The Purpose of the Pastor-Teacher Gift, No. 2
BD07-02© Berean Memorial Church of Irving, Texas, Inc. (1971)
I have nothing but good things to
report to you on the first
week of summer camp. You have an
excellent staff there. We are enduring
some new things this year, some new features. The particular part in Oklahoma around Lake Texoma
in which we operate
is a kind of a fascinating geological area so we have included a
geology tour. The youngsters have been very
responsive to this. It’s
particularly interesting to see the little boys. The
instructor was amazed on how they came up with their little hands just
full of fossils and things they had found. In
fact we had to make a new rule. We had
to start acting like park rangers in that we can’t pick up so
many things or we
won’t have a tour. It is fascinating
to see these (fossils) that are just there, fully developed, lying right
there the way they were embedded, perhaps even from the flood itself.
We’ve been running this as one
tour and then we have for our
older boys and older girls a whole course in scuba diving. So, this is a whole new realm. We
had two boys when we started off on the bus
for the first scuba lesson. We operate
out of a live pool and all of a sudden they weren’t there. So, we stopped the bus and they were down at
the lake and they came around and said, “We don’t want to
go scuba diving.” So, we said,
“OK, get on board the bus.” That’s
how we deal with kids who tell us they
don’t want to do things.
So, we got at the pool and they were
sitting under the cabana
and they had the first instructions on how to handle the gear and
what’s all involved. Then they said, “Alright,
let’s go down to the pool now and we’ll have it where one is underwater
and an instructor follows him, checking him out on the equipment. Guess who the first two boys were who jumped
in line to get on the two tanks. The
ones that we had to tell to come. Then
the next day I was telling the instructor that I noticed that these
boys were kind of enthusiastic. He smiled and
said, “Yeah, one of them who was not eligible for today’s
session said, ‘I’ll
carry all of your tanks and gear if you’ll let me go
today.’”
We’re learning how to do things
that we’ve never done before
with enthusiasm in a very excellent camp. We’ve telling the kids around the campfire
where the world is going, and
most of them have gone home a lot smarter than their parents relative
to where history is moving. One of the kitchen
staff got in on the last session and he said, “Have you been
talking about that all week?” I said, “Yeah,
we’ve been sort of on that same theme.” He
said, “Boy I want to get there next week and not miss a single one of those. We’ve just tapped the summary of where
history is moving.
We even talked about dope one night. The final church, the world church, is going
to be a ritualistic church. One of the
phases that the book of the Revelation tells us that will constitute
this church will be the use of drugs. The
Bible says that society will be heavily drug-oriented and that the
final worship will be a drug worship, which of course is just where
it’s going today. It uses the word sorcery in the
book of the Revelation. The Greek word
is “pharmakeia” from which we get the word
“pharmacy,” and the word means
enchantment with drugs.
You should have heard, once we brought
up that subject. I asked some question, I forget what it was, and
the circle of kids exploded with information about drugs. They were popping off words such that it was
hard for me to keep up with: amphetamines, barbiturates, or what I was in, and
they knew all about it. The fact is I called marijuana “Mary
Ann,” and some kid said, “No, it’s Mary Jane.”
We’ve all gotten briefed on the
drug scene pretty well this week at camp. I knew you would be glad
to hear that. I hope your daughter is going. She’s in for a great and a
fascinating week.
We continue this morning with the
purpose of the pastor-teacher gift, number two. Just to
bring you up to date, we have indicated in our summary of the doctrine
of the ministry that the word “ministry” is used in reference to
the specific relationship of a specific ministry of a pastor who is in charge and
authority of a local church.
One of the things you should evaluate
to make a judgment as to the spiritual stability and soundness of a church is to look up the
church’s constitution and see who runs the church business meetings. If you find that the chairman of the board of
elders runs the church business meeting, you have a spiritually
disoriented church. Here’s another thing you can
look for. See whether a man who has
served faithfully as an elder or a deacon or in some capacity can
follow himself in office. If he can’t,
you’ve got a spiritually disoriented church. These are two clues of the people dominating
God’s man and the people dominating the voice of God.
