in my pool well again if you want to but it's not baptism according to the scripture baptism torna the scripture takes place when the church mates and gathers it's a coming-out party for that believer so if you're if you have a church is anybody isn't saved is anybody getting baptized and then the scripture goes on to say the church is a great place to to feel connected with other people we do rallies all over the country for turning-point I love them they're well attended they're in these big arenas and I get to preach and that's not the church I preach some people get saved but when we say Amen they all leave and go back to their places and I never see them again I don't know if there's any connectivity between some of them they probably come in little groups but there's no ultimate connectivity and that that's a one-time thing that happens that it's over but I've never ever dreamed that it was a church you know one of the things I've tried to do to make sure people understand this is when I when I teach on the radio as you well know media is very expensive and our budgets enough to give me a nightmare every time I think about it but when I ask people to give even at these rallies here's what I tell them please do not give us your tithe we want your tithe your tithe belongs to the church give your tithe to the church and then I say and if you're if you're ministered to a local Christian radio station they depend on your income here if you have more than your tithe give it to them and then if you've given your tithe then you've helped your local radio station you've got anything left over we'd be happy to receive it well you know what God has blessed that we don't have we're not standing on the edge of collapse financially because we've made that appeal why do I do that to remind everybody of the centrality of the church and this is God's purpose that the church be at the center of all that we do so the church is a place to feel connected acts 2:41 says that day about three thousand souls were added to them it wasn't just the names that were added to them the souls were added to them Peter had more converts in one day than Jesus had in his entire three years of ministry on this earth this made the total number of believers in that early church 3,000 120 120 of chapter one and three thousand chapter two we do not know what kind of role was kept in the early church but the Bible says they were added to them they had some idea of how many people were in their group and in that group they were connected to one another so the church is a place where you get saved where you find Christ where you follow Christ where you feel connected with each other and it's a place to focus on change here's the key element of a church that delineates a church from almost every organization that might claim to be one at the center of every church is the declaration of the gospel is the preaching of the word of God and they steadfastly continued in the Apostles doctrine James Montgomery Boyce has an interesting observation about the priority of teaching in the early church here's what he wrote he said there were a lot of things that Luke could have said about the church as we go on we find out it was a joyful church it was an expanding Church a vibrant Church these are all important items nevertheless the first thing Luke talks about is the teaching he stresses that in these early days in spite of an experience as great as Pentecost which might have caused them to focus on their experiences the disciples devoted themselves first to the teaching of the word of God it is important to observe what they were studying they were they were studying the Apostles doctrine the Apostles were those who had witnessed the life of Christ from the baptism to the resurrection and they had been observers of his ministry and his death in his resurrection and his ascension and these were the words that were being taught to the early church and continue to this day to be the core of teaching for believers everywhere a spirit-filled Church will be a Bible studying teaching Church now that might seem like to all of you who are watching this as just you know of course but there there's a movement out there that is really troubling to me and it's it's captured by a little statement that has been attributed to more than one person I don't know who really said it the first time but here's the statement preach the gospel and if necessary use words now when I first heard that I thought what a great statement but it's not a great statement it is it is an error in statement because there is no such thing as the gospel without words you cannot preach the gospel without the word the words are here then the words are here then they have to be here the gospel is the preaching of the word of God and without the preaching of the content of the gospel no one can be saved you cannot become a Christian without two things you have to have the Word of God and the Spirit of God those two things cooperate and new birth happens but if there is no content they say well just go help them go minister to them go to the hospital go serve them and they will come back and ultimately find Christ not it doesn't happen I have a wonderful friend who in Boone North Carolina he is a medical doctor and has been my consulting doctor all of my life since I pretty much came here he was Billy Graham's doctor and helped to keep him alive all those years which gives me great hope I hope he can perform the same thing on me that he did on him but my friend is one of the founders of world medical missions so every year he spends weeks on the mission field he's a thoracic surgeon a very highly regarded thoracic surgeons written several books he's retired from his practice in Boone but he spends all of his time helping doctors take short-term mission trips to the mission field I'll never forget one day when he told me this story he said all of our doctors are skilled in helping people get healed there's a lot of facial work done on the mission field because of leprosy and other things that disfigure a person and he said they're very good and they come to our clinic and we help them and they go back to their home different people but he said one day it dawned on me that we were doing these people a very very bad service I said dr. Furman how could you be doing a bad service he said we were healing their bodies and not taking care of their souls I said what do you mean he said they would come they would be anxious to be served and we would bring them into the operating room and we would help them get better we would have a prayer with them and we would send