how it works, how it's supposed
to be understood, etc. And I know we could go on and
on for hours and hours and hours, but I think for tonight, it would
just be good to take a brief look at how the New Testament
was written, what the purpose of certain aspects of the New
Testament are, what audiences that the apostles were trying
to reach, and just how we as believers in the New Testament
should understand how to read and apply the New Testament today.
So here is one of the questions, and I'll sort of go through it,
and then we'll talk about what we're gonna do today. First,
it says, you speak about the purpose of the New Testament. Can you
explain how the New Testament relates to the assembly? Now,
over the last few weeks, a few years really, but over the last
few weeks, I have spent a lot of time focusing on the fact
that the New Testament letters specifically are written to the
people of Christ in the assembly. They're not written to the people
of Christ in a vacuum, nor people of Christ in a, you know, isolated. Because some of the reasons behind
the New Testament and its writing is that we see a desire for the
apostles to see the church walk together in unity. And so a lot
of the instruction, the correction has to do with how the life that
we live as Christians together with the saints it's going to
always come at a cost. So there's always going to be
division of, what's the word I'm looking for? A division of
affection, a division of labor, a division of resources. There's
always going to be something that's biding for our time, and
our talents, and our treasure, and our focus, and our affections,
and when we're together with the church, we're going to see
that even more and more. And so I thought one of the ways
that I could explain this is to just go through the scripture,
go through the New Testament, and ask ourselves, you know,
what is it that the New Testament is, you know, how is it constructed,
and what is it that we're supposed to understand relating to the
scripture? the context of the local church.
So hopefully I'm making some sense. So I've decided to make
this a special broadcast, and my camera's at a sort of different
angle, so when I'm looking up, I'm looking at the questions
and etc. So it seems odd to me because
I've never had to look at the camera from this point of view
before. But anyway, that's sort of where we're gonna go, and
if you have comments or thoughts, please feel free to to put them
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And of course, you can go to anchoringfaith.org or gracedruth.org
and leave comments or questions related to these things. absolutely
at any time related to your questions or the things that we teach here.
So anyway, I'm rambling now, let's get busy and go ahead and
get started. This New Testament. What is the
New Testament? Well, the New Testament is divided
into two specific sections, or two specific types. You have
historical writing, and you have letters. Now, some of you might,
wait a minute, you're missing this, you're missing that note.
It's not Gospels, histories, instruction. We're not talking
about the contents of these writings. We're just specifically talking
about the genre, and if we're talking about the genre, we really
should just say the whole of the New Testament is just a collection
of letters, but there are four documents, five documents rather,
that are historical in nature. They're accounts, and those are
histories. So the other letters, all the
other letters in the New Testament, all the other writings in the
New Testament are just letters. The Revelation is a letter. Everything
else is a letter. There's no other way to define
them. I say, oh, it's prophecy. No, it's a letter. It's a letter
written to the churches. The format's a letter, et cetera,
so on and so forth. So we'll talk about some of those
things as well. We're not going to exhaustively deal with a New
Testament survey, but I hope that by expressing some of this
stuff and teaching some of this stuff in a simple way or in a
succinct way, it'll help you have a better set of eyes on
which to look at the New Testament. So in that, let's just go straight
into some of the divisions of the histories and some of the
letters. We have the Gospels, and the Gospels are in two categories,
and basically we have the Synoptic Gospels, which are Matthew, Mark,
and Luke, and they work together as a narrative of events, but
they're put together in a specific way, and we'll talk about that
in a minute. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are written
by the named apostles and they are a record of the account of
the teachings of Jesus. The teachings of Jesus. The life
events of Jesus. But each of them have a different
audience. For those of you who are familiar
with the synoptic problem and other types of academic or higher
critical assessments, just relax. We don't have to worry about
these things. This is not something that the Christian in the church
needs to deal with. As a matter of fact, I don't
even think it's something that a lot of the pastors of churches need to deal with,
but because it's important to a lot of folks, it's worth mentioning. When we get to the Synoptics,
we see Jesus illustrated in several different ways. When we get to
the Gospel of John, it's not as much of a narrative and life
events as it is instruction and theology. And we see the difference
between the synoptics and John, not just in that, but also in
their purposes. And we also see that in the synoptics,
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, that the writers are teaching things
from more of a factual point of view about the humanity of
Jesus. undergirding his human nature
and his purpose in his humanity, being a servant, someone who
serves his people, being a king, someone who leads his people,
and so on and so forth, but in John's account, in John's gospel,
This is very theological, and I've got a lot of thoughts about
how these intersect, etc., but for tonight, I just want to focus
on the basics of this. So the Gospels are really a historical
account of Jesus' teaching, which also includes some historical
events like the birth or the baptism and not every gospel
has all of these things, but most importantly is to give a
record of the important information about Jesus and his teaching
related to the audience or the purpose of the writing, but it
is considered history. So the gospel accounts are considered
historical accounts. Then we have Another historical
book which is written by the Apostle Luke, and that is the
book of Acts. So the book of Acts is the history of the church.
