Introduction: One of the reasons why people don’t join a church is because they are nervous about all the talk about authority and submission. Our age makes us allergic to institutions; we are trained by the media to distrust our leaders. On top of this there have been many instances of spiritual abuse where a church leader has damaged his church by being oppressive and self-willed. I know there are many here today who have seen this type of spiritual abuse where elders have assumed powers to themselves that have dictated who one should marry, what job they should do, how they should dress, wear their hair, and even think. This type of spiritual abuse has not only gone on in places like Gloriavale it is also prevalent in the Charismatic Church or wherever people claim that God has given them a revelation about what I ought to do with my life. It can go on wherever you have big ministries and personality cults, where a church develops around a single man and his ideas. I have also seen examples of it when a man has been a pastor in a single place for over 40 years and his opinions become law. For all of these reasons and more people are nervous to commit to becoming a member of a local church, in submitting themselves to a church, submitting to the members and the elders. Today I would like to clarify what the Bible says about authority in the local church. There is no one verse we will be looking at but will be jumping around. I have chosen to structure this message around a sentiment expressed in a 1648 document called the Cambridge Platform. This was a document written by the American Congregationalists in response to the Westminster Confession...

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Introduction: John 14:6, ‘Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ How do people respond today to the statement that Jesus is the only way to heaven? Here is an excerpt from the Phil Donahue Show, where he is interviewing conservative Evangelical scholar, and principal of the Southern Baptist Seminary, Albert Mohler, along with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, DONAHUE:  Well, Dr. Mohler, sir, nice to see you again. You’re how many strong these days, the southern Baptists? REV. ALBERT MOHLER, SOUTHERN BAPTIST MINISTER: About 16 million members, Phil, and about 40,000 churches. It’s good to be with you tonight. DONAHUE: Thank you. Do these 16 million people believe Jews can go to heaven? MOHLER: Southern Baptists, with other Christians, believe that all persons can go to heaven who come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And there is no discrimination on the basis of ethnic or racial or national issues, related to who will go to the Scriptures. It’s those who are in Christ. The defining issue is faith in Christ. DONAHUE: So a good Jew is not going to heaven. MOHLER: Well, all persons are sinners in need of a savior. Jesus Christ is the sole mediator. And the gospel, we are told by the Apostle Paul, comes first to the Jews and then to the gentiles. And salvation is found in his name, and in his name alone, through faith in Christ. DONAHUE: So if a Nazi killed a Jew, a good Jew, practicing Jew, the Jew goes to hell, but the Nazi still has a chance to get to heaven. That would be the consequence of your position. MOHLER: Well, the gospel is not just for the worst of us. The gospel...

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Introduction: When you woke up this morning and the reality of life came slowly through the sleep fog and you realised that it was the Lord’s Day and you had to go to church, what was your emotional investment in that thought? Today as we continue our series on membership I want to talk to you about the necessity of Church and strike a tone that scripture strikes when it speaks about the necessity of going to church. I have called this sermon: Going to Church as if your life depended on it, because it does. Too often when we think of church we think of boredom, burden, optional extra. We don’t think lifeline, life guard, life support system. So today we are going to be listening to the letter to the Hebrews as it talks to us about the necessity of Church. The book of Hebrews was written to a group of Jewish believers who under a lot of pressure to give up Christianity and return to Judaism. Their faith was under fire and the letter to the Hebrews was written to equip them with the facts of Christ’ superiority to Judaism that they needed to know in order to cling to Christ, the warnings they needed to hear so that they would not forsake Christ, as well as instructions about how they needed each other in order to survive the pressure of these persecutions. The verses I would like us to begin with are Hebrews 10:24-25: “And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” Let’s fill in the context. The Book of Hebrews in general...

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Introduction: One of the most emotional arguments against Christianity is the problem of hell. Many are ready to accept a God of love but will not believe in the God of the Bible because of the doctrine of endless conscious torment. The Bible’s teaching on hell is one of the most nightmarish images we can imagine, and our minds and emotions have drawn back in horror from them. The enemies to this teaching are everywhere, outside Christianity, inside the church and even our hearts cringe in the face of such harsh realities. We must recognise as we begin this discussion that the doctrine of hell is a deeply disturbing teaching, but we will see that the problem is not logical rather it is psychological. One of the things we have to realise as we begin looking at this teaching is that Jesus speaks more about hell than any other person in the Bible. God made man, who proved His identity by His miracles, who was witnessed to live a perfect life, and who resurrected from the dead, He is the one who gives us this teaching to embrace. E.G., Matt 25:41, ‘Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’ Many think of Jesus as a good teacher, or ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’, but it just goes to show that they have not familiarised themselves with the Christ of Scripture. Christ’s own descriptions of hell are severe and terrifying. He spoke of hell being a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth, a description of intense pain and sorrow, Matt. 25:30, ‘And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. This is...

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Introduction: When do we call a group of Christians a church? What distinctive marks does it have to have to qualify as a church? At what point would you call a church apostate and say they were once a church but they are a church no longer? What is the bare minimum for having a church? Isn’t a church when 2 or 3 are gathered? Is it a church when: A few friends meet at a coffee shop to discuss the spiritual message in a film like the Matrix? When a family is having its daily devotions? When the staff of a Christian publishing company meet for morning prayer before work? When the staff of a Christian book shop go on a retreat together? The group of ladies on a ladies retreat? When the youth group meets? When a home cell meets? When two Christians are enjoying God’s creation doing a round of golf? When the bible college students and faculty meet for chapel? Are mission agencies and evangelistic ministries churches? Is a soup kitchen event church? I want to show you why none of these scenarios are properly called, church. As our point of departure we will be using what the Reformers called, the marks of the church. The later reformers and reformed confessions came to a basic consensus that there are three basic ingredients to a true church: the true preaching of the word of God, the proper administration of the sacraments, and the administering of church discipline. Implied within these three is a fourth mark, properly appointed officers of the church, in particular elders who both teach and oversee the disciplinary aspects of the church. And still further the mark of membership is implied as a fifth mark. Last week we looked at the church as an...

