Why Are There So Many Churches?

Introduction

I certainly want to express my appreciation for the opportunity of being here in your midst tonight. It’s a special privilege in a number of ways, not the least of which is to be with brothers and sisters in Christ that we’ve known for many years and for whom we have a great deal of respect. Also to be in this beautiful building that has been erected recently for the glory of God. And I’ll tell you one thing whoever planned this building for singing planned it just right. The singing was just beautiful, and it’s always kind of a step down in my mind to come up and try to speak after something like that. And it would be just as well, I think, to the glory of God to continue the singing and praise God in that way and teach each other.

I’m thankful, though, for the opportunity to be here. It’s my understanding you’ve had good audiences each service, and that it has been a very profitable series of lessons to this point. If you are here tonight and you’re visiting in our midst, and you are not a member of the Church of our Lord Jesus Christ, or maybe you are searching, maybe you have never been at the service of this particular congregation before.

So that you can examine whether or not what I am saying is what God says.

And I certainly would not want to mislead anyone. But frankly, the responsibility for determining what God has to say and how he will direct your life through his word ultimately rests with you, the hearers. And while I have the responsibility before God and must give answer for what I say, what effect it has upon your life and whether or not it will lead you to do what God says rests upon your shoulders. I hope you too feel that responsibility as we speak together tonight. You were born, even the oldest of you in the audience, into an age of great religious confusion. We live in a time when there could be published an article in March of 1980 in a popular magazine, an article entitled The 12 Hundred Religions in America.

You may have seen that article that came out some time ago, and in it were a list of all the different religions that exist in America. And among them, literally hundreds that all claim to be following the Bible. That all claim some allegiance to Jesus Christ.

But it is a most interesting list. And frankly, if a person were not very well acquainted with the Bible and were, say, new on the religious scene, it would be most confusing to try to look through all of this and decide what on earth am I going to do religiously? Why are there so many churches in existence today, all of whom are claiming to follow the Bible, and all claiming some kind of allegiance to Jesus Christ our Lord. Now, admittedly, that’s a very large subject with which to deal in one lesson. And yet, I think one of great importance. Because of the religious confusion in the world, and probably as a result. I would not try to determine which came first. I think they came together.

Attitudes have developed in our society. Attitudes of tolerance toward all these differences, toward religious division. In fact, I have an article in my files at home written by a preacher in which he proclaims that it is a wonderful thing that there are so many different churches because therefore people can choose their own, which makes them feel comfortable. And in fact, religious division is a good thing because therefore you, as an individual, have all kinds of things to choose from. Sort of like when you go to the cafeteria. You like roast beef, other people like pork chops. And therefore, you can choose what suits you the best and where you feel the most comfortable. That type of an attitude pervades our society. All churches are okay. You make your own choice.

And I’m going to challenge you to see whether that’s so for yourself. Don’t believe it because I say it or any other preacher says it. Challenge yourself to find out what the Bible teaches. It teaches no such doctrine. Let me ask you, first of all, two simple questions. Just from a logical standpoint. How on earth could God, if He gave us the Bible, have given us such a document that would produce hundreds and hundreds of different groups, all claiming to follow the Bible and yet all teaching contradictory doctrines. Does that make sense to you?

And secondly, I’d like to ask you if all are following Jesus Christ and therefore God. How is it possible that they all come up with different conclusions? Using the same book.

1. Jesus Built His Church, and There Is One

I want to turn with you first of all to Matthew 16. And again, I want to urge you if you have a New Testament, open it with me and read along and see if that’s what the Bible says. And when you have a few moments later and you have more time to think about it. Take the time to examine the context of the verses we will read and see whether I have misused those verses in light of their context. If it is important, it is important enough for you to spend time on to find out whether you are a part of the church that Jesus built. In Matthew 16, Jesus speaks about his church. In verse 16, Simon Peter, in answer to his question, Whom say ye that I am, answered, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.

And Jesus said, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjonh, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee that thou art Peter. And upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Several interesting things about verse 18 that I want you to note. In the first place, Jesus speaks of building his church. I will build my church. In the second place, you’ll note that the word church is singular there. In the third place, he says, the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. All through that passage, Jesus speaks of what he was going to do, and he speaks of it in the singular sense, and he speaks of its belonging to him.

