Saturday, August 22, 2026
Climbing the Staircase 1 — The Bottom Steps
📚 CLIMBING THE STAIRCASE
Adding to Your Faith, One Step at a Time
Booklet 1 of 6 • The Bottom Steps
By CHUCK TRUSTY
Pastor | Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church
Faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance — the four steps the whole staircase stands on.
A Word Before We Begin
This little book began in a math class, though I did not know it at the time.
I had been preaching a good many years before I ever stood in front of a chalkboard, and when I finally did, I taught boys and girls that everything in arithmetic rests on one small idea. Addition. You cannot take away until you have first put together. You cannot multiply until you have learned to add. Every new thing a child learns in that room is stacked on top of something he learned the week before, and if you skip a step the whole thing comes apart on him later, usually at the worst possible time.
Years later I was reading the first chapter of Second Peter, where the apostle tells us to add to our faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance, and on up the list until he arrives at charity. And it came to me all at once that Peter was doing the same thing I used to do at that chalkboard. He was not handing us a grab bag of nice qualities to pick from. He was building something. One thing on top of another. A staircase.
I have preached that staircase to my congregation over a long stretch of Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights, and I have gathered those messages here and shaped them into a little book. I have tried to arrange it so that each chapter can stand on its own, like a small pamphlet you could read in one sitting. Read them in order if you like — the order is part of the point — or open to the step you need today.
The book falls into three parts, and I ought to explain why.
Part One is the climb itself — the eight steps Peter lays out, from faith at the bottom to charity at the top.
Part Two takes a different road, and I want you to know before you get there why we go down it. Somewhere in the middle of preaching this staircase I stopped and spent a long season in the hundred and seventh Psalm, because I came to believe we cannot understand why the staircase matters until we have seen what happens to a man who quits climbing it. That Psalm is not about lost people. It is about God's own — believers who drifted, at different speeds and for different reasons, and every one of them found the same way home. So Part Two walks with them: the wanderers, the worn out, the prisoners, the drifting heart, the fools, the unsteady, and the storm-tossed. If any chapter in this book has your name on it, it is probably one of those.
Part Three brings us back and finishes the climb — the last two steps, which are the only two the world can see from the outside.
I am no scholar and I will not pretend to be one in these pages. I am a plain man who came to know a gracious Savior, and who has spent his life since then learning, slowly and with plenty of stumbling, what it means to grow up in Christ. So you will not find fine words here. You will find pickup trucks and potato chips and garden weeds and fence posts, because those are the pictures God has used to teach a plain man plain truth.
Let me say one thing clearly at the very front, and I will keep saying it all the way through: not one word of this book is about how to be saved, and not one word of it is about how to stay saved. A child of God cannot be lost. Nothing in all this world can pluck you out of the Father's hand. What is at stake in these pages is not your soul. What is at stake is your nearness to God, your usefulness to Him, and your joy in Him. Those are worth more than most of us have ever stopped to consider, and they can be quietly lost by a man who never once rebelled — only drifted.
The King James Bible is the well I have drawn from all my life, and it is the well I draw from here.
The staircase is already built. He built it. All that is left for you and me to do is climb it.
PART ONE
The Climb
CHAPTER 1
The Bottom Step
And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge. — 2 Peter 1:5
I spent years in a classroom teaching arithmetic, and I want to tell you the one thing I learned in there that has served me better in the pulpit than it ever did at the chalkboard.
Everything in that room was built on addition.
That is not an exaggeration. Addition is the floor the whole house sits on. Subtraction is only addition turned around backward. Multiplication is nothing in the world but addition done in a hurry. Division is multiplication undone, and fractions are division written down, and ratios are fractions compared, and exponents are multiplication piled on top of itself until the number gets away from you. Every single concept in that class was stacked on the one before it, and I could always tell which child had missed a step three chapters back, because that is where the wheels came off.
Now open your Bible to the first chapter of Second Peter and read the fifth verse and the two that follow it. Add to your faith virtue. To virtue, knowledge. To knowledge, temperance. To temperance, patience. To patience, godliness. To godliness, brotherly kindness. And to brotherly kindness, charity.
