Text: Ephesians 2
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé
The Duties of The Congregation
This morning, we continue our 4-part walk through the doctrine of the local church and membership in it. We’ve established that local church membership is biblical and good, that fundamentally, in local church membership, we are saying, “I belong to the Church universal as a Christian, and this local church is where I will be a Christian.”
We looked briefly last week, then, at the duties of the leaders of the church. And now this morning, we ask the question, “What are the duties of the local assembly? What are the duties of the congregation of a local church?”
I’d like to begin reminding us of what it is that we, the Church, are and are not.
The Church is not a mere gathering of people with certain shared preferences and affinities. That is to say essentially that it is not a religious version of Facebook group devoted to organic gardening or NBA fandom.
The Church is not a spiritual vending machine, where congregants come and insert attendance and tithing and receive spiritual goods and services from a priestly class of professional Christian ministers. The Church doesn’t merely exist, in other words, for the ministry of a few members of it.
The Church is not just another political organ, bent on reforming politics.
The Church is rather, as Colossians 1:18 teaches, is the very body of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The Church, 1 Timothy 3:15 teaches, is a pillar and buttress of the truth.
The Church, 1 Peter 2:5 teaches, is a spiritual house, built of individually prepared, living stones, a house where the Lord our God gladly accepts spiritual sacrifices. It is a family, not a mere organization.
The Church, 1 Peter 2:9–10 teaches, is a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession.
The Church, Ephesians 3:10 teaches, is the means through which God is making known his own manifold wisdom to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.
The Church, Matthew 28 teaches, is that people which has been entrusted with nothing less than the invasion of the world with the gospel of King Jesus and his Kingdom, to declare the amnesty of blood-bought grace for rebels, their adoption as sons through faith, to teach them to obey all his commands, and to fervently pray and seek to see God’s will be done and his Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.
That is what we are. The Church is no mundanity. She is no small thing. The Church is glorious, because the Church is the work of God’s hands for the cosmic mission which God is at work in seeing accomplished in history. So as we take up the duties of the congregation, we do so with those glories in mind—because all of the duties of the church are pointed at those glories and more.
There are five duties we will take up specifically. Number one:
Fellowship with the Lord
The first duty of the congregation is fellowship with the Lord—it is that we would be a people who repent of our sin, trust in Christ, and aim together to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength.
This is why, nearly every week that we gather, out whole service is bent towards the table of communion. It’s why we respond to the preaching of the Scriptures every week with confession of sin, meditation on the broken body and shed blood of our Lord, and the assurance of our pardon in that shed blood and finished work.
The first duty of the congregation is fellowship with God—because it is the first duty of all men. We are not a people who come with our hands full of our own righteousness or our own best works. No, we come, week in and week out, confessing that this week is another week in which we live on the grace of God in Christ.
All of the duties of the congregation are built on this one, the duty of believing the gospel and coming again and again to the throne of grace for mercy and help in our time of need. Ephesians 2:1–10,
“…you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
-Ephesians 2:1–10
The church begins with the saving, redeeming initiative of God, and all of its activities are built on our fellowship with God through Christ. Members of the local church cannot fulfill any of their duties in the body of Christ without this first one: Fellowship with God by faith. Secondly,
Fellowship with One Another
The congregation is to stay in fellowship with one another. Think about the logic of the gospel in creating the church: We were at enmity with God through sin. But God, in his mercy, humbled himself to the point of death on the cross, in order to unite us to himself through Christ—and to do this by uniting us to Christ as members of his body.
What that does, fundamentally, is to make that body, the church, one thing, one organism, one new people of God. This is Paul’s main point in the section right after what we just read in Ephesians 2:1–10. In verse 11, he moves from that vertical reconciliation of men with God to the resulting reconciliation of men with men.
The logic is inescapable: If Christ has united Jews and Gentiles together in himself, then they must be at peace with one another. He did this, verse 16 teaches, that he “…might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.”
