What it Means to be Devoted to God's Church - Sinclair Ferguson

well thank you for joining me this afternoon sinclair to discuss your newest book devoted to god's church uh core values for christian fellowship thank you for having me yeah it's been very exciting to receive this book from the printer and it's been a joy to read through it as i prepared for this discussion i wanted to start our discussion by asking you what led to the writing of this book was there a particular issue that you wanted to address or is it something more general than that well it wasn't really a particular issue part it was i think it was that i i was thinking i was trying to think of a book that i would want to give to somebody who was um a potential church member that was my basic idea um or somebody who was already a church member and really needed some recalibration about what it meant to belong to the church um and i think what i have noticed of probably over the last 25 years or so there have been many many books written uh by christian leaders in churches about how to do church um but it struck me there weren't so many books of substance about actually how to be a member of the church so that most of the books struck me were being written by leaders for leaders um and some of them kind of smacked a little of this this made our church successful and if you follow that pattern that will make your church successful too um and i i was personally much more interested in what the church was than in strategies to to make the church successful so you know that was uppermost in my mind and also um something that i think has been true of a number of the books that i've written part of my thinking has been can i write something that a busy pastor might be able to use um if somebody was discussing for example in this instance church membership that he couldn't say well i can spend 15 hours with you anytime you want um but in the absence of that to say well here's a book that roughly is what i would want to say to you and if you read through it then maybe we can meet up and we can talk together about it so in my mind there were really several levels of function for for the book so new members recalibration of our own membership and usefulness to christian ministers and other leaders in churches to help them help people come into membership and understand what church membership really involves yeah i appreciate that it actually dovetails nicely into my next question uh which when you touch on the subject of who you write for and the kinds of books that you see on the market recently here at the banner of truth we've been privileged to publish a number of books by you including from the mouth of god maturity growing up and going on the christian life let's study james in the let study series a child in the manger and also devoted to god blueprints for sanctification with these five books and including your newest book here today they seem to be directed towards christians in the pew or at least they're they're made to be an accessible read and you mentioned some of your rationale there it seems like it seems it's a passion of yours to write that kind of book do you think that's fair yeah i think it is um i i think it's where i've always seen myself belong um i mean obviously just in terms of you know how how god's providence has operated in my life i've spent a lot of time in the academy but the academy has never been my my passion um the church has always been at the center of my you know my personal devotion inside service and the ministry of the word in the church has been very central to me as a recipient of that ministry and also as a minister of the gospel um and so you know having spent having had the benefit of spending time in the academy i think what i've most wanted to do was to try and take the the benefit the privileges that i've had there um and melt them down as it were and make them accessible to christians in general and i think also in that sense um to try to do what i can um given the fact that i've had so far had time and energy to do it to give something to ministers pastors church leaders that they might not themselves have time to produce by themselves but would have enough sympathy with what i was trying to say that it could be serviceable to them so actually i think through most of my life the idea of how can how can i serve my fellow servants of christ as well as the whole body of christ has actually been quite a big driving force to me because i i think very early on in in them when i was i'm not even sure i was out of theological college when this dawned on me just by observing uh ministers that i had heard or that i was coming to know when almost gets the sense there is as broad a diversity of gift among ministers as there is in the body of christ in general and that kind of set me thinking when when i was in my early 20s what gift has god given me that i can use for my fellow ministers and say you know i think christ has given this to me it might be ability it might be time it might be the opportunity to write as in my own case i can give to you and say i think the lord christ has given me this um for you and how can i serve you in that way so i think that is probably true of quite a lot of the books i've written that they've had that kind of background it might not be evident in the books themselves but that's been the background part yeah well i think that's why people have come to appreciate your writing is that balance that you try to strike and the lord's helped you to do so um so we mentioned a couple of the books that you've published recently uh i mentioned devoted to god blueprints for sanctification this book's called devoted to god's church so similar title i think some of our uh readers and listeners might wonder is this in some way a sequel to devoted to god the the one that you did a couple years ago well they certainly could think about it that way but it's it's it's a kind of prequel um if i can use the modern jargon because i think i had put most of it together before i started writing devoted to god and that partly explains why um there are not chapters in devoted to god about how does this it's on sanctification how does this work out in the in the community of the church um i i hope that's not absent from it but the the other book was actually kind of already there and i hadn't got around to completing it so in a sense they they really do belong together um i don't think you could actually put them into one volume um because there's slightly different feel i think uh about the two books but they're very much integrated in in my own thinking okay that's helpful so we won't use the language of devoted to god strikes back we'll take that out of our our jar or jargon that's a helpful yeah i think that would be a good idea well i thought we could talk a little bit about the theme of the book devoted to god's church and begin with uh just the opening question what exactly does it mean to be devoted to god's church yeah um you know it's a week while since i've written the book and to be honest i could not give you a