them home he said we've changed everything in our missions we will not ever operate on anyone in the future until we have presented the gospel of Jesus Christ to them before the operation because if we send them home better all they are is in better health on their way to hell he says not everybody accepts and if they if they choose not to accept the gospel we serve them but we give them this opportunity to become a Christian and to get healed spiritually before they get healed physically I will never forget that and I would tell you there's an awful lot of work that's done in the name of Christ where there is no gospel where there's just service because people believe that you can preach the gospel without words I'm here to tell you it is impossible to preach the gospel without words the gospel is content concerning Jesus Christ to preach the gospel is one of the greatest callings you could ever have and the Bible says without a preacher that can't hear and without hearing that can't be saved so I treasure the fact that in eternity sper spective my calling is much better than that of a medical doctor for the healing that comes from the gospel takes them all the way to heaven and beyond the healing that happens here just takes care of what lasts for a few short years so what I want you to know is that in the church there is this growth that happens there's the preaching that happens if they stay it's a church if they say this is a 501c3 Church ask them when they had their last baptism and ask who's preaching the gospel every week the church cannot be renegades it cannot be pushed into something that it is not you can't morph it into what you want it to be it to be the church is what the Word of God says it is so just a couple more things first of all the church is a great place to find Christ it's a place to follow him it's a place to feel connected it's a place to get changed through the teaching of the word of God but it's also a great place to fellowship with other Christians as I've talked to our people during the cove 819 thing that we've been through they miss the church they can't miss the preaching too much because I've been preaching to them ever since they couldn't come you know if they miss they missed the worship and they missed the fellowship when you're a Christian in today's culture you're in the minority to some extent your hope and your encouragement and your motivation and your strength for life comes when you gather with other believers and you find out you're not alone that you're in this you're in this thing together you're swimming upstream against the culture if you take that away that leaves a big hole in the heart of believer the church is supposed to be a place where we fellowship in acts 2:42 in this seminal passage says and they continued steadfastly in fellowship the New Testament word for fellowship is the word Koinonia and it means partnership or sharing it's a word that means to hold things in common John Stott says that the word fellowship was born on the day of Pentecost it's a reminder to us that the Christian life is not to be lived in isolation the fellowship we enjoy in the church's fellowship with Jesus Christ and fellowship with his other believers for some reason a Christian can't go to church I believe that God extends special grace to that person our radio and television ministry reaches many homebound people we're grateful for that opportunity but I've been really concerned about a lot of people I've heard saying you know what this going to church on online is pretty cool I get up on Sunday morning and get my pajamas on get my coffee we huddle up on the couch and turn on the worship and watch you preach and and we think this is great and I've been screaming at the top of my lungs it's great but it's not Church Church is not isolated Church is the gathering together of God's people Almighty God has put a high priority on our relationships when he wanted to reach us with the gospel he didn't send us a message he sent us his son his son to tell us that the gospel is a relationship with with God through Jesus Christ and then with each other as we grow in Christ the book of Malachi in the Old Testament has a verse that describes the priority that God gives to the relationships of his people here's what it says those who feared the Lord spoke to one another and the Lord listened and heard them so a book of remembrance was written before him for those who fear the Lord and meditate on his name now let me just tell you three things that happen when you fellowship first of all you open your hearts to one another you you you talk to each other you interact with each other you open your heart you become vulnerable to one another you confess your challenges you ask people to pray for you you're you become maybe for the first time in your whole life you become honest with other people and you pray for them and they pray for you you open your heart to them the second thing you do is you open your hands to them if they have a need you help them one of the things that's been so wonderful for me to watch during the Kovan is the is the food stroke the food drive that we've that we started here we began to hear that there are people in El Cajon that were hungry that didn't have enough food to eat we had no idea what we were doing but we know how to ask questions and so we ask a lot of questions and we found other places where they were doing it and we established our own food distribution during and we've delivered over 380,000 pounds of food to people here on this campus as I am in here teaching today the food distribution is going on outside of our building and I almost couldn't get in the building because of the traffic hundreds and hundreds of people have been helped but all of the need is an outside of the church there are people in the church that don't have enough when you become a part of the fellowship you become aware of the the needs that people have and you don't just bury those needs in your heart you open your hands and you give to them we've had people give other families a car we've had them bring them the food that they need that's the spirit of fellowship first of all you open your heart then you open your hands and the ultimate is you open your home and you allow them to come and stay with you in your home you are not afraid 9 I grew up in an open home family my dad was a preacher and every time we had anybody come to speak I got pushed to the couch and they got my room to sleep in so I know what an open home is like and I have to tell you when I visited a radius early on I found out that one of the requirements for graduation