Do you see what he is doing? Peter is not writing out a shopping list where you can pick up whichever item catches your eye. He is teaching arithmetic. He is stacking one thing on top of another thing, in an order, on purpose, and the whole structure only stands if you build it from the bottom.
I have come to picture it as a staircase. Eight steps, faith at the bottom and charity at the top, and every one of them holding the weight of the one above it. And I want to spend this whole little book climbing it with you.
But we have to start where the stairs start. We have to start at the bottom step.
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The bottom step is faith, and faith is not one virtue among several. Faith is the ground the staircase is bolted to.
But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him (Hebrews 11:6). Read that verse slowly, because it does not leave us any room to negotiate. Not difficult. Not unlikely. Impossible. There is no amount of work, no amount of religion, no amount of sincere human effort that can be substituted for faith, any more than a child can substitute enthusiasm for knowing that two and two make four.
And notice the second half of that verse, because most of us hurry past it. He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. God actively responds to faith. He is not sitting back with His arms folded, daring us to prove something. He is leaning toward the man who trusts Him, ready to give.
So the first question is simply this. Have we laid that foundation? Not, have we joined something. Not, do we come on Sunday. Have we put our trust in Jesus Christ and nothing else? Because a great many people spend a lifetime looking for love in all the wrong places, as the old song says, and a great many spend a lifetime looking for salvation in all the wrong places too, and the sad thing is that both of them are looking hard.
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Now let me take you back to the chalkboard, because the next thing we taught was subtraction, and subtraction is where a good many believers get frightened, and they ought not to be.
What happens if some of our faith gets taken away? What happens to the child of God who grows weak, who lets doubt in, who quits reading and quits praying and quits caring the way he used to care? Does he lose his salvation?
Hear the Lord Jesus Himself. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand (John 10:27-28). That phrase, "shall never perish," is about as strong a way as the Greek language knows how to say never. It does not mean rarely. It does not mean probably not. It means absolutely never, under any circumstance, in time or in eternity.
And He gives us eternal life. Present tense. Not a hope for the future if we manage to hang on. A possession, right now.
Look at it from another direction if you like. The Lord told about a strong man armed who keeps his palace, and his goods are in peace, until a stronger one comes and overcomes him (Luke 11:21-22). The whole illustration turns on the question of who is stronger. So let me ask it plainly. Is anybody stronger than God? Are you stronger than God? Because that is what it would take. For one of His sheep to perish, somebody would have to be strong enough to pry open the hand of the Almighty, and that somebody does not exist.
So no. When faith is subtracted, salvation is not what goes.
But something does go. And I do not want you to shrug that off, because what goes is precious. What goes is joy. What goes is peace. What goes is that quiet settled confidence that lets a man sleep at night. What goes is a whole catalog of blessings God was standing ready to hand you, and He never withdrew them — you just stopped coming close enough to take them out of His hand.
Think of Demas, who was in the work right alongside Luke and Mark, and then was not. Nobody plucked him out of anything. He just loved this present world, and he drifted off, and what he lost was everything except his soul.
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Then came multiplication, and multiplication is the happy part.
Because faith does not only shrink. Faith also grows, and when it grows it does not add — it multiplies. The apostles knew this. They came to the Lord one day with a request that I have prayed a hundred times myself: Lord, Increase our faith (Luke 17:5). They were not asking for a different faith. They were asking for more of the one they had.
And here is what I have watched happen in people, including in myself. When faith starts to grow, appetite grows with it. You want to learn more. You want to know what the next verse says. You start noticing things in a passage you have read forty times. And joy goes right up with it, off the charts.
Solomon put it this way: For God giveth to a man that is good in his sight wisdom, and knowledge, and joy (Ecclesiastes 2:26). Now stack that on what we have already learned. Without faith it is impossible to please Him — so the man who is good in God's sight is a man of faith. And the very next thing Peter tells us to add is virtue, which is moral uprightness. So the man who receives wisdom and knowledge and joy from the hand of God is the man who has laid faith down as his foundation and then started building on it.
