Peter Witkowski Discipleship, Ecclesiology

Praise the Lord for the Small Work of Small Days

The Lord often expands his kingdom through the ministry of small things though many western Christians tend to assume the opposite. They believe that God is best seen in megachurches and massive conferences that pull together thousands of people. And while God does work through large evangelical churches and parachurch ministries, the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob is just as much at work in the church of 10 as he is in the church of 10,000, as Ezra and his fellow Jewish exiles discovered thousands of years ago, when they began building the second temple.

Ezra and Small Days

Following the leadership of Zerubbabel, Jeshua, and others, the Jews of Ezra 3 set the foundation of the second temple in 536 BC bring 70 plus years of worship futility to an end. They rightfully long to celebrate and set aside a day to worship the Lord for his good gifts.

But as the worship unfolds with loud hymns and joyful praises, another dissonant sound begins to invade the service…the sound of weeping. Ezra describes the scene as follows: “But many of the priests and Levites and heads of fathers’ houses, old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice when they saw the foundation of this house being laid, though many shouted aloud for joy (Ezra 3:12).” Instead of rejoicing in the laying of the temple foundation, these old men derided this day as a day of small works…a day that could not measure up to, much less rival, the glory of Solomon’s temple, whose every corner sparkled with ornate gold designs (Zech. 4:9; Hag. 2:4). As the quirky baseball coach Yogi Berra once noted, “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

Though cultures have changed a lot since then, the temptation to compare—and then complain about—God’s ongoing work remains in full force. Western evangelical denominations seemingly mourn their declining numbers without end and spend countless hours coming up with baptism strategies, giving campaigns, and church-growth proposals in an effort to recapture the glory of the 1950s. Similarly, local congregations can remain fixated on past glories, complaining about the smallness of their children’s ministry, the lack of people at worship, or their trickle of baptisms. They remember when the children’s ministry was busting at the seams, when the church had to hold two services to accommodate all its members, and when the church was spitting out baptismal candidates faster than Ford made cars. That was when God worked. But this?

The Glory of Small Days

But what evangelicals miss today—and what the Jews of Ezra’s day missed—is that the work of small things advances the kingdom of God just as much as the work of large things. What the old men mourning the temple foundation did not know was that this temple would one day house the glory of the Son of God. As the Lord told Zerubbabel: “Be strong, all you people of the land, declares the Lord. Work, for I am with you, declares the Lord of hosts… The latter glory of this house shall be greater than the former, says the Lord of hosts.” Jesus would come to worship and teach in this temple, guiding men and women to eternal life. Though this work seemed small, it would be used by God to advance his glory in ways those men could never imagine. In other words, the small works were not to be lamented but praised for they were even more glorious than the fomer.

What was true of the temple is true of every denomination and local church today. God is still advancing his glory through the ministry of small things. As Reuben Bredenhof notes in his book, The Ministry of Small Things,” The most glorious and everlasting foundation has been laid, and that is Christ (1 Cor 3:11). If we are building on him, then we need never despair, nor discourage these small beginnings.” God can and does use the woman teaching five children in Sunday school to regenerate the hearts of lost children. God can and does use the pastor faithfully counseling two to three members a year to sanctify and grow his people. God can and does use the finances of small church budgets to sponsor missionaries around the world. The hours spent advancing the gospel in small places, in small ways, are not wasted but are being used by God to expand his kingdom. One day soon, countless men and women will be gathered around the throne of God, praising Jesus because men and women were faithful in the day of small things. Praise the Lord for the small days of ministry.

Spurgeon and the Day of Small Things

The great preacher Charles Spurgeon, who preached to thousands and shaped much of nineteenth-century evangelism through his prolific ministry output, came to saving faith through the ministry of small things. On the snowy morning of January 6, 1850, teenage Spurgeon slipped into a small Methodist church that was even smaller than usual that morning. Because the church’s pastor could not even make the service, a senior deacon had to ascend to the pulpit in the pastor’s place. The faithful old saint preached a simple and yet direct message of salvation that God used to awaken and redeem Spurgeon’s heart. The Prince of Preachers was brought into the people of God because a man was faithful on the day of small things.

Small Things Are Essential

What was true of the second-temple era and of the nineteenth century is still true of the church today. The gospel goes forward because men and women like Zerubbabel, that deacon, and countless others keep up the ministry of small things. For example, my church exists today because our finance team faithfully collects and deposits the church’s offerings and pays bills. My church can gather for worship because the deacons faithfully show up early to unlock the church, because my church’s worship team faithfully practices during the week; because the nursery team faithfully watches the children; and because men set aside time to prepare prayers, Scripture readings, and sermons that guide the worship of the church. Worship occurs in my church and in millions of other churches across the world because men and women are doing small things. The next generation of Christians will be in heaven because this generation of Christians, like every other generation of Christians before it, delighted in the ministry of small things in small days. As Bredenhof notes, “we should remind ourselves that oftentimes the little things are the big things.”

Dear saint, do not grow weary in doing good. God is advancing his kingdom through the service of small days.