Then he says, I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, tying the church with the kingdom, which are the same in different expressions in the New Testament. And whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. The picture given there is rather simple. Jesus said, I’m going to build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Then I invite your attention to the book of Ephesians, chapter 4. At the time Matthew 16 was spoken, the church wasn’t in existence. Jesus said, I will build it. By the time Ephesians, the fourth chapter is written, the church is in existence. We have not the time tonight to prove to you exactly the date that that took place.

But Ephesians 4, verse 4 says, There is one body and one spirit. Even as you are called in one hope of your calling. One Lord, one faith, one baptism. One God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all. That passage speaks of one body. Turning back to Ephesians 1, verses 22 and 23, you read that the one body, which is the fullness of him that filleth all and in all, is the church. Now the Bible speaks of Christ’s building his church. It then speaks of the one body or church being in existence. The one. And I would urge you to study every other scripture with regard to the church that Jesus built, and you will find out that it is unique.

That there is one.

That in the face of 1200 religions. The Bible doesn’t teach 1200. It teaches one. Oh, I understand that the Bible uses the word church in the plural sometimes when it refers to local congregations like this one. In fact, in the city of Orlando and in the city of Tampa, there are a number of churches, local groups of people that gather to meet, worship and work for the Lord. But when the Bible speaks of the Church of Jesus Christ, it speaks of one.

His body, which he bought and purchased with his blood.

2. The One Church Divided Into Denominations

And I would like to say at the beginning of this lesson that for someone today to take the position that there can be a multiplicity of churches, all claiming to follow Christ, teaching contradictory doctrines, is a perversion of what the Bible teaches. I challenge you to determine whether that’s so or not for yourself. Now I would like to trace with you an answer to the question, why are there so many? And first of all, I want to define something for you. I teach a little mathematics. And in mathematics, we speak of a whole, and you can illustrate it with a circle. And that is one circle. That is a unity. That’s one. It represents one thing. However, you teach children in mathematics that it is possible to subdivide that kind of a whole into parts.

And you can divide it into however many parts you want. Depending on what you’re trying to do or to illustrate. And when you have divided that one thing into a series of parts, you can count up how many parts there are. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten in this case, if I counted correctly. And you can say that one of those parts out of those ten is one tenth of the whole thing. And when you divide something like that into parts, the bottom number, everybody in this audience that can listen to me knows is called the denominator. And it represents the number of parts into which the whole has been divided. And then if you take one of those, you’re taking one of the denominations of that unity which has been divided into parts.

That’s simple enough. That’s what’s happened to the church of our Lord Jesus Christ. The unity of the one church has been taken and divided into not ten, but hundreds of parts, each of which is a denominator or a denomination of the whole thing. And some folks say that is a wonderful thing.

Because you can go in here and pick the part you want. And not only do folks say that, but they say that all of these denominations go to make up the one church of Jesus Christ. And that therefore every church is okay. It’s just a part of the whole. That’s where the idea of denomination comes from. I’d like to say that I don’t want to have any part in any denomination of the Lord Jesus Christ. I want to be a part of the church that Jesus built, plain and simple, and that’s all. I hope you do too. And if you are partaking in one of the divisions of the body of Christ, which I might say to you, do not go to make up the whole.

This picture of the denominational world, while it is presented by that world as being the correct one, is not what God presents. What God presents is one church, one, only one, into which nothing is divided, which start teaching different doctrines that uniquely identify them. Let me read you a definition. A denomination is a dissenting party from an established or parent church. A denomination is a body of persons holding specific opinions, usually religious, having a common name, and for the various sects into which members of a common faith may be divided. That’s what it is. Why are there so many of them? I’d like to give you a Bible answer to that. Turn with me first of all to Matthew chapter 7.