The same verse says the sinner gets travail — trouble — gathering and heaping up, spending a whole life piling up stuff and never once finding the satisfaction he has been chasing the entire time. That is a sorrowful picture, and I have seen it up close more than once.
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There is one word in the fifth verse that I do not want us to walk past, and it is the word diligence. "Giving all diligence, add to your faith."
Diligence is not a word about talent. It is a word about attention. It means being thoughtful about what matters to God, and honest enough to admit that a great deal of what matters to my flesh does not matter to God at all. And Peter puts it right at the front of the list, before he names a single virtue, because he knows how this goes. Nobody drifts upward. Nobody climbs a staircase by accident.
Peter also says do it quickly. Give all diligence. Get after it.
And here is the thing about the order. You cannot skip a step. I have been told by some good people that it seems awful strict of God to insist on a sequence like this, and I want to answer that as plainly as I can: it is not strictness, it is arithmetic. You cannot teach multiplication to a child who has not learned to add. And you cannot add knowledge of God's ways to a man who has already decided he is not going to live by them. You cannot add self-control to a man who does not yet accept God's definition of right and wrong. Every step holds up the next one. That is not God being difficult. That is God being honest with us about how growth actually happens.
So let me leave you at the bottom of the stairs, and let me say the thing I most need to say to myself.
We got saved. Wonderful. Heaven threw a party over it. But being saved was never meant to be the end of anything. It was the doorway. God did not rescue you so that you could file the paperwork and sit down in the lobby. He saved you so that you could climb — so that a whole lifetime from now you would be something you are not today.
The foundation is laid. The stairs are built. The only question left is whether we are going to stand here at the bottom admiring them, or start climbing.
CHAPTER 2
Which Game Are We Training For?
Add to your faith virtue. — 2 Peter 1:5
I want to talk about athletes for a minute, because an athlete will teach us something about ourselves that we would rather not learn any other way.
Take a young man who is serious about his sport. Really serious. Watch how his whole life bends around it. He eats a certain way because of the game. He sleeps a certain way because of the game. He gets up before daylight in the cold and runs, and nobody makes him do it, and nobody applauds when he does it. His summer is arranged around the game. His friendships form around the game. Every ordinary decision in his week gets weighed against one question: will this make me better?
Two things are driving all of that. He loves the game, and he wants to be the best there is at it.
Now here is the question I cannot get away from, and I do not ask it to be clever. If somebody watched your week the way we just watched his — the hours, the money, the appetite, the effort, the thing your mind runs to the second it has nothing else to do — what game would they conclude you are training for?
Because it is entirely possible for a saved man to spend his whole life in strict, disciplined, dedicated training to be the very best sinner he can possibly be.
That is what the second step on the staircase is about.
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Virtue means moral excellence. Moral uprightness. Living right on purpose. And it is the first thing Peter tells us to lay on top of our faith, which ought to tell us something about how God orders His priorities.
Now understand me carefully here. Not one of us is going to live above the practice of sin in this life. I have never met the man who did, and if I ever meet the one who says he has, I will know something about him that he does not know about himself. So virtue is not sinlessness. Virtue is direction. Jesus expects a child of God to live in such a way that sin does not control the overall direction of his life.
There is a great deal of difference between a man who stumbles on the road and a man who has changed roads. One of them is going the right way and fell down. The other one is walking steadily and happily in the wrong direction, and he has not fallen at all.
And that is why the word Christian has always troubled me a little in the way we use it. We treat it like a title, something we put after our name, like a rank we were awarded on the day we were saved. But it is not a title. It is a description. It describes how a person lives. Calling yourself one does not make it so, any more than calling yourself an athlete makes you one when you have not been to a practice in eleven years.
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So why does virtue have to come before knowledge? Why not learn first and live later? A lot of us would prefer that arrangement.
Here is why, and it is one of the truest things I know about the human heart. If we are unwilling to live the way God says to live, then we are not going to be very interested in learning any more about what He says.
Think it through. Suppose a man has already decided, quietly, in a room where nobody can hear him, that he is going to keep a certain thing in his life. He is not going to give it up. It is settled. Now hand that man a Bible and tell him to study. What is he going to do? He is going to read carefully around the edges of that thing. He will find the passages that comfort him and skim the ones that convict him. He will develop an interest in prophecy, or church history, or somebody else's sins, and a strange lack of interest in the plain commands about his own life.