Can you imagine a person who serves
faithfully for three years in an office, and God the Holy Spirit says, “OK,
you’re going to be out
for a year now,” as church constitutions sometimes do before you
can be in office for two years. You can tell a lot
just by reading through a church constitution to see how they’re
oriented toward this position of the pastor-teacher. Most churches are grievously disoriented.
We’ve seen that he’s
called “elder,” which means, not that
he’s an old man, but that he has spiritual maturity. He is called “bishop,” which stresses
that he is an overseer. The word
“bishop” means
overseer. His business is to oversee the
flock and to take care of the sheep, keep them out of trouble, to stand
up to their enemies and to stand up to the sheep if necessary. He is also called a combination name of
“pastor-teacher.” In the Greek
it’s one combination name. You
can’t say one without the other. That’s
why the Bible says if you’re going to
be a pastor you must be apt to teach. You have to have the ability to teach or
you’re out of business to begin with.
We’ve also found that this man was told to feed the flock and that the
language was such that he was to do it himself. He was to perform this function, and it was
given to him as a command. We found that
the Scriptures speak of the authority of the pastor. While he is in office, he is the chief
authority within that local congregation, but the congregation has the
right to remove the pastor. Once he’s
removed, he’s no longer an authority over that congregation. An evangelist is not an authority over any
congregation. He’s an authority in reference to the gospel,
but a pastor is an authority within that local congregation. Therefore, you have these words such as rule,
obey subject, and submit. These are all
strong words in reference to the ministry of this particular leader.
Now the wrong pastor can cause a lot
of problems for a certain church. There is a right pastor
for a right church. When you have that
combination, you have God’s ideal condition of blessing. No pastor will last if he’s the wrong
pastor. One of the signs of his being
the wrong pastor for a church is that he will flit out after three or
four years of ministry and he’ll be on his way. A right pastor for a right church will be there over
an extensive long period
of many years. He will not be using the
church as a springboard. Some churches
are in a constantly rotating pastor situation because they’re
people-dominated. So, the pastor has no
particular authority and he has no really particular interest. He’s simply doing his job, and as his
professional status is promised a better step upward someplace else, he
moves on. He says, “Well, I like you
people. We’ve grown to be good
friends. I’ll always remember
you.” But he doesn’t have any
deep emotional attachment to that congregation as he should to someone of his own
family that he was living. He’s a professional,
so there’s a professional detachment. So
he comes and he goes.
Now the right pastor for the right
church is protected by God. Therefore, when the members move
against him, they find themselves removed. You have these conditions that are the most amazing
things that happen to people when suddenly they’re filtered out of the
church—the people you would least have expected. The reason for it
often is they have taken a position of opposing God’s man. They were in the wrong and God isn’t
going to tolerate it. He himself is warned that
he is to give an account for the people. He is not to lord it over them. But he is to be respected as the one who speaks the
voice of God. As long as he speaks the
truth, he is a personality to contend with. When he no
longer speaks the truth, then God will take care of him very quickly.
The purpose of the pastor-teacher gift
was summed up in Ephesians 4. Let’s turn back to it. This is the passage that we’re working
our way through and coming to the climax. Ephesians 4:12 is the verse that we’re looking
at now. Verse 12 has the word “for” in it three
times. We looked at this last week. We stopped here. In
Ephesians 4:12 we have the word “… for …
for … for …” In the
Greek language it’s three different words. It’s the word
“pros” and then “eis” and “eis.” Grammatically
what this means is that numbers two and three are dependent on number
one.
You have three purposes here in this
verse. If the first purpose is not
performed, which is described by this word “perfecting.” The pastor is to perfect the saints (that’s
the Christians in the local assembly), and the word “perfecting” means to equip them
for combat, to get them ready to do spiritual combat. Now
if he’s not doing his job of getting the people ready for
spiritual combat, you cannot experience the next two “fors” that we’re
going to look at in greater detail. In this verse you have the
totality of what the local church is all about.