3. False Prophets and a Falling Away Foretold

From the days that Jesus Christ Himself walked on the earth and taught men, he began predicting problems. In the 15th verse of Matthew 7, we read, Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. You shall know them by their fruits. And he goes on to discuss more about that. That is one small instance of many cases in the life of Jesus when he warned his disciples to beware of false prophets, which were going to come. I turn to another in the book of 2 Thessalonians, chapter 2.

Where likewise a serious warning is given to God’s people about what is coming. I remind you, we’re answering the question, why are there so many churches?

2 Thessalonians 2, verse 1. Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto him, that you be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter, as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. Let no man deceive you by any means, for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first. And that man of sin be revealed, the son of perition, who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped. So that he is God, sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God. I will return to this passage a little bit later in our lesson.

This apostle Paul warns the church at Thessalonica, don’t you think the Lord’s coming back yet? Because he will not come back until there first be a tremendous falling away. You see the diagram on the board before you. The illustration is supposed to sink into your mind what has happened. You see across the top a timeline. Straight. From the time the church began until this very day. And on top of it, you see the Church of Jesus Christ. And the reason it’s drawn that way is to strike home to our minds that the Church of Jesus Christ has not and will not ever change. It is the same. Because it is based on God’s word, which never changes. Though all the world perish, the word of God will not perish.

But the sad part of the diagram is that’s not all there is to the story. The fact is that from the time almost from the church, when the church began, there began a falling away. I have illustrated that with a downward line on the board, because that is precisely the direction in which it went. And the farther it got away, the farther it was away from the original church that Jesus built. The progression would be worse than that if I could draw it properly. This passage says Jesus isn’t coming back until there come a great falling away, and it gives some specific descriptions about that falling away, to which we will return in a moment. You’ll see other passages on the far side of the board, all of which were profetic of the coming of terrible things.

4. The Falling Away Begins in the New Testament

Why are there so many churches? God said through Christ and through his apostles that there would be false prophets, teachers that would lead people away from the truth, and many would follow them in the falling away. That’s why there’s so many churches. Turn back to the book of Acts with me for a moment, and I’ll illustrate this with a case. In Acts chapter 15, the church by this point has grown by leaps and bounds. There are thousands of people who’ve become members of the church of our Lord Jesus Christ through simple obedience to the gospel. As was preached on the day of Pentecost, they believed the message of the gospel that Jesus Christ died for their sins, that he was buried, and that he was risen to sit at the right hand of God, ruling and reigning until all enemies are put under his feet.

And having believed that, they were told to repent and be baptized for the remission of sins, and the Lord added them to the church. Acts chapter 2. But I’ll tell you something. Anything that is being successful in the kingdom of God will not be left alone. The devil will see to it. And one of the first problems that arose is described in Acts 15. Certain men which came down from Judea taught the brethren and said, Except you be circumcised after the manner of Moses, you cannot be saved. Why, there were teachers early in the first century that were coming along and saying to Christians, you have to circumcise your men, or you’re lost.

And they had to have a conference at Jerusalem to settle this problem. And a letter was sent out to all the churches saying, No, you do not bind the law of Moses upon Christians. And in Galatians, the first chapter, the first passage mentioned on the board. The same problem is dealt with. And I want to read you specifically what the apostle Paul had to say. Verse 6. I marvel that you are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel. Which is not another, but there be some that trouble you and would pervert the gospel of Christ. You know what that word means? The word pervert. It carries with it the idea of taking something and twisting it to suit your fancy.

What happened to the churches in Galatia? What happened to the church in Jerusalem and in Antioch and other places on this occasion was that some people came up there and they took the gospel of Christ and they twisted it around and they said, You’ve got to add to it or supplement it with Judaism. You have to circumcise people. You have to keep the law. And so what developed from that was a new church. A splinter group, a denomination. A group of Judaizing Christians. Now I want to pause here just a moment and say something from my heart.

During the rest of the lesson this evening, I’m going to be talking about some specific people in history and some specific churches by name. I would like to say that in doing so, I am not intending at all to embarrass anyone or to be ugly, disrespectful, in fact, it is out of love and a desire to help you seek truth and help me seek truth that I would say such a thing. But I’m as convicted in my heart that people are being led down to falling away. And we need to say it as clearly as we can, and I would ask you to give me the honor and the privilege of correcting me if I’m wrong. Because it is a matter of life and death.

