The Manifestations of a Good Church: Part 6 - 1 Thess Lesson 10

1 Thessalonians 1:9

The Manifestation of a Good Church – Genuine Conversion

Stand together with me as we read our text for today’s study. Read 1 Thessalonians 1. We are currently looking at the manifestations of a good church. As we work our way through this letter from Paul, it will become more and more evident that this was a remarkable assembly of “called out ones.” That is what makes a church. A church is an assembly of individual Christians. The true church is made up of genuine Christians. There are always those who participate within the church who are not genuine. Even Jesus had an imposter in His close circle. Paul had many who proved to be less than genuine. But a good church will be made up of those who are genuinely converted.

The Thessalonians were a good church because they were genuine. This is evident from the marks they bore. They bore the marks of a good church. We saw those in verses 2-3. A good church is marked by a good relationship between the leadership and the laity. Paul gave thanks to God always for all of them. I’m excited to get to Chapter 2 in a couple weeks because we are going to learn a great deal about the relationship between Paul and this church from that chapter. A good church is marked by genuine converts who bear the marks of the work of faith, the labor of love, and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, in the presence of our God and Father.

These marks of a good church are the result of God’s making a good church. God makes good churches by making genuine Christians. Genuine Christians are made from those who are brethren, beloved by God, whom He has chosen, who, because of God’s choice respond to the gospel, which comes in power and in the Holy Spirit with full conviction, presented by men who prove to be among those who have been transformed by the message they proclaim. This was what we saw in verses 4-5 as Paul described the making of a good church.

In verses 6-10 we have been looking at the manifestations of a good church. A good church will be revealed as those genuine Christians who make up that church become imitators of godly examples, especially the example of Christ. A second manifestation of a good church is the reception of the word of word, in spite of the tribulation brought about as a result of the word, it is received in the joy of the Holy Spirit. This produces the third manifestation. Those who imitate Christ and receive the word become examples for other believers. This was the truth of verse 7. Last week we saw that another manifestation was that the word of the Lord sounds forth. The message is proclaimed with the lips and confirmed with the life. The faith of those who sounded forth the word of the Lord also had gone forth. Their faith spoke for itself so that Paul didn’t need to say anything.

I would encourage you to go back and listen to any of those messages you may have missed. As I said last week, these are foundational truths. Your spiritual house is no stronger than the foundation upon which it is built. There is life transforming truth in this chapter. Perhaps no other verse has more potential to transform than the verse we will look at today. It would be hard to overestimate the importance of verse 9. This verse contains the most succinct but accurate description of the work of genuine conversion found anywhere in the Bible. Because it is an accurate description of the work of genuine conversion, this verse presents for us what I am convinced is the most relevant manifestation of a good church. That is the evidence of genuine conversion.

A good church is made up of genuine converts. And there is no better description anywhere than this description of a genuine convert. Genuine converts are those who turn to God from idols to serve a living and true God. This is as comprehensive a description of a Christian as you will find in the New Testament.

It is a self-evident reality that a church consisting of anything other than genuine converts cannot be a good church. Satan hates a good church, so he works to fill the church with false converts. Jesus warned of tares among the wheat. Satan’s earliest attack on the church focused on eliminating the church through persecution. That always backfires on him because the church flourishes when it is persecuted. So he pivoted to another tactic. He unleashed demonic inspired false teachers who perverted the gospel. His perversions of the gospel are always designed with one goal. Satan wants to convince people they are ok with God without them ever experiencing the genuine work of salvation. If he can succeed in convincing them that they are converted, when they have never truly been converted, he has them right where he wants them. He has them among the group who will stand before Jesus, claiming to have prophesied in His name, performed many miracles, and having cast out demons, only to hear Jesus say, “I never knew you, depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.” (Matt. 7:23) By filling the church with false converts, Satan prevents the church from being what Christ wants it to be.

Satan has been the author of many successful and effective deceptions. I don’t have time to address every false work of Satan. I want to focus on the one that has had the greatest impact on the church today. It is the one that still has an impact on Grace Bible Church. Up front I want to say that I know this is going to challenge many of you because of the approach that was used when you first believed. It is challenging to me because this is the approach I once used in my ministry. It is convicting to me because this was the way I first responded to the work of God in my life. I was not genuinely converted at that point in my life. There was no evidence of anything other than a temporary excitement and an experience that produced no lasting transformation. 