This theme hits its crescendo in chapter four of the letter to the Ephesians, where Paul writes,
“I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”
-Ephesians 4:1–6
By the blood-purchased grace of God, we are in fellowship with the Lord. We therefore must be in fellowship with one another, must guard that fellowship fiercely, and consider it something to fight for. There are many duties that live under this umbrella, right?
We ought to consider how to stir one another up to love and good works, as Hebrews 10:24–25 says.
We ought to avoid foolish quarreling and controversies, as Paul urges in Titus 3:9. This takes epistemic humility and Spirit-born self-control.
We ought to keep short accounts of sin with one another, confessing our sin to one another quickly and asking for forgiveness.
This isn’t at odds with pursuing a love for the whole Bible and a love of right doctrine and wholehearted pursuit of truth—not at all! Those things, unity and doctrinal excellence, are not enemies, but friends. In fact, as we all sing in tune with the tuning fork of the Word of God, we will maintain humility and harmony.
So if I could urge us together: Take care not to be a divisive person. Take care not to be arrogant and haughty and to think too highly of yourself. May the Lord preserve and strengthen our unity in fellowship by his grace week by week. Number three,
Honor the Elders
The congregation is to honor and submit to the elders. We will move somewhat quickly through here, because much of what we could say here was covered last week. But the command of the Scriptures is plain.
“Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.”
-Hebrews 13:17
The elders of the church are charged with shepherding the flock, exercising oversight, ruling well, overseeing discipline, preaching the word, guarding the doctrine of the church, and more. The congregation is called to honor the elders and obey them, and to do so humbly and joyfully.
We live in a culture that is radically autonomous, individualistic, a culture that hates real authority outside of the self, a rebellious culture. This can seep into the local church in the form of Christians who don’t view their elders as having any kind of actual authority over them.
This is foolishness. We’re Christians, and what that means is that we know how to properly deal with categories of authority and submission, hierarchy, and chain of command. Because we worship a King, we are to be a people who know how to take orders.
You aren’t a lone sheep wandering a wilderness region. Don’t try to function that way. You need help in establishing and maintaining healthy doctrine and life—we all do.
So when your elders tell you to do something, consider something, or change something, don’t be swift to get your hackles up and feel like you’re being trampled down. The Lord Jesus has commanded that undershepherds govern the local assembly, and that the assembly submit to the undershepherds. Number 4,
Participate in the Means of Grace
The congregation is to participate in the regular means of grace. Hebrews 10:24–25 says,
“And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”
-Hebrews 10:24–25
The Lord has appointed for certain regular, normal, repeated activities to be like aqueducts that carry his grace to his people. We don’t invent these things, but rather discover them in the Scriptures. Remember, God doesn’t just command us to worship him, but also how to worship him.
So we don’t neglect to gather on the Lord’s Day, as the early church did, the day the Lord rose from the dead, the first day of the week—the day that through Christ, God began a work of new creation, just as on the first day in Genesis, he began his work of creation.
And as we gather, we do so to devote ourselves to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, and to teaching, as Paul commanded in 1 Timothy 4:13. We read, teach, preach, and obey the Scriptures, not our own ideas of philosophies or clever arguments.
And we gather to let the word of Christ dwell richly in our midst by singing to one another in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness of heart, as commanded in Colossians 3:16–17. We know that our worship is not a weak thing, an impotent thing, but rather a potent thing—that our worship is warfare as the Psalms teach us.
Every week that we gather to sing and preach and revel in God’s glory in high defiance of the gods of this age, it’s as if we all take up a place at a great battering ram and give the gates of Hell a few more knocks.
And there’s of course more to his means of grace as well: The Lord’s Table, catechism, Sunday School classes, fellowship, exhortation and encouragement of one another, feasting together and table fellowship, bearing one another’s burdens—all of these are channels and means of grace in our lives together.
