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

If you've never contacted Grace to you, we want to send you a free booklet by John called Forgiving One Another.

It spells out God's super abundant forgiveness for redeemed sinners, and it explains why our forgiveness of those who sin against us should be just as lavish.

Request your free booklet titled Forgiving one another by writing to forgiving at gt y.org. That's forgiving at gty.org.

This offer is good in North America and Europe through December 2023. 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.

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 of creation over which God

is the universal sovereign. He rules over all creation. There is the eternal kingdom to come,

...