This was the approach used with Donna during our pre-marital counseling. Again, there was an experience that did not result in a genuine conversion. Her conversion happened years later. This was the approach I used with my three daughters. For two of the three, the results were, once again, an experience that did not result in a genuine conversion. Their conversion occurred later as a result of the work of God to open their eyes and call them to repentance and faith.

Now, I want to add something up front. I am not going to stand here and say that no one has ever been saved as a result of this popular experience. There are some people whose lives give evidence of genuine conversion having gone through the process I will describe. I must hasten to say that if they were genuinely converted, it was not because of the words of their prayer, or their decision to receive Christ. It was because they were born again by the will of God. God saves whom He wills to save and He alone can work even through a flawed method, especially if that flawed method contains the essential message of the gospel. The gospel is the power of God for salvation to those who believe.

But there is far too much at stake for us to defend an approach that fails more often than it succeeds. It fails because it is not biblical.

I am talking about an approach to the gospel and the work of salvation that asserts that man receives Christ, and that man’s means of receiving Christ is the praying of a prayer to receive Christ, or to ask Jesus into one’s heart. There is no biblical evidence for such an approach. I don’t know how many times I have read my Bible through from cover to cover. It has been in the dozens. The New Testament I have read through I am sure at least a hundred times. I have preached verse by verse through the majority of the New Testament in over 35 years of preaching the word of God. I have never found a place in the Bible where the work of salvation is described in the popular terms utilized by people today attempting to do the work of evangelism.

There isn’t a single example in the Bible of someone being converted by praying a prayer asking Jesus into their heart. There isn’t a shred of biblical support for such an approach to responding to the gospel. Jesus did not teach that this is the way one is born again. None of the Apostles taught or wrote about this evangelistic methodology. The Apostle Paul is the foremost authority to the church on the work of salvation and he does not describe this as a way in which a person comes to salvation. Despite the lack of biblical support, in thousands of churches across the world today, a message will be preached, an invitation will be given, people will walk an aisle because they have been compelled to “make a decision for Christ.” They will be told they are sinners in need of a Savior. They will be promised the gift of eternal life. They will be led in a prayer where they will confess their sins, acknowledge that Jesus dies on the Cross to pay the penalty for their sins, and they will ask Jesus to forgive them of their sins and to come into their heart. They will be congratulated on their decision. They will get baptized, maybe. They will be told that they are now a part of the family of God. They will be given this assurance without ever having shown any evidence of genuine conversion.

Biblical support for this approach to the gospel is based on a couple verses that are commonly misinterpreted or wrongly applied. Revelation 3:20 is commonly used in this approach. Quoting Jesus, from His message to the church at Laodicea, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock, if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come into him and will dine with him and he with Me.” The picture is presented as Jesus waiting for an invitation to do His work in the heart of the sinner.

First of all, this is a gross misuse of the text. This is not an invitation to individuals. This is an invitation to a church to repent. It was a church that was lukewarm and sickening to the Lord. This church was wretched, miserable, poor and blind, but it did not know its condition. This church needed to repent. Many reputable scholars believe the seven churches represent the periods of church history. If this is true, then the Laodicean church would be representative of the church of today. There is not a better description of the state of the current church than the one found in the letter to the Laodiceans. If that church is representative of the current state of the church, the present day church got in this condition largely due to the faulty evangelistic approach that is based largely on this passage.

Another passage that some reference to support the idea that one must receive Christ is John 1:12. This verse says, “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become the children of God, even to those who believe in His name.” The context demands that we understand that to receive Him is not to ask Him into our hearts. The text says nothing about a prayer to receive Christ. To receive Christ is to accept the reality of who He is. That passage talks of Him coming to His own but His own did not receive Him. They rejected Him as the Messiah. They denied the evidence of His divinity. To receive Him is to understand who He is as Christ and Lord and to bring one’s life under His rightful place of authority as Lord. It is to trust Him as the only solution to the problem of your sin and to submit to His lordship over your life.