is you have to go and stay in the home of one of the local families for a period of time and interact with them and you have to develop that yourself you don't get a sign there you have to open their door and I thought to myself what an incredible way to help people understand the principles of the Word of God and to develop that get-along relationship sort of thing that gives you the opportunity to share your faith so we open our hearts we open our hands and then ultimately in whatever humble way we can we open our homes and that's called fellowship that's what the gospel says we do if we're in a church are you getting the picture of the church the church isn't just something you put on an organization because it sounds good the church is very wonderfully defined in the scripture as a unique organism it's not even an organization it's an organism it's a living breathing organism and so the church is where you find Christ it's where you follow Christ where you feel connected and focus on change and where you fellowship with each other and it's where you fulfill your calling the Bible tells us when we become Christians there's certain things we do first of all we come to the Lord's Supper one of the things I've missed during this time is we haven't had communion and because of the coronavirus restrictions we're not going to be able to have it for a while but communion is one of the things we're commanded to celebrate as a church and the reason for that is were to do it in remembrance of him or to remember how this whole thing happened it's like the Lord God said here's the core of the church and here is an institution that I want to put in your heart so you never forget why you come together communion and then they gather together in prayer I believe more praying is going on during this time perhaps than any other time people are praying together they're just getting together in circles in praying praying for one another praying for the people who are sick praying for the leadership of our country in our community praying for the church that it could be reopened in the early days one of the callings of the believers was to pray and you see that everywhere they continued in prayer they prayed daily they prayed without ceasing they prayed for others and they prayed for the Lost and they celebrated their faith one of the hard things about being a pastor is to watch what happens to people when they get saved most of the time there's a period of time when they get really excited they haven't learned Christianese yet so they speak in their own language and it's really refreshing sometimes a few words get in there that shouldn't perhaps be in a church conversation but it's still okay it's real but then somebody gets them aside and teaches them how to say holy and be thou and all that and and they lose their sense and then what happens you lose contact with the people they know what's supposed to happen when a person comes to Christ in the church is you not only win them to Christ you win their whole sphere of influence you win their families you win their their children their loved ones but what happens to many people they become Christians and then they just close up in the church and they sit and they soak and they sour and they never go out well I want you to hear what happened in the early church fear came upon every soul and many wonders and signs were done through the apostles they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart praising God and having favor with all the people they didn't just become a group that withdrew from society the early church reverence seized everyone the people who saw the church saw that it was alive and moving and different than anything they had ever seen it is evident from this passage that many of the early believers were flaming evangelists they went out with the gospel and they caused others to hear the gospel the explosion of the gospel in Jerusalem can only be explained in that way someone once told me that if you want to empty your church give them this announcement you're going to have a two-week series the first one on prayer and the second on witnessing and they will stay home in droves that's what they said why there's no two things that we feel more guilty about as believers than those two things we all know we don't pray as we should and we don't witness as we should and one of the reasons we don't witness as we should is because we've allowed theologians and teachers to elevate witnessing to something that it isn't that you have to have a theological education to talk to other people about Jesus I once heard a wonderful story about a young monk who was called on to preach the first sermon at his Sterry he was frightened and intimidated in the open with a question how many of you know what I am about to say when no no one raised their hand he admitted well I don't either and he dismissed the assembly and they dismissed it with the words Dominus vobiscum the Lord be with you of course his superiors weren't happy about that and they brought him in and chewed him out and so he had to do it again the next week in the next week to everyone's surprise he asked the same question how many of you know what I'm about to say and this time the brothers decided to teach him a lesson so everybody raised their hand courageously the young monk smiled and he said so since you already know you don't need to hear the sermon and he walked off the stage with Dominus vobiscum after a severe reprimand he slowly ascended the stairs of the platform yet a third time and he deliberately astonished Lee asked the question he had asked twice before how many of you know what I'm about to say two completely unbalanced this clever amateur half of the brothers raised a hand and half of the brothers did not well said the young monk those of you who know tell those who don't know Dominus vobiscum and he walked off the stage well that's a cute little story but it's a story with a very powerful lesson witnessing is those of you who know telling those who don't know who Jesus is and what he can do in your life when we try to make it more sophisticated than that with our charts and books and and all kinds of fancy little things that we do to help people come to Christ we will win some but we're making our work way harder than it should be just ask yourself the question what has Jesus Christ done for me and every time you get a chance to tell somebody what that is that God will begin to use you to fulfill that part of the calling of the church so this is the church and I thought maybe you should know that Radiesse believes everything I have been teaching