Now if that bothers you to hear that
said, then you need to revise your thinking about the local church. If you think there is something more in the local
than what you find in Ephesian 4:12, you’re in trouble in your thinking. If you think there is something more that a
pastor should be doing before God than what is in Ephesians 4:12,
you’re disoriented to God’s point of view on that subject. He is to perform number one in order that
number two and number three may be executed. If you do not have number one, you cannot stand up
against Satan.
The Grace System for Spiritual Perception
Now what we’re going to do is to
run very briefly through some things we have mentioned before. We
won’t apologize for this because a review is necessary in order
that we bring things together that you know and bring them together maybe in a new
light and a new relationship. First of all, we
want to look at this system by which we learn spiritual
things—the grace system
for spiritual perception. God has a
grace way for you and me to learn. We
have distinguished between human IQ and spiritual IQ. We found that human IQ uses the process of
the senses (empiricism) or it uses the process of just reason
(rationalism). 1 Corinthians chapter 2
tells us that we do not learn spiritual things by reasoning nor do we learn them through
our senses. So, rationalism and empiricism
are out. The reason they’re out is
because they’re merit systems. They
depend on your human ability. They
depend on the human IQ for their functioning.
God says He gives you a system that’s a grace system. He will give
you an understanding of the Word of God, and the person He has given you for that is God
the Holy Spirit. This is what Jesus promised. He said a time is going to come when God the
Holy Spirit will indwell you. You won’t
have to have any man to teach you. You
will have to get information from some man in the form of a
pastor-teacher through the Word of God. But what you
learn will be the result of God the Holy Spirit who will indwell you. He will show you many
wonderful things. He will bring to your remembrance the things that I have told you and He
will show you what’s in the future. He will tell you things to come. He will tell you
where history is going. All of this is going to be totally apart from your abilities.
Now this system works because it is a grace system. It is something that God is
doing. 1 Corinthians 1:19 – 2:16 you may read at
your leisure. You will discover that God’s
system excludes any human ability from learning spiritual things. This is important to understand because the
Christian who may not be so sharp mentally is not disadvantaged by that. He’s not in an inferior position. He can learn spiritual things just as well as
a person who’s a genius when it comes to human IQ.
The goal and purpose of this system of
spiritual perception is to take that human spirit of yours and to fill it as a storage place
with these various compartments of doctrinal understanding. This is the key to your survival. That’s what the first part of this verse
means, “for the perfecting of the saints.” This is the only way that a pastor-teacher equips
you for the other things that are coming. He equips you
for your combat with Satan by filling your human spirit. He can give you information. You
don’t have a human spirit until you’re
born again. Up to then you’re spiritually dead. You don’t have a
human spirit. It’s dead. Then when you’re born again you come alive
spiritually and you have a human spirit. You then have a chance to come to understand and to
know what God is
thinking.
1 Corinthians 2:12 gives us a little
clue about how this system works where God says, “Now we have not received the spirit
of the world.” We can’t go
over this in detail as we’ve done
before but you’ll remember that the expression “spirit of
the world” refers to
a technique for learning. The
world’s technique for learning is senses or reason. Now we Christians have not received this. Incidentally, in the Greek Bible, the word
“we” is at the first of the sentence which is an emphasis. It’s the point of emphasis. We Christians are different than the world. We don’t operate by the world’s
methods of learning things. There’s a different
technique and the world is excluded from it completely.
Now when you understand this you see
why it is that intelligent men are such fools when it comes to spiritual things. They’re the greatest ignoramuses on the
face of the earth. A great man in a
university that has great learning is a dodo bird when it comes to
spiritual things because his intelligence and his reasoning powers will not get
him one step into spiritual perception.
