118. Freedom In The Church Series

Welcome to the For Freedom Podcast. This podcast exists to bring the freedom of the gospel for everyday Christians with everyday issues. Now here are your hosts, James Seyfried and Brett Martin. Welcome back to the For Freedom Podcast. We've got some great things planned for you today. We've got some great things coming up in the next few weeks that we're just excited about. I can't wait to share those with you today. But man, we've just been loving life and doing church and doing ministry and preaching the gospel and just loving every moment of serving the Lord. But James, what's going on over in your neck of the woods? Man, yeah, we are doing well. Of course, we're still getting settled in in our new church and man, loving. First of the year, we preached through our mission statement the first week of the year. And the last couple of weeks, we've been talking about our core values. And so we're spending about three, two to three weeks on each core value. So we're in core value number one, which is glorify God, which I think is where we should start all of our lives at. And so it just helps our church know where we're at. And so we're preaching through what it means to glorify God through worship, through prayer, our first couple of weeks on that. And then we'll be going into growing together in a couple of weeks. And so, man, we are pumped and excited about that. I'll tell you what. Let me tell you something that I did yesterday. Yesterday, I'm in my office. I'm reading through my sermon. I'm preparing it. And before I go out to preach, I have a few minutes before I go out and start shaking hands where I look through my phone. And I'm looking through my phone and there's a live going. And it's for Pleasant Grove Baptist Church. And I open it up and I see old James up there leading the music. So the thing about it is, is that when you sing on those Facebook lives, it isolates the vocals. So it's like James is singing solo. And, man, you've got some good pipes on you. You know, you've got some, you know, I don't think that old Simon Cowell would hit his X button for you. So, you know, I think you're doing a good job up there pulling double duty. Yeah, I appreciate it. We, our music lady, she is having a little bit of health problems. And so she asked me if she could take the month of January off. And so at first I'm like, no, but it's hard for me to tell someone who's not getting paid or anything. Hey, no, you have to be here. And so the last couple of weeks I have led music, led the choir. We've had choir practice. I'm not a singer by any means. But, man, Brett, I'm telling you, the last couple of weeks I've led music. And I told my wife, I said, singing for 10, 20 minutes, 15 minutes as you lead through that. I said, you're using different part of your vocal cords. For then when you turn around to preach, I said, I feel like I'm just yelling sometimes. And I get done and it's like I don't even have a voice. Like I get done preaching and I come down. We have our invitation time response. And those couple of minutes there, my voice rests. And then I go to talk again and my voice cracks. And it's like I'm raspy. It's like my voice held up while I was preaching and speaking. And then I got done and it was like, boom, nothing. Like I don't have a voice left anymore. So it's been interesting. I did it for six years at my last church. For six years, I was the pastor and the song director. And, brother, I definitely can sympathize with you. Because sometimes you just strain your voice so much and then you've got to get up there and preach. And it's definitely not fun. Yeah. Yeah. So it's been great. We've been having a good time with that. And, you know, for me, it's I'm able to curtail the music a little bit more because I know what I'm preaching. So I'm. I'm developing those musics along with it. So we're gearing the worship service toward it. So I've enjoyed doing that. But I will look forward to when someone else is able to step in and lead so I don't have to. But, yeah, it's been great. It's been cold these last couple of weeks. It's been a great time. And church is doing well. I appreciate you listening and tuning in on my message there. And I've loved your little clips that you put out from your church there, Rocky Point. And but, man, church is doing well. We're seeing we had two first time guests this past week on a down Sunday when it was cold. You've gotten some ice. We haven't gotten any ice. It's just been cold. No snow or anything. Just really cold. But we've had a little bit of sickness come through our house and also in the church. So we've seen some some ups and downs as far as numeric people go. But it's been been great. And I think we're getting some good response from our core values and our mission statement. And so really, really excited about that. You know that we don't get paid to do the for freedom podcast. This is sort of a side hobby. So so pastoring and preaching is our our main thing. And so being able to see lives changed. I got a lady that, Brett, you'll like this, that came to me Sunday after I got done preaching. She hung around afterwards. She's had some marriage problems. She's left her husband. Her husband left her. I don't know the whole story. She's got a couple of kids. And she came to me afterwards and she said, hey, pastor, she said, I want to get baptized. She said, I've never, never followed the Lord in believers baptism. And I'm like, dude, I'm stoked. It's awesome. Like lives are being affected. And it's just been great. So I figured you'd appreciate that, too. Dude, that's that's awesome, bro. That's that's what we're in it for. That's what we're