To be a healthy Christian, you need a healthy church.

Welcome to Radical with David Platt.

For more gospel-centered resources from Radical and David Platt, visit us at our website radical.net.

While many Christians today tend to have an individualistic or self-centered concept of the Christian life, the Bible places a high priority

on the church community.

Here's David with a sermon titled Defining Church from 1st Corinthians chapter 3.

If you have a Bible and I hope you do, let me invite you to find with me 1st Corinthians

chapter 3. In this last, kind of key term when we think about missions, I want us to think

about the church together. So who is a church or what is a church? And this is so

important. I just I think about a missions flyer.

I got in the mail one day.

And it was from a missions organization saying,

for $20 a month you can plant a church in this particular country and it

went on and talked about just the rate of church growth in that place.

And then I dove in a little deeper and found out

that this is a mission organization that was basically

defining the church as wherever two or three people are gathered that is a church.

So wherever you have two or three Christians that accounts the church and that flyer, that definition of church just grieve

to my heart because it's not it's not the way the Bible defines church and in fact it's a total abuse of that

biblical passage wherever two or three gathered and I just I thought at that point if we're not careful, especially in our desire to report numbers and raise money for missions,

we can totally prostitute the nations for the sake of our

numbers and it's a dangerous tendency that we've got to avoid. When we think about

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