“Spirit” vs. “spirit”
Now we as Christians have not received
these techniques of learning. Now at this point you should
have some corrections in your Bible if you’ve been with us before. You should know that it is not
“Spirit” with
a capital “S” as it’s printed in some Bibles,
indicating God the Holy
Spirit. The Greek says, “the spirit
out from God.” Not the Spirit of God. This is a total mistranslation here. It’s the spirit out from God which means
it’s the spirit which God gives us. “That
we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.” And the word “freely given” is
just what word? “Grace given.” That’s what it means. It’s the word for grace. “The
grace given.”
So, what God is talking about here is
this system whereby you may learn as the result of grace. But
none of this works unless you have a pastor-teacher who is giving you
information.
Now I want to establish something with you in case there’s a
little doubt in your mind about this business of the importance of your
human spirit. There should be no question in
your mind that if your human spirit is not filled with divine truth,
you have no contact with God. God does not lead
you through your mentality. He leads you
through your human spirit. He leads you
as the result of doctrine that you have in your human spirit.
I want you to think for just a moment about an Old Testament
personality, the young man named Josiah. Josiah was called a good king. He
became king when he was eight years old. His father was an idol worshipper as was his
grandfather Manasseh before him. They were the kind who built these
high places where the sex orgies took place and where the vilest kinds
of immorality was practiced, including the burning of infants—often
throwing them into the flames, and the Baal worship.
Here’s this little boy growing
up. His grandfather Manasseh is a big
promoter of idol worship. His father Amon follows in
the grandfather’s steps and is another promoter of the high
places, the groves, and this little eight-year-old boy becomes king upon the assassination
of his father Amon. Now there is something
about Josiah even as an eight-year-old that is reaching out for God.
Here you have an example of a person
who is in a primitive situation. It’s like a person today
who has never heard about the name of Jesus Christ. But everybody sooner or later comes to consciousness
of God, and if you go positive toward that consciousness, God will bring a missionary down
that trail to give you the information you need to be saved. And
Josiah reaches out for God.
The book of 2 Chronicles 34:1-4 says, “And Josiah was eight
years when he began to reign, and he reigned in Jerusalem one and
thirty years. He did that which was right in
the sight of the Lord and walked in the ways of David his father,
…” He took David as his example, as his ideal—not
his father or his grandfather. “…
and declined neither to the right hand, nor to the left. For in the eighth year of his reign, while he
was yet young, he began to seek after the God of David is father: and in the twelfth year he began to purge
Judah and Jerusalem from the high places, and the idols, and the carved
images, and the molten images.”
(“And they brake down the altars of Baalim in his presence;
and the image, that were on high above them, he cut down; and the
groves, and the carved images, and the molten images, he brake in pieces, and made
dust of them, and strowed it upon the graves of them that had sacrificed unto
them.”)
Now this is where the phallic cults
were being worshipped where idols were used for the sexual orgies and everything else that
was connected with this kind of worship. Now
here is a youngster who grew up in the surroundings of this kind of
darkness and immorality. He goes positive toward
God. One thing that he does not have is
the Word of God—no Bible. There is
no Bible because what has happened at the temple? The grandfather has set up the cult of the idol
worship right in the temple itself. The temple is a shambles.
Now when Josiah comes to the throne
when he gets older, he orders that the temple be cleaned up. You know the story. In
the process of repairing the temple, somebody looks in the corner and says,
“Hey, what’s that sticking out there?” And
a workman reaches down and he pulls out the end of something. It’s a long thing and it proves to be a
scroll. And they unravel it and they say, “Why this is the Bible.” They
finally found a copy of the Word of God. Now
this is important so they rush it to the young king Josiah.
Verse 14 says, “When they brought out the money that was
brought into the house of the Lord (for its repair), Hilkiah the priest
found the book of the law of the Lord given by Moses.” Verse 18 of 2 Chronicles 34 says, “Then
Shaphan the scribe told the king saying, ‘Hilkiah the priest hath given
me a book,’ and Shaphan read it before the king.
Now here’s a young lad who is positive toward his awareness
of God but he has no information. He is in the condition as most Christians who go to church.
Many a Christian walks into church. They’re sitting in churches all over this
city now, and all over this nation. Many of them are very receptive to God. They
would go right to him. They would open their hearts, if they had some information.