Because the church is the saved ones.

In Galatians 1, they twisted the gospel. They put a Judaizing twist on it. And you know what he said about those folks? Though we are an angel from heaven preach any other gospel than that which we have preached, let him be accursed. There’s no stronger word in the Bible. Let him be anathema. You know what God thinks of the falling away? The Bible is very clear on that. In Acts the 20th chapter. Please turn to verse 28. This is significant, and it is a beautiful illustration from the Bible itself of why there are so many churches. In Acts 20, it says, take heed therefore to yourselves and to all the flock over which the Holy Ghost has made you overseers to feed the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood.

I want to make two or three points while I’m here. In the first place, he’s speaking to the overseers. You see that? In this instance, it’s the overseers of the church at Ephesus. Earlier in verse 17, he had called the elders. You see, the elders are the overseers, and another word for overseer is a bishop. The elders were the bishops. They also were the pastors. They’re told in this passage to feed. Or to take heed to the flock and to feed the church of God. That’s what a pastor does. This passage proves that an elder is a bishop, is a pastor. I’m not a pastor. I hope to God one day I can be. But I’m not one yet. And sometimes I’ve been a little thankful for that.

I don’t really want to be called pastor pain.

Somehow it just doesn’t have a good ring to it. But a pastor is not a preacher. Interesting that that’s the way it’s come to be today. Pastors are preachers. That’s not what the Bible teaches. A pastor is an elder, which is a bishop. They’re all the same. And this passage clearly shows that. Acts 20. So why do we have different ones today? Interesting. Something else, the church at Ephesus had more than one elder. And you read the Bible throughout, and you’ll always find more than one elder in a local church. I challenge you to do it. You won’t find a single instance where one church had one elder. Or one bishop. They always had more than one. And in talking to these elders of the church at Ephesus, he says to them, watch out.

Notice verse 30. Of your own self shall men arise speaking perverse things to draw away disciples after them. Therefore, watch and remember that by the space of three years I cease not to warn everyone night and day with tears. This congregation can be thankful that it has a group of men who are elders who are watching and praying and teaching day in and day out to watch out for the flock. And you know why? Because it is a constant struggle to keep from falling away with the devil and his agents. And elders are charged with the responsibility of keeping that from happening, if at all possible. But you know what this passage says? From their own number, men would arise, teaching perverse things. You know why there’s so many churches?

Because in the past, some elders have taught false doctrine and led people off. Now I want to illustrate it graphically. This is the church at Ephesus in Acts 20. We read of that same church again later in the book of Revelation. Let’s go there to chapter 2. Much later in the history of this church. The book of Ephesus, written earlier, the book of Revelation written later. Now, by the time Revelation was written, there were certain problems developing. Verse 2 says, I know thy works and thy labor and thy patience and how thou canst not bear them which are evil, and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles and are not, and found them to be liars. Amazing. Within just a few years there were lying apostles.

And the church at Ephesus, thank the Lord, had been able to test them out and prove they weren’t. But that’s not all. And it’s born and has patience for my name’s sake, has labored and has not fainted. Nevertheless, I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen and repent and do thy first works, or else I will come into thee quickly and will remove thy candlestick out of his place. Except thou repent. They were falling away, brethren and friends, and if they didn’t turn back, the Lord would take their candlestick away, and they would no longer be a part of the church that Jesus built. Now notice one thing happening there in particular. He says, verse 6, this thou hast, thou hatest the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which also I hate.

There were a group of people called Nicolaitans. I don’t know a whole lot about them, but God says he hated their teachings. And so did the Ephesians. Another church was involved, embracing their teachings, and God said, You better get rid of them because I hate them. Why are there so many churches? I’ll tell you one reason. Because the Nicolaitans infected a bunch of churches and led disciples off after them and started another one. Because Judaizing teachers started another church and left what God said. And now I turn to something about which the Bible does not specifically speak, except in prophecy. And that you can read in the history of man’s pen. Some things which break your heart when you read about it. Some things which are clearly spoken of in the New Testament as coming in the future.

