All the reasons which require the subjection of a believer to the brethren of a particular church, require his subjection to all his brethren in the Lord.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
As a member of the Church, you have made sacred covenants with the Lord.
Just very practically, pastors need to be careful that while they have a right to call people to absolute allegiance to the Word of God, we don't have the right to call people to absolute allegiance to our programs or every ministry we have at the church.
Those who embrace belief in Christ Jesus are bound together in Him, in a real yet incomplete way, in his Body, the Church. Faith is never a solitary activity, nor can it be simply private. Faith in Christ always draws us into a community and has a public dimension.
In the first place, our faith ought to lay hold on Christ as God and man in that nature by which He has been made our neighbor, kinsman, and brother.
Men who hold a theory of the Church which excludes from communion those whom they admit to have the Spirit of Christ simply proclaim that their theory is in flat contradiction to the spiritual fact.
We are to introduce our people into the life of the Church, which is salvation, that they may grasp its meaning, its contents and purpose, to taste and see how good the Lord is.
Every Christian must be convinced of his fundamental and vital duty of bearing witness to the truth in which he believes and the grace that has transformed him.
Therefore, the church is not absolutely necessary as an object of faith, not even for us today, for then Abraham and the other prophets would not have given assent to those things which were revealed to them from God without any intervening help of the church.
The faith of the church must be tried by God's word, and not God's word by the church; neither yet my faith.
It is a thoroughly anti-christian doctrine that the Spirit of God, and therefore the life and governing power of the Church, resides in the ministry, to the exclusion of the people.