So we've got the history of Jesus' life and ministry and his teaching
and theology, and then a history of the church. So the Acts of
the Apostles, or as some like to say, the Acts of the Holy
Spirit through the Apostles or for the Apostles or with the
Apostles. But at the end of the day, Luke wrote his gospel and
the book of Acts together as a reading to be understood. One grasping the teachings of
Jesus and his person and the other showing the expansion of
this gospel of this person Jesus who is the God-man. into the
world through the apostles and specifically or more emphatically
the apostle Paul and his missionary journeys and his imprisonments
and freedoms and etc. So that is in a nutshell the
historical elements of the New Testament. The next thing is
letters, and we've got four, five, excuse me, we have five
authors of the New Testament letters, and that is the Apostle
Paul, who accounts for most of them, the Apostle John, who accounts
for the second number, then James, Jude, and Peter, and of course,
Peter has two letters, but I'm just talking about in quantity,
they wrote a lot less than, you know, John, and of course, a
lot less than Paul. And there's no other authors. There are some
people who would argue, well, so-and-so sound like this, and
go ahead and tell you right now, I scribe Paul as the author of
Hebrews, and I have a lot of reasons for that. If you don't
like that, then say that a scribe wrote it, but it's Paul's theology
and Paul's wording. Paul's teaching. So however you
want to handle that, it is Pauline theology in the book of Hebrews.
So we ascribe that to Paul. So those letters are written
by these five men, and they're written to churches and to individuals. And that's one of the main things
that I want to emphasize when it comes to the New Testament.
The New Testament was written as letters, and those letters
are meant to be read in one sitting. They're not meant to be studied
as a textbook, even though they have like, for example, Romans,
as we'll see. We have a lot of doctrine and some deep theological
things there on justification and faith and salvation, redemption,
all this stuff. They weren't written as a textbook.
They're written as a letter. So they're made to be read in
a sitting, and they're made to be read aloud to the church. it's either a letter to the church
to be read aloud or a letter to a specific person or a letter
to a specific elder and the only person that wrote to an elder
was you know well you know Jude No, it's really Paul and John. So we see John writing in an
ambiguous way to the elders of the church, but ultimately, all
of John's writings are church letters, and then we see Paul
writing to some individuals, Philemon, Timothy, and Titus.
So in that, we also have some further instruction. that regard. So those are the two types of
letters or two specific audiences of those letters. This is the
church, you know, the church is found in Galatia, Thessalonica,
Corinth, Rome, Colossae, Philippi, the Church of Ephesus, I forgot,
and then also the letter to the Hebrews of which Peter says is
Paul's to the Hebrew people in the dispersion, so all over the
the area, all over the region, and so multiple cities would
have been involved in the writing of the letter to the Hebrews.
When we talk about the individual letters, we see Philemon, 1st
and 2nd Timothy, and Titus. Paul wrote these things. Philemon,
he wrote as a letter, just to go ahead and, you know, it's
very simple. He wrote it as a letter because Philemon was a supporter
of his and his missionary journeys, and Philemon had a slave named
Onesimus, and to undergird the gospel truth of forgiveness,
redemption, and intimacy in the context of the confession of
the true gospel by an individual. He pleaded with Philemon to submit
to the fact that Onesimus was a brother now, no longer a slave,
and that when Onesimus returned home, he was no longer to be
charged in the crime of abandonment. nor treated as a slave, but to
be treated as if Paul had come to visit. And it's a really rich
little note written and that's why the Lord has canonized it
in the New Testament letters and why the first century apostles
used it in their list of letters, which is where we get our New
Testament from. And then of course to Timothy, he writes two letters
to Timothy, different times of his ministry, but Timothy was
a protege or a mentee of Paul. Timothy was a young man and had
come under the tutelage of Paul to be trained in the ministry
as an elder and as a elder of, or not an elder of elders, but
as a teacher of elders, as all elders are to be about the business
of doing, is training other men to fill the role of elder in
the local assembly. Because it's not really a biblical
model to go out and hunt for a pastor and then bring him in
and then calling family. It may be the way things are
done, but it's not a biblical model. in that regard. So Paul
teaches Timothy some things, and we can talk about that as
well, and then of course Paul teaches Titus as an elder, and
he's supposed to be appointing other elders as well, and when
we see the teaching there in Philemon, Timothy, and Titus,
we can make some general and theological application, but
we have to remember these letters were given to these people, And
only when we see in these writings, for these three letters, that
Paul says, teach this to the church, or this is required of
others, we aren't to try to adhere to the fact that whenever Paul
says to Timothy, entrust to reliable men, that means everybody in
the church is supposed to be mentoring people in the faith to be elders.
That's wrong. that's really ridiculous. Like
receiving an order from your doctor and thinking you have
a right to go in there and do surgery. No, that didn't work.
You might read the order, but the order is not universal if
I can say it that way. Even though there is some doctrine
there, and there's some teaching there, and we glean from it,
and of course they should be read to the church. They were read
to the church by way of information and admonishment, to understand
and be submissive to those who are giving charge for their soul,
who are going to be accredited that. And of course Paul establishes
some of those same teachings in relationship to the construction
of the church. in some of his other letters
as well. So we'll just go from there and keep moving right along.