This boy had an open heart but no information. Well look what happens when he gets the
information.
“And it came to pass when the king had heard the words of
the law that he tore his clothes…,” which was the oriental
way of expressing sorrow and repentance and grief. “…
and the king commanded Hilkiah, and Ahikam the son of Shaphan, and Abdon
the son of Micah, and Shaphan the scribe and Asaiah a servant of the king’s
saying, ‘Go inquire of the Lord for me. And for them
that are left in Israel and in Judah concerning the words of the book
that is found, for great is the wrath of the Lord that is poured out upon us
because our fathers have not kept the Word of the Lord to do all that is
written in this book.’”
Leviticus 26 - Discipline
As he looked into the Word of God being read he realized
that his nation was in a disastrous situation. He realized that the nation had gone so far against
God’s principals, and God had said what He was going to do to people. All you’ve got to do is look up Leviticus 26
and you’ll see six stages of discipline through which God brings
people and a nation who rebel against Him. And he
(Josiah) realized that they were in one of the latter stages of the
series of discipline. So, he said, “Ask God
what’s going to happen to us in view of the way we have violated the will of
God.”
Now in verse 24, “Thus saith the Lord, ‘Behold I bring evil
upon this place and upon its inhabitants, even all the curses which are
written in the book which you have read before the king of Judah because they
have forsaken Me and have burned incense unto other gods that they might
provoke me to anger with all the works of their hands. Therefore, my wrath shall be poured out upon this
place and it shall not be quenched. As for the king of Judah
who sent you to inquire of the Lord, so shall you say unto Him. Thus saith the Lord God of Israel concerning
the words which thou hast heard. Because
thine heart was tender (which is another word for positive volition)
and thou didst humble thyself before God when thou heard his words against this
place and against its inhabitants and humblest thyself before me and didst
tear thy clothes and weep before me, I have even heard thee also saith the Lord. Behold I will gather thee to thy fathers and
thou shalt be gathered to thy grave in peace. Neither shall thine eye see all the evil that I will
bring upon this place and upon the inhabitants of the same.’ So, they brought the king word again.”
Now what the king was told was the nation is going to
suffer. There is no return. This nation is doomed, Josiah. That
might ring a familiar note to you and me in the United States of America today because everything that’s
going on in this country today spells out another step in the doom of this nation. Interestingly enough, the drug bit has become
so monstrous that the president of the United States has taken personal
command of dealing with that issue. Now he’s
kind of busy. When he says, “I’m taking
personal command of an issue,” you know it’s something big. And I’ll tell you something else. The president of the United States is not
going to turn the tide backwards, and the drug culture is going to
mount precipitously in this nation. Berkeley
has already been taken over by a communist oriented government, and one
of its purported goals is to make the drug culture safe within the confines of
the municipality of Berkeley.
This nation that we live in is headed for disaster. We know that it cannot be
the leading nation of the world in end times. The western
world will be led from Europe by the Antichrist. So
you live in a nation that’s headed for
disaster. Josiah is a tremendous example
of what a Christian can do who is living in a disastrous situation,
either personally or nationally.
God, in another place in the Word of
God, said that if such great men as Noah and David and Job were in a city that God had doomed
such as had been pronounced upon Judah at this time, the Word of God says the
only people that would be saved by their positive volition would be Job and
Noah and David and men who had responded as they did to the Word of God. But they would not save the city. What the Word of God is telling us is that
the Davids and the Jobs and the Noahs can survive through national
disaster. Why? Because of their righteousness. Where does the
Christian have his righteousness? Right there, in the human spirit. This is what
preserved Josiah. In his day there was peace.
(The Word of God) says you Christians
are the salt of the earth. You are the preservers. When a nation comes to a certain point where
it has fallen below a certain line of people who have divine viewpoint
in their human spirit, that nation goes to destruction. Once it goes there’s no turning back.
