Do Online Sermons Undermine Local Churches?
00:00:00.000 | We have an email from Loretta, who lives in London, and she asks, "Pastor John, do
00:00:09.520 | you think technology is threatening the submission of a congregation to their
00:00:13.620 | pastor, in that people have so many choices of online teachers?" Well, first
00:00:19.800 | let me affirm her concern. I really appreciate anyone who wants to highlight
00:00:27.600 | the biblical conviction that pastors are leaders by God's appointment and should
00:00:34.320 | be biblically followed. Hebrews 13, 17, "Obey your leaders, submit to them, they
00:00:41.760 | are keeping watch over your souls." They're gonna have to give an account.
00:00:45.560 | Let them do this with joy and not groaning, because that's no advantage to
00:00:49.360 | you. So this beautiful portrayal of happy pastors doing their work with joy, and
00:00:55.040 | people happily supporting, that's right. She should be concerned about that. Or
00:01:00.080 | 1 Thessalonians 5, "We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among
00:01:05.780 | you and are over you in the Lord." They're your leaders, they're over you, they've
00:01:10.400 | been put by God in a place of authority and spiritual leadership, and you
00:01:14.680 | should respect them and esteem them highly for their work, for love's sake. So
00:01:20.240 | yes to the concern. Now that raises the question, what does submission mean and
00:01:27.560 | what does it not mean? And then we can ask how does the Internet affect
00:01:30.800 | that? Because submission to a pastor or a group of elders does not mean the pastor
00:01:37.760 | is infallible, or the pastor is the ultimate authority. The Bible is the
00:01:44.320 | ultimate authority and is infallible, not the pastor, not the elders. And it
00:01:50.400 | doesn't mean that you believe everything he says without examining it, but rather
00:01:57.400 | you go to the book of Acts and you see in Acts 17 that the Bereans were more
00:02:01.480 | noble than those in Thessalonica because they examined the scriptures daily to
00:02:05.760 | see if these things were so when an apostle was speaking to them. So it's not
00:02:11.360 | wrong for a people to love their pastor and submit to their pastor and still
00:02:17.280 | make sure that from the Bible what he is saying and how he's leading squares up
00:02:23.760 | with scripture. So positively I would say that that submission to pastoral
00:02:29.840 | authority involves respecting them, having a high esteem for their office
00:02:35.180 | and calling, giving them the benefit of the doubt, not becoming cynical and
00:02:40.680 | skeptical about things that they say, supporting their plans and their
00:02:46.560 | vision for the church, throwing yourself into the life of the church in any way
00:02:51.800 | you can without sinning. In other words, your basic disposition towards the
00:02:57.320 | leadership is, "Yes! Let's go! Let's support them!" just like a wife's basic
00:03:01.640 | disposition towards her husband should be, "I just love it when you lead! Any way I
00:03:06.320 | can support your leadership that's not sinful, I'm gonna be right there by your
00:03:10.400 | side supporting you." I think that's the way we should feel about our
00:03:13.960 | our pastors. Now, the Internet, with all of its teachers out there that people can
00:03:20.640 | listen to, is one more step in people's access to truth other than their
00:03:29.120 | preacher. And error too, but truth I'm thinking right now. So I'm thinking when
00:03:33.880 | I say one more step, the first step was translating the Bible into a language
00:03:37.920 | they could read, and that got some of them burned at the stake. The
00:03:42.000 | pastoral authority was so threatened, "If you read your English Bible, I'm gonna
00:03:45.600 | burn you at the stake," and they did. And the next would be books and
00:03:50.080 | magazines, the next would be radio, the next would be TV, and now we've got
00:03:53.160 | Internet, and all of those give access to more and more teaching that might or
00:03:59.160 | might not be different from what we're hearing. Now the question is, is that
00:04:05.200 | a bad thing to have exposure to knowledge that might reveal unhelpful
00:04:13.000 | things in your pastor? And my answer is, it may be a bad thing, or it may be a
00:04:18.000 | good thing. I would say if it makes the pastor acknowledge that he has to make a
00:04:26.520 | good case so that people can see in the Bible what he's really saying is really
00:04:31.160 | there, and that his plans for the church are really biblical, then that's a good
00:04:35.120 | thing for him to feel that pressure. But if what's going on in the Internet
00:04:40.320 | makes a person or a family disrespectful to their pastor, or cynical to their
00:04:46.520 | pastor, or disengaged from their church, then I think it's hurting them and not
00:04:53.120 | not helping them. But if it leads the pastor to be more vigilant and leads the
00:05:01.200 | people into a careful consideration of what's really biblical, then I would
00:05:06.560 | think that would be all for the good. It might create some relational tensions
00:05:11.920 | between what they're hearing in the Internet by some preacher and what
00:05:16.760 | they're hearing at the church, but I think avoiding those kind of tensions by
00:05:22.200 | hiding from truth is probably not going to honor God, the God of love and the God
00:05:28.600 | of truth. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast.
00:05:32.520 | Please email your questions to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.
00:05:36.080 | At DesiringGod.org you'll find thousands of other free resources from
00:05:39.520 | John Piper. I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.
00:05:44.000 | [BLANK_AUDIO]