Where Did They All Come From?

Introduction

Good morning to all. Welcome from the South Bummy Church of Christ, where we are serious about shining light and darkness. We welcome all who are visiting, especially, and those who are visiting from the community. We welcome you and are so glad that you have chosen to come and be a part of our services today. We hope that it will be uplifting and encouraging to you. Thousands and thousands of denominations and doctrines exist in the world of Christianity today. How did this come about? Is this what God desires? And does it really matter? We’re going to analyze these questions in today’s special lesson entitled Where Did They All Come From? A History of the Churches. And I hope this will be interesting. I hope that it will be educational.

1. I Will Build My Church, Singular

And it it might be in some ways to you inspirational. I hope that it makes a difference. And I invite you to listen along. And I’m so glad that you are lending me your ear. I take that as a very high honor that you would take the time to listen to what I have to say today. Jesus said to Peter, I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church. And the gates of Hades will not overpower it. Jesus had asked his apostles who do men say that I am. And they said, Elijah or John the Baptist, Jeremiah, one of the prophets. He said, But who do you say that I am? And Peter said, You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.

And in Jesus’ response here in Matthew 16, 18, he uses two different Greek words for rock. One of them is the word for Peter, which really means uh stone. You know, I have a son named Stone. Like a stone you could pick up and throw, perhaps. The second word, a different word he used, uh, is a word when he says upon this rock. And that is a word that means bedrock, a solid bedrock, which I believe is referring back to that foundational principle that Peter confessed when he said, You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Upon this rock, Jesus said, I will build my church. Notice two things. He did not say, I will build my churches. He said, I will build my church, singular.

The word means the called out. It is the body of believers. And secondly, notice he said, My. The church belongs to Jesus. The church is not a democracy. We really have no vote in the matter. Uh but we are follow the dictates of our King, the King of Kings, King Jesus. Surely before Jesus would be arrested, he was with his apostles, and he prayed a beautiful prayer in John 17. He said to God, Sanctify them, the apostles, in the truth. Your word is truth. You sent me into the world, I also have sent them into the world. For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth. I do not ask on behalf of these apostles alone, but for those also who believe in me through their word.

So he’s praising, praying for all who would come to believe in him, that they may all be one, even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us. Or your version may say, one in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me. And so Jesus is praying here fervently for unity among believers. There may be some who say, Well, you know, really all that matters is that you believe in Jesus, and that’s all the unity really that we need. And certainly there is a degree of unity there, but Jesus prays for those that would praise for those that would believe in him, that they would be perfectly united and have a unity like the Father had with the Son.

2. Scriptural Unity Is Based on Truth

Now the question we need to ask is what is the basis for this unity? Well, we connect verse 21 with verse 17, that they may all be one is connected with your word is truth. Unity, scriptural unity is based on truth. It is not based on an absence of conviction, but unity is based on the presence of the conviction of truth. Paul rebuked the church at Corinth, saying, Now I exhort you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be made complete or perfectly joined, your version might say, in the same mind and in the same judgment. Again, these were believers. These were Christians he was writing to that were choosing men’s names and dividing, and he said, No, no, don’t do that.

You need to have a perfect unity in the same mind and in the same judgment. Again, it’s more than just belief that joins Christians. In 2 Timothy 3, Paul wrote to the young man Timothy and said, All scripture is given by inspiration of God. Literally, that is, God breathed, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. So it is very plain that we need nothing more than scriptures to make us complete for every good work. In fact, there are warnings in Scripture of going beyond or taking away from. For example, in Revelation 22, 18 and 19, I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book that if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book.

And if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city which are written in this book. So do not add, do not take away what we have revealed, needs to stay that way. Jude verse 3 says, Contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. So what we’re going to do, and I think this will be fun, is we’re going to follow sort of a timeline, and we’re going to see, did the churches really stick to the Bible, or did they add and did they take away?