The idea of inviting Christ into your heart suggests that Jesus is powerless to do anything in your life unless you invite Him in and ask Him to do something. This is the same Jesus who spoke the universe into existence. This is the same Jesus who spoke to dead people and they rose back to life. This is the same Jesus who multiplied food in the palm of His hands. This is the same Jesus who made blind eyes see, lame legs walk, leprous flesh like new, and spoke to legions of demons and they obeyed, and who spoke to storms and they were stilled. We think He needs permission to do what He desires to do in our hearts. Who do we think we are? Jesus is not some jilted Savior who stands outside weeping over being rejected. If He wants to kick the door down, He will kick it down. He is the Sovereign Lord of salvation. He saves whom He will save. He saves all the Father has given to Him.

The Bible gives us the language and the terms and the conditions by which we come to salvation. We must repent and believe. These are the biblical terms. These are the words that describe salvation. These are the words that are synonymous with salvation. Repentance and faith are the biblically accurate terms to describe genuine conversion.

When Jesus witnessed to the Samaritan woman at the well He confronted her sinfulness and presented the truth concerning who He was. She repented and believed in Him as the Messiah and she was genuinely converted. When she went to share with others in her community she didn’t invite them to pray a prayer to ask Him into their hearts. She went and told them who He was and that He knew every sin they had committed against God. She shared the truth about who He was. Many of them repented and believed. None of them received Christ by praying a prayer. They repented and believed.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all give the account of a young man who came to Jesus and asked the most important question of life. Let’s look at Luke’s account in Luke 18:18. This young man was the hottest prospect in the gospels. He was ready. He knew he did not have eternal life. He wanted to know what to do to obtain it. He came to the right One to ask how to be right with God. Jesus did not tell him to pray a prayer. Jesus did not encourage him to invite Him into his heart. Jesus didn’t say “I’m standing at the door of your heart and knocking. All you need to do is pray a prayer and ask me in.” Jesus explained to him the need to repent. His self-righteousness and his pride stood in the way. Jesus refused to work in this man’s heart because he would not turn from his idolatry. His idol was his money.

I took you to the account of the rich young ruler because he stands as the antithesis to the Thessalonians. The rich young ruler would not turn to God from his idols to serve a living and true God. This is Paul’s description of the work of salvation that had occurred at Thessalonica. They repented. They turned to God from idols. They believed. They received, meaning they acknowledged and embraced Jesus Christ for who He is and they submitted to Him as Lord of their lives. This is the nature of saving faith. It accepts Jesus Christ as Lord and submits accordingly. Saving faith manifests itself by repentance and submission to the lordship of Jesus Christ.

A good church will be made up of individual Christ followers whose lives give evidence of having turned to God from idols to serve a living and true God. This was the message of Peter in the book of Acts when the church was born. The church was born a good church because it was made up of people who turned to God from idols. Look at Acts 2:37-42, 3:19. These invitations to salvation sound nothing like the most common invitations today.

Phrases like “Asking Jesus into my heart” or “Accepting Jesus as my personal Savior” are emblematic of a mentality that carelessly reverses the roles in salvation. And that mentality is widespread in the church—today those phrases are some of the most common Christian clichés used in the church.

There is nothing wrong with evangelism that impresses upon the sinner the urgency to repent and believe. But formulaic altar calls have spawned all sorts of reckless Christianese and faulty views of salvation. They are the tragic legacy of Charles Finney, a nineteenth-century evangelist who denied the sovereignty of God in calling and regenerating sinners. Finney was convinced that revival hinged on the preacher and his methods.

Finney’s desire to see greater numbers of converts at his meetings led him to invent the “anxious bench.” The anxious bench was one of Finney’s favorite preaching tactics. It provided vacant seating at the front of the church where those who were worried about eternal matters could sit, be specifically preached at, and personally converse with the preacher after the meeting.

While you wouldn’t see that exact pattern repeated today, the pragmatic principles are still at work in modern altar calls and evangelistic crusades, and in the work of personal evangelism. We must avoid humanly engineered means of producing converts. If the work of salvation is not the work of God, it is not the work of salvation. The work of God that results in salvation is a work that turns sinners from idols to worship and serve the true and living God.