And then we've got the letters of John, and the letters of John
he wrote of course is three little notes. First, second, third John,
and he wrote things known or things revealed. What we call
revelation or some people use the transliteration of the Greek
apocalypse. It is not prophecy. It's not supposed to be seen
as prophecy. Now Portions of John's letter,
Things Revealed, is of course written in a prophetic style,
as was very prominent during the first century, especially
among Semitic writers. But it's supposed to be understood
as a letter. Revelation is written as a letter.
I mean if you go to the book of Revelation, And you look and
see how it actually is, you know, how it started. Well, I've got
to get to my little thing here. Sorry, guys. You know, you can
see very clearly. I can't make it. I can't make
it come up here. Well, maybe it is. But you can see there.
Oh, yeah, there it was. You can see that it says, you
know, Revelation of Jesus Christ. to show his servants the things
that must soon take place. He made it known by sending an
angel, a messenger, to his servant John who bore witness, and he
says right here, John to the seven churches that are in Asia,
and he gives a salutation, an introduction. This is a letter. The format of this writing is
to be understood as letter, even though there is some prophetic
language in it. it's not to be considered like
a sealed prophecy or things of that nature or an unsealed prophecy,
etc. So he's writing to the churches
of the congregations and to their pastors. As you'll know, I'm
writing to the angels of these churches in Asia Minor. These
seven and the number seven, of course, is a number of completion.
If you want to know more about a way of reading Revelation,
you can go to gracetruth.org and search there on a reading
Revelation series where we took 26-27 weeks to illustrate just
going through, reading the text, and talking about the text within
its context without any interpretive imagination, if you will, And
it's not completely accurate. I've learned some things even
since I've taught that a few years ago. But ultimately we
learn to read the scripture within the context of itself and we
learn to identify what John is speaking in his revealed things
or things known by what he wrote in his letter. So the key to
what John teaches is found in the rest of what John teaches
and vice versa. So this is the letters of John,
and he wrote these things specifically to the church to deal with, of
course, love and intimacy and assurance to walk away from sinfulness
and in certain aspects, but most importantly, he wrote these letters
so that the church may be unified in their understanding of the
gospel and to understand that to love the Lord is to love each
other. and that it's going to come at
a great cost, because it's going to be difficult. It's going to be
very, very difficult, and that we don't bake ourselves into
knowing we have eternal life because of the fact that we are
loving, but that because we have eternal life, we therefore should
be loving, because that is the epitome of the gospel of free
and sovereign grace. Anyway, yes, because Christ God first
loved us, we now love Him, and He loved us. In what way? How
do we know God loves us? because he gave his son. God's
love is seen in what he does. It's not a feeling in that context. It is a doing. It is what God
does. So let's continue to move right along here. Now I don't
know what's going on with that. There we go. So we have the Gospels,
and we're going to talk about the four Gospels, and not as
much about John as we will the synoptics, but in the Gospels,
we're supposed to read the Gospels as believers. Now some people
say, well, it was written to unbelievers. Of course it's for
the sake of unbelievers to understand, but for the most part, the letters,
I mean the Gospels even, all the New Testament was written
to the church. There may be things in there, of course, the teaching
of Jesus, the Gospel, the theology, and all of those things that
demonstrate and teach us about even the narrative of how Jesus
taught, et cetera, and the apostles taught. Of course, unbelievers,
and when they hear these things, as God wills, he can cause them
to be believers through regeneration, through the gift of faith and
the working of repentance, to have a changed mind, to see and
apprehend and rest in the truth of the doctrines of Christ or
the teachings of Christ. But Matthew's gospel then, as
believers, was written to predominantly Jewish believers. And he focuses
on the idea that the prophetic word of the Old Testament prophets
pointed to the time when Israel would receive a true king in
the lineage of David. And in the lineage of David,
this true king would do much more than David ever did. And
it wasn't going to be like David. David was like him as a shadow,
as a foreshadow. and the true king was going to
create an eternal kingdom with his people. Now of course as
Jewish people they really understood that in the context of ethnicity
and genealogy rather than in the context of God does as he
wishes and has mercy on whom he has mercy. and they missed
the ideas found in the Old Testament teaching of their entire childhood
up to the day they died, that the Old Testament is to point
to Christ, the King of kings, rather than to point to Messiah
as just the best king or a final king for an earthly kingdom.
It points to the fact that these Jews need to learn how to read
the Old Testament in the lens of the new revelation, the mystery
revealed of Jesus Christ. So in that, we see, if you read
Matthew, we see it, and I could talk about the divisions of Matthew
and the different stories and the things that he teaches, but
if you look at it, he really shows Christ's lordship over
Israel as a redeemer that is not of this world, but that he
is the king. And everything that the Old Testament
pointed to from the law, from the precepts, from Moses, everything
that has ever been written, that they were very familiar with,
is fulfilled in Christ and pointed to Christ and so on and so forth.
And so we then, as non-Jewish believers, should also read it
in that context. And some of you might be saying,
well, Tippins, where do you get this information from? Oh, well
just read it. Just read it. What happens typically
is that we don't read in our culture here in the United States,
we don't read the Bible. We really don't read the Bible.