list of the chapters but very foundational in my own thinking there's really two passages in the new testament one is matthew 16 18 um christ saying i will build my church and the gates of hades will not prevail against it and then the conversation with peter and then um is speaking about the cross that that statement very much seems to me to to present to us what is at the heart of jesus vision for his own ministry to to build the church um and coupled with that um in the paul's statement in ephesians that christ loved the church and gave himself for the church and these two ideas that central to christ's ministry is his church building program and central to that is that he loved and loves the church and gave himself for the church these two passages to me carry with them the implication that if we are followers of christ then we need to learn to share christ's vision and we need to we need to learn to share christ's love and this means uh i think for us that the the church um obvious obviously i'm thinking especially of the church local uh the church really ought to lie at the very center of our lives and we must constantly be asking how do we um how do we negotiate our lives out of that center in christ and uh in christ people and in a way there is a there's a very real connection between a theme that really runs through devoted to god and um my concern and devoted to god's church and that is union with christ is quite a big theme in um devoted to god but the implication of being united to christ that comes out in many of the ways in which the new testament expresses it is that if you're united to christ you are thereby united to everybody who is united to christ so that if you think of the vine and the branches or the the the sheep and the shepherd the husband and the wife so many of those ways in which our union with christ is expressed imply that it's not an individualistic thing but is a is a real community thing yeah thank you um i think maybe maybe i could add partner um you know another another consideration there which i think i maybe expressed more in the dedication than i did in the book is that the church um the people of god the family of god has meant more to me than i could possibly express um and it you know has been very much at the center of my own existence and has been the fellowship into which we have tried to enfold our own family so personally and existentially you know i think i could say in christ the church means everything to me uh picking up on on how the church has been a blessing to you personally i wonder what is the most encourage as a pastor what is the most encouraging thing that you've heard church members say about the church and then conversely what is the most discouraging thing that you hear um you know the i think the mo absolutely the most encouraging thing i i think i hear and or have heard is at the end of the lord's day for people to say this has been a glorious day because i think in that statement which i've heard often enough you catch the sense um one of the centrality of worship to the importance of the ministry of the word three the sheer glory of being in the presence of the risen christ and the privilege of access to god by the spirit in worship so that in my own view it's in it's in those occasions when we worship together that the church most fully and clearly is the church um and i think another another tremendously encouraging thing that i think i've heard um is when when people begin to voice that this is their family um because somewhere along the line i came to the conclusion that the the most important a if i can use the word model although i don't think it actually is a model the most important description [Music] of the church in the bible is that it's the family of god and that i think has very much driven part of my own sense of what i am about through being a pastor through the ministry of the the gospel and it i think it's become increasingly important to me the more i've observed the the radical dysfunctionality of family life in the late 20th early 21st century that makes this a dimension of the new testament's view of the church a very powerful witness in the world and so um just to extend the encouragement part um i think it has been a tremendous encouragement in churches i've served when you sense that people who are outsiders realize that this is what is true of this community and this is one of the reasons it is so radically different from other communities and one of the reasons why they sense what they sense when they're among uh when they're among these people um the most discouraging thing um [Music] no i to be honest i don't know what the most discouraging thing is um i think it's probably not in my experience been what people have said um although what people um have said has often been a discouragement to me um i think the most discouraging thing is watching how people respond and and sensing sometimes that people simply do not see what is there because they are actually looking for the wrong thing and but one thing that does discourage me actually is when when people um when people go to other churches and see things they like and then come back and say we should do this here because i think as soon as they say that you realize you're not really thinking about these people um and you're not thinking from first principles upwards about you know this church is these people in this place with these facilities with these pastors with these gifts and our responsibility is not to not to clone ourselves not to use as a model something that is alien to us and i think one of the reasons that discourages me it doesn't discourage me too long and thankfully it hasn't discouraged me too often but one of the reasons it discourages me is because i think it often breathes a sense of dissatisfaction and detachment i remember many years ago now and i may even mention this in the book i was standing um at the front of a church with an elder in the church i was a visitor and they were receiving new members many of them and he turned to me and he's he said to me don't you think this is the greatest church in the world and i remember thinking two things the first was no i don't i think the church i belong to is the greatest church in the world and the other thing was i'm really glad you think that um because that's what one certainly as a minister or pastor or elder um or leader of any kind that's what you long for that people realize we may not have all the facilities that others have we may not have the great preacher that another congregation has but we are us and christ loved us and gave himself for us and he set us down here so that we will learn to love this church to grow and love for one another and to grow and love for him so that's kind of round about answer to the question well you do share that story in the book uh with the friend who talks about the church so that your memory is is working it was a helpful section in fact you touch on a couple of the points that i want to get to next um you make the point uh early on in the book that this is not a book to