I went to their website and I found perhaps the best definition the church I have ever read in my life and I'm going to take just a moment to read it to you before we shut this down a church is a group of obedient Jesus followers that are salt and light in its community and that carries out its corporate functions as the body of Christ it grows out of its own social and cultural context so it is comprised of families and marriages and children and elderly it has mature leadership that teaches disciples and exhorts as a living organism it brings in new believers and matures through discipleship into reproduction and multiplication it loves and cares for its own members including the poor and the elderly it meets regularly for biblical instruction in worships sharing resources and prayer taking on forms that are relevant to that culture context it loves its neighbors by engaging them relevantly and meeting their needs it evangelizes those around it and sends its own members to disciple the nations these are not Western ideas the New Testament concepts that must be built into the church are here and at radius we equip you to do the long-lasting serious work that is modeled to us in the New Testament church back in 1969 Don and I left our youth pastor in New Jersey and accepted the call to Fort Wayne Indiana to to plant a church I must tell you that on my list of a hundred things I always wanted to do it wasn't on my list I went to seminary by the way I went to college and I thought when you go to college you go to seminary you shouldn't have to start a church you should be able to inherit one that's big and you know that's what everybody thinks but we met the people the seven families that we're going to start that church and we were we were struck by the genuineness of their heart so in 1969 in August we moved from New Jersey to Fort Wayne to a part of Fort Wayne called the Black Hawk community which was a high ride kind of upper level group and we began what was then and is still today called the Blackhawk Baptist Church first Sunday I preached in that church we had 35 people I stayed there for 12 years 12 of my 50 years of ministry were involved in establishing that church when I left the church was about 1,500 in size and and it was growing and it was vibrant and and I hated to leave it because it was part of who I was well here's the interesting I want to tell you last year just a few months ago Donna and I were invited to go back to the Black Hawk Baptist Church and celebrate their 50th anniversary who gets to do that start a church and stay around for 50 years to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary and ladies and gentlemen when I got what I found there is so overwhelming to me that if I ever had any doubts about the power and uniqueness of the church they were all resolved on that weekend first of all I met all kinds of people who came up to me and said doctor Jeremiah we remember the night you came to our home and shared the gospel with us and then they would tell me what's happened to their children and the grandchildren and how they're serving the Lord and generationally the whole area was changed because of the gospel the church is about 2,000 plus they have a beautiful auditorium but they've spawned five other churches since I left and one of the churches they spawned is now bigger than the home Church when Don and I were there after having been there for about a year and a half we had a group of the young families come and say we need a Christian school our schools are going in the wrong direction we don't want to put our children in the public schools I didn't want to start a school I really didn't I was having a hard not hard enough time trying to figure out what to do with the church but after being pressured we started a school I remember we had just a few students the first year I was a head basketball coach and the principal and my my wife taught typing and we did all the stuff that had to be done when I revisited that church 50 years later just a few months ago its largest Christian school in the whole Fort Wayne area over a thousand students highly regarded and respected and last year they won the state basketball championship in Indiana which I never dreamed that would ever happen and they had to wait till I leave I leave and then they go do that but it was an amazing thing why do I tell you the story when you plant a church you don't plant something that you think is going to last for a while you plant a church forever we planted that church and they've had five pastors in 50 years it is today a vibrant testimony in the city of Fort Wayne we stayed with it for a decade to give it a good start and then we walked away to come and do what God want us to do here but we went back to see that when you plant a church it's the greatest thing you can ever do you have no idea the impact it's going to have in the days ahead and we just got a little glimpse of it in our 50 year journey with that church I covet for all church planters and experience like that don't just plant it and then go do something else plant it and nourish it and grow it and build it and get the right people there and get lay leadership and teach evangelism explosion or whatever you need to do so the church can grow and you will discover that you have fallen in to the greatest thing you could ever imagine you are now in the church and you're building the church and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it father we thank you for this opportunity to talk about this one thing that is so important and vital in my life and in the world in which we live the Church of Jesus Christ we see people doing great things outside of the church and we laud that but we do not lot it enough to give them our title we are the church we are the Church of Jesus Christ the local Assemblies of the body of Christ and we serve under the leadership of our Savior and Lord and we see the effect of the things that were said order in Acts chapter 2 we constantly need to measure what we do against what we should do so that we don't lose our way I want to pray for all the church planters others who are watching this that you will put within their heart a love for the church as we have learned about it today in Jesus name Amen

Channel: Radius International

Views: 19,672

Rating: 4.7003746 out of 5

Keywords: Mission, Great Commission, Chruch, Dr. David Jeremiah, RMC2020, Radius, Radius International, Missions, Church planting, Conference, Missiology, unreached, upgs, People Groups

Id: lMqywQ6leT0

Length: 38min 24sec (2304 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 24 2020