3. A Continual, Gradual Departure From the New Testament

So we’re going to begin with the death of Jesus in AD 33. It was in that same year, shortly after he died, that the church was established in Acts chapter 2. This is the church that Jesus promised that he would build. It was established. So let’s move forward a little bit. And but before we do that, a prophecy that Paul makes. He said, But the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons. He also said, for the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine. But wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth, and we’ll turn aside the myths.

So again, as we go through, let’s see, can we see that happening? Can we see that falling away that was prophesied in the New Testament, really over and over again? So as we move into the future here, really we’re passing now the first century, and we’re really getting into the third century, and really by that time we begin to see centralized control, where really this was reached through a process that you have a city bishop, this archbishop that is a religious leader that has authority over an entire city. That’s a lot of authority. Imagine if we had an archbishop over all of Orlando. And under this city bishop, there were presbyters and deacons. Now already we see that this is uh a beginning of a departure.

Really, this is going to be a continual, gradual departure from what the New Testament says. Uh we read in passages like Philippians 1 and verse 1, where Paul greets the church of Philippi with its elders and deacons, and so the New Testament church organization was simply every church had elders and deacons. And so we didn’t see this hierarchy of an archbishop in the New Testament and so forth. Uh by the way, bishop and presbyter in the New Testament are the same. So they’re not one above the other, they’re the same. In fact, presbyter is the same as elder. So these refer to we have our elders here in this congregation. I’m not one of them. I’m just a preacher. But we go back now to our timeline and and uh we continue along and get to year 313.

This was a transformative year, because it was in this year that Roman Emperor Constantine, who was the first emperor to claim Christianity. That’s a big deal. Because the church had been persecuted for a long time. And so now you have an emperor who says, I’m a Christian, and through an edict in 313, he legalizes Christianity, which is a good thing. But it also had a bad result because it mixed paganism in with Christianity. Really, through through his own declarations, that would that would be the case. So you begin to see a blending and a watering down of Christianity. In year 325, still during the reign of Constantine, we have another major development in this first council of Nicaea. Okay. Now, Arius was a man who was teaching that Jesus is not eternal, that he was created, and that he is of not of one substance with the Father.

And it really brought to the forefront, Arius did, this controversy that had been going on for a long time about the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And I mean, this was a majorly divisive issue in the early centuries following the establishment of the church. And so Constantine wanted to end this Aryan controversy once and for all. And so he gathered together all of these church dignitaries and clerics from all over the place, this ecumenical, which kind of just means from a bunch of churches, council in Nicaea, which is in modern day Turkey. And they formed a creed that stated, more or less, that Jesus always existed and is of one substance with the Father. Now I agree with that conclusion. I hope that we all would agree with that conclusion.

But the subtle error that was going on here was that now you had a work of man that was regarded on par with Scripture, and it was viewed with authority because these clerics formed it and it came from the Roman church and all of that. And so when you have a work of man put on par with the work of God, then it’s it becomes problematic and it would lay the groundwork for more and more creeds to come. But this was the first major creed at uh the Nicene Creed at Nicaea. This is really an effort to unify the Roman church that had just become splintered. And so it was this desire for doctrinal conformity, and Rome would kind of take control of that and would continue to do that in really every aspect.

Moving to 380, we have another Roman emperor, Theodosius I, who went really a step beyond Constantine, and he actually made Christianity the state religion. But not just Christianity, Nicene Christianity. In other words, that Christianity that aligned with the Nicene Creed of 325. Right? And so he declared that it is only those who align with the Nicene Creed that are officially Catholic Christians. And so this is an important development in the Roman Catholic Church, which does not claim to go according to Scripture. They claim that the tradition of the church is just as authoritative as Revelation. But remember we read not to add and not to take away from this. Now we move forward into 445, and we have Pope Leo I, the Bishop of Rome. Now, Leo, and there were a lot of Leos to follow in the papacy.