teach you how to fix your church but this is a book to teach you how to fit in and love the church that god's placed you in do you think that the propensity to want to fix your own church or fix someone's church is a particular issue for young reformed uh folk or do you think it's a broader issue that you see in all age groups in all walks of life yeah i i am i think it is something that has increased for a variety of reasons um you know i remember when i was a young christian you know people might say you know i wish it was this sort of wish i was that um but there weren't there weren't there was neither the literature nor the media pressure um a there wasn't the communication that kind of very quickly infiltrated the way people think so i remember i remember somebody coming into my study in one of the churches i saw and um you know i've kind of amassed quite a number of books over the years and they walked into the study and you know three walls were covered in books and immediately they walked over to rick warren's book the purpose-driven church picked it out and said this is a fantastic book and you know without wanting to comment on rick warren's book the purpose-driven church in my heart i had to sang but of all these books about the trinity about christ about sanctification about the lord's supper you know and books by by authors whose works have lasted for centuries uh it was just it was just the way their eyes were drawn um to this book and it really kind of underlined for me um well 70 years ago if somebody had seen that title uh it wouldn't have been the first title that eyes were drawn to and they would have said well that's an unusual title for a book um so i i do think something has happened and one of the things i think that has happened is this you know if the lord really works in the church and and in lord gives it spiritually numerically at least this would be my own disposition um if people began to say how do you do that you know we need to you need to come and tell us my disposition would be to say i'm not coming to tell you if you want to know come and see and watch what you see and then if you want we'll we'll meet together and we can talk about it but my question will be what did you see here that teaches you about the dynamics of the biblical teaching that you can go to your own congregation and work that out with your people in your place and in your time um and so i think i think over the years i got i got a wee bit suspicious um even god-given success in a church that then turned itself into a literature uh telling other people how to do it or seminars or organizations of consultants and experts um it just seemed to me to be a counter to how you see the teaching of the new testament coming over to the the very varied congregations aware in the new testament you mentioned a little bit uh ago about the dynamic of church life and home life and the differences between the two i think it's it's some balancing life's responsibilities is a is a struggle for many if we're all honest probably a struggle for everybody um and a common struggle uh for families is how to how to balance life between work home life church life and and you've probably heard it said before that well i'm not sure we can make to that service i'm not sure we can make it to that midweek meeting because we need some more um home time we need some more family time so they're making a distinction between the church family and our biological or nuclear families but you make the uh startling point in your book that uh church family isn't like family it is family and i wonder if you could unpack that distinction uh unpack that for us a little bit yeah um i think my first principle is this um there's only one marriage that is going to last forever and that's the marriage between christ and the church you know your marriage my marriage however good and blessed by god they may be appear to be interim arrangements um one of my friends says well i hope i'll be near enough in heaven to be able to speak to her you know even if there is no marriage in heaven but i mean the general point i'm making is um that there are things that are really important to us god given things that are really important to us that in the last analysis are functional in this world but there is a family that will last forever there is an eternal family that will last forever and therefore in a sense we have got to learn to think of that as the family that has absolute priority for us and i think actually this is underlined by jesus um language about family i mean clearly jesus loved his own family and ex and teaches us to love our our family to honor our peer parents to love our siblings and yet he very clearly underlined that his family um in in this sense in even in his own life his family the the church the family of god had a priority over the natural family now when we see that i think we there are two things i think i would say one is that insofar as the local church is an expression of that family um a family branch in carlisle or in dundee or in wherever it is um insofar as we are a branch of that family we need to be very wise about how we structure that family life so that we we don't find ourselves or our families in a situation where we actually create tension between two and i think in the last 150 years often that has been created by the overloading of the church um with all kinds of things for all kinds of people with all kinds of needs and with all kinds of preferences um so that sometimes in churches the things that are people find time for the things that are ancillary to the life of the church and as a result they can't find time for the things that are absolutely central so i think there is a responsibility that the church bears in terms of how it structures its family life and actually in my own view um a really important thing in that context is that we that we put the central things in in the central place and we seek to be as simple as we possibly can be now on the other side um i think sometimes i've encountered christian families and genuine christian families who who give absolute priority to their own family and to their own family traditions over the family of god and the traditions of the family of god and so i think there is a call to us who are nuclear families to make it a priority that we will fold our family life into what i would think of as the absolute elemental or basic structure of the congregation to which we belong and one of the things i've i've i think i've observed um in in christian families is there are some christian families where the parents uh place great emphasis on their responsibility for the spiritual nurturing of their children and that's an appropriate thing but when that begins to be severed from the life of the church it becomes an inappropriate thing and the way i've put it is this because god has never given to any two parents all the resources they need to raise one child for jesus christ and at least in i think i would say in our own experience in in as parents raising our children if you were to say to me what you