Final Thoughts

While all Christians should aspire to see the universe praising the Lord and should praise the Lord for grand displays of worship, they should also recognize that God is working in the small days as much as the great days. Brothers and sisters, when you see the smallness of your denomination or church, do not complain about what you lack and lament what you once were. Rather, rejoice in the knowledge that hearts are still being changed and that lives are still being sanctified. Rejoice in the small works of the Lord that are advancing his kingdom and filling up the reservations for the marriage supper of the Lamb. And then… do the next small thing.

Peter Witkowski Ecclesiology

Church Membership and its Powerful Connection to Eternal Security

The American church’s slide towards individualism and its corresponding neglect of local church attendance hurts not only the local church; it undermines the health of the individual Christian, depriving him of the blessed gift of eternal security. In other words, the church maintains the believer’s well-being just as much as the believer maintains the church’s well-being.

The Love Connection to Assurance

In 1 John 3:14, the apostle John tells his readers that assurance of salvation—the knowledge that a Christian can joyfully embrace the return of Christ because the Christian knows that he or she has been redeemed by the blood of Christ—flows through his or her love of the saints. John writes, “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death.” In other words, Christians can have assurance of salvation through loving interactions with other Christians. Assurance flows through knowledge that is applied or lived out within the context of a Christian community.

The Church Connection to Assurance

Admittedly, such a conclusion is not stated explicitly as a command. John did not write, “Thou must attend church.” But the link between his command to love and local church membership proves inescapable. Those who do not attend or who do not regularly interact with their local church will lack the opportunities needed to live out their faith and to secure the assurance of salvation. Stated positively to love Christians, a Christian must spend time with others Christians. And the one place ordained by Christ in which Christians can consistently meet one another, fellowship with one another, and care for one another is the local church.

John’s argument does not imply that relationships cannot form outside the walls of the church. To love the brethren faithfully, Christians must push beyond the limits of Sunday morning services. But loving the brothers can never be anything less than worship. After all, the author of Hebrews tells Christians not to forsake meeting together because their meetings provide them with the fuel and the motivation for ministry. Worship stirs up Christians “to love and good works” (Heb 10:25). Christians come to church to glorify God through communing with God and helping others to commune with God through their congregation’s corporate prayers, preaching, singing, reading, and celebrations of the sacraments. The nineteenth-century preacher Charles Spurgeon once noted that if everyone believed that they could honor God while skipping church, then “there would be no visible Church, there would be no ordinances. That would be a very bad thing.” Moreover such togetherness – loving worship that exceeds the bounds of ethnic demographics, politics, sports, and hobbies – beautiful demonstrates the glorious of Christ to the unsaved visitor among them. To love the saints, Christians must attend church.

But loving the brothers must also be more than Sunday morning worship. John argues in 1 John 3:17–18 that love concerns itself with practical needs: “17 But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? 18 Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.” Christians who love one another will do more than talk, pray, and sing with each other at church. They will care for each other during the week. They will follow up with those who are sick and bring them a meal. They will watch the single mother’s kids for a night so that she can rest. And they will pay the widow’s electric bill. They will love in deed and action.

Where do Christians learn of those needs? They come across them through the normal rhythms of the local church. A single man who faithfully attends worship notices that an elderly brother has not attended for a few weeks and gives him a call—and then a ride to the next service. The couple sitting next to the single mother in Sunday school learns of her exhaustion as they talk in the minutes leading up to the start of their classes. Others pay the widow’s electric bill because they learn of the need while interacting with her during the church’s visitation program. By being part of a church, the members gain awareness of needs that provide them with opportunities to live out their faith—the very opportunities that will give them an assurance of their salvation.

Final Thoughts

Though the local church needs believers, believers need the local church to have vibrant Christian lives. In addition to stewarding and preaching the gospel, which saves, the church also facilitates the believer’s sanctification and his or her awareness of salvation. The local church provides Christians with the community that they need to live out their faith through loving their neighbors, which produces assurance. Dear Christian, if you long to have a vibrant Christian life, if you long to have assurance of salvation and no fear of death, then root your life in a local church.

Peter Witkowski Ecclesiology

Sometimes You Should Leave a Church

Christians have the freedom in Christ to leave churches that have rejected biblical orthodoxy. At first glance, such a statement seemingly contradicts the teaching of the apostle John, “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us” (1 John 2:19). The apostle asserts that, those who forsake their church pews have ceased to fellowship with Jesus. In other words, they have left the physical manifestation of church because they were never truly part of the spiritual or universal church that consists of all believers across eternity.

2 Marks of a True Church

But for such a statement to be true, the local church in view must be a true church—a church composed of members who are part of that spiritual or universal church. Though John does not provide the readers of 1 John with a full blueprint of a healthy church, he does note two important marks that define all local expression of the spiritual or universal church.

First, John argues that the majority of a true church’s members will be those who fellowship with the Father and the Son, having trusted in Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection for the salvation. John tells his readers, “I am writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven for his name’s sake” (1 John 2:12). The natural outworking and demonstration of such faith-driven fellowship is obedience to the Savior. To quote John again, “And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments” (1 John 2:3).