We read the whole 66 compilation sometimes straight through, but
we don't read Matthew. We don't go in there and just
read it and read it and read it, and then if we do, maybe we don't
read anything else. Maybe we haven't read John's
Gospel. Maybe we haven't read the teaching of Paul or anybody
else, and so we have a very dissected and broken understanding or relationship
with the text of Scripture to the point that we have more verses
that are important rather than letters that are important, and
by doing so we divide God out and dissect Him into a place
where we don't have the full counsel of the Word of God. So
that's one of the things that Matthew wanted to help his readers
understand is the full counsel of the prophets. culminated in
the person of Jesus Christ and everything they wrote, everything
that happened in the history of the Israelites, everything
that happened from the creation of the world beyond, was for
the purpose of expressly revealing the fullness of who God is in
the person of Jesus Christ, who is the Messianic King. So hopefully
that makes some sense there. The second gospel of course in
our New Testament is the gospel of Mark. Now Mark There's a lot
of things I could talk about in the context of higher criticism
and things of that nature, but Mark wrote predominantly to Roman
people, and why? Because he was in Rome, and we
see the other areas of scripture where Mark was in Rome, and he
wrote to a Roman audience. And one of the reasons we know
that he was writing to a Roman audience, not only because of
the location where he was, and the fact that he intersects Roman
culture there, and his language, and some of his colloquialisms,
and some of the uses of some of the phrases he used are completely
Greek, I mean completely Roman. He explains Jewish customs as
if they've never heard of them. So you know he's not writing
to a Jewish audience, and he's teaching the Roman people that
Jesus Christ They already heard he was the king of the Jews,
but he was a slave of his people. He was a servant. And so this
human idea of the God of heaven who is the king of all kings
now coming into the flesh to be a servant was sort of strange,
because if you know much about the Romans, they called their
Caesar Lord. They called their Caesar God.
And so it's something that was a real shock to them. And we
know that Paul parallels these same things in Romans chapter
8, 9, and 10, specifically chapter 10. And Mark writing his gospel
is writing to these Roman Christians. and he explains Jewish customs,
and it's written in such a way that it's supposed to be read
in one sitting. It's really hard to break Mark's gospel up. It's
just written in a way that if you just listen to the whole
thing, you sort of absorb it, and it's much more palatable
to just take it in in one sitting than it is to go in and just
read here, read there, because remember, it's a letter first
and foremost, but it's also historical, so it's written of course, but
the genre in and of itself would be a history. We see some of
the parallels there between Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and I won't go
into all of them, but some of the things that are there are
also displayed in the other Gospels, and vice versa. Anyway, that's Mark's Gospel
there for you. The next one, Luke's Gospel. Luke is writing to the Greeks.
He's writing to the Greeks, and one of the reasons we know that
is because he writes very well, and not that you need to know,
nor would it be important for you to know this, but even Greek
scholars look and go, wow, you know, Luke was a very educated
man. He was a doctor. He was a physician. Sometimes
you say doctor today, it doesn't always mean that, but he was
a physician and he taught the Greeks and actually addresses
his letters to Theophilus, and that is a word that means the
lover of God, and so, you know, most people who in a precursory
reading of Luke, that means the Gospel of Luke and his letter
Historical Narrative Acts, same attention, the same person, no
one believes that it's an actual individual name, the lover of
God, but rather it is the Greeks who receive the letter and read
it as believers and he calls them lover of God. So it's a
very endearing term and he wanted these two letters or these two
writings to be read together. So one is the teaching of Christ
as the righteous human being, the true perfect human being. worthy of sacrifice, worthy of
praise, worthy of honor, worthy of glory, who came into the world,
and this is someone who stirred and started the totality of the
Christian faith in its real sense now. I'm not talking about historical
Christianity. I'm talking about the Christian faith in its real
sense. so much so that when he wrote these two things he wanted
them to be understood and read and acknowledged together so
that the Greeks who would read his gospel and his historical
narrative would appreciate not just the doctrines and the prophecies
concerning Christ who was the righteous human being who was
also God but also what happened and the after effect of the expansion
of the local assemblies all over the world historically, moving
into even present day, if you will. If Luke were still writing,
he could continue to be writing church history. So that's the
purposes of Luke. That's the purpose of Luke's
gospel and the book of Acts. Now we get through with the history,
the Gospels, and of course John, I didn't mean to skip John, but
John deals with the theology of Jesus, not as much in his
humanity as it is his divine person, his divine nature, and
so Jesus is seen as the God-man who is the complete essence of
the Father, who is the one who came from heaven, who is the
one that the Father has sent, The difference in the synoptics
in John's gospel, one specific thing that needs to be understood
is that in John, in the synoptics, Jesus does a lot of broad teaching. Well, he does the same thing.
I mean he does not have four different lives, but the synoptics
emphasize the larger public teaching of Jesus where John's gospel
emphasizes the small tiny conversations that he had with individuals.
For example, his mother, for example, the few people at the
wedding, for example, Andrew, for example, Nicodemus, the woman
at the well, the blind man, the paralytic, and the list goes
on and on. So we see this large teaching,
and then John's gospel focuses on these intimate moments. where
Jesus is able to be omniscient and work in the lives of individuals,
and that's one of the reasons that John's Gospel is probably
the best evangelistic writing in the New Testament bar none.