know what have been the really key elements and that i would just absolutely have to say that a very key element has been the people in the churches to which we belong and i again i you know i i think of one particular instance which which means so much to me i may have used it in the book before about um an elderly very ordinary lady in the church as minister of um that after the end of evening service i was just kind of moving among people and she was sitting in the back seat and i stopped um and one of my boys had been home the previous weekend and i said i saw you were not to embarrass the particular boy i said i saw you were speaking to mentioned his name and this the son is a surgeon um and this lady she probably had no schooling beyond maybe 13 or 14. lived a very ordinary life very minimal means um oh she said it was so good a viewer mentioned his name you know him being what he is to to come and speak to me last sunday and i you know i've never forgotten that it could have like the thrill i felt inside of saying to her you know mrs he was he was he was doing no more than making a tiny repayment on the debt he was to you for a number of times when he was running around this place as a nine-year-old on sunday night that you showed an interest in him um and you see i um you know my children didn't know much about their grandparents but here was a woman who had kind of been a granny um and when you think about the family place in our church and the what we would deprive them of if we didn't let them loose on the the vast and rich experience that is represented in any living congregation i mean i sometimes say to young people you know you should just go and sit down beside somebody in the church and at the end of the sermon said you know so what's your story how did you get here and you'd be absolutely astonished at the stories that lie behind faces that are this old and even older um and it's so thrilling to discover that you you belong to this kind of family um so well my my uh one of our grand daughters in the city she lives in there is actually a statue to an ancestor of her father um who was some kind of admiral or something i don't know much about him and i i've never forgotten her saying uh you know that she had visited she said i visited the statue of my ancestor and she was so proud of him he was such a great man and and i thought to myself well you know the church is full of living stones yeah there are the ancestors in heaven as well but the privileges that we have in the family of god are so vast and rich and we need to treasure them and we get getting back to the question of families i think we need to so fold our children and ourselves into that community that we benefit from all the gifts that christ has given to us that sounds more like a sermon than an answer i'm sorry that's okay you can you can preach all you want yeah no it's it is a lovely story that you share with your son and i just think what a what a lovely godly disposition of that lady to minimize in her own thoughts her the efforts that she's put into that relationship and to focus on the privilege and blessing that she's received i thought that that sounds like a mature christian response yeah yeah it's wonderful really yeah and then you know when you hear that kind of thing you cannot but love that woman even more you know they're so self-effacing totally self-forgetful so seeing i mean it's like a cup of cold water given to her and seeing it as a priceless gift and you know it was a priceless gift for her what she didn't know was that she had given our family a priceless gift as well you know yeah i think we talked about family life and church life and as a young as a young father of four my wife and i we talk a lot about all the opportunities that our kids have you know we want to take academics seriously we love playing sports uh there's soccer there's a baseball there's we take the kids golfing and there's just this pressure of the children you're trying to play piano there's this pressure to put them in everything partly because you see other families putting their children into everything you think well look i want to stretch my children i want to i want to push them and give them these great experiences and opportunities so that they can grow and uh so that they don't they're not sitting on our hands at home but then it's it seems almost impossible to do that as much as you possibly can and have a healthy church life balance so often we we don't do all that we could do and sometimes you think oh i'm not sure if i'm if i'm pushing them enough but then you have those sunday afternoons where you have people over from your church or you're at the evening service or buying service and you see your children interacting with uh the other children in the church or with other parents and you see them looking up to other i mean i can i can speak to my boys like looking up to other dads and thinking oh mr so and so you know i really like what he's doing there and i thought well this is although in a secular sense i'm not pressing them as much as i can in the worldly opportunities that aren't necessarily good or bad what they are getting a very healthy dose of is experience or exposure to christian witness to godly homes to a godly fathers who are setting an example for them and i think oh i don't think i'll look back on this in 20 years and think that was a mistake no no no well if i could uh move on in a couple chapters of the book there's something interesting that you've included in this book that i think some listeners might want to know why you've done this so there's an appendix in here from membership rules for the rotary club and i thought it was interesting that you put that in there and there's a point you're trying to get across uh because you speak uh you or i should say you do get across where you speak of how when we start to talk to new member prospective members at our churches about joining and some of the responsibilities that we would hope they would take on and that they would own and they would pray over in some people's uh perspective that can seem legalistic or even negative and then you you've also given us this rotary club membership rule to give us an example of kind of what's out there so i wonder if you could speak to why you included that in the book yeah it i i really included it in the book because i've just noticed so often that if a church says this is how we live as a church this is what we seek ourselves to do um people may come from a different kind of church or you know they they may really want to structure church life in a way that's convenient to them so that you know if you if you were to say so here are things that are absolutely basic and where you know if you become a member here you should commit to these and people begin to get a bit antsy about this and say well you know that's a wee bit legalistic um i think i just think one day when i was thinking about that i just had this sense uh the rotary club rotary international had certain principles for membership and i thought you know i'll look them up i just