5. Church Government in the Falling Away

I’ve already read you some passage. And as I start this, I want you to turn back to 2 Thessalonians chapter 2. Because one of the first things that developed in the history of the church was something that I’ve chosen over here to classify as church government. I’ve already mentioned to you that in the book of Acts, we find elders appointed in every church. Those elders were appointed as overseers of local congregations. And in doing so, God ordained that they should feed the flock, protect it from harm, and see to it that the church grew. The sad thing about that is, within the first century and into the second century, and I’ve tried to mark these off in 500 year blocks so you can kind of get a feel for where we are.

By the first of the second century, the end of the first century, there were already men in the government of churches who were as presuming authority over others. There were already men, and it can be traced rather clearly in the history of the church, who were claiming to be chief elders. More important than the elders. Very gradual. And that’s what I’ve tried to illustrate here. And this could be illustrated repeatedly with hundreds of different things. The falling away started very small. Some men have a more forceful personality. I’d venture to say that right here in this church, one elder probably is more forceful than another. And probably has a more dominant character and maybe has more influence in some way or another. Godly men who are elders the way God wants will work together and function as a unit and not get one man up here above the other, but that’s what happened.

And however innocent it was to begin with, I want to read you some statements about the development of how this happened. And the reason I’m reading these is because they’re as well put and they’re brief. The form of church government, which began to exist in the first century, was in the second century more industriously established and confirmed in all its parts. One president or bishop presided over the church. And they began to call him the bishop. Whereas the Bible called the elders all bishops or overseers. There came to be one bishop and the rest elders. During a great portion of the second century, the churches continued to be at first independent of each other. You see, there’s no authority in the Bible for one elder or a group to have any authority over another church, even in the same city.

But that began to happen. In the process of time, it became customary for all the Christian churches within a province to unite and form a sort of larger society or commonwealth. In the manner of confederated republics and to hold conventions. May I pause here a moment? Does the church of which you’re a part have conventions? To which they send representatives and they vote on what your church believes? Do you know where that dates to? The second century, not the first. It dates to the falling away of the early church, not to the church of Jesus Christ. And I would challenge you to think about it.

Pretty soon they began to have meetings regularly enough that they gave them names. The Greeks called them synods, and the Latins called them councils. And they began to vote and agree upon laws, and the laws became canons or rules for the church.

So what started out as a simple thing of one man taking precedence over another began to be a group of men voting on rules for the church. I challenge you to find out if the church of which you’re a part has church rules that somebody voted on, and then that’s in a book that tells you what your church believes. I challenge you.

Most every church does.

And once it’s voted by the church, that’s what the church believes. And if you’re going to be a part of that church, that’s what you believe. At first, the bishops did not deny that they were merely the representatives of their churches. And that they acted in the name of the people. It was representative. But little by little they made high pretensions and maintained that power was given them by Jesus Christ himself to dictate the rules of faith and conduct for the people. After a while, the representatives started saying, God told us to tell you what to do. That’s exactly the way it worked. As the falling away progressed. And finally, the bishops appointed metropolitans over cities. They began to appoint higher rulers over their councils, and eventually patriarchs over whole regions, and eventually a Roman pontiff over the entire church.

To the point that we had one man dictating to the entire worldwide, Church of our Lord Jesus Christ. The first such one appointed, and some disagree on who was first. In approximately 606, 607 BC, Boniface III. The power of that man progressed until about the year 1000, approximately the second mark I have up there on the board. There was a Pope, a Roman pontiff by the name of Innocent III, who claimed more power than anybody ever had before. He claimed to be the vicar of Peter that had become the vicar of God himself. The idea of a theocracy on earth in which the Pope should rule, fully possessed the mind of this Innocent III. In his view, the two swords, the temporal and the ecclesiastical power, had both been given to Peter.

You understand what that means? He claimed that he had church authority and also authority over all the kings of the earth. Jesus Christ, and this is a quote from Innocent III. Jesus Christ wills that the kingdom should be priestly and the priesthood kingly. Over all he has set me as his vicar upon the earth. So that as before Jesus every knee shall bow. In like manner to his vicar, all shall be obedient. And there shall be onefold and one shepherd. And guess who the shepherd is?