It is the best thing to show unbelievers, and it is the bread
and the butter of new believers and mature believers alike that
they don't lose sight of the fact that even the synoptics
who emphasize his humanity did so to point to his divinity,
and the teaching of salvation and redemption through the gospel
of John is as thorough in the context of, I don't know why
my, sorry about that guy, I don't know why my camera's all blurry
up there, is as thorough as even Paul's writing, even though it's
done in narrative form. So we get to see the emphasis
of Jesus teaching certain deep theological things through the
lens of the one whom he loved the most, the disciple whom Jesus
loved, which of course we know is John. So the letters then
after the gospels are written to the assembly, to the church
as a whole, or to individuals as they relate to the church.
Now it doesn't change the purpose. The purpose is that as individuals
they were working within the body of the church. as elders,
and then Philemon as an individual who was tied to the local assembly,
who needed to understand the relationship he had with people
who came to faith. Not worry about who they were,
but who they are now, who they are once they come to know the
truth. They are found there to be seen and judged in Christ.
because that affects the assembly. And then the others, Paul writing
these pastoral epistles to these elder brothers so that they could
learn to work within the church and to lead the church and to
encourage the church as we see Paul emphasizing this to the
Ephesians. He says that those who teach
and those who are called to give oversight and shepherding are
supposed to continue to teach the apostles' teaching and to
undergird The churches work in the ministry by preparing them
to do it through the teaching and through the encouragement
and through the oversight. The elders aren't to be teaching
every single person and doing Bible studies and waiting tables. It's not that they can't, but
that it's not the emphasis of their calling, and if they do
all of these things, then they will actually disobey the Lord
and those other things which are most important for their
calling. So that's why we have deacons. That's why we have those
who serve in the office of servant so that they may empower and
equip and organize the servanthood of every believer and the priesthood
of every believer. for the sake of the local church.
So the letters are written for that purpose. Let's go through a couple of
things. The letters are written to encourage the church, to encourage
the church for whatever reason, for whatever might be discouraging,
or for whatever might be going well. Like Thessalonians, he
was encouraging them to continue in the faith, to continue in
their love for one another. It was a really, really good encouragement
on both sides of the coin there. The letters are also written
to teach, so they teach specific things, but they're not to be
understood as textbooks. They're letters. They're intimate,
personal things that the apostles wanted the church to know as
it related to whatever occasion, problem, or commendation that they might
have been giving to a specific person or persons or a particular
congregation. So they wanted to encourage and
to teach and then they also wanted to correct. So sometimes you
know this thinking is bad, this doctrine is bad, this action
is bad, this attitude is bad. you're not listening to me,"
Paul would say sometimes. Those who won't listen to this
letter, kick them out of the church. Don't consider them a
brother until they come back and are submissive to the writing
that I give. I don't care who. If a cat meows out the Word of God,
we have to obey it if we are a believer. We are bound to do
what the Bible teaches us to do in all seasons, in all circumstances,
in every aspect of every sense. of our relationship with the
body of Christ and his people, no matter what we think, feel,
desire, or can manipulate in any other way. We are bound to
it, and Paul was adamant on that. That's why he constantly defended
his apostleship. I don't have to listen to Paul.
He's not one of us. He's not like that. He's just different.
He's blah, blah, blah. It didn't matter. So whatever the Scripture teaches
in the context of how the church should operate and do and deal
with certain things in correction or in truth, we are bound to
it, and those who refuse to listen are to be put away and put out
until they come back and say, I'm sorry, I am part of this
family, I am part of the body of Christ, and I will listen
to the Scripture. Then we can work out all the details, but
we don't get to dictate in strong arm like a terrorist. our way
of thinking in that context. The letter sometimes dealt with
that. There were people who were wanting their own way. Fourth,
the letters are written for growth, for spiritual growth, for emotional
growth, for unified growth, for ministry growth, for missions
growth, for evangelism growth. All these are the different things
that, you know, the buzzwords we use at the church, but ultimately
growth together, and their understanding of the gospel more and more,
and then also for their understanding of living out the gospel together. Five, the one of the, you know,
and these aren't exhaustive, just something I came up with
just before broadcast time, and you know, individual instruction
of what a church must be and what a church must have in order
to constitute a church. It must have people. It must
have professing believers. It must have the, you know, it
must have Elders that must have, you know, oversight. It must
do certain things. And then corporate instruction
of what the church should do and what the church should believe.
Doctrinally, this is what the church should believe. This is
what the church should be doing corporately. So all these things are in the
letters of the apostles. And we'll talk about some of
those things if we have time. I don't want to go through every
letter of the New Testament, but I think I want to break down
a few of those that we're probably not as familiar with just to
give a sense of how the New Testament should be read and how the New
Testament should be understood in a way that could relate to
the New Testament assembly. So that's something that would
be important. I believe. So let's try that for a second.
Let's go through the letter of James. And I'm teaching James
on midweek, and I've been out for a couple of months, but now
we've picked back up in week five, and this week will be week
six. But James wrote to Jewish Christians, and these Jewish
Christians were across the nation. They were all over the place
in the dispersion. And James writes this letter
as a practical letter of instruction to believers. It's not evangelistic.
None of the letters are. There's no letter written in
the New Testament that's supposed to be read out loud so that somebody
can come to faith. It's not written to the church
because they thought that the church was lost. They weren't
written to elders because they thought elders were unconverted.
