The following sermon is by John MacArthur, pastor, author, and Bible teacher with Grace to You.

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And now unleashing God's truth one verse at a time.

Here is Grace to You Bible teacher John MacArthur.

As you can tell from your bulletin, and if you've been here in the last couple of weeks,

we're doing a brief series looking at the church under the title,

heaven on earth. That is what the church is in the world. It should bring down heaven.

A church should be nothing like the world, and it should approximate

heaven. Churches, however, today seem to have lost their sense of heavenly connection.

They have an identity crisis in so many churches, shifting styles, changing methods, shallow

sentimentalism, naive theology, superficial worship, all kinds of things, the smorgas

board of attempts to, quote-unquote, make the church relevant to a fast-changing world.

And this calls for us to go back to the foundations,

and that's what we're endeavoring to do in this series.

The right way to define the church in its true form is this.

It is the present form of the kingdom of heaven. It is the present

form of the kingdom of heaven. That is a fundamental definition of the church. The kingdom has

many manifestations. There is the universal kingdom. The kingdom has many manifestations. There is the universal kingdom, the kingdom of creation,

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