The seventh indictment, and we'll
just rush through this. And I know that this is misunderstood
today, and so I'm going to define it. A lack of loving and compassionate
church discipline. Most evangelical pastors in America
today ought to take Matthew 18 and rip it right out of their
Bible. You can't do that, sir. You've
got to take the whole thing. Many pastors, their theology
gets left behind when they come out of their office, out of their
study. They're theological in conversation,
they're theological in their office, but when they step out,
they run the church by carnal means. I am not an elder at my church
and have not been there very long, so I can say this without
boasting. It practices church discipline.
It's a very large church, about a thousand. And they estimated they've saved
30 marriages in the last several years through loving, compassionate
church discipline that does not begin with excommunication. It
begins with ye who are spiritual. We say, oh, I'm too loving. We
can't practice discipline. We're just too loving. You're
more loving than Jesus. He's the one who commanded this.
Yeah, it'll cause so much problems. Yeah, you're right. Maybe that's
why there's not a whole lot of problems between the church and
culture today because we're not confronting culture. And we don't
confront culture just by going out there and picketing Hollywood.
We confront culture by obeying God. Noah built the ark and condemned
the world. You don't have to have a protest
sign. Just walk in obedience and the world will hate you. My dear friend, if your brother
sins, go and show him his fault in private. If he listens to
you, you have won your brother. Oh, what a wonderful thing. But
if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you
so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses, every fact may
be confirmed. It's not that these guys are
on your side. They're going to listen and judge. Maybe you're the one
that's wrong. Maybe your brother's not in sin. Maybe you're overcritical
and legalistic. Who knows? And listen, if he
refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses
to listen to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and
a tax collector. My dear friend, I believe that
we need to hear this. We can either start obeying God
and disciplining ourselves. Or we can have God do it for
us. And maybe the hour is coming and now is when that's going
to happen. I'm not talking about critical,
legalistic, hateful men. There's enough of those. I'm
talking about a man, a group of elders, leaders who love enough
to lay their life on the line because they know this is not
a game, this is not something that we do just for this life,
that eternity is at stake, the salvation of souls. Look at all
these Christian books, stores. Look at the old books of the
old days of the Wesleys and the Whitfields and on and on, the
Puritans and the Reformation. Most of those books dealt with
what is the gospel? How do you preach it? How do
you bring someone to Christ? How do you discern true conversion?
How do you be a doctor of souls? We have joined Rome in this matter. Rome, the baby is baptized, the
baby is Christian, the baby is Rome. Never again. Deal with conversion. Just create
all sorts of worldly means to try to keep them in the church.
Evangelicals have done the same. Pray a little prayer with them
after two or three minutes of counseling. After a half an hour
of preaching, 25 of which was very funny stories, and then
drawing the net after five minutes. Counsel them for a little bit,
and then declare them saved, and then spend the rest of their
days discipling them and wondering why they don't grow. I want to
submit to you, and I believe in personal one-on-one discipleship.
My dear friend, the church got along for a thousand or more
years without it. Without what we know as personal
one-on-one discipleship with all the books and all the different
things. I want you to think about this. One-on-one discipleship
became gigantic in the late 70s. And until today, what was the
cry? Just as many people are going
out the back doors, coming in the front door. And the reason
why that's happening is because we're not discipling people.
No, the reason why it's happening is because people aren't getting
converted. Because His sheep, they hear His voice, and they
follow Him, whether you disciple them or not. Now, we ought to
disciple, but that's not why they're leaving. They went out
from us because they were not of us. And they hardly got a
chance to be of us because they never heard a true gospel, and
no one ever dealt with their soul. So we spend a fortune discipling
goats, hoping they will become sheep. You can't teach a goat
into a sheep. A goat becomes a sheep by the
supernatural working of the Spirit of Almighty God. Now, church
discipline. I moved my family to this church
because they practice church discipline. Because I need to
be under church discipline. the watchful care of elders and
other members who take this seriously. I want my children, if they are
converted one day, they're all tiny right now, but if they are
converted or they make a profession of faith and then go awry, I
want to know that my children will be brought before the church
if necessary for the salvation of their soul. Some of you in
here would get so mad if a pastor walked up to you and says, honestly,
I've been praying about your child and I fear that they're
unconverted. You'd get so mad you'd rally up a group to have
that pastor kicked out. instead of realizing, oh, praise
God, we got a man of God here.