did a google search and i think i came up with a one particular rotary club and it really blew me out of the water there were like pages of what was expected of you and that you would be at every meeting was one of those expectation and if you missed a meeting that you would make out the meeting and i thought i have never ever heard a member of the rotary club not that i've known a tremendous number but i have known some i've never had one single one of them say you know the rotary club is so dreadfully legalistic it is you know we we want to we want to belong to the rotary club and when we want to belong to the rotary club we take on board the style of membership that is characteristic of members of rotary international um and i you know i just thought when i put it into the book maybe someday some member of rotary international who has sat very loosely to church membership well the penny will drop with them you know that they have they have been willing to take on a certain levels of responsibility in a secular organization that they have not been willing to take on with respect to the family of god and if they see that they'll recognize as something completely um out of synchronization in the way i'm living the christian life yeah i hope that happens um uh originally i think originally it was a footnote but it was such a long footnote i think i decided it better go in as an appendix yeah and i i it was it was shocking another thing actually when when we we lived in colombia um there was a saint andrew society in colombia being in the carolinas lots of scots that settled there and i discovered um to to my astonishment that at one point uh when we lived there there was a seven year waiting list to become a member a seven year waiting list and i remember one of them one of the deacons in the church greeted me one one day with this tremendous smile on his face who had some scottish blood somewhere in his ancestry said i've become a member you know waiting seven years i thought this is really there's something really interesting about this um so you know occasionally i might say to a new member's question if you want to become a member of the surrounding society there's a waiting list of seven years would you wait that long to become a member of of this church will does it mean that much to you and again it's i think when you see what we are prepared to do for secular things um it it really exposes what we may be unprepared to do for the sake of our own spiritual well-being in our families well you've experienced church life you mentioned your time in colombia you're from scotland you spent some time in philadelphia you've experienced church life from a number of vantage points in the u.s and the uk as a church member and as a church pastor in smaller churches and larger churches and i wonder how have these changes influence your view of the church well i you know i think um i think as as a minister um i think one of the things i've um i think one of the things i've learned is that it doesn't matter what culture you are in sin is sin and failure is failure but the sin will speak with a different accent in in different cultures um and you'll fi certainly as a minister you find different challenges in in different cultures um i certainly i think i was in one at least one culture where being an outsider was it was in many ways a tremendous disadvantage and then i think there are other cultures where being an outsider can can actually be an advantage in some ways you get away with things because people think well they must do that where he where he comes from um [Music] i think another thing that i've i've learned certainly as a minister is um you you i remember reading a book when i was i think i was still a teenager um and it was written by a missionary and he said you know when a missionary goes somewhere overseas he should keep his mouth shut for a year and listen and i think one of the things i've discovered in that respect is that individual congregations have got different cultures and you know your task as a as a leader or minister or a pastor in the church is not to impose an alien culture on the congregation but to draw that congregation into the fullness of the framework of the new testament pattern for church life and that may look different in different places and at different times depending on where you are and the particular people that you have um so i think one of the things that we we learn just by experience is that the church is not a matter of one size fits all and so you need to learn to adapt to the congregation in my case of which you're a minister appropriately adapt to it and on the other hand if you become a member you know you you need to realize that there there is there's a necessity of seeking to release what you had in the church to which you formally belonged in order to embrace what you're given in the church to which you now belong because sometimes i think i've encountered people who just cannot go to any any other church than the church that they once went to and you realize that actually something has happened to slightly misshaped their christian life um sometimes actually it's been caused by the ministry that they've been on under um and sometimes caused for ill in the sense that the minister they'd been under may have given may not have opened them up to an ability to feed on a variety of ministries and and so you know i think as you move from one congregation to another you know there's always this challenge to adaptability and always this challenge um to see what was to see what is central in the church and what is peripheral and not to confuse the two because when you i think when you confuse the two um you end up not being able to adapt to the new situation yeah i think that's a helpful point on on what is essential what is central what is peripheral and i think the sad story of many of our churches is we get those uh priorities backwards or we invert them unfortunately yeah with our you know i think another thing i would say because i have seen this from time to time is um i think it's very important when if you if you move from one church to another to realize that part of the pain of that is going to be that you are no longer who you were in that previous church um and i think i've noticed increasingly um maybe over the last 25 years and more i think probably slightly more a very increased consciousness or at least a speaking about that consciousness among people of what their gift is and so you are gifting it i have no idea where that new language came from but it's become very common language my gifting is and it always can have startles me inside when in an early conversation with someone who's coming to the church says my gifting is because one of the things i think i've noticed and have come to fear is that when you think that way what you are looking for is the church as it were to say to you well if that's your gifting here this this is your place instead of recognizing that the first thing i need to do when i go to a church is become part of that church and wherever there seems