 The greatest concern of a sinful man is not his need to accept Jesus as His Savior. The greatest need of a sinful man is a means by which he or she can be accepted by Jesus Christ on the Day of Judgment. Matthew 7:21-23, those chilling words of rejection by Jesus that I have previously referenced, make it clear that it is Christ’s acceptance of us that matters most, not man’s acceptance of Christ.

 Christ’s lordship isn’t up for debate. Paul states clearly in Philippians 2:8-11, “Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth, and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

 Listen, we don’t make Jesus Lord. He is Lord. You simply need to demonstrate that He is Lord of your life by submitting to Him in repentance, faith, and obedience. Christ’s lordship has never been contingent upon anyone’s willingness to grant Him that title. The reality is that He is Lord of true converts and atheists alike. Our belief has no bearing on that which God has declared to be an eternal reality. True converts bend the knee to Jesus as Lord now. The atheist will bow the knee as he is sentenced to burn in the fires of hell in regret.

God’s sovereign means of salvation have never changed. He draws the sinner through His call (John 6:44; Romans 8:28), convicts the sinner by the Holy Spirit (John 16:8), regenerates the sinner by His power (Ezekiel 36:26; 2 Corinthians 5:17), and sees the sinner through the lens of Christ’s atoning work (2 Corinthians 5:21).

The preacher should never presume to take upon himself any of the Holy Spirit’s responsibilities. Instead, God has chosen preaching as the means of proclaiming Christ crucified and calling for the response that He demands—repentance from sin (Acts 17:30–31) and faith toward Christ (Ephesians 2:8¬–9; Acts 20:20–21).

Rather than asking sinners to accept Christ we should call them to plead for His acceptance. Rather than telling sinners to “make Jesus Lord” we should call them to submit to His lordship. And instead of calling sinners to a saving altar, we should entrust them to a sovereign Savior.

Everywhere the word of the Lord sounded forth from the lips of the Thessalonians, their faith toward God went forth. So compelling was the evidence of the work of God that Paul had no need to say anything. Those who saw the evidence were reporting about the kind of reception Paul and his companions had among the Thessalonians. The report wasn’t that there had been a thousand people walk an aisle, pray a prayer, and sign a commitment card. The report was that the Thessalonians had turned to God from idols to serve a living and true God.

My challenge to you today is straightforward. I am asking you to examine your own heart and life and ask yourself if you are one who has turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God. Or, are you one who at some point in your life was convinced that the need was to pray a prayer and ask Jesus into your heart. Listen, I know how easy it is to convince people to do that. Regrettably I utilized that approach in the early years of my ministry. I had many notches on my spiritual belt. I baptized dozens of people whom I convinced to pray that prayer. I naively followed the pattern I had learned. I don’t know how many of those people may be on the road to hell, believing that because they prayed a prayer they are ok. I pray that God will open their eyes to the truth. I repented of that error.

If you are sharing the gospel and utilizing clichés like “ask Jesus into your heart” or “accepting Christ as your Savior” I am warning you that you need to stop. You need to share the gospel in biblical terms and biblical terms only. It is a warning because Paul said that if anyone preaches another gospel he is cursed. You don’t want to be there.

Confront the sinner with the reality of his or her sin so that they are brought to an understanding of their spiritual bankruptcy. Urge them to humble themselves and cry out to God for mercy. The Holy Spirit will cause them to mourn over their sin and create in them a hunger and thirst for the righteousness that will make them acceptable before God. Call them to repent and believe. Make it clear that repentance involves a complete turning from sin and to God, to serve the true and living God. Leave the work of salvation up to the Spirit of God. Stop worrying about being able to tell someone how many people you led to Christ. You don’t lead anyone to Christ. Leading someone to Christ is way above your pay grade.  It falls in the category of divine work and we are not God. You can tell them about Him. He does the work.

If you have been deceived, you still have hope. The opportunity is before you, today, to repent and believe. There is no formula to follow. There is no magical prayer to pray. Cry out to God for mercy and repent and entrust your soul to the One who is able to save both body and soul from death.

Let’s pray.