So listen: Participation in the ministry and means of grace in the local church is emphatically not an optional accessory to your Christianity. It is not the equivalent of whether or not you want whipped cream on your white mocha.
If you aren’t here with us, singing, learning, rejoicing, lamenting, believing, repenting—you are robbing us and yourself. And when I say “here,” I don’t mean twice a month. I don’t mean I-come-for-Sunday-School-but-skip-church. I don’t mean I-come-when-I’m-not-camping.
Fund the Church
The congregation is to fund the church through the tithe.
There are several places we can look to see the New Testament teaching on how the local church is to be funded, which is mainly spoken of in terms of funding the ministers who were to lead the local church.
The most direct reference is in 1 Corinthians 9, where Paul is defending his ministry from accusers. And in the course of it, one of his arguments is that, even though he refrained from asking for support from the church, the support of the tithe is the normal means through which God ordained for local church funding. He writes,
“This is my defense to those who would examine me. Do we not have the right to eat and drink? Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas? Or is it only Barnabas and I who have no right to refrain from working for a living? Who serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard without eating any of its fruit? Or who tends a flock without getting some of the milk?
Do I say these things on human authority? Does not the Law say the same? For it is written in the Law of Moses, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain.” Is it for oxen that God is concerned? Does he not certainly speak for our sake? It was written for our sake, because the plowman should plow in hope and the thresher thresh in hope of sharing in the crop. If we have sown spiritual things among you, is it too much if we reap material things from you? If others share this rightful claim on you, do not we even more?
Nevertheless, we have not made use of this right, but we endure anything rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel of Christ. Do you not know that those who are employed in the temple service get their food from the temple, and those who serve at the altar share in the sacrificial offerings? In the same way, the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel.”
-1 Corinthians 9:3–14
In the same way that the priestly work in the Temple was funded, Paul teaches, the local church is to funded. What was that? It was the tithe, the rendering of a tenth of the firstfruits from the income of God’s people. He reiterates this same concept and principle in 1 Timothy 5:17–18,
“Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching. For the Scripture says, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,” and, “The laborer deserves his wages.”
-1 Timothy 5:17–18
What happens when the tithe fails, when the people of God refuse to trust God, order their finances wisely, and bring the tithe in from the firstfruits of their income, is that what ought to be the ministry of the church becomes the ministry of the state. When the tithe fails, the state swells and the church languishes. It shrinks down to a gnostic kind of “spiritual” thing with limited resources for its God-ordained functions. R.J. Rushdoony wrote along these lines,
“Without the tithe, the need for social financing remains, and thus the state tax takes over, as well as statist corruption and misappropriation. A limited state without the tithe is an impossibility, and political conservatives who dream of such an order are fools and dreamers, as are anarchists who dream of existing with no state at all. A strong familistic society and a tithing society can create a wide variety of institutions, schools, and agencies which can take over the basic function of church, school, health, and welfare and thereby shrink the state to its proper dimensions. Social financing is necessary: either the people of God undertake it, or the state will.”
-R.J. Rushdoony
So our concept of normality politically is a state which slowly encroaches on the proper spheres of both the family and the church, and much of this due in our society today to the failure of the tithe. It becomes much easier for the church to care for her poor members, for the church to establish schooling for the children of members, for the proper shepherding of the sheep to take place, for the work of church planting missions to expand when the church brings in the tithe.
See the Glories
Now remember the glories of what it is that we are and that we’re doing. Because it would be easy to hear these duties and lose heart, to see them as a burden. “You want me to give a tenth to the church, be there every Sunday, give my life to this thing?”
Yes, I do. And yes, the Lord does. Because he loves you, and he made you to do be involved in something of greater significance than any other thing you could possibly be involved in: The saving of the world. The growth of the Kingdom of God.
What could be better than that? I can’t think of anything more pressing and more glorious and of greater moment than that. So may we give our lives to one another here, in fellowship with the Lord and each other, for his glory and our joy, world without end. Let’s pray.