Mark Dever is the pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church.
Mark Dever
I would like to talk about the church.
I have no new ideas, that’s not what I specialize in. But I do have one fresh idea.
“One thing I can promise you is that the church will win. God will accomplish his victory.”
Success looks like faithfulness. My job is not to determine where the church will go, but to be faithful.
We don’t pay staff to emotionally manipulate us into being involved.
The big idea: something far more important is going on in the local church than we tend to think – God has put himself on display for the world to see. God is about showing himself.
When you read your Bible, God has always been about displaying himself.
The theme of 1 Corinthians is that the church is the display of the very character of God.
In the OT, God chooses a nation to display himself. In the NT, God chooses the church.
Catholics: the church created the Bible
Protestants: the Bible created the church
God’s people have never created His word. God’s word builds God’s church.
Sermons should be monologues: displays the character of God and how we have done nothing to earn our salvation.
God is about making a new creation – that is not good news for us particularly – but that Jesus died and offers salvation and new birth, that’s good news for us!
Culture is not neutral; culture is hostile to the gospel. Paul understood the “normal” way of communicating in Corinth and he would not use it.
Truths are not at war with a personal relationship with God; they are part of what God uses to build us up in the gospel.
The church is a bowl that God holds up to the world to display what He can (and is doing) do.
We do not want to ever undermine the distinction between the church and the world. We want to see our lives now as believers and those without Christ.
It is not just us as individuals, there is a corporate nature. Matthew 18 helps us see necessity of membership. As unrelated as membership seems to this issue, it is crucial to see what God is calling us to do in evangelism.
Our lives should be congregationally centered. We are not called to be a lone ranger portfolio.
There is something about how we “do life together” that confounds the world.
Imagine if our churches stopped talking about quantity and start talking about quality. What if we saw people in our churches investing in others.
SBC churches are known for nominalism and carnality.
Being asked about an altar call at an SBC church is like being asked about mass at a roman catholic church.
How does someone get saved? The same way people did for the 1800 years before altar calls were created.
God set up the church to make it deliberately distinct from the world.
Don’t think of your church as event to be produced but a community to be cultivated.
You need the long lasting love of a parent as a pastor.
God must laugh at us when we discover something that “works”.
My soul is fed and terrified by Hebrews 13:11. We must give an account … to God.
Love to hear you comment on this quote:
My job is not to determine where the church will go, but to be faithful.
And this sounds awfully familiar:
Imagine if our churches stopped talking about quantity and start talking about quality. What if we saw people in our churches investing in others.