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Introduction: One of the most common objections to Christianity goes something like this: I would never join the church because there are too many hypocrites in it; or, if the church is supposed to be preaching the truth, why is it responsible for so much evil. Or as famous Atheist Madalyn Murray O Hair put it, ‘Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea.’ I have mixed feelings about how good an argument against Christianity this really is. On the one hand I am sympathetic to the fact that a messenger can discredit a message, and credibility is lost when the church that claims to believe and follow the truth ends up denying the truth it preaches. However, I also think there is a logical fallacy here, an Ad Hominem argument. The words Ad Hominem literally mean “to the person”, and it is a cheap tactic in logic when you attack a person and not examine the argument they are proposing. Irving M. Copi in his text book Introduction to Logic explains how the ad hominem argument works: ‘The way in which this irrelevant argument may sometimes persuade is through the psychological process of transference. Where an attitude of disapproval toward a person can be evoked, it may possibly tend to overflow the strictly emotional field and become disagreement with what that person says. But this connection is only psychological, not logical. Even the most wicked of men may sometimes tell the truth or argue correctly.’1 This is a very effective way of swaying public opinion and the cheap and common tactics used by politicians to try and discredit one another in order that their policies will also be rejected. We do not believe that the truth of...

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Introduction: When Hitler was trying to enthuse the German nation to get behind his expansionist programs he told them that the German race was the Ubermensch, the Beyond-man/Hyper-man. He understood the psychology of action, we do as we believe. If we think we are better than others we will happily walk over their heads. We have also given the name slave mentality to a state or mind that acts out of the way it sees itself. This is a life of subservience and submission that thinks of itself as less. Activity follows identity. We see this everyday in life, our children with low self-esteem don’t try very hard. Battered women who think they are worthless stay in destructive relationships. People who think they are stupid give up in the face of a difficult task without trying. Racists who think they are superior to others, are full of resentment and superiority. Paul, recognising that we do as we perceive ourselves and that the gospel has made something new of us as individuals and the church grounds all of our activities and duties in the church in the realities that the gospel have created. We need to learn the lesson of thinking right in order that we can do right. The way we see ourselves affects the way we see others and how we live for God. Today as we consider the church and our role in it as members I want to tap into a Pauline teaching tool. Paul helps the believer to fulfil his responsibilities in and toward the church by reminding the believer what God has done and has made true about us. Understanding this way of thinking is the difference between legalism and God glorifying obedience, the difference between hope and joy filled obedience or the drudgery of...

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Introduction: Today we begin the second half of our apologetics study where we handle objections to the faith. In the first part we laid out some of the most common ways to present the rationality of Christian belief. This was by no means an exhaustive survey. We presented the following list of arguments for God: the resurrection; the authority of Scripture; the unity of Scripture; the uniqueness of Scripture; the prophecies of Scripture; archaeology and the Bible; the manuscripts of the Bible; Jesus as an argument for God; the moral argument; the ontological argument; the cosmological argument; the teleological argument; the transcendental argument; and the arguments from desire and experience. If you have a grip on those arguments you have a good armoury for engaging in a conversation about God with our unbelieving generation. However, apologetics is not only about presenting the facts for God making a positive case; but also defending against objections, and that is what we are going to begin today. The objections are legion so we will have to limit ourselves to the most pertinent ones. The problem of evil; Christians are hypocrites; science and the Bible are incompatible; the Bible has errors; the problem of exclusivity These are just a few of the most common ones. Today we begin with the most common, the problem of evil.

Introduction: This is our second sermon in our membership refresher series. We have dealt with the issue of why every believer ought to be a member in a local church. We attempted to show by 7 arguments that the modern notion of membership is very different to our modern opt in understanding of membership. The Bible paints a picture of de facto membership, in other words, it would be odd for us to talk about our membership in the country of New Zealand. If you are born here you are a ‘member’ of the nation. When you are born again you are automatically one with the Church and one with Christ. Formalised membership is like getting a passport. It is making official something that is already the case. Today we want to move from why every person should be a member to the question of who should be a member. We are a Baptist church so we answer baptised believers, and what we mean is those who have made their own confession of faith, and made their own obedience to Christ’s command to be baptised, not some man made ceremony of confirmation and only those are to be accepted as members. We base our view on the practice of the NT church in Acts. This brings us in confrontation with those who eschew baptism and think it unimportant and those who are baptised as infants. Today I would like to make a case for believer’s baptism. I want to do this by taking what I think is the best verse that infant baptism has going for it, Acts 2:38:39, and making an exposition of it, And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins,...

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Introduction: Last week we began to enter into some of the more subjective aspects of apologetics looking at the argument from desire. Today we want to go a little deeper into the subjective side of things looking at the argument from experience. The argument is a simple one: millions of Christians of all ages, education levels and cultural experiences testify to a real experience of knowing God. The various experiences include, answers to prayer, sightings of the miraculous, a transformed character and life, joy inexpressible and full of glory, a sense of presence, an overwhelming sense of guilt and terror, etc. In non-Western cultures this is one of the most important and powerful ways to speak about God but we in the West with our history of Modernism which is biased towards a naturalistic explanation of all things and sees empiricism as the only valid foundation for epistemology, this argument has fallen on hard times. So today as we consider this type of argument we will firstly answer some objections and secondly give some examples.