Steve Stanley > Recent Status Updates

The local church is ... important in the life of every professing Christian since it is here that we learn doctrine, receive reproof, and train in righteousness.

Time and again, the Bible anchors right actions and behaviors and attitudes for God’s people in right doctrine. (63-64)

As Michael Horton has put it, God's Word does not merely impart information; it creates life. It's not only descriptive; it's effective. It produces worship, obedience, communion, and disciples. When God speaks, some kind of change happens—always.

*One thing is necessary* in our churches—hearing God’s Word through preaching, reading, singing, and praying.

God is good.
God is all-powerful.
Terrible things happen.
...To embrace all three makes no sense. Faith involves believing all three truths. The evidence of faith is that you continue to worship God, even when terrible things happen. Life is hard. But life is not God. God is God. And God is good all the time!

True worship is not fair-weather worship. True worship continues to worship God when the storms of life are raging. . . . God does not change when circumstances change. So we continue to worship God in sickness, sorrow, and suffering.

The church is often spurned because of things members of the church do and do not do. No leader or member of the church is the standard by which we measure what the church should be. Christ is the standard. (41-42)

The Reformation recovered the distinction between what Christ did for us and what he does in us.

The heart of spiritual worship is hearing what the Lord says to us, responding to him in prayer and praise, and encouraging one another in his fellowship.

And in this community meal [the Lord’s Supper] we bolster one another’s faith by looking together to Jesus in the present, based on his completed work for us in the past, knowing that he will take us to be him in the future.

Still, the fact that a regional synod was called to discuss infant baptism suggests that the practice was not universal, even in the mid-third century.

In the history of the church, the so-called sacraments came to predominate over the gospel, which gives us some reluctance about the term...We believe *ordinances* is the better term. The term *ordinances* refers to the fact that Christ has ‘ordained’ these rites as a means of visibly portraying the gospel.

The task of raising up new leaders in the church does not belong primarily to Bible colleges or seminaries. It is the task of elders to identify young (or not so young) men who will be faithful to carry on the gospel message.

It is a sign of an unhealthy church when the pastor is gone and no one in the congregation can step in and fill the pulpit. Biblical eldership includes training others to do the task of preaching and teaching [2 Tim 2:2].

Biblical leadership is humble, servant leadership [Mark 10:42-44; John 13:1-20; 1 Pet 5:3].

The emphasis of the qualifications given in 1 Timothy and Titus stresses the present situation of a man’s moral and spiritual character. The real issue is not so much where he has come from but who he is now by God’s grace. If a man is currently faithful to his wife, being above reproach [1 Tim 3:2; Titus 1:6], and has proven himself in that relationship, then it is possible for him to become an elder.