But Pope Leo was one that really enhanced and increased the authority of the Pope like no one before him. And he obtained a decree from the Roman emperor. So you kind of have this alignment between the state and the church. He obtained a decree recognizing primacy of the bishop of Rome. And at that time there were many bishops, many popes. Really, the Pope didn’t come to be just identified with only the bishop of Rome until much, much, much later. But the bishop of Rome, we’ll see there were many bishops. There was a bishop of Constantinople. There was a bishop of Antioch, and so on and so forth. And so it was then viewed at this time that, well, the bishop of Rome really has the top role, the chief role among all the bishops, because he was regarded as the successor of Peter.

And that had been really, that idea had been going on for a while now. Now, this was really taken to a new level with Boniface III in 606. Because Boniface III obtained a decree from the Roman Emperor at that time, ensuring that the title universal bishop belonged only to the Bishop of Rome. I mean, Boniface sure didn’t want the bishop of Constantinople usurping that authority. And so this competing of power was going on between the East and the West and would continue for the centuries that follow as the Roman church continues to grow in power. Now the New Testament tells us that Christ is the only head of the church. For example, in Ephesians chapter 1 and verse 22, and he, that is God, gave all things, put all things in subjection under his, that is Jesus’ feet, and gave him his head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

And so God did not put that authority under anyone but Jesus Christ to be the head of the church. Now we move along in our timeline here as the Catholic Church grows in its power, and we have this competition of where is going to be the seat of power? Is it going to be in the East in Constantinople or in the West in Rome? And so there was a split, and the East became the Eastern Orthodox or Greek Orthodox, some call it the Catholic Orthodox Church. And the Roman Catholic remained with its power in the West in Rome. So we continue moving along, many centuries now, where the Catholic Church grows in such power that really anyone who descents from Orthodox teaching and so forth is persecuted.

4. Protest and Reformation

And you have many people who begin to protest against this and resist. And one of, and the primary protester is Martin Luther, who writes his 95 Theses, that’s kind of the short title, against the Catholic Church. And tradition holds that he nailed it to the door of the cathedral in Wittenberg, Germany. And his main complaint, I was going to say his main beef, but that just didn’t feel right to say. But then I just said it. So, whatever. His main complaint was that of indulgences. The Catholic doctrine of purgatory is that, you know, when people die, they either go to heaven or hell, or some people go to an in-between state, they go to purgatory. And the selling of indulgences was a way for the Catholic Church to raise money.

And what people were told is listen, if you pay money, then the souls of your loved ones who are in purgatory will be freed and go to heaven. So a lot of money was raised. And Luther understandably had a big problem with that. And that was the primary issue with his 95 theses. Well, this really sparked quite a movement. It was the chief catalyst for the Protestant, which means protesting against Reformation, which means reforming the church. And we move just a few years into the future here. 1530, by this time, Luther has been excommunicated for 10 years, and he has really formed quite a following, and his followers were by their enemies called Lutherans.

Now, Luther, I think, overreacted to the meritorious works of the Catholic Church. And he taught that works, obedience, that doesn’t have anything to do with your salvation. We’re saved by faith and faith only. And certainly there are passages you can read and understand where he came to that conclusion, but those passages can’t be understood in the way that he understood them, because faith cannot be the only condition for salvation because of such passages as James chapter 224. You see then that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone, as Mr. Hawkwriter pointed out in the 9 o’clock hour. Now, do you know what James thought? Not James, do you know what Luther thought of the book of James? Well, it doesn’t belong in the Bible.

That’s what he thought. Because it went against his doctrine. So he rejected it. Do not add, do not take away. Now, he did not want his followers to call themselves after his name. Why? Well, Paul says this to the Corinthians. Now I mean this that each of you is saying, I am of Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Cephas, who is Christ. And I of Christ. Well, they should have all been saying I of Christ, but they were choosing men’s names. Paul said, has Christ been divided? Paul was not crucified for you, was he? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? Paul is saying, hey, don’t you dare call yourself after me. And Luther told his followers, don’t you dare call yourself after me.