He is not lazy. He is protecting something.
That is why Peter will not let us have knowledge before virtue. A man who has already refused to obey has no real use for further instruction. He is only collecting information to argue with.
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Let me show you what this looks like from the other side, because it convicted me the first time I saw it.
Everybody loves the story of the good Samaritan. A man goes down from Jerusalem to Jericho and falls among thieves, and they strip him and wound him and leave him half dead. A priest comes down that way, sees him, and crosses to the other side. A Levite does the same. Then a Samaritan — the outsider, the man that fine religious folks looked down their noses at — comes where he is, has compassion on him, binds up his wounds, sets him on his own beast, carries him to an inn and pays his way (Luke 10:30-35).
Now that is a fine lesson on mercy. It is a fine lesson on prejudice. It is a fine lesson on the emptiness of a religion that has titles and robes and rituals but no compassion in it. The priest knew the law. The Levite knew the law. Neither one of them did the law.
But here is what struck me. That whole beautiful lesson is completely wasted on a man who has not added virtue to his faith.
Because a man who has already decided he is going to live however he pleases can hear that story, be moved by it, wipe his eyes at the right place, tell you it is one of his favorites — and go straight home to the same life he had before. The story never gets past his ears, because there is nothing in him prepared to obey it. Preaching mercy to a man who will not live right is like handing a man a map when he has already decided he is not going anywhere.
That is what I mean when I say the second step holds up all the ones above it.
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Somebody will ask, quite fairly, whether this is all just a roundabout way of teaching salvation by works. It is not, and I want to answer it head on.
We are saved by grace through faith, and that not of ourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast (Ephesians 2:8-9). If you could earn heaven, you would spend eternity bragging about it, and heaven would be a miserable place full of people comparing résumés. Salvation is a gift. It was paid for by a Savior who paid what we never could.
Virtue is not how we get saved. Virtue is how a saved man lives. It is not the price of admission; it is what love looks like once it is real.
And I will tell you what has helped me test myself on this, because saying "yes, of course I want to live right" costs a man exactly nothing. The evidence is never in one deed. It is in the direction of a whole life.
Lay one photograph on the kitchen table — a man in a uniform, standing tall — and you will draw a conclusion about him. But pull out the whole album, spread every picture of his life across that table, and the truth comes out. Forty pictures at the ball field. Twenty at the deer camp. Pictures at the lake, at the game, at the shop. And how many with a Bible in his hand? One or two, and you have to hunt for them.
The single photograph was not a lie. It just was not the truth of the man's life. The truth of a life only shows up when you back away and look at the whole album, and see which direction the man was actually facing, day after ordinary day.
That is virtue. Not a snapshot. A direction.
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So here is where I want to leave this second step.
If we consider the Christian life a journey — and it is — then it is simply not possible to take the second step before we have taken the first. Not because God is arbitrary about it, but because that is how walking works. You cannot get to knowledge by climbing over virtue. You cannot get to self-control by skipping past the decision to live right. Every man who has tried has ended up with a head full of doctrine and a life that does not match it, and that is a miserable way to live.
So the question this chapter asks is not complicated. It is only uncomfortable.
We are all in training for something. Our hours are going somewhere. Our best effort is being spent on something, and whatever it is, we are getting better at it every year.
Which game are we training for?
CHAPTER 3
Two Bottles on the Counter
And to virtue knowledge. — 2 Peter 1:5 Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding. — Proverbs 4:7
Picture a man standing at his kitchen counter early in the morning. Two bottles sit in front of him.
They are the same size. The same shape. The same amber color. Same white cap, same childproof top, same pharmacy label printed in the same little type. Standing there in the gray light before coffee, a man would tell you those two bottles are identical.
But one of them is his blood pressure medicine — the thing that keeps his heart going. And the other one is his wife's medication, which his body cannot tolerate, and which could put him in the hospital.
On the surface, the same. In reality, they could not be more different.
Discernment is the ability to know the difference before you swallow the wrong one.