to be a need that i am able to meet i should do that um because i've seen i think i've seen quite a number of people become very disenchanted with the church to which they've gone because the you know the sea has not opened up and they have not been given a place for their particular gift and i think they've not recognized that their particular gift isn't actually for them it's for others and the way other people in the church will recognize that you have got a gift is that you do whatever comes to your hand with a servant spirit and within that context if the lord has a purpose to use some particular gift among his people the way will open up um but if you move to another church with the consciousness well this you know this is my gift so this church should make room for it you've really begun to see the church as um as your servant rather than you being that servant you do an excellent job of bringing that out in chapter nine of you from the foot or christian service where you focus on christ's washing of the disciples feet and if the king of glory will uh work on such humble tasks who are we to come into churches and to require a teaching position to feel like my gift thing is being is being appreciate appreciated so yeah that's helpful yeah um well can i ask you some questions about baptism um and it might not be what what most people expect i think when you talk about focusing on the essentials focusing on the foundational first principles of the church i think you make the point in your chapter on baptism that sometimes we are lost in the debates of who should be baptized and you're not saying that those are irrelevant or unhelpful but sometimes we are so focused on that that we we failed to think about reflect on meditate on what baptism is and how how we can benefit from it moving on in our christian life and looking back to our baptism you tell an interesting story about a particularly great student of yours who you said gave you a lesson on baptism i wonder if you could uh share that for the listeners yeah you know maybe i can preface it by saying you know there's a there's a chapter on if i remember rightly as chapter and baptism in the chapter on the lord's suffer because these need to be in a book on the church um you know these are christ's gifts to us and they are important but at the same time um you know i'm a presbyterian um but i i tried to write both of those chapters in such a way that you know that no matter what um connection you had in the church uh at the end of the day if you were whatever kind of baptist you were you would you would be a happier and better baptist and however you celebrate the lord's supper you would you would be more enriched by coming to the lord's stable or the lord's table coming to you um so so the goal there has not been narrowly to persuade people of a of a denominational position but to be serviceable to whatever connection one belongs to but to answer your question directly this is wonderful student um who was from the far east and had a far eastern name um but um he went by timothy and he was a very bright graduate student very very bright man absolutely delightful man and um i felt i got to know him well enough uh to ask him about his his real name and i said i said what timothy what's your real name and he said it's timothy and um i mean timothy is a what we would call a european name it's not a far eastern name so i said i said yeah i know that but what's your real name and he just smiled again he said it's it's timothy and i said um yeah i said so what's your you know what's your what's your your birth name and he told me that very eastern name and i said so that's your real name no no he said my real name is timothy that's the name i was given when i was baptized and i thought what a great lesson you know about i mean it was such a wonderful illustration of what baptism is intended to mean to us um but it's a naming ceremony and we're being named in the name of the father the son and the holy spirit and and from that as for example i think paul does especially in romans chapter six um the significance of our baptism is telling us what our real identity is and i think increasingly i think it's true for most of us that baptism in the lord's supper ought to mean more and more to us the longer we are living the christian life but i think especially in the present identity crisis world in which we live um i thought you know i wish somebody had made that clear to me when i was a 15 year old um but i had this identity um this was who i was because i think you know if you're if you're a 17 year old in this world where you're supposed to make up your own identity and governments are spending fortunes trying to help young people find their identity and the more money they spend the more more confused the young people become that to know who you are when you're 16 with all of this stuff going on around you you know gives you a stability and a dignity that nothing else in the world does and this is what baptism is for um but when we think about it in these terms i think we understand we begin to understand that therefore baptism is not so much a sign of what i have done but it's a it's a sign of what god has given to me in christ this marvelous new identity and timothy was such a great illustration of that here was somebody with this semi-unpronounceable far eastern name and this new name and the new name was the real name i thought this is i can learn a lot just from this conversation i've had with them that's great i enjoyed reading that in the book um i think you don't touch on this specifically in the book about children in worship but i think reflecting on the identity crisis with our youth and then the benefit of seeing baptisms remembering our baptism even for children who aren't partaking of the lord's supper in a in a presbyterian context uh witnessing it and seeing that this is what god's people do being there being present in the congregation singing the hymns with your parents with your peers sitting under the word together that's that great i think one of the most powerful arguments for having children with us in worship is that they would experience all of that and this would be their identity that from their youngest days this is the place where they've been welcomed and where they've been their parents have brought them um yeah yeah so you know um the the church should not be a babysitting a agency for us so that we can enjoy worship as it were um and we recognize that and we also recognize that is it is actually hard work um and naturally some children are going to be harder work than others i remember i was i must have been a church conference somewhere and at one of the meetings i i just sat down at a certain point and one of the other speakers was speaking and i was behind a family vermi amber rightly father mother and three boys and the three boys looked as though they were maximum two years apart so one looked as though he was maybe 13 the next one looked as though he was maybe 10 or 11 and the next one looked as though he was seven or eight and watching them