No, no, no. The apostles always affirm the
conversion. of anybody who affirmed the gospel
despite differences, despite error, despite anything else
that may intrude. The letters were written to correct
those intrusions, to solidify the doctrines, and to exercise
oversight of making sure that the church got on the same page
in two things. One, living together according
to the gospel, and two, dealing with the right understanding
of the truth of the gospel, and we work through these things
without our pet peeves and without our encroachment above and beyond
what the Bible commands and teaches. So there's practical application
in the book of James, and then also encouragement in suffering. James
wanted to encourage these Christians, these Jewish Christians, in their
suffering. He also wanted to show them that the most important
aspect of their life in order to obtain wisdom from the Lord
and not be double-minded is that they are to settle their differences
and really affect their intimacy by being patient with each other
and not feeling like they were superior or even in the humble
brag, it's all of the Lord's grace that I'm not, that I believe
what I believe, but you don't believe what, you know, this
kind of stuff. No. James knocked that stuff in the
gut and threw it down the staircase. He says, no, you're going to
relate together and you're going to treat each other in the way
that the gospel calls you to treat each other. and let the
Lord, through the process of interaction and intimacy, when
he sees fit, uncover wolves or goats or improper life and things
of that nature. Let the Lord do those things.
So that's one of the things that James... James is not a test
of faith to see if you're truly born again. That's not true.
James did not write that letter. Neither did John write his letters
to that end. And we got 1 Peter and 2 Peter.
First Peter, he wrote to believers to encourage them in suffering.
He wrote to remind them of the work of redemption in Christ
Jesus. He wrote to exhort them to be subject to the governing
authorities, and he wrote to affirm himself and Paul were
in agreement because people were rumor mill. Well, Peter shouldn't
be listened to because Paul had to rebuke him. He's an unbeliever.
That's garbage. That's just so satanic. That
kind of stuff is just so demonic. We need to rejoice when people
reconcile, not then plug holes in the rest of their testimony
because we want to get to the bottom of something suspicious.
Suspicion is from Satan, y'all. Fear is from Satan. The disposition
to not believe people is from Satan, and I'm going to say that
a thousand times over the next few years. It's from the devil,
and if that's the place you live, you are not living in the joy,
and you are not living in the and the freedom of Christ, and
the Spirit is not giving you that. That's not called discernment.
That's destruction. Discernment gives you joy. Discernment
settles your spirit. Discernment settles our soul
to know all is well with our soul. Discernment knows, you
know what, no matter what's going on with that person over there,
I'm going to pray for them and love them, and I know the Lord's going
to bring it to the place that He wants to bring it in His timing.
That is what the scripture is teaching us. That's what Peter
is trying to help these people understand. Second Peter did
the same thing. He continues to tell them that they need to
grow in grace. They need to mature through the trials of life. Like James, he says, don't let
the trials push you to fall away. Don't just walk away from the
church like Paul says to the Hebrews. Don't walk away from
the people of God just because there's stress. Don't walk away
from the calling just because there's tension. Don't do that.
Because that's not what the scripture calls us to. It calls us to endurance
and then promises us that endurance comes through the power of the
Holy Spirit. And he says don't run from the body and don't run
from the truth. And then the third thing here
I want to just to bring up is that the point of 2 Peter is
that Jesus is coming back. So let's hold fast and wait on
him. Let's wait upon the Lord in the trials and let's wait
knowing that one day even if we die now or we suffer greatly
or everything we have is taken away from us we still have everything
because Christ has promised that he's coming back to see us. Jude. Jude's a neat little letter,
and it's got some interesting stuff there. We could talk for
an hour about Jude, but Jude is written to teach the church
to endure in the faith, to teach the church to resist false teachers,
because they had gotten... Jude is a late written letter,
and people had gotten complacent, and they just accepted the reality
that, oh, you know what? Everybody that says Jesus is
okay. Hey, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Now, would just somebody saying,
I believe in Jesus, constitute a gospel confession? Of course
not. Well, what do you mean? And tell me more, and let me
hear your testimony. And then we have an evangelistic
ability to come in and talk about some of the things that the scripture
teaches, and someone may come to the truth. But we just don't
say, I love Jesus. We don't accept, I love Jesus,
or I believe in Jesus. as a gospel confession. There's
got to be some substance to it. There's got to be some specifics
there. And there's a few of those things that we've talked about
before that are necessary according to the scripture. But we endure
in the faith. But see what happens is we have
gotten, and this church, gotten to the place of just being complacent.
Not because they were lazy or non-discerning. It's just the
trials and the suffering had left. So everybody just squeezed
in. But guess what happened? false teachers unbeknownst to
the church had squeezed in and their motives. See, the difference
between a wolf false teacher and someone who's just wrong
is a false teacher, according to Jude, is one who comes in
with the intention of twisting people's doctrine, changing people's
idea. Like Galatia, we want to get
these guys who are really strong in the faith. Let's get these
guys to come in and start thinking about circumcision like the Judaizers.
So Jude was saying, hey, we've got to resist false teaching.
Don't let these people teach this stuff. Call them to quit.