here to do. I as well, in the month of January, am introducing a new mission statement, vision statement to the church. And we've been preaching through it through the month of January. I think things have been good. Man, we had a really, really yesterday. I mean, the the house was packed and we had a lot of people there. I had one of my deacons get up. And, you know, it was Sanctity of Life Sunday for our convention. And so I had one of my deacons get up. He's the assistant chairman. He's also teaches our teenagers and talk for about five minutes on Sanctity of Life. And man did an awesome job. So great. Bruce did an awesome, awesome job. He's been a school teacher for for years and years and years. But he loves the Lord. And many. He did a great job. We had a good response from the message. And one of the things we're doing at our church that I'm really excited about is we're starting a praise band. And we're we're we're getting met together. We've got some we've got players. We need singers. We've got some singers that we're going to audition soon that are don't attend our church, but our friends do our church. And we're thinking maybe doing this on like Friday, Saturday nights, have like, you know, youth meetings, explosions and, you know, maybe every quarter or so have the praise team do a service. And I'm excited about what that's going to bring in for the church. And we're expanding. We're expanding our fellowship hall. Getting a bigger kitchen, bigger deck, bigger bathrooms. And, you know, we're expanding because we we don't have the room. We've grown to this point where we just don't have the room anymore and we got to get bigger. And that's a that's a good problem to have. It is. And so I'm just excited about what the Lord's got for us. And I'm just excited about church, man. I love church. You know, I've went to church. From the time I was 12, 13 years old, my mom took me sporadically before that. But, man, from the time I was 12, 13, I just went to church every week. And I love church. I love my church family. I love being around the people in church. And I just don't know what my life would be without the body of Christ. That's fantastic. Same here. You know, I've been going to church since I was a baby. I think I shared a couple of weeks ago where I was born on a Thursday and began going to church on a Sunday. And so I've been in church my whole life. There's a picture of me when our church was running the bus ministry of me in a car seat and my mom driving the bus and my dad leading the bus program on the bus there. And I'm a bus kid as a kid in a car seat. And so the church, again, it's my life. It's everything. My family's in it. We talked about that yesterday in our message of just serving as a family and having that family worship, which leads us right into where we're going to be going over the next month or so, which is in the church. We're going to do a series of in the church and what that looks like. We're titling it Freedom in the Church. And as we look through, we're going to be discussing several different topics. We're discussing topics such as abuse. We'll be talking about worship and music in the church. We're going to be talking about dress in the church. One of our, Brett, our very most listened to episode. You may not know this. You don't get the analytics, but is our episode we did on modesty. And it's gotten thousands of downloads and people still go and listen to that episode. It's one of our most listened to every single month. And so we're going to be discussing modesty again. But that was a specific women modesty. We're going to be discussing it as far as dress for men and women, the service and structure in the church, translations as far as the Bible, preaching styles and several, several different other topics. As we begin to just talk through what is the church? How does the church function? And how do we have freedom in the church? Brett, why don't you talk a little bit about that? Because I think oftentimes in our life, we do church the way we've always done church or the way we were told the church is supposed to be done. And as we begin to grow in our faith and we're in a different style or different county or different state, church is done differently. You know, I was raised in a pretty metropolitan area. And so it wasn't huge by any means. But rural church, where I'm at now in a very rural country, family style church, is done very differently than the way I was raised. And so we're beginning to see and having to adapt the way we do ministry. But oftentimes that can be a downfall or a hindrance to us when we come to worship because we expect it to be done a certain way. And so tell us a little bit about your experience and about what your thoughts are as we go into this series. Well, you know, of course, growing up in, you know, legalistic churches that we attended and I attended, you know, everybody did church the same way. It was the same thing. And then there were little differences here and there. Like, for instance, my church growing up, they would stand up and shake hands while the piano played, handshake and time. And, you know, I didn't see that in some of the other churches I went to. But for the most part, church in our circle of fundamentalism was always done the same. And if you strayed from that, if you went outside of that box, you were wrong. You're not doing church the way it used to be done. You're not doing church the way it was done back in the 1950s. And you're a sinner and a compromiser. And I knew coming out of that that I wanted to change. I wanted to do something different. But my thing is, is I didn't know how. I didn't know how to do church different. So