during the service was like watching the same child i think you know at three different ages that the the older one now was taking things in not distracted the middle one was coping pretty well and the you know the the wee boy was he was a wee bit over the place and i think actually i think mum was at this end and dad was at this end but it was such a marvelous illustration to me of how it actually is um because you could see there in the in the the second sun and the first where air in god's goodness the third son was you know he was heading there as well um and it you know it's weekend and week out and you know there'll be some occasions that are more difficult than other occasions and there'll be services that attract their attention more than other sermons that are more interesting than others but then being there among the people of god and in the family of god by that kind of spiritual osmosis discovering who they are and what it means to be a christian um you know that's not something that you can learn by um by going to a special class on the subject you've actually got to be there lead the family through that um you know there's no quick way to that there's no 10 steps to that yeah there are just 52 sundays in the year and 52 days next year and this particular family you know you know they turned you know they took a thousand sundays um but you could see the fruit of it and it's a beautiful thing to see yeah i think in a similar sense to your rotary club uh comparison i often think that um growing up in canada it's very common for parents to put their kids into hockey and hockey practices are very early in the morning at like 5 a.m parents will get out of bed they'll get in the car they'll drive their kids to hockey and they'll sit there and they'll watch their practice for about an hour before the kids go to school before the parents go to work you think what parents are willing to do to help their kids and what they value and what they value and and if you think of that in comparison to the heart like you say the hard work of of training your children to worship uh it is hard work but if parents are wanting to do that for hockey certainly i'll be willing to do this for for worship and for that sense of identity that comes with it um well you know you in one of the chapters you make an interesting decision a distinction for me in the chapter called have you ever arrived at church uh and you make this distinction you mentioned that there was a a proponent of or a a church growth analyst so you were speaking to and he was measuring success of a church by external things like the eloquence of the preaching or the uh the quality of the music and you you wrote in response to that if there is a way of assessing the quality of our worship it is the degree to which we bring it with reverence and on the reference hebrews 12 there otherwise it may be that the object of our worship is no longer the lord but our own worship of him for true worshipers are not conscious of worship so much as they are of god and his presence if this is the case then there is a difference between going to church and arriving at church and i wondered if you could unpack that distinction for us yeah um you know i i think something i've noticed part is uh what i sometimes think of as vicarious worship in which say i have a a pastor who is who is really fine orthodox preacher that well what i believe is what he believes um and you know i i i've often enough heard people say and you know maybe i'm old and grungy but i i i just had a wee bit of a suspicion when they've told me that they they sit under so-and-so's ministry that they're actually trying to tell me something about themselves about their spirit if they sit under his ministry then you know they they are clearly persons of spiritual maturity and it's this kind of transfer of the activity of worship to what is you know purely horizontal the quality of the preaching um the the organ or the band or the soloist or the choir or you know and i think well what we are looking at is what we are doing um and so long as our eyes are on what we are doing we have actually missed the point of what we are doing um that our eyes are are on the lord um remember my i'm my great minister when i was when i was a student william still um spoke at a very famous convention once and he was a he was a complete unknown at it and he he really was a bit of a fisher of water and he was walking away from one of the meetings one night and the lady just turned to him and obviously didn't recognize he was actually one of the speakers and she said to him wasn't he absolutely wonderful tonight and mr still said to her who you know he was making the point you know where were your eyes um were your eyes still on the preacher um and i think i think it actually is true in when the spirit comes and really works through preaching we we become largely oblivious to the preacher um he he fades into the background and the same with the with the music it it supports the words and it's the upwardness of the words that become important to us and for that reason worship is um is a much more exalted reality then i think we often think of it and it's actually it's harder soul work than often we are prepared to put into it but you know here i am singing along and happen to be singing something i enjoy singing and what i'm doing is enjoying singing what i enjoy singing and the words have become you know they're coming off my tongue but the weight of the words is not affecting my heart um and so i think this to me anyway this is a a great challenge to take what i'm doing much more seriously and to seek to have my my gaze focused in in the right place and i think i i think maybe in the book i use the illustration of isaiah um you know if if if that experience took place in the temple in isaiah 6 which i imagine it does um he'd been there plenty of times but on this occasion he saw an experience something that was of a different order altogether um and you know i think in maybe in the book i use that as an illustration of him thinking have i just gone to church for the first time in my life and when that you know i think when you experience the presence of god in that way you can never really be satisfied with anything less i granted there are going to be special occasions special experiences we may have and often they are they seem to me to be to be completely unrelated to the size the size of the congregation can be in a massive congregation can be in a tiny uh congregation but you are conscious that you have met together you have met with god and that that's the supreme goal in our in our worship that's the goal of our praise it's the goal of our praying and it's certainly the goal of our preaching um remember i think maybe he says this in his book preaching and preachers uh martin lloyd john says he can forgive a preacher almost any thing as long as the preaching of the lord brings him into a sense of the presence of god and it's that i think that cleanses and transforms us in our whole being and nurtures us that we have met with him and we have some