What is Jude say? Warn them to stop. And what happens
if the false teaching stops? We rejoice. We rejoice. We instruct and we rejoice. And
then If they don't stop, we get rid of them. We exercise expulsion
as part of our loving correction for the sake of the body and
the person who's teaching falsehood. Because if we expel someone from
our lives who continues to just teach falsely, the reason we
do it is to show the harshness. It's like time out. To show the
harshness of the fact that this is divisive to the body. The
same thing with the attitude and actions of people taking
upon themselves universal discipline of the church. It's demonic.
But we expel people from our lives and from the lives of the
assembly so that God, through that, He promises, as He teaches
the Corinthians through Paul, He promises that He will then
reconcile His sheep back to one another. And that when we see
that reconciliation, just like Jesus says in Matthew 28, we've
gained our brother and we rejoice in that. So error, another thing
that Jude talks about is that we should live out the gospel
no matter what kind of false teachers are going on. Get rid
of them. Move on. If they come back, rejoice. But error, fourth
thing, is always in play. God has purposed error and false
teachers, and He's purposed His enemies to be among the church
and to be discovered and be dealt with in a compassionate, polite,
temperate, patient manner, because God is the one who brings about
restitution, not man. And some people in Jude's writing
probably said, well, man, I mean, how long has this been going
on? How long is it going to happen? And that's why he uses all these
things. He says, you remember Sodom and Gomorrah? Remember
the angels that fell from heaven? Remember this? Remember that?
Remember the others? The conflict is constant. It's promised. It's
part of God's purpose. So don't think you'll ever be
free of false teachers in the body of Christ until you are
glorified. And God has truly separated the sheep from the
goat. Remember the history of the Bible, Jude says. Remember
the history. There's even some mythology that
is not in the Bible that you need to remember. Remember that
about Moses' body and some other stuff? So that's what Jude's
about. It's about the church could rejoice.
That's what it all comes down to is that the church could be
free and live in a manner of rejoicing. The letter to the
Romans, we all know what that is, but this is Paul's writing
to the Christians in the region of Rome to encourage in the faith
against Judaizers who were saying, hey, you know what? You're not
Jewish enough to be a believer. You got to do these things. He
also wanted to give them updates on his missionary plans. He wanted
to explain God's purposes of elections and the fact that just
because someone's an ethnic Jew doesn't mean that they're an
elect person. And then he wanted to give a lot of instructions
starting in verse 12 through the end of the text, and commands
on how to live together in grace, and also how to live together
in a gracious way amongst the believers of the world, and the
magistrate, and other things like that. So Romans is an instructive
text to which we learn truth, and then we say, why was this
taught? Because of this. Therefore we walk in this manner.
So that's the whole purpose of it. So without the assembly,
there's no walking in the manner. You see what I mean? And to abandon
the assembly in the context of conflict is to not trust the
Lord. Period. I don't care how people
shape it. They are liars and they are weak and unable to listen
and learn because they're not listening to the Scripture of
God. 1 Corinthians deal with a lot of mess. And the reason
I said that is because this is what Paul wrote 1 Corinthians.
I mean, people weren't willing to learn. They weren't gonna
be told what to do. They weren't gonna be told how
to deal with sin. They weren't gonna be told how to deal with conflict.
They weren't gonna be told how to deal with false teaching. They
weren't gonna stop arguing. And Paul's like, get them out,
put them out. And if someone says they're not
gonna listen, do not consider them a brother. That's what Paul
says to the Corinthian church. If they don't listen to my letters,
They have no business among you. Get them out. So on the matter
of church discipline, on the matter of loving your brother,
on the matter of being wise, on the matter of being prudent,
on the matter of being patient, when people stomp their feet
and run away and act crazy and stir up division, You know, division
was stirred predominantly in the New Testament by people not
wanting to get along and not wanting to reconcile according
to the scripture. It was very little to do with doctrinal things. It was mostly to do with people
not being willing to deal with things in a biblical manner,
by either not deal with sin or deal with things sinfully, if
you see what I mean. So he instructs the church on
expulsion. He also instructs the church
on restoration. And then he instructs on the
matters of conscience. He instructs on matters of support
and offerings and, you know, taking up offerings. He defends
his authority in this letter to show that what he writes has
teeth. It's not something that we can
just ignore. And then he also gives a lot
of encouragement in trial. 2 Corinthians chapter 4 specifically
is a very encouraging text for the believer. We've got Galatians. Paul, this is the first of Paul's
writings according to what we can do in the context of dating.
Some people say it's his last writing, but I believe it's his
first writing. He rebukes those who trouble
the saints with conditions to the gospel. He rebukes the saints.
Born-again believers, there's nowhere in Paul's writing of
Galatians that reprobates any person that received the letter.
Nobody in Paul's mind who was part of that congregation was
a reprobate. Nobody in Paul's mind who was
a part of that congregation was an unbeliever. He was just using
emphatic and very aggressive verbiage and rhetoric to establish
the severity of the fact that the Judaizers were unbelieving
people. and that they were bringing a
false gospel, and they were bringing worse bondage, bondage to the
believers in the context of Galatia, and so he wanted them to instruct
them and warn them against these people, to have nothing to do
with these people, and then in an attempt to correct that thinking
that a lot of them were like freaking out, some of them were
getting circumcised. I mean it's crazy. He instructed on faith alone
apart from the law. That's why Galatians is so emphatic.