And after he died, that’s really when it became officially known as the Lutheran Church. Now it was around this same time in 1525 that we have the Anabaptist movement. Have you ever heard of the Anabaptists? Anybody? This may be one that we’re not familiar with. Okay, well, I see some hands, okay. These rejected the baptism of babies, as was taught in the Catholic Church. Now, certainly we don’t read in the New Testament of baptism of babies, and we don’t read of sprinkling either. The word baptisma means uh immersion. And uh Jesus said in Mark 16, 16, he who believes and is baptized shall be saved. So a believer’s baptism is what is taught in the New Testament. And so these Anabaptists were baptizing people, and their enemies were saying, Oh, look, they’re Anabaptists, which means one who baptizes again.

Well, they’re taking people that were baptized as babies and baptizing them as an adult. They’re baptizing again. And the Anabaptists did not like the term Anabaptists because they say we weren’t re-baptizing because these children weren’t baptized in the first place. We’re just actually baptizing them for the first time as an adult. And I would agree. Out of the Anabaptist movement came later the Amish and the Mennonites and some other groups. So I find that interesting. Now, moving to 1534, we have a lot going on here in the 1500s. Henry VIII breaks from the Roman Catholic Church. Do you know why? He’s married to Catherine of Aragon. What’s wrong with Catherine of Aragon? Well, she cannot bear him a son to be on the throne. So he doesn’t want Catherine of Aragon.

So he wants to get the marriage annulled, and he goes to Rome. He goes, I mean, to the Catholic Church, to the Pope. Can I get this marriage annulled? No. Huh. Well, all right, then. I’ll just take over the Church of England, which had formerly been a part of the Roman Catholic Church, and I’ll just make it my own church. And then I can do whatever I want. And he did. He married six times and beheaded two of his wives. The Church of England is also known as the Anglican Church, really worldwide, or the Episcopal Church in the United States. Just a couple of years after this, we have another very, very influential and famous reformer, John Calvin. Or he was a Frenchman, Jean Calvin, or whatever.

But we say John Calvin. So we’ll stick with that. Now, he had left the Catholic Church as well, and in 1536 wrote the ground shaking work, the really just transformative work, which is well written, but I think it is false.

And this really became the standard for reformed theology. This theology of Calvin’s later became known as Calvinism. And is really based on the idea of the sovereignty of God. That God is in charge, but it defines the sovereignty of God this way. In order for God to be sovereign and to truly be in charge, then he had to have made all decisions before the world began. All. Calvin was, you know, he was very strict about that. Now, what toothpaste you used this morning? What colored shoes you’re wearing right now? Did you forget your glasses today? All of those things God decided before the world began, according to Calvin. Which means, too, that your salvation was decided by God before the world began. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

You cannot even want to be saved unless the Holy Spirit quickens you because God chose you before the world began. So really there’s no free will, according to Calvin. But the Bible teaches that there is free will. What did Joshua say to the Israelites of old? If it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve. And God is not impartial. Peter said God shows no partiality, but in every nation, whoever fears him and works righteousness is accepted by him. And truly God wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. 1 Timothy 2 and verse 4, and is not slack concerning his promise, as some count slackness, but his long suffering.

And he wants everybody to come to salvation. That’s 2 Peter 3 and verse 9. And so it is our choice. Jesus died for all mankind so that we can have salvation. So we come back here to our timeline and we move along to 1609, where really this is most likely the beginning of the Baptist denomination. John Smith, S M Y T H, was an Anglican priest. Now, when I say Anglican, what am I talking about? The Church of England. So he breaks away from the Anglican church and believes, begins teaching a believer’s baptism, which is the same thing that Anabaptists had done before, but their response was to the Catholic Church. His response was to the Anglican church, which had just continued many Catholic doctrines, like baptism of babies.

And so tradition holds that since there was no real ordained priest to baptize him. See, he still had Anglicanism in him some.

So we move forward now to 1739. Now in 1739, we have in a very official way the very first Methodist society established by John Wesley.