sense of what paul is speaking about in in to the corinthians when he says the outsider comes in and says surely god is here he's among you in this play it's sort of a frightening thought that you can go to church and not really be there um i think sometimes when you i mean again i often reflect on my own context of father my wife lives with small children get them on the car and you get there and they adjust nicely and you know everything looks nice and we sit down we get to our pew but then you can you can be there in an hour hour and a half to go by and you weren't really there because you weren't focusing on the lord and you like you're being distracted by these secondary things and i think it's certainly an exhortation to us that we would um you know depend on the spirit on the lord's day and and not to go in to sit in our our pews and to just relax and kind of tuck in with service yes yeah that's okay yeah yeah well i have one final question for you and i appreciate all the time you've given me this afternoon to talk about your newest book now because i've been reflecting on the release of this book on god's church of being devoted to god's church at a time when uh for many of us there's i mean some some people here in the united states are back at church some people aren't back at church yet i don't know exactly what it's like in the uk right now but at least in the west we we've never really had an experience of not being able to go to church um so it seems like being a part of a local church is never it's never been a bigger issue than it is today i i don't remember ever having so many ecclesiological conversations with people in our church both the church and state relationship and you know theology of presence and how important is it to be together what about the one another passages and how we're commanded to love one another and to show that they're sharp uh to sharpen one another to absorb one another to rebuke one another how do we do that with outside when we can't be together so my first thought was that this is a really pressing issue now whereas maybe it wasn't before but then more i thought about it uh in different parts of the world up in china or in the middle east for example with the persecution that's going on the threat of not being able to gather is a regular occurrence and certainly it was in the early church as well and then i also thought even broader about what about our our brothers and sisters in nursing homes and they're not able to make it to church like they used to and they're getting on their age and it's just becoming more and more of a battle to make it to church and so i'm i'm saying all this to build up to my question which is what does it look like to be devoted to god's church in a time when it's hard to be together as a church yeah something happened in the connection there maybe you could repeat the question yeah sure so i i'm saying all this to build up to my question which is what does it mean to be devoted to god's church in a time for many of us when it's hard to get together as a church yeah um you know it's one of the interesting things about the use of the word church in the new testament it's the word ecclesia that it it's also used in was used in the secular world of an assembly but when the people dispersed there no longer was an ecclesia so you were only the ecclesia the assembly when you actually assembled and by contrast with that the way the word is used of of christ church in the new testament makes it clear that you're that ecclesia whether you're assembled or not assembled you're that ecclesia because you've been called out of the world to union with jesus christ and in being united to jesus christ you're united to those who belong to jesus christ and i think i think it's this reality that hopefully we have actually experienced in in the last six months or so that the ache that is in us is because while we are still the church safer doesn't wear from one another we are most truly that church when we are gathered together for the worship of god um and at least my own hope is that the expressions i've had from people of how much they miss the gatherings here in scotland at the moment just at the moment over the last couple of months now we've been able to meet a maximum of 50 wearing face masks and not singing um and in our church that means that you you're able to assemble only once every few weeks um and you get this very palpable sense of people just longing to be together and longing to be able to express praise to god um and you know i hope that that's going to be a lasting sense and that while i am very grateful for the technological facilities um that give you a semblance of the life of the church i you know i hope that people are not foolish enough to think that you can you can be the church just as well that way one of one of my sons works for one of the the major um companies that everybody knows the name um and he has teams of these technological experts doing i have no idea what they do in in different parts of the world um and of course they have all the sophisticated technology that they're able to communicate very easily with each other but i've noticed in the and he's worked with two very big multinationals i've i've noticed in both cases that he flies around the world to see people face to face when from one point of view there's absolutely no need to do that except that i think people have this very fundamental sense that you don't really know anybody until you're breathing the same atmosphere until you can smell their breath be with them in a three-dimensional way um so it would be i think the height of of blindness and falling and theological stupidity if anybody were to think as i fear some people may think well we've done it this way we can continue to do to do it that way what we would end up uh if we did that we would end up as grossly distorted christians um we are made for we from the very beginning in genesis 1 26 to 28 we've been made to be together in in these communities and you know i hope it will be true of god's people that we will just as we long to be together more we will appreciate more the the amazing privilege and the tremendously stabilizing nurturing phenomenon that we belong to the people of god when we are surrounded by people who don't belong anywhere and they don't they don't really know who they are it just underlines for me again what an amazing gift the church is to us from the lord jesus well amen i think that's a good place for us to bring our discussion to a close i appreciate your your wisdom and your stories and uh again i've enjoyed uh getting to read the book and and to meditate more on the church and what a gift it is from christ to us so thanks again if you want to find the book you can find at vantruth.org other christian bookstores online it's called go to god's church core values for christian fellowship sinclair thank you so much for your time and appreciate talking to you you

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Length: 79min 29sec (4769 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020