So, is the pastor-teacher an important job or
isn’t it? Is it something that we
can take lightly? Can you afford to keep going to
a place where this is not functioning, and pouring your money into such
an operation?
You should see what we can tell about
these kids in camp and these counselors of ours. You’ve got
some over high school kids and some young college adults that have a
lot of savvy. They spot these kids just like
that. They talk with them a little bit
and they size them up immediately and they’re the kids who come
from the big denominations. They’re just as
disoriented to spiritual things. They’re
just as dull in spiritual things as you can imagine because
they’re sitting in church every Sunday listening to something else except the exposition
of the Word of God.
The human IQ is excluded from all this. We’re told that this system works. It’s a grace freely-given system. But it’s all as God contacts you in your
human spirit. If there’s nothing
there, there’s nothing for Him to contact you. Josiah went on and he became a very great king
because once he had the
Word of God, he had information. And the
more information he got into his spirit, the greater the king he became. When he died, we won’t take time to read
it, but when this man died, he was killed in battle, the response of the people
was, “Who can take his place? How will we ever
have another Josiah? We have lost something that we shall again see in our day.”
Now why could they say that? Because he was positive to the Word and God saw to
it that he got the Word. He had a mother who was teaching
him. His father was teaching him how to
run orgies up on the hillside, but his mother was giving him
God’s point of view, and probably Hilkiah the high priest. Once the father was out of the way, they were free
to give him the information, and he was a kid who responded.
I want you to notice something about
this human spirit of ours in Romans 8:16 so we can tie a few things together. The Bible tells us that God the Holy Spirit
himself beareth witness (makes testimony) with our human spirit that we
are the children of God. Now here’s a clear
verse that tells you where God contacts your life with information. He makes it clear to you that you belong to
the family of God, not up in your mind, but by the information that He
gives you in your human spirit which then does come up and affects your
mentality.
1 Corinthians 2:12 (which we have already looked at this morning)
says, “Now we have not received the spirit of the world (the
world’s techniques for learning) but the spirit which is out from God” (our human
spirit). Why have we been given this human
spirit from God? “… that we might know
the things of God that are freely given to us.” The
word for “know” here is not the word to “know”
by experience. This is not what you get by
experience. It’s the Greek word for
knowing by information that is delivered to you. And you have to have a human spirit to understand
spiritual things. It ties together
beautifully.
Job had this information in Job chapter 32. This was one of the first
books of the Bible written, maybe the first book. Job 32:8
says, “But there is a spirit in man and the inspiration of the
Almighty giveth him understanding.” “There is
a spirit in man and the inspiration of the Almighty.” What God tells (is what) gives them understanding.
He gives men understanding as the result of the spirit that is in him. Look at the
verse before. It says, “Days should speak, and
multitude of years should teach wisdom.” It says that as you get older you should get smarter. But it says here that when it comes to
spiritual things, there is a spirit in man and God gives that
understanding, not the fact that you’ve lived.
There are some people who go around
religiously. They think they’ve been
in church for a long time. They’re adults. And I can take a lot of adults and match a
few juniors out of this church up against them and they’ll run
circles around them in spiritual understanding. Just
because you’ve got years doesn’t mean that you’ve got
understanding in spiritual things because you get that from the Word of God into your
human spirit. And if you’re not around the
Word of God, you don’t have anything in the human spirit.
Let’s match up a couple more
verses here in Proverbs. Proverbs 20:27 says, “The spirit of man is
the lamp of the Lord, searching all the inward parts.” It is the human spirit of man which God uses
as the lamp to shine upon our understanding, to give us direction, and
to show us the way. And in Psalm 18:28 it says,
“For thou will light my lamp. The Lord my God
will lighten my darkness.” Now put those together. The spirit of man is the lamp
that God uses to give him guidance, and it is God who will light the lamp.
Now you may pursue this on your own but you had better have
an appreciation for your human spirit because it’s different than
your soul and it’s different than your body, and it is the key of God’s
dealing with you in your lives. Now you can apply human
knowledge from your mind but you can’t apply spiritual knowledge
from your mind. Truth in the mind is just knowledge. We’ve been calling it
that Greek word “gnosis.” But when
you believe God, then it comes into your human spirit and it becomes full
knowledge or that “epignosis.”
