Latest / The Living Waters Podcast / What is the Church? False Converts in the Church. Living out a Gospel Community. - Highlight Episode 348

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What is the Church? False Converts in the Church. Living out a Gospel Community. - Highlight Episode 348 · The Living Waters Podcast

• 1:04
  Speaker 1: All right.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Today we are talking about exploring healthy biblical community.
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: Can you better explain what we're talking about?
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because when I first saw this, I thought what are we talking about here?
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah Well, the body of Christ, the church, is a community.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: It's made up of individuals that are called to be accountable to one another, called to love one another, called to pray for one another, called to serve one another, called to proclaim the gospel together.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: And we live in an era where this has seriously become just a lost virtue, if I could call it that.
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: Can I say something here?
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the church is hidden from the world, it would seem.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: You ask most secular people what's the church?
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: They really don't know that.
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: It's the community of believers around the world.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: The foundation of God stands, sure, having this seal.
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: The Lord knows them that are His, and so the true believers are those who are trusting in Jesus, despite their so-called denomination.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: For most people, they hear the word church or think about church and they're immediately going to the building.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Right, they're going to just.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: You know, I go to a church.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: You know, rather than seeing, that the church is the community of God's people, that it's not just a place.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: Of course, you can use the word church to describe the place where the saints gather, but ultimately it is the people of God.
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: We are the church, the genuine church, is a fellowship of true believers and there are some who are lonely because they're disillusioned by the church.
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: But if you go to a genuine church and you approach someone and show an interest in them, the love of God will radiate from them to you and you'll become part of that fellowship.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: You'll get to know good friends, true friends.
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: But what we don't realize is a lot of churches have got false converts in them.
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: That's what Charles Spurgeon said Nobody can do as much damage to the church of God as the man who is within its walls but not within its life.
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: That's an ooh.
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: That's an ooh, that's a good one Do it again, ooh and an ah.
• 3:09
  Speaker 4: That's a good one.
• 3:10
  Speaker 4: No, no.
• 3:10
  Speaker 4: If it's worth saying once, it's worth saying twice.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, ray, yes, you want it again.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: Nobody can do as much damage to the church of God as the man who is within its walls but not within its life, man that is, there is a loneliness epidemic in the world.
• 3:27
  Speaker 3: Today, 50% of US adults report living a lonely life.
• 3:32
  Speaker 3: Loneliness increases your risk of premature death by 29%.
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: You have a higher risk of heart disease, you mean suicide or falling down stairs.
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: Well, that, and heart disease, stroke, dementia, depression all of them linked to loneliness.
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: And here's the reality is that we know, like it's written on our hearts, we are literally dying for a community, but we are trying, as a culture, to fill the void with substitute communities, with gyms that have a community, with gaming, online communities and politics and online tribes, but the reality is, none of these communities will satisfy, because none of these communities are the ones you were made for.
• 4:14
  Speaker 3: Here's what's crazy, too, is that we are more digitally connected than we ever have been in history.
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: That's the irony, isn't it?
• 4:22
  Speaker 3: That's exactly right.
• 4:23
  Speaker 3: These alternative communities will never satisfy us because we were made for something else.
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: We were made for God's family.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: You know, oscar, as you were saying that, I was thinking back to the whole COVID shutdown and I think it was really demonstrated that social media is not going to cure the loneliness issue.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: Because everyone had it at home still, everyone was locked up and you had access to internet.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: I mean, that didn't get shut down, but, man, that became like one of the big things that those who were opposed to the shutdowns were talking about, like the mental health crisis because of isolation.
• 5:00
  Speaker 4: That's usually what happens with solitary, isn't it?
• 5:01
  Speaker 4: They just go crazy because we've been designed to be in community and then you put them in solitary confinement and there's no windows and you can't see birds, you can't hear people, you just go insane.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we weren't designed for that.
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: It goes back to Genesis 2.18, where God said "'It is not good that man should be alone'".
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: I don't think our churches, our modern churches, our cultural modern churches, are designed for community.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: And seriously, you go to a local church and someone says I go to your church, say, can you turn around and see the back of your head?
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: So I say if I'd recognize you, Because that's all you see, the back of a couple hundred people's heads and then they have like a three-minute break where everyone has to kiss each other and welcome to the church and have little hugs and it's not any depth and that's why I really like house churches and that's why I've mentioned before that when I was a brand new Christian, I was in a church and I realized this that we weren't having community in our church meetings and I tried to move these pews to face each other by myself, these long, big pews, so we'd all be facing each other, so the person ministering would have people here and people behind them in front of them.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: You know that's how the synagogues were designed back in ancient times Like remember Mark, when we went to Israel, they would show us like ancient synagogues and they were designed that way yeah they were like you know, where everyone could see each other.
• 6:17
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 6:17
  Speaker 3: We have to be brutally honest, which is that we have a consumeristic mindset.
• 6:21
  Speaker 3: We go to church and it's like entertain me, justify my prejudices, show me something worth remembering for this rest of the week.
• 6:32
  Speaker 3: And so we show up late, halfway through worship.
