My church journey part three.
Hey, welcome to today's lesson.
I've been sharing here on this beautiful Florida beach, as the sun is rising over in the East
there, about my church journey.
In the last lesson, I was sharing about my experience in the third church that my wife
and I pioneered and pastored.
And specifically the story of how the Lord led me to reading Matthew, chapter 25, verses
31 through 46.
The future judgment of the sheep and the goats.
And asked me the question, "If everybody in your church died today, and stood at this
judgment, how many would be sheep and how many would be goats?"
Of course all that just ruined me in a good way, and so I repented, I asked God to forgive
me, and I asked my congregation to forgive me, and I began to try to make disciples by
teaching the word.
Never underestimate the power in one sermon, spoken, written, no matter what.
Because if it contains truth from the word of God, well then it's powerful.
Because God's word is powerful.
Jesus is not here on the Earth today in the flesh modeling before us how we ought to live
and so forth.
We can't see him according to flesh, but we certainly have his Holy Spirit living in us,
and we have the stories in the bible about him.
Who would ever underestimate the power of reading something that Jesus said, or anything
that's inspired by the Holy Spirit in the bible?
I mean, that's the word of God.
So a sermon based on the word of God, never underestimate the power of one sermon.
So I'm certainly not downplaying the importance of preaching and teaching in the church, it
can be powerful.
As I did that, after I repented as a pastor, and began to focus on teaching more of the
truth, we did see some results.
Now, we also experienced some things that were not so good.
Because some people didn't like it.
Which that was surprising.
We're all claiming to be Christians, but we don't want to hear about obeying Christ's
commandments.
Something is very wrong with that.
Wow, it's just hard even to know where to start there.
I mean, if we have faith in Jesus Christ, that he is the son of God before who we will
stand one day and give an account, well, stands to reason we'd want to obey all his commandments,
right?
Right.
Okay.
So, anyways, I ultimately was released from that pastorate and began teaching pastors
all over the world in pastors conferences.
What I would do is I would tell them my church story.
What happened in my last church.
I would just tell them about Matthew, Chapter 25, verses 31 through 46.
And how that impacted me, and the question the Holy Spirit asked me.
And I wouldn't point my finger at those pastors who were in those conferences.
I'd just tell my story and, of course, I knew what all them were thinking, they were thinking,
"Wow, what if everybody in my church died today and stood at this judgment of the sheep
and the goats?
How many would be sheep and how many would be goats?"
So many of them began to evaluate, of course, the real fruitfulness of their ministries.
And why?
There was significant impact.
And I ultimately wrote a book called The Disciple Making Minister, that contained that kind
of teaching.
It's been translating into something like 30 languages, and it's on DavidServant.com,
and you get lots of people from around the world reading that.
So that stuff is still impacting people.
People write to me rather frequently, I bump into people rather frequently, who tell me
how some of that teaching impacted them and changed their life, and set them on a new
course.
But I'm talking about my church journey here, and I'm bringing up more to the present.
When I left my last church, I was itinerating as a teacher, but I was home some of the time.
So my wife and I would visit churches.
And was the very first time that we got our perspective from the pew rather than the pulpit.
I'm going to tell you, it was eye opening.
I remember saying to my wife one time as we were driving home, I said, "You know, honey,
the best part of church is when it's over."
And I explained that.
You know, I'm sitting there looking at the back of somebody's head, and watching this
show up on the stage, and I was used to being part of that show.
So it was a little tough for me to be sitting out there with the viewers and not up in the
front with the performers.
So looking at the back of people's heads and oftentimes listening to sermons that weren't
always entirely biblical, and oftentimes wrongly motivated, and listening to pastors that really
weren't trying to make disciples, just trying to build a church and get more people to come,
and it became kind of disillusion.
I said to my wife, "You know, the best part of church is when it's over, because at least
then you could talk to people, and you can kind of interact with them, and interrelate
with them, and you can have spiritual conversations."
What's the Lord doing in your life?
What's the Lord showing you?
Is the Lord opening any doors for you to serve him?
The real stuff of Christianity, not just listening, listening, listening the endless sermon.
Sometimes I would look at those parishioners out in the pews, and I'd look around the church,
I think to myself, "Does this pastor not realize that no one is listening to what he's saying
right now?"
He's up there droning on, and yes, people's faces are facing towards the front, but I
could tell by looking at them that no one was really listening, they had that thousand-yard
stare in their eyes, and I just thought, "This is insane."
People are coming pretending to listen, and someone's up there speaking, fooling himself
that they are listening, and even if they were listening, it's not going to change their
life much at all.
Because it's not really biblical, it's not challenging, it's not lending itself to making
disciples.
I just thought, "Something is wrong with this picture."
So I was sitting there one time in my living room, one Sunday evening, and I said to my
wife, "Wouldn't it be nice if you could strip away all the non-essentials from church and
just like meet in your house?"
Kind of like a bible study.
You know, you could sit in a circle, but you know.
But we say this is church, because it has all the main components of church.
You don't have a pastor, ordained pastor there, and you don't have a choir, and you don't
have a baptismal tank, and pews and so forth.
But you got the essentials.
Jesus said, "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in their midst," so
obviously Jesus is willing to come into our living rooms.
I said, "We could just sit around, we could worship the Lord.
Maybe a guitar, maybe a cappella.
We could study the word together.
People could interact, people could ask questions and so forth.
We could take our money instead of giving it to the mortgage, and the electric bill,
we could help the poor.
Help the least of these like Jesus said the sheep do."
My wife said, "Yeah, that would be great."
I said, "Let me just google this and see if anyone has ever thought of this before."
I googled it, and I said to my wife, "Oh my goodness, Becky, not only have people thought
about this, a lot of people have thought about this.
And a lot of people are doing this and they've been doing it for decades all over the world.
They call it The House Church Movement."
It was happening in China, millions of people were in house churches.
I realized that actually maybe it was possible, very possible, that in the wider body of Christ
around the world, the true believers in Jesus, more of them probably meet in houses, or in
apartments, than meet in churches, because of the explosion of the gospel in places like
China and India, [inaudible 00:08:52].
Okay.
Well, I'll tell more about my church journey on the very next edition of Little Lessons.
Thanks for joining me.