Pastor's Blog: Book Recommendations on the Authority of the Local Church
Book Recommendations on the authority of the local church
In follow-up to Caleb’s June 25 sermon on the authority Christ gave his church, I recommended two books on the topic this past Sunday. Mark Dever’s Nine Marks of a Healthy Church and Jonathan Leeman’s The Rule of Love both helpfully flesh out the purpose and role of the local church.
If you open God’s Word and listen to what he has to say about why the church exists, one concern looms over all others: the church exists to make much of Jesus. And the most loving thing God could do for a world that desperately needs to know Jesus is show them exactly where to look to see Jesus. He gets that done by gathering his people into distinct, identifiable communities where the people of God are clearly distinguished from the world.
In fact, distinguishing his people from the world is so essential to God’s mission in the world that he hasn’t entrusted that work to us as individuals. He’s given that responsibility to his authorized representative on earth, the local church. A true local church is a body of baptized believers associated together for the worship of God and for carrying out Jesus’ commission to disciple the nations. It’s characterized by three things: the right preaching of God’s Word, the right administration of the sacraments, and the right maintenance of corporate holiness through discipline.
If these topics are new or different or hard for you, let me encourage you to go back to Scripture, and with help from someone like Jonathan Leeman or Mark Dever, study what God says about the church’s authority, what it looks like and doesn’t look like, and why Christ is glorified when we submit ourselves to a local church through membership, asking her to affirm and oversee our profession of faith.
Brothers and sisters, the church exists, KingsWay exists, because God is on a mission to ravish the world with the splendor of his beauty. May we magnify the worth of our Redeemer in the eyes of a world that desperately needs to see Jesus.
Matthew Williams