Moreover, he applied the words that Jesus stated in Matthew 28, verse 18 All authority hath been given unto me in heaven and on earth. And he said it’s talking about me.

And again, for every human creature it is a condition of salvation to submit to the Roman pontiff.

With grief. To illustrate just how far away people can get from what God said. From the apostle Peter, who came to the house of Cornelius, who ran out and fell down at his feet and began to worship him, and he yanked him up and said, Get up, for I myself also am a man. We come to those who today and from this time onward claim to be the vicar of Peter and the Vicar of Christ, and proclaim that they should be worshipped as God Himself. That’s how far it can get when the falling away begins.

And so during the Middle Ages, we had all kinds of developments in connection with that. Because whenever there’s one falling away, there’s a bunch of others that fall right along with it. And so there was developed a special priesthood. Men claiming to have the authority and the place of God even to forgive sin. There developed a sacramental system in which the church had the authority to administer certain rights to people, and only priests could do it. And I want to illustrate two of those that go hand in hand. One is called penance, and the other is called confession.

As it developed in the falling away, the church claimed to have the power, through the priesthood, to require members of the church to come to the priest and confess their sins to him, and he in turn had the authority from God to absolve them of their sin. One means to do that was penance, which was a series of acts performed by people on the earth that were given to them by the priest to do, which were for the purpose of helping to absolve them of the guilt of their sins. The church came to teach that some people did enough good deeds that there were good deeds left over. And so the doctrine of works of super arrogation. They claimed, for example, that if a man was good while he was living and then died a martyr’s death, he did more good than he did bad, and he had leftover goods that were stored up in heaven that could be used for other people.

And so the priest had the right to call on those other righteous deeds and submit them to other people. Can you imagine? And the ultimate perversion of that particular system can be found in a speech, part of which I want to read you. This speech was delivered by a man by the name of John Tetzel.

He lived in the late 1400s and the 1500s. And he was an agent of the Pope himself. He was sent out to raise money to build St. Peter’s Cathedral. And the means by which the money was to be raised was to sell people pieces of paper which gave them the right to commit sins and be forgiven of them. I want to read you, and the purpose of this reading again is to illustrate how far away people can get from what God says as the falling away progresses. Why are there so many churches? Because, brethren, the farther we go, the worse it gets.

He would come into a city where the poor would be. And he would set up a cross. And he would set up his collection plate. And he would start his speech. Come and I will give you letters all properly sealed, by which even the sins you intend to commit may be pardoned. I would not change my privileges for those of St. Peter in heaven. For I have saved more souls by my indulgences than the apostle by his sermons. There is no sin so great that an indulgence cannot remit it. I declare unto you, though you should have but a single coat, you should strip it off, sell it, and obtain this grace. The Lord God no longer reigns. He has resigned all power to the Pope.

And so what you could do was come up and put some money into the treasury. They would give you a paper signed by the Pope himself that gave you all kinds of rights to church ordinances, to church services, and the rights to commit sins you haven’t even thought of yet.

And they built St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

6. Reformers, a Movement Back, and More Splintering

It doesn’t surprise me in the least that in the 14 and 1500s, all over the world almost, and particularly in Europe, men began to pop up everywhere, saying there’s something terribly wrong here. Martin Luther would stand up in Germany and say, the sale of indulgences is as great sin as I’ve ever seen. And he would speak out against the church with the hope that somebody would be willing to reform it. There were great wickednesses taking place. He listed 95 different things that he could see in which the church was wrong and needed to change. And he was willing to stand up for them in the face of tremendous danger to himself personally. But not only Luther, but Zwingli and John Calvin and John Knox and many, many others throughout the then known world would stand up and say, there are corruptions, there are sins in the very Pope himself and his agents.

And we need to change it. And God be thanked for men who would be courageous like that and willing to stand up. I really wonder.

How many of us today would have the courage in the face of the kind of conditions I’ve described to you, in which the Pope had absolute control, even over kings, and stand up and say it’s wrong. May God help us to be infected with a spirit that says, we’re going to stand for what’s right. I don’t care what’s going on around me. And we need it today.