It was a desire to really bring revival, enthusiasm. He saw and his brother Charles within the Church of England, this cold formalism. And he wanted to bring sort of the idea of this personal spirituality and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and wanted to bring, you know, zeal and everything. And so he did within the Church of England. After he died, Methodism split from the Church of England, but not during his life. Now, back up a couple of years when John and Charles, these two brothers were students at Oxford. They had formed a holy club. And if you can imagine a college setting, you’d think about here are these people that in this holy club, these young men have in a very organized fashion planned out all of these sort of spiritual acts of service and so forth.

And so you had a lot of college students making fun of that. And they called these people Methodists because of these methods of spiritual service. And John and Charles just thought, well, we’ll just stick with that term, and it has stuck for centuries and will continue. Well, we move forward forward now to 1840, and breaking off of this Methodism timeline is uh the holiness movement. I say breaking out, really just that’s where it had its roots. The holiness movement is the idea of uh achieving Christian perfection. And was this time of uh really staunch uh resistance to sin and uh mixed bathing and you know alcohol and and the women sat on one side and the men sat on the other side of the church building, and they were very, very conservative in their morality.

Coming out of the holiness movement in about 1900 was the Pentecostal movement, and uh which wanted to be like the church at Pentecost, which spoke in tongues and performed miracles, and uh I don’t have time to just deal with all that, but do you see the roots of Pentecostalism uh of the charismatic movement as a whole comes out of Methodism that placed this heavy emphasis upon the work of the Holy Spirit that will guide you? That’s what was taught. In fact, uh, you know, the the creed book that is used by Methodists states in there that this is the constitution of the Methodist Church, and that we are guided by the Holy Spirit in this work, which is putting really the writing of man on par with the writing of God.

Now, in 1830, Joseph Smith. He was surrounded by all of this division in the religious world and was just confused and discouraged, and claimed that God began to reveal to him that he wanted Joseph to restore the church of Jesus Christ in the latter days, because it had been corrupted. And so there’s going to have to be more revelation in order for that to happen. There was the book of Mormon that had happened. And he claimed that the angel Moroni revealed to him these golden plates with this message that was later translated by Joseph is what he claimed, and published as the book of Mormon, which is in addition to the Bible. Now, many of Mormon beliefs or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are outside of mainstream Christianity.

Joseph Smith himself was a polygamist and taught that polygamy was really a way to put you on the fast track to achieving Godhood. And you say, now those are some strange ideas. So some strange ideas when we’re used to what the Bible says when it comes to Mormonism.

As Mr. Harkrider also used in his sermon. But even if we, meaning the apostles, or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, let him be anathema. Let him be accursed. So even if an angel comes and says that, remember what the Bible says. Do not add and do not take away. So we come back now to our timeline, and we have the beginning of the Adventist movement. William Miller in the 1830s was a Baptist who began teaching the imminent return of Jesus. If you want to get people excited, you teach this sort of thing. And boy, he had by 1840, it was a national movement. He had thousands of followers, and he prophesied that Jesus was going to come in 1844.

Always a big mistake. Because when that did not happen, what do you think happened to his followers? They turned away, but Ellen G. White, among others, re-gathered them and established the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which is uh which is the most well known and the largest of the Adventist churches. 1879, Charles Taze Russell. In that year, he began writing uh the Watchtower magazine and uh had a lot of followers, many beliefs outside of mainstream Christianity. Uh Russell rejected the idea of the Trinity and taught really only one God, that is Jehovah. And so his followers are known as Jehovah’s Witnesses. You probably had them show up at your door. They’re also big on the end times, and throughout history, they have set many dates that have failed as well.

5. Non-Denominational Churches and Churches of Christ

Now, non-denomination, if you were asleep, now you’re awake, right? Now, we haven’t really talked about non-denominational churches. These really started in the time of the Reformation, and today they have become exceedingly popular. These community churches, they have names that are not the traditional denominational names, sometimes they’re real exciting, like Fuel Church or something like that. This really is an effort to overcome the religious confusion of denominationalism. Hey, listen, you don’t have to choose any of those names. Just come to our church. It’s got a real general name and everything. And the idea of the term non-denominational might sound like a good idea. I might prefer the term anti-denominational myself. But because the term non-denominational has really come to mean any denominational. That’s what it has come to mean.