• 6:34
  Speaker 3: We leave as quickly as we can so we don't have to deal with the traffic getting out of the parking lot and we go about our own way.
• 6:40
  Speaker 3: And when you look at the early church, specifically in Acts, when you look at church history, thinking of Joseph Tellerman's book, the Church Was a Family.
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: Church community was not this thing that was done for 45 minutes to two hours on a Sunday.
• 6:55
  Speaker 3: Church community was something that you lived out in the totality of your life.
• 7:00
  Speaker 3: It's something that happened throughout the week at the dinner table as you were raising children.
• 7:06
  Speaker 3: It was this all-encompassing experience.
• 7:09
  Speaker 3: The onus is on the Christian today to find a way to live out a communal life in the context of gospel community.
• 7:22
  Speaker 3: Our hearts need it and the church needs it.
• 7:25
  Speaker 3: The church needs us to be in community.
• 7:28
  Speaker 4: Right, it's not just going through a book together, it's not just getting coffee with someone, it's living life with someone.
• 7:38
  Speaker 4: Right, I'm going to this memorial service.
• 7:41
  Speaker 4: You got time to go with me.
• 7:42
  Speaker 4: Hey, I'm heading over to Costco to pick up some things.
• 7:45
  Speaker 4: Why don't you cruise on over there with me?
• 7:47
  Speaker 4: And there's these little weird time limits that are attached to it, so it doesn't become so overwhelming.
• 7:52
  Speaker 4: Remember, jesus didn't say to go into all the world and make converts.
• 7:55
  Speaker 4: He said to go into all the world to make disciples.
• 7:57
  Speaker 4: And if we put that to use to the best of our ability, without pulling our hair out, I'm waiting for ability without pulling our hair out.
• 8:09
  Speaker 4: I'm waiting for Ray Ray's, scared to death of losing his hair.
• 8:12
  Speaker 4: We would see that it's living life.
• 8:16
  Speaker 4: It's the good, it's the bad.
• 8:17
  Speaker 4: It's how the guy cuts you off and how you handle that.
• 8:18
  Speaker 4: It's maybe giving somebody else a park job while you park way over in the parking spot and you park in a completely different place, right.
• 8:26
  Speaker 4: Isolation is a lot like the devil's lunchable, if you would right that you're preparing for him a meal because you're completely left.
• 8:39
  Speaker 4: Remember those lunchables.
• 8:39
  Speaker 4: You have these little crackers and cheese and ham and turkey, right, and you kind of eat it on the go.
• 8:45
  Speaker 4: Idle time is the devil's workshop, when you're kind of isolated by yourself, you have no plan and you think that I'm an island onto myself.
• 8:55
  Speaker 4: You're just being teed up for the enemy.
• 8:58
  Speaker 4: It's easy to grab the one who's wandering by themselves.
• 9:02
  Speaker 4: The enemy doesn't come along necessarily and say, all right, here's 30 sheep that are over here, let's just go for one of them.
• 9:08
  Speaker 4: When there's one over here by himself, he's going to look for the weakest one.
• 9:11
  Speaker 4: Are you hitting for a Spurgeon quote?
• 9:14
  Speaker 4: Well, some Christians try to go to heaven alone, in solitude.
• 9:18
  Speaker 4: But believers are not compared to bears or lions or other animals that wander alone.
• 9:22
  Speaker 4: Spurgeon went on to say those who belong to Christ are sheep, in this respect that they love to get together.
• 9:28
  Speaker 4: Sheep go in flocks, and so do God's people.
• 9:32
  Speaker 4: I just stole that from Ray, isn't?
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: that cool.
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: You stole that from Spurgeon.
• 9:37
  Speaker 4: Okay, proverbs 18.1,.
• 9:38
  Speaker 4: Whoever isolates himself, seeks his own desire.
• 9:41
  Speaker 4: He breaks out against all sound judgment.
• 9:44
  Speaker 4: So your spiritual strength is tied in your spiritual circle.
• 9:49
  Speaker 4: Your spiritual strength is tied in your spiritual circle.
• 9:54
  Speaker 4: Who are you hanging out with?
• 9:55
  Speaker 4: Discipleship?
• 9:56
  Speaker 4: It's so important you should be discipling and get discipled at all times.
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: If you're not in good, healthy, biblical community, get into it.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: And we have people ask us at times should I stay in my church?
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: There's this, there's that.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: First, try to be a part of the solution, and if you can't be, if there's unhealthy things going on, then you need to find a place where there is good health in terms of biblical community.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: And so do that.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: And again, don't let this just slip away.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: Decide right now.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: I'm going to do A, B and C in order to make sure that I contribute to good, healthy community and that I have it in my life.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: Thank you for tuning in to this week's highlights from the Living Waters podcast.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: Friends, we value your time, so we've created a bite-sized version of our podcast for listeners who want to get equipped, without the jokes and fellowship.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: Be sure to check out the full episode every Thursday, where we dive deeper into the topic.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: Until then, you can watch the full podcast episode available now on livingwaterstv.