So, here’s the grace system for learning doctrine. God has given us the
Scriptures. He has established local churches. He has given us pastor-teachers
to instruct. They have a special gift. Every Christian is a priest so he can listen
privately and make his decisions. 1
Peter 2, 5 and 9 tells you about that priesthood. We
have the Holy Spirit who indwells us to make
this system work. 1 Corinthians 2:9-16
tell us about how the Holy Spirit indwells us in order that we may
learn. We may take the information that is
given and we may learn from it.
Let’s look up 1 John 2:27. It says, “But the anointing which ye have
received of Him abideth in you.” Let’s compare that to 1
John 2:20, the anointing of which he’s speaking, “But ye have an
unction (or an anointing) from the Holy One and ye know all things.” The Holy One here is God the Holy Spirit who enables
you to understand all spiritual things. 1 John 2:27 says
that the anointing which you’ve received of Him abides in you,
and you don’t need any man to teach you. “But as
the same anointing teacheth you of all things and is truth and is no lie,
and even as it has taught you, ye shall abide in Him.
Now people who are negative to the idea of the necessity of
a pastor-teacher will bring this verse up to you. They’ll
says, “Ah hah.” And I’ve
had them come to me and say, “I want
to show you. You don’t have to have
a man to teach you. All you have to do is
sit down and start reading the Bible.” And
in some of our Christian schools you’ll find resistance over the
idea that you need a pastor-teacher.
Well what this verse is saying is that
an understanding of spiritual things can’t be delivered by a human being. That has to be delivered by God the Holy
Spirit. But that understanding, as we search the rest of Scripture we discover, is dependent upon
information—right information from the Word of God, and that’s what comes from the
pastor-teacher. Naturally, he’s not going to give you the
understanding. He’s going to give you
the information. As to whether you
understand it or not depends on what? If
you are filled with God the Holy Spirit. If you’re sitting here this morning and you
have sin that’s in conflict
in your life and you haven’t confessed it to God, you’re
not going to understand much of anything at all. But
if you are open to the Word because you are filled with the spirit, you
will understand. Now you may reject it as you
understand it, but you will understand it. And it is God the Holy Spirit who is the teacher in
every church service. So, the confession of sin is
important to open the door. Then what
you do with it determines how useful this truth is to you.
So, the pastor-teacher teaches. He explains, he gives you summaries, the Holy
Spirit gives you understanding, you have volition towards this into
your human spirit (or you reject it), and you get knowledge in your head and you
get full knowledge in your spirit. It builds up
this tremendous frame of reference that we’ve already been
talking about which does so many things for us. It gives us
the knowledge of advanced doctrine, and conscience.
Conscience
I hope you understand what the human
spirit does for your conscience. Once more, here you have this
area of your mind. Here is this frame of
reference. God the Holy Spirit takes up
information and He gives it to your frame of reference. Your frame of reference comes over here and
it gives rules and values to your conscience. Your conscience takes the understanding side of your
mind. Your conscience gives information to
your understanding, to your perception. And
your perception determines your actions.
Now the poor world has nothing for a
frame of reference but all that human viewpoint guff that is given out from society around us.
So, it has a bad conscience. There is a conscience that gives its
perception bad instruction. This is why
our nation is in trouble. We have a bad
frame of reference nationally. We have a
bad outlook toward communism. We have a
bad outlook toward the war in Vietnam, and the fact that it is the will
of God that we defend national entities. The
more disoriented you are in your conscience, the more opposed you will
be to everything the Word of God stands for. Your human spirit and your reception of the Word and
your ability to be able to have the Word from somebody is all tied together. Proverbs 23:7
says, “As a man thinketh, so is he.” And you remember that this
Hebrew word means the way you cut a thing, how you divide it, how you look at
it. The word conscience in the Greek means
joint knowledge. It’s information that has
been put up there. So, if you have bad
information, you have a bad conscience. If you have good information, you have a good
conscience.