It's not the treatise on things. It is a treatise on this circumstance
that Paul wrote as it related to the dysfunction of the local
assembly who wasn't living together in gospel unity because they
were not dealing with it biblically. They were not dealing with it
in a godly way. So Paul writes this and charges
them to do it. He teaches and admonishes them
also then on Christian liberty and not to flaunt that etc. And
you know this has everything to do with being the church of
Christ. And then we've got Philippians, and Colossians, and Thessalonians,
and I talked about Timothy already, and Titus, and Philemon, and
Hebrews, and I could go on and on and on to talk about all these
things, but I hope you get the picture of why the New Testament
is a letter, a compilation of letters and history written to
the assemblies of the saints, and the application of these
writings are for the intimacy of the saints together, and I'm
going to say some things that I really want you to understand
my heart. My heart bleeds for the sheep
of Christ. In every aspect, in every corner
of the world, in every place we know of, my heart bleeds.
My heart bleeds for the saints, local, and I give everything
that I can give. Every waking hour I'm constantly
inundated with prayers and thoughts and things for the body of Christ.
We're not a pragmatic ministry of sorts. We're not a business. We're not doing cool things to
attract anybody. We're just living life together
in hope that our joy will be full in the truth of Christ. that we are able to learn, to
see and watch God do his work through and in us and through
us together. And so my heart bleeds and longs
for that continued intimacy and growth. My heart also longs and
is burdened greatly for many of you who are without a church
family, without local, without even another brother or sister
in the area that you can be a part of. Christian fellowship in a
real-life way. And I say this to say that we
have been praying and God will do it in His time. It may be
20 years from now and maybe some of you may not be on the earth
when any of these things take place and the Lord may never
do it, but there will be a time where church planters will be
equipped to go into the other places where you live and start
churches, but we can't decide when those things are going to
take place. We can't put plans down and go, okay, Here's the
criterion. Check, check, check, check. Now
plant churches. That's not the way the Lord works. The Lord
will do what he's going to do. I mean, you're talking about
nearly 14 years before Paul's conversion and his first open
preaching mission event. I mean, this is the Lord's timing. You just don't wake up and go.
It's not frivolity and loose cannon zeal. That is ungodly. It is long-suffering patience
and humility. That's what God does in the people
that he's actually literally called, and we wait upon the
Lord. But in the end of it all, you
know, the New Testament can be learned from and gleaned from,
and there are relationships within personal relationships, even
across the world, that of course have some, the New Testament
teaching has an impact on. I mean, if I have somebody that
I know people in other parts of the world, other parts of
the country, I need to treat them kindly. I need to treat
them as I'm able to. I need to pray for them as I
can. But that's not the application of the New Testament. The New
Testament applies in living together as the saints in a local sense,
not a foreign sense, not a digital sense. The church does not exist
on Facebook. It does not exist. I don't care
what group you're in. There's a sheep without a home.
That's the whole point. You have no home. We can minister
as much as we can, and we can relate to one another in a biblical
way, but that is not the full application of the New Testament
writing. For people who forsake that because
of arrogance and ignorance, Those of you who long for it, pray
for them. Don't get angry. Pray for them
and know that we love you and we're truly praying for the Lord
to establish and we're doing what we can. And COVID has just
like pulled the rug out from under everything we were doing
as a ministry. Everything we were doing locally
and around and even abroad and internationally. Everything.
But the Lord is perfect in His purposes on that. So we just
wait and we love each other the way we can. And I want to talk
about these things. I want you all to think about
these things. That is where you need to be thinking. You need
to be thinking, how can I minister in such a way? Quit being an
apologist. Quit trying to be an internet
hero. Stop. Just find intimacy around
the gospel and soak in it. Even if you've got two people,
that's all you need. You don't need 100 people. You don't need
1,000 people. You don't need a lot of likes and things. Find
relationships that you can build in the gospel that you can be
encouraged one-on-one with someone else. If you don't have a congregation
near you, if you don't have another brother or sister near you, get
on the telephone and talk and enjoy. Make the conversation
seasoned with grace about the truth of Christ, about the letters
of the apostles, and if you got questions, ask each other. If
you don't know, ask me. If I don't know, we'll dive into
some other things together. We can go to the Excuse me, I'm
trying not to sneeze. We can go to the Scripture and
we can learn together and have it exposed to us by the preciousness
of our loving Father who gives us the Spirit and gives us wisdom
without reproach. So all these things are true
and powerful. We can go to John's writings
and his letters in 1st, 2nd, 3rd John. It's about loving one
another. Things revealed is about enduring to the end and it gives
a history of the whole world and the fall of Satan and everything.
showing those suffering saints at the end of things that Christ
is the King of kings and the Lord of lords, the Alpha, the
Omega, the one who comes with righteousness and righteousness
and rules with thunder and justice. And he is the gracious lamb that
laid himself down for the sins of his people. And no one will
stop him and no one will take us from his hands. And when we
stand with him around the sea, it will be at peace. There are
not even waves. at the sea of glass. That's why they call it
that. It's such a place of peace that the wind doesn't move the
water, that kind of stuff. So there's the images there.
I've got one other question here, but I think I've run out of time.
Beloved, I'll pick up with this question next week. I love you, and I'm glad that
you have decided to join us tonight. I'm sorry that I didn't get into
all the other questions, but it is good