when I left my IFB church and went and pastored my first Southern Baptist church, I only knew how to do church one way. So I just did church the way I had always done it and kind of started to turn my little Southern Baptist church into a little mini independent Baptist church because I didn't know any other way to do church. One of the one of the biggest things that it took for me to get used to one of the hardest hurdles that we had to kind of get past was when I took this new church, they did not have a Sunday night service. And man, just the guilt and the shame that we experienced for not having a Sunday night service. And I remember getting to that church and thinking our first Sunday night, man, we got to go to church somewhere. So we went to the closest independent Baptist church to us and we went there a couple Sunday nights. We started jumping around and going to different church on Sunday nights. And even though our church didn't have a Sunday night service, we would still go to church on Sunday nights until I came to the point where I was like, OK, let's just let's just stay home. Let's just try it. And so what we did is we stayed home from church and we didn't go to church on Sunday night. And the feeling was so weird because, you know, three to three to thrive, man. Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night. That's what you need to be a good Christian. And I remember that first night we stayed home. It was a little awkward. But then the next night, then the next week and the next week, that time. Not going to Sunday night church, just that family time did more to bring our family together. And, you know, I was working a lot. I was working 50, 60 hours a week. And so my wife was working and she was homeschooling the kids. And so we're also doing church stuff. So we're busy going every day. We had something to do. So that time we had as a family on Sunday nights together, playing a board game, watching a movie, going to a restaurant, just doing things together, did more for my marriage and more for our family as a whole. And really it gave us healing because when we come out of the IFB, we were hurt. We had been run over. We had been verbally abused and spiritually abused. And we had been put through the ringer to the point where I almost lost my faith over this. And then those Sunday nights, just spending time with my family, getting the word of God in the morning and then at night having that family time. Man, it did so much to heal our family and really so much to bring us closer to God than anything else we experienced during that time. And then that experience, my first church out of the Independent Baptist Church, it was just a learning curve of trying to learn the right way to do things and the right way to process things and get out of this mentality that there's only one way to do it. And if you don't do it this way, it's not right. And that's why I'm excited about this series, because this is what I needed. When I came out of legalism, I needed this type of series to process what I had been through and to explore the correct way to do it moving forward and what's the right way to proceed in church. And so I'm just excited about this series and I'm ready for it, because like I said, when I came out of it, this is something that I desperately needed. Absolutely. One of the things that we're so looking forward to, I know me personally, is we've got some stellar interviews lined up. We've got Bob Coughlin coming on here in a couple of weeks. Some of you may not know who that is. He's part of Sovereign Grace Music, just a fantastic worship guy and done a lot of seminars and teaching and preaching on worship. Jim Neuheiser in a couple of weeks will be coming on. But Brett, one of our got off the phone with this young man. I'm going to call him a young man. Got off the phone with him just a couple of days ago and we were talking about our episode. I haven't even shared this with you. And it's Brian Edwards and he's going to come on and he's going to talk through the evolution of church with Hope Church. So Hope Church started out as Blessed Hope Baptist Church and they went to Hope Baptist Church and then they went to Hope Church. And the evolution of how that formed and how that moved with the changing of them evolving and them growing and knowing how to do things. I'm so excited about him sharing that with us because. It's going to help us to see that things don't always have to be the way, quote unquote, the way we've always been told it should be done. And, you know, as you were sharing, my mind went to the old story illustration of the young lady that was cooking a roast. And she chopped off the front and back into the roast and put it in the pan and then put the pan in the oven. I mean, chopped off a couple of pounds of meat and put it into the oven and began cooking it. And one day the grandma was over there and she said, what are you doing? And she said, well, this is the way my mom taught me. She said, this is the way you taught her. And she said, well, I did that because our oven was too small. The roast wouldn't fit in. And so I had to chop the ends off of the the roast. And so now it was this is the way mom told me to do it. And so I've got to do it that way. But when grandma came over, she's like, no, if I had a bigger oven, I wouldn't be chopping the ends off. But so often it's because it was done 50, 60, 80 years ago. Well, then it has to be done this way now. When in reality, we need to get back to the way the New Testament church operated and do church that way. And so I'm so looking forward to some of these topics, some of these interviews that we've got lined up with men