For Whom Will You Give an Account?

Check out this article, “Southern Baptist Mistake,” by Mark Dever today on the Together for the Gospel blog. His views are something that every leader needs to take into account. At this point in your life how many people are you to give an account for when you come before the judge of the universe?? Yourself only? You are called to at least be shepherd of your family. How’s your wife, children, extended family?? Starting thinking, and do something about it.

"Mortality continues on… as we are all eventually called home. And when we do, according to Hebrews 13, we pastors will give an account to God for the souls in our care. Who are they? They are the members of our churches. At this point, I'm to give account currently for 536."

"For me to allow my local congregation to continue on, with people in membership regularly forsaking assembling together is to be in sin, to lead my congregation into sin, confuse what it means to be a member, and confuse what it means to be a Christian. Any one of these topics could be treated at length. I simply want to reflect for a moment on how we're serving these "prospects", non-attending members."

"All of them will die, many of them without returning to church. Some of those will be our brothers and sisters in Christ who were in sin. I fear that many of them will not have been our brothers and sisters in Christ, and so they will slip into a Christ-less eternity , face a good and just God while they are still pleading their own merits for salvation, and fall under God's deserved penalty forever. We could have helped them, like the man in I Cor. 5 who was caught in sin (and may have repented II Cor. 2?), or like the man in Gal. 6:1. But we didn't. "

"We continued to teach them that church membership was their own private business, not the business of the congregation. We continued to meet their absence with our silence."

"Friends, "prospects" are in the phone book, in our family, in our neighborhood, at work. Church members are not "prospects". Church members are supposed to be our brothers and sisters in Christ. Church members are supposed to be saved from God's wrath against them. If they give no evidence of it, we're playing a high stakes game here with the souls of those we claim to love."

"Church members are not prospects. Church members are not prospects."