Second, John argues that a true church consists of those who affirm the integrity and truth of the apostolic message. In other words, a true church is composed of those who believe that the Scriptures are the inerrant, inspired, and authoritative word of God. John encourages such trust in his writings (and the Bible as a whole), declaring that his epistles and the Gospel of John contain “that which we have seen and heard…so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed, our fellowship is with the Father and with the Son, Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:3). He believed his words to be the inspired words of God—free of error— in part because Jesus had promised that Holy Spirit would help John remember all that Jesus taught and said (John 14:26). Thus, John expected those who fellowshipped with the Father and the Son to share John’s assessment of the New Testament canon. To quote John, “You have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge…you know it [the truth], and you know that no lie is of the truth.” For a church to be a true church, it must be composed of those who accept the Scriptures as the word of God and of those who embrace the fellowship of the Son that comes through the Scriptures.

Anti-Christ Should Leave

Those who forsake these local manifestations of the universal or spiritual church should feel the full weight of John’s condemnation in 1 John 2:19. Their leaving does evidence a lack of saving faith. For example, Joseph Smith and Charles Taze Russell left the true church and created the Mormon and Jehovah’s Witness cults because they rejected the biblical teaching on the divinity of Jesus. These cult leaders replaced the gospel of grace with gospels of works. Similarly, when Muhammad founded Islam, he too left the true church because his belief that Jesus was nothing more than a human prophet placed him at odds with the clear teaching of Scripture and its offer of salvation through grace. These and countless others went out from their local expressions of the spiritual or universal church because they had exchanged the righteousness of the cross for that which could be won through special underwear, prayers toward Mecca, or the avoidance of caffeine.

Others walk out of the true church to worship the god of self. They reject the biblical teaching of sin and declare themselves to be generally good. Salvation no longer consists in denying oneself and following Jesus but in exploring oneself through introspective actions that range from meditation to picking up litter to exploring sexual expressions that violate the commands of Jesus. Such men and women leave their local expressions of the true church because they were never part of the spiritual or universal church.

When Antichrists Stay

While most Antichrists will leave the church, some will stay and seek to convert their local church to their errors and heresies. The apostle Peter warns of this phenomenon in his second letter, declaring that false teachers would “secretly bring in destructive heresies” into the local churches and that “many would follow their sensuality” (2 Peter 2:1–2).

Few enter the church proclaiming themselves to be false teachers. Only slowly do they demonstrate their lack of faith, teaching against the integrity of Scripture and denying elements of the faith. For example, they may proclaim their love for the Bible and then explain why they take issue with the Bible’s sexual ethic, viewing it as culturally bound and oppressive. If the church’s elders and leaders refuse to correct the new teacher, she will not graciously fade into the background. She will double down on her teaching and in time call the church to affirm the homosexual marriage of her cousin as good and proper. Having abandoned the authority of Scripture, the congregation and its leaders will have little reason to object and will eventually acquiesce to the Sunday school teacher’s request. After all, no local church wants to be culturally irrelevant or unkind.

What is true of one sector of the church will quickly become true of the whole body. If its leadership board requests the pastor to jettison the church’s doctrine of substitutionary atonement because they see it as “divine child abuse,” he will once again defer to their proposal. After all, he has no Scriptural authority upon which to challenge such claims, and no one wants to support child abuse, divine or otherwise.

Those who do speak out against the doctrinal shift will often be labeled as unloving and antiquated. With each passing Sunday, their resistance will fade more into the background of the church’s consciences. The church’s inclinations toward goodness, truth, and love will slowly atrophy and then die. The gospel of the Antichrist will supplant the gospel of Christ. As J. Gresham Machen noted, “What the liberal theologian has retained after abandoning to the enemy one Christian doctrine after another is not Christianity at all, but a religion which is so entirely different from Christianity as to belong in a distinct category.” The spiritual or universal members of the local church will be supplanted with earthly members who have never fellowshipped with either the Father os the Son.

When To Leave

When believers find themselves in a Christless church, they should leave. As the refomer Martin Luther notes in such cases, “Not he who flees the darkness, but he who remains in it, is the Antichrist.”

Prior to leaving, Christians should confront the error in their church as best they can. They should schedule a meeting with their pastors, reach out to the Sunday school teacher, or talk to their church’s deacons. But if their conversations prove fruitless and fail to effect change, then the Christian must leave. As the Puritan John Owen notes, “Where the fundamentals of religious worship are corrupted or overthrown, it is absolutely unlawful to join unto or abide in any church.”

To leave such a church does not go against the teachings of the apostle John and the broader teaching of Scripture. The believer is not forsaking truth for error but error for truth. To quote Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “To leave a church which has become apostate is not schism. That’s one’s Christian duty and nothing else.” In other words, if a local church ceases to commune with Christ and his spiritual or universal church, Christians should cease to commune with that local church. In such circumstances, they should not be vilified but praised. They have traded that which is false for that which is true.