Couldn’t go bring themselves to go far enough, and some of them swung from the doctrines of the works of supererrogation, and the Catholic Church was teaching salvation by works. And they swung over to the other end and said, No, there’s no works at all. It’s salvation by faith and faith alone, without any works. I understand why they did that. They were so sickened by what they saw that they swung to the other extreme. And out of these great men and their movements, limited as they were, came all kinds of churches. Because when they died, their followers collected their works and established churches. And they came.

And we have not the time to deal with all that tonight, but so many churches came out of this movement. Churches in which they claimed allegiance to the great men who led them out of this tremendous darkness in which the world existed.

But the sad thing is, Luther himself would say, Don’t you take my name.

Why do we have so many churches? Why things got so awful over here that everybody, many people could see it and started speaking against it, standing up for what was closer to the church of Jesus Christ. And when they died, lots of people followed them.

And then, not long after, in the late 1700s and the 1800s, some people began saying, look at all the different churches. Why are there so many? The Bible doesn’t teach many. Let’s get back to the one. And so men like Alexander Campbell and his father Thomas, men like Barton W. Stone, and many others, all over the United States of America and Europe, began popping up again and saying, look at all the dispersion of churches. It can’t be right. Let’s get back to what the Bible says. Let’s speak where the Bible speaks and be silent where the Bible is silent. And there was a tremendous movement back to the one church of Jesus Christ. But I say with weeping that it was but a few years when those groups began to splinter and formed hundreds of other churches.

And to this day, we’re still splintering and forming more churches that believes this and that believes that. And may God help us.

Among the churches listed in this 1200 religions to bring this very close to home is the disciples of Christ, unrelated churches. And you have 12 groups under that listed in this publication. And I’ll not read them all, but some churches of Christ, non-instrumental, churches of Christ, non Sunday school, churches of Christ, so that once again it’s splintered off. Why are there so many churches? The devil won’t let us alone. And it’s just one thing after another. And do you know where I’ve come in all this? I’ve come to believe that in this local group right here, if you, with the help of God and Jesus Christ and good elders and leaders in this congregation, can keep body and soul together and can spread the word in this vicinity and do all the good you can to leaven this community and help it to see Jesus Christ and help other men to preach it in other places.

That is God’s work for us, and we need to stick to it and cling to it with all that we’ve got and put our soul into it and pray to God that it won’t split. Amen.

And even try to see to it about the whole brotherhood. Not our job.

The church that Jesus built had congregations that were independent, that had elders for their own congregation, and they spread the cause of Christ as much as they could independently of one another. And don’t you know there’s some wisdom in that? If this church in Orlando fell, it wouldn’t take everybody with it.

Conclusion

And what I think we need to be doing is putting the utmost energy we can into the local work where we’re apart. And God will bless us. Now I started by saying there’s religious confusion. And I want to end by saying this. The only way I can recommend to you out of religious confusion is if there is an authority which we can follow. And my friend, if there is no authority which we can go to for our ultimate answers to what church to be a part of, to what God wants man to do, then we are at sea and we might as well give it up. We believe the Bible is the Word of God revealed for mankind to show us the way from earth to heaven.

Do you believe that? If you do, then you have your ultimate authority. And I would challenge you as we close tonight to go to that word and find what it tells you and do it as closely as is humanly possible for you to do with what capabilities God has given you. Find a local group to work and worship with that is doing what the Bible says. Become a Christian the way God says, and you’ll know that you’ll be pleasing to God.

For you to die for your sins. If you believe that. And I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to act just the way the early disciples did. You know what they said when they heard the message of the gospel? What do we have to do? You know what folks say today? Why do I have to do that? Are you asking yourself the question? Well, what do I have to do? I will give you the same answer Peter did. You need to repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins.

The Lord will add you to the church, which is his body, and you can begin working and serving him for the rest of your days in the simple church of Jesus Christ. And if that’s your desire tonight, there’s been a song selected to help further encourage you to obey the gospel. And we would urge you to come while we stand and as we sing.