Jealousy among the church of God is about jealousy among the members and ministers of a local church.
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Apostate spies and traitors 1
In our understanding of what is an apostate, an apostate is a person who fully knows the truth such as to be saved, and even though knowing that truth, they turn from it.
“Apostate spies” in my opinion are those people who whether knowingly sent by some other religious faith, or just on a curiousity adventure come into our church, and then leaves us.
Biblical NT Church: Service Elements
I must repeat, and insist that God has given us the precept of “Church,” and we are not at liberty to set what God has given us aside to do some other thing we want to do. If we examine the New Testament, we see what a church is, and we see it functioning quite well. (“Well” in the sense that the NT church does what God wants it to do. We have no right to insert our desires and purposes into what is God’s work.) A typical church in the New Testament has various service elements which we would do well to understand and imitate. As this series goes on, we will come back to these service elements and re-examine them and meditate on them. For now, we start by defining the Service Elements briefly.
Click on tag: Church-Definition to see the entire series.
Developing Your Ministry Philosophy
In a previous post (Church Work’s Governing Principles), I explained how church work or the ministry should be governed by some “working principles”. These principles are rules, internal yes, personal definitely, but none-the-less established procedures for doing what you do in the ministry. These rules should be based on biblical principles explicitly understood and stated by the pastor as the how and why we do what we do.
I want to expand on this concept and apply it to various areas of the ministry, not-the-least being ministry ethics. But I will wait until a later post to develop ministry ethics.
This commentary explores the development of your own personal philosophy of the ministry. How you do it, why you do it, what it is that you do.
Marks of an Unbiblical Church
Marks of an Unbiblical Church
By David Cox
See Tract:
Whereas a good church is a pretty focused thing, a bad or unbiblical church can take many different forms. Because of this we need to divide our study into areas. First of all, we need to separate what would be a “church” from a sects, cult, or false religion. Although really there is not much difference between them, I would consider a “church” that would identify itself with solid biblical doctrine something different from a cult. Some “Fundamental” or “Baptist” churches would officially hold to correct or biblical doctrine, but actually practice or secretly believe in unbiblical things. There may also be some groups that would do things as a biblical church would do them, but they hold tightly to some doctrine that is not biblical. Usually these groups always have some defective concept concerning salvation. So these characteristics are a composite of a whole bunch of bad and erroneous churches, sects, abusive churches, groups, etc.
The list of marks of a bad church (Marks of an Unbiblical Church) on this page therefore should be understand as a bad church can have this or that characteristic or mark, but it is defined as bad by any one, and not necessarily by all. Also let me add that some good churches are good on most things, and they may fall into one or more of these marks of a bad church. I do not pretend to know all churches, all situations, and how a person should act or the decision a person should take in such cases. I think soul searching your own heart in order to find what God wants you to do is most important in any situation, and it is essential in these cases. See my thoughts on Getting out of a Bad Church.