and women that are just going to be fantastic assets to us and to learn from. And I've shared this often. And I really appreciate that you said it, Brett, because we do feel like sometimes we're on an island when we come out of legalism, when we come out of what we were at. And these are episodes that are going to help us as we move forward in any stage or situation that you're in in the church. Some of you may be, you know, questioning church altogether. Should I even be in church? Is church even a thing that I should be in? And so this helps us to understand, helps us to process things, helps us to verbalize some things that we're in. And so we hope you're going to enjoy this. We hope you'll share some of these episodes that help you with other people. And, man, we're so looking forward to what we've got going on. One thing that another thing that I thought of that we need to talk about, and I don't know if this is on the list. If it's not, we can put it on there. But it's different forms of outreach. You know, when we're, you know, sometimes independent Baptist churches, we have this idea, door knocking, door knocking, door knocking, door knocking, door knocking is the only way to do it. And don't get me wrong. As a pastor, you should be knocking doors. As a pastor, you should go door to door. You should go house to house. You should invite people. I'm not saying don't do that. But that's not the end all and be all. That's not the only way to do it. And it's definitely not the best way to do it. There are other options. One of the things we're doing in our church in the next couple months is we're actually starting an outreach team. And this is going to be people in our church that are going to get together with me. And we're going to talk about different, you know, brainstorm on different ideas. We're going to innovate and try to think of different ways we can reach our community, how we can implement those, how we can carry them out. And I'm excited about it. I mean, I know when we go to the For the Sake of the Gospel Conference this coming November, me and you are going to start a bus route at JC's church. You know, we're going to, you know, get out there and we're going to be. Absolutely. One thousand percent. We're going to be eating goldfish and we're going to have world largest ice cream sundae in one week and we're going to get him a bus route going. So, you know, he'll need to get a CDL or get right with God. Absolutely. One hundred percent. We are doing that. And so hopefully John will be there, too, to help us. And you can help us. You can maybe start bus number two as we start bus route number one. And so it's going to be great. We're number one. We're number one. That's right. That's right. But, yeah, we're excited. Hey, I just added outreach to the list of topics as well. Maybe you've got a list. Maybe you've got an idea of something that you would like for us to talk about. Leave us a message. You can reach out to us on our social media websites. You can reach out to us on our email and you can let us know some things that you would like for us to talk about. So some areas that you've had questions about and that you would like us to dissect a little bit more. And so, Brett, any any final thoughts before we wrap up the episode? I got a question for you. I just kind of thought of. Can you name? I know you may watch other church services or, you know, other people. Can you name just like a church service that you watch that you're just like, man, that's kind of that's kind of the way church needs to be run and not saying you want to copy that verbatim. But just thinking, man, that's just a great way to do church. And I'll go first, give you time to think. And I think that that's Matt Dudley's church. You know, the Ridge in Sullivan, Missouri. You know, I watch the way he does church from time to time. And, man, I think that that's just he's got a great thing out there. He's got a great ministry. His preaching, the music, the atmosphere that they've created at the Ridge. I want to give a shout out to him and his church. They just got a new building. I pray for that ministry because I've been there a couple of times. Matt's a good friend of mine. And I really think they're doing a great job out there at the Ridge. And I wouldn't, you know, encourage anyone to just get on Facebook and go watch one of their services. And it'll just blow you away what's going on out there in Sullivan, Missouri. Do you have any pastors or churches that maybe from time to time you look up and watch and think, man, that's just that's just a great way to do church? Yeah, I'll mention two. One will be a place called Nebo Crossing. Bob Ritter. I like listening to him. I like his style of preaching. It's it's very, I would say, informal, but he's a great communicator. And then his worship there. My sister-in-law's on the worship team and just doing some great things up in North Carolina. The other one that I would say we mentioned a little bit, but Hope Church. The thing that I so love about what Brian's doing and with Hope Church and, you know, we were in the talks of even possibly helping out with that, me and my wife and being a part of one of those church plants. But Lord didn't see fit. And so we're just continuing to serve him. But one of the things that I loved when we were looking at it is each one of the Hope Church locations are completely different than the other one. It's not this plug and play. You're going to do it this way and you're going to go in. And Brian said like this. He said each one of them are different because we use the skill sets that are at each one of them. He said that at my location, we may have a full