And it really reduces the gospel to a set of very few essentials that any believer can agree upon. Chiefly, do you believe in Jesus? And if you do, then it doesn’t matter what differences there might be. That’s a really major thought in the religious world today. But do you remember what Jesus prayed for, those who would believe in him to be united like Jesus and the Father? And you remember in 1 Corinthians 1 that Paul prayed to be perfectly joined in the same mind in the same judgment. Now, I haven’t talked about churches of Christ. So I want to give you now, to be fair, I want to give you now a history book explanation of the origins of churches of Christ.

But this is what you will find in a history book. This is what you will find on Wikipedia, and so to be fair, we need to put it out there. Barton W. Stone in the early 1800s, along with Thomas Campbell and a man named Alexander Campbell, that was a second movement. You had the Stone Movement and the Campbell movement that were similar because they rejected creeds and they rejected denominations and division. And they thought, you know, we really need to just go back and instead of trying to really reform the church, we need to just restore the church and go back to the New Testament and make that our only creed. So these two movements were similar enough that they joined and really became one movement in 1832, and this continued through the 1800s, and the history will tell you that in 1906 there was a very official break where you had those who were really more inclined to stones teaching that established Christian churches, and those who followed more what the Campbells taught to be churches of Christ.

And sometimes even today, members of churches of Christ are called Campbellites. Now let me just say something. I don’t mean this to sound disrespectful to the Campbells.

But I don’t care what Thomas Campbell and Alexander taught. That has no bearing on me whatsoever.

But this is a history book explanation. The term church of Christ is a term found in the Bible. In Romans 16 16, the churches of Christ greet you. So were there churches of Christ in the first century? Absolutely. Now, that was one of the terms. There were other terms like church of God and many others. And we must understand that the term church of Christ and any other term was not a title as we understand the terms today. The church of Christ would be very different from the church of Jesus Christ or the church of God in today’s world. But, you know, in the New Testament, it was not a title but a description. Listen, if you take a pig and you put a sign around his neck that says cat, is that going to make the pig say meow?

It’s not going to change what the pig is. A group could put a sign out here that says church of Christ and belong to the devil. All that matters is whether we actually are the church, the body of the saved that belong to Jesus Christ. Now, I can’t speak for other churches of Christ. In fact, I know that many times, if you go into a church that has a signed church of Christ, you will find many different doctrines than I believe are true. You might see things that are totally alien to Scripture. So I’m certainly not giving my stamp of approval on any church out there that has church of Christ. But what I can do is speak for this church. And let me tell you what I know about this church because I’m one of the leaders.

Our desire here, though we’re not perfect, our desire is to practice simple New Testament Christianity, organic Christianity, to use the Bible and the Bible only as our standard of authority and no man-made creed whatsoever. And our desire is to follow the New Testament without man-made additions, without man-made subtractions. Again, that is a gargantuan task that requires intense Bible study and looking at things in context. And we’re not perfect, but from everything I can tell, what we’re teaching is true from the Bible. And what we have to all do is just analyze that for ourselves and determine, is it true? When you think of the body of Christ and ask the question, which one is the right church out there in the body of Christ? Well, the body of Christ is not made up of a group of churches that all bear the same name.

6. Six Characteristics of a Scriptural New Testament Church

The body of Christ is made up of individuals who have obeyed Jesus and abide by what he teaches. Acts 2 and verse 47. Those who are saved were added to the church. So the church does not save you. The church is the body of people that have been saved. That’s what the body of Christ is. But it is necessary, I believe, to find a scriptural New Testament church. And there are at least six characteristics, and we’re moving along quickly here. They didn’t give me quite as much time as I needed, but that’s okay. So you’re hanging with me, everybody. You’re doing great. So very quickly, six characteristics to look for in a scriptural New Testament church. First of all, does it have a scriptural name? If a church has a name that is not found in the New Testament, maybe that’s an indicator.