When you’re out of fellowship, you short-circuit all of this
and you can’t learn anything. You
short-circuit at this end where it’s coming down from your mind,
and you can’t learn anything. So, the conscience is
dependent on your relationship to the Lord. When you have it, you have a stable divine viewpoint.
Incidentally, this resolves the problems of your subconscious. This is
what makes psychiatrists rich. They get some poor joker out there on the
couch who’s got some deep-seated guilt complexes that he’s
not even aware of. And you are guilty of things perhaps
that you have done in the past that shoved down into the subconscious
and you’re not even aware of them, but those things eat away at you. You are not built to be able to live with
unresolved subconscious guilt. But this system that God had created will remove that. That’s what the frame of reference does for
you. It cleans up your subconscious and gives you
a conscience which is stable with God’s point of view.
You find Christians who are unhappy that once they start getting the
Word of God become very happy Christians. Christians who are depressed because of
what’s eating away underneath in their subconscious become Christians who have
a relaxed mental attitude once they get the Word of God. What you’re breathing out towards God and
towards man is this full knowledge. This is what your experiences are with people.
You’re actually dealing with people on the basis of divine
principal. You’re breathing out toward
them “epignosis,” instead of just your human viewpoint.
Now a Christian’s fellowship is
this constant exhaling out of his being of this full knowledge toward God. So, you can love man. You
can remove callouses off of your soul. You
can love people in the right way. You
can build up this spiritual maturity structure which we’re going
to go in great detail on which is your defense against Satan and his attack. You can’t communicate what you
don’t know, and you can’t use what you don’t have. That’s why God has established the system of
the local pastor to provide this spiritual maturity.
Now the second purpose that we want to
just get into this morning is the next “for.” The
first purpose in Ephesians 4:12 is to equip you for the work of spiritual
combat. The second purpose is “for
the work of the ministry.” The first purpose has to
do with preparing you for Satan’s attack. The second purpose has to do with divine versus
human good.
This is the other problem we face as Christians. We’re forever running
around producing human good instead of divine good. The work of
the ministry here refers to that which God the Holy Spirit produces
through us. If you are going to go heaven and be
rewarded as a Christian, it will be because you have produced divine
good. If you go to heaven and find
yourself at a loss as a Christian it will be because you spent your life producing
human good. This is immediately a very sobering thing. Here if the
pastor-teacher has not done the first part of his work, then you are
doomed in the second part. You can’t produce one
bit of divine good if the pastor-teacher fails in his job. Now that’s frightful.
Now you think of all those poor Christians who are sitting
around in churches where the Word of God is not being talk by
explanation, according to the historical background, and people being given
summaries of truth so that they get human spirits that are filled with the Word of
god, they don’t have a chance. They just do
not have a chance and they are spending their lives being nice people
producing human good.
Next Sunday morning we are going to
begin with the doctrine of divine good, and I’m going to spell this out in great detail
to you as to what’s involved in producing divine good, and what it constitutes. You need to have this thoroughly in your
understanding so you can constantly be questioning yourself and saying,
“Just a minute. Am I doing some nice sweet
humanitarian do-goodism, or am I really producing, because of what God
is doing through me, divine good?” Don’t
you kid yourself. There’s many a seminary
student that’s shoveling out human good by the carload, and he
feels tremendously pleased with himself because he’s out there in the
do-goodism of society. He doesn’t realize that
there’s no difference between him and the unbeliever who can do human good just
as good as he can.
God has a divine program of divine
good for your life. That’s his plan. I’m happy to tell you that there’s
a way for you to function under it but you have to understand what it is. We begin there next
Sunday morning. If the pastor-teacher fails at the first “for,”
for the perfecting of the saints, there can be no work of the ministry. Do you see why
the church is viewed with such contempt by young people today? Because
there is no work of the ministry.
Dr. John E. Danish, 1971
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