praise team, drums, electric guitar, you know, an acoustic guitar. He said, but, you know, maybe over at Roxburgh or at Thomasville or one of the other locations, they are more of a rural country style church. And they've got a banjo, an acoustic guitar and a cajon. And they said the style of worship is completely different. The way they teach is completely different. And I think that's what is so important in ministry is that we figure out what works for us. We figure out the skill set that God has gifted that specific church at and then lean into that. You may not have an electric guitar player. You may not have a drummer, but you may have someone that can beat a box drum. And so you give them their tools and you allow that to happen. And you may have a person that can play a banjo or a canjan or whatever it may be. And all of a sudden you begin to build your worship around the people and the gifts that God's given you in that area. And I think that's what's so appealing to what Brian's doing, because he's not saying, OK, we're going to be a hope church. And this is what you need to look like. You need to look like what we're doing in Danville. He says this is hope church and it's going to look like what hope church looks like in that area. And I think as we would be wise to figure out what our area looks like and begin to build our church around what that looks like in our community. The church at Philippi was completely different to this church at Galatia and the church at Colossae and the church at all these other places. They were all different. Paul wrote a different letter to each of them because they had their own strengths and weaknesses that they needed to be addressed. John in the book of Revelation, each one of those seven churches got a different letter from Jesus because Jesus knew that each one of them needed different correction or different encouragement. The church at Philippi or the church at Philadelphia was not was not going to benefit from the letter from Laodicea because they were two different churches that were struggling in two different areas. And so for me, that would be what I would encourage people to do is begin to look around and see the strengths and weaknesses in your own community. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. That is such a good word. It's something that we need to take into consideration that, you know, it's just not all cookie cutter. It's just not all, you know, the same thing. We're different as individuals, just like, you know, each individual is different and has their own. I talked about yesterday. I talked about church being a big potluck and how each person brings their own dish and by that dish by itself. It doesn't make a meal. But, you know, but not, you know, not we put all those dishes together and you get a church. And now it's going to be different every time. You're not always going to have the same items, but not everybody is going to bring string beans. Somebody is going to bring a meat. Somebody is going to bring a side. Somebody is going to bring a dessert. But, man, when it all comes together, it works in perfect harmony. And it's different. It's unique. And that's what's great about it. And we don't need to strive to just all be this same church that we're stamped out, that we learned in some Bible college somewhere that, you know, I wrote this book on how to do church and you need to do church. Just this way. You know, I'll even call it a manual. But you need to you need to do church this way. And if you're not doing church this way, it's wrong. No, church is church is unique. Churches are different. And it's OK to celebrate those differences. And we don't all need to be the same. And we don't need to be put off by other churches that are different than ours. We need to celebrate those differences because we're all part of the family of Christ. Yes. Do you mean to tell me that you're putting out a Martin church manual here soon? Absolutely. Yes, it is. It is. It is in the works. Love it. Love that. You know, what I love about that even more, Brett, is that it's going to have Martin church manual. It's not going to be Jesus's church manual. It's not going to be the New Testament church manual. It's going to be named after your last name. And that's probably the most important thing that we do when it comes to churches is put our name on it, not Lord or God or anything else. It makes sense. And I'm also going to require our to read it on tape and record themselves, mail it in so I can make sure that they read it. Good man. Love that. Love that. So I hope you hope you guys are picking up on our sarcasm a little bit and I hope you guys are excited about this new series as we are. And if you if you have any idea or topic that you want us to discuss, let us know. Like I said, we've got up until about April planned out and we're loving and excited. We've never done seasons, but this new season of the podcast. And we thank you guys for listening. We thank you guys for tuning in. And with that being said, remember to God, not the pastor, be the glory. I found my new name. I found that good grace. I found that healing. And the tears fell down my face. When I found my beginning. It has no ending. I found that second chance. I found my best friend. I found my forgiveness. I found my happiness. I've been singing ever since. I found my freedom in you. Thanks for listening to the for freedom podcast. If you enjoyed our content, do us a favor by liking, subscribing or sharing our podcast or whichever podcast platform you use. Be sure to join us next time for the for freedom podcast. I will. . Thank you.

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