You know what? This may not be a scriptural church. Secondly, a scriptural creed. Now be careful to listen to what I’m saying. I don’t mean a man made creed. I mean the creed itself is the Bible. If there is a man made creed, then maybe that’d be an indicator that this church that you might be considering would not be a scriptural church. A third indicator is scriptural organization. Remember Philippians 1 1, elders, plural, and deacons in the local church. No hierarchy. We don’t read in the New Testament of any headquarters or anything like that. Each church was local and autonomous and independent. That is what we see in the New Testament. A fourth indicator is scriptural worship. When you come, is there singing, praying, taking of the Lord’s Supper, preaching and giving, and nothing more.

That is the extent of what we read in the New Testament for scriptural worship. A fifth indicator is a scriptural mission. Is the mission of the church, you know, is it physical or carnal in nature? Does it emphasize entertainment and so forth? If it does, then you need to stop and say, hey, I don’t find that in the New Testament. Because the mission of the church in the New Testament is to be the pillar and ground of the truth. It is a spiritual mission of benevolence to saints, of edification to saints, and of evangelism to the unconverted. A sixth and final characteristic is scriptural conditions of salvation. I think some really view Christianity as a smorgasbord. And we had fun discussing that word in the high school class.

Like a buffet. And you can choose what you want. I don’t like that stuff over there, so I’m going to avoid that, but I’ll have this stuff over here. I think that is sort of the mindset of some of many, maybe most within modern day Christianity. And certainly with salvation, that becomes the matter. We choose, people may choose one verse over here that they like and leave others out, but we can’t leave any out. So we know that belief is required from John 3.16. We know that repentance is required from Luke 13 3 and in verse 5. We know that confession is required from Romans 10, 9 and 10. We know that baptism is required from Acts 2.38 and Acts 22.16 and 1 Peter 3.21 and a host of other passages.

Conclusion

And we know that continuing to remain faithful and obey every command of Jesus is required from Acts chapter 28 and verse 20 and other passages. So can we leave any of those out? If a church that you’re considering leaves any of those out, that is a major stopping point to consider. Is this really a scriptural New Testament church? Jesus, in the parable of the sower, and we’re almost finished, said that the seed is the word of God. The Bible. This is the seed. Did you know that some seeds were found in Jerusalem a few years back that were 2,000 years old, dating back to the time of Christ, and these seeds were planted, and one of them actually sprouted and grew. This is what I read.

And a particular tree that would have grown 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem. What we need to do is plant the Word of God, and what will it produce? Forget the last 2,000 years. Forget all of the division and confusion that we see out there. If we plant this, what will it produce? Exactly what God desires. If we study this and we obey the Bible, then we will be a Christian. And a Christian only. Not a Christian with a prefix. Just a Christian. And I believe that’s what God wants us to be. For God is not a God of confusion, but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints. And Jesus said of the Pharisees, but in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines, the precepts of man.

And Paul wrote in Colossians 2 8, see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception according to the tradition of men. So the emphasis cannot be upon men, but upon what God has revealed through his Spirit, through the apostles and prophets. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. I’m so thankful that you came.

And I hope that it has made a difference. If you’re visiting and you want a Bible study, I really love Bible studies. One on one. Greg loves them, Mr. Harkrider. We have a number here. Please come and ask us. If you have questions, disagreements, we welcome those. And we’d be happy to talk with you and see if we can learn God’s will together. If you’re not a Christian, you can become a Christian today by believing in the Lord, repenting of your sins, confessing his name, and being immersed in water for the remission of sins, and continue to obey the gospel until the day that you die. And you will be saved through the Holy Spirit by God’s grace and mercy. If you like the prayers of the church, if there’s a way we can assist you, we invite you to come now as we stand and sing the song of invitation.