That is the third step on the staircase, and I want to be careful about what we mean by it. When Peter says to add knowledge, he is not talking about being an educated man. There are educated fools in every county in Arkansas, and there are unlettered saints who can see straight through a thing in about four seconds. Knowledge here is not intelligence and it is not schooling. It is learning God's definition of right and wrong, and then being able to tell the difference between two things that look alike.
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Proverbs paints wisdom as a woman standing out at the crossroads, calling out loud in the street. She is not a concept. She is a guide. She stands where the roads fork and she says, This is the way, walk ye in it, and she says, Do not go that way, there is danger ahead.
Wisdom is the one who sees the difference. And once you start looking, you will find that nearly everything that hurts a believer comes disguised as something that looks almost exactly like something safe.
Take a man who misses a Sunday service. On the surface it looks like rest. It looks like a break. He worked hard all week and he is tired, and there is not a thing in this world wrong with being tired. But look at it in reality. One service becomes two. Two becomes a month. A month becomes a habit, and the habit becomes a drift. What looked like refreshment turned out to be replacement. Wisdom is what sees that difference on the front end, while it still looks like nothing.
Or take two voices that both speak to your heart when you have done wrong. One of them is conviction. One of them is condemnation. On the surface they sound alike — both of them make you feel bad, both of them point at your sin, both of them expose your weakness. But they are not the same voice at all. Conviction draws you toward God. Condemnation pushes you away from Him. One says come home; the other says do not bother, you would not be welcome. A believer who cannot tell those two voices apart will spend years being beaten with a stick he thinks God is holding.
Discernment is spiritual eyesight. And Peter tells us exactly what happens to the man who quits adding: he that lacketh these things is blind, and cannot see afar off, and hath forgotten that he was purged from his old sins (2 Peter 1:9). Blind, and near-sighted, and forgetful. That is what a man becomes when he stops climbing.
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Now I want to show you something in Proverbs 4 that changed how I read that whole chapter.
Solomon is talking to his son. In that culture, discipleship was not a class or a program; it was a father taking his boy by the shoulders and saying, "Son, listen to me. I have lived long enough to know where these paths lead. Let me teach you how life really works." And because it is a father to a son, every word he uses is carrying more weight than it would in ordinary conversation.
He says, Get wisdom.
Now in English, "get" is about as ordinary a word as we own. Get the mail. Get your shoes. Get the remote. But the Hebrew word Solomon uses is qanah — kah-NAH — and it is not an ordinary word at all. It is the word for buying land. Redeeming property. Acquiring a treasure. Paying a serious price for something valuable and taking possession of it.
Same verb we would use for "get the remote." Completely different weight, because of what he attaches it to.
It is the difference between two sentences that use identical words. If I ask a man, "Do you brush your teeth every day?" he says, "I do." And when the preacher asked him, "Do you take this woman to be your wedded wife?" he said the very same two words. Same words. Not remotely the same promise.
So when Solomon says get wisdom, he is not saying pick some up if you happen to have time. He is saying pursue her the way you pursued your wife. Pay the cost. Make the investment. Treat her with the seriousness of a covenant and not the casualness of a chore.
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And that raises the question I have to answer honestly. If wisdom really is that valuable, why do we not all just go out and get her?
Here is the reason, and it is simpler than we would like. We do not get wisdom because we do not see wisdom. And we do not see her because we have never valued her.
Value is what makes a thing visible. You can walk through a crowded room and see nothing but faces — until somebody you love walks in, and suddenly the room has one person in it. Same room. Same eyes. Different value.
I found a coin in a drawer once and thought nothing of it. Dirty, worn, not worth the trouble of looking up. If somebody had told me it was rare and worth a good deal of money, I promise you my attitude would have changed in about one second. Nothing about the coin changed. My eyes changed, because somebody told me what it was worth.
That is exactly how we treat wisdom. She looks to most of us like fool's gold. Like an education we will never use. Like training in how to drive a wagon in a world full of cars. Something outdated, optional, unnecessary, not really applicable to real life.
And I know why. Wisdom is not flashy. Wisdom does not sparkle. Wisdom is quiet, and steady, and slow, and costly, and disciplined, and she never once promises you a thrill.
But sin is glamorous. Temptation is glamorous. Convenience is glamorous. They shine, and they shout, and they promise you something right now.
A fish does not bite a hook. A fish bites bait. He never sees the hook at all — that is the whole design of the thing. The bait looks good right now, and feels good right now, and promises pleasure right now, and the hook is what comes after. Sin always hides the hook. And wisdom is the voice that says, look past the bait, look at the hook. But because she cannot offer you anything this minute, we walk right past her and take the thing that is going to hurt us.
We do not pursue wisdom because we do not see her. And the fact that we do not pursue her is proof of what we think she is worth.
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Solomon does not stop with get. In the very same breath he says something else: forget it not.
If "get wisdom" is a treasure word, then "forget it not" is a danger word. The first is about acquiring her. The second is about keeping her.
And the Hebrew idea behind forgetting is not what we usually mean. We say "I forgot" and we mean it slipped our mind. That is not it. In that language, to forget something meant to neglect it. To quit practicing it. To quit rehearsing it. To quit applying it. To let it drift out of your life the way an old friendship drifts when nobody writes back. To treat something valuable as though it were ordinary.
It is the same word used when Israel forgot the LORD. They did not forget His name. They could have recited it. What they forgot was His ways. They remembered who He was and quit doing what He said.
That is how it happens to us, too, and it is never dramatic. It is a house plant nobody waters. It is a skill nobody practices. It is a lifejacket treated like clutter in the bottom of the boat, right up until the boat tips over.
I could give you a dozen pictures of it and every one of them is true. Forgetting wisdom is like forgetting to check the oil — the engine runs fine, right up until the moment it does not. It is like forgetting to lock the door — everything seems fine until something gets in that should not be there. It is like forgetting the parking brake — the drift starts so slow you cannot see it, and then it cannot be stopped.
Forgetting is not rebellion. It is not defiance. It is not anger at God. It is slow, and quiet, and unintentional, and that is exactly what makes it so dangerous. Nobody sounds an alarm over it. There is no moment to point at. It does not feel like sin.
But it is the first loose stone on a staircase that leads downward, and we will spend two whole chapters later in this book walking down those stairs to see where they go.
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So here is the third step, and here is how I would ask you to test yourself on it.
How is our eyesight?
Are we seeing the difference between things that look alike? Are we recognizing danger while it is still small enough to walk away from? Are we seeing the exit before we pass it, or only after? Are we weighing today's decision against where that road comes out ten years from now?
Or has the drift already started, quietly, while we were busy?
If any of that lands on you this morning, do not take it as bad news. Take it as mercy. Because the fact that you can still feel the difference means the eyesight is not gone. The prayer is not complicated, and I have prayed it many times myself.
Lord, give me wisdom. Restore my discernment. Help me see afar off again.
He gives that liberally, to all men, and He does not scold us for asking.
CHAPTER 4
The Bird That Catches the Spider
And to knowledge temperance. — 2 Peter 1:6
Most of us grew up on that old children's rhyme about the little old lady who swallowed a fly.
I say most of us. I used this illustration in a service a while back and afterward several people told me they had never heard of it in their lives, which taught me something I want to be careful about — that a preacher ought never assume everybody in the room has heard what he has heard. So in case you are one of them, here is the whole thing.
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. Nobody knows why she swallowed the fly. Then she swallowed a spider to catch the fly, and that spider wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her. Then she swallowed a bird to catch the spider, and a cat to catch the bird, and on it went, each one swallowed to take care of the one before it.
It is a silly rhyme for children. It is also about the best picture of Second Peter chapter one that I know of.
Because Peter hands us a list of things we have to swallow, one on top of another, and each one takes care of the one beneath it. Faith — confidence in Jesus. Virtue — commitment to Jesus. Knowledge — learning what pleases Jesus. Temperance — behaving to please Him today. Patience — behaving to please Him every day. Godliness — being the same man at work that we are at church. Brotherly kindness — being good to those who love God. And charity — being good to those who do not.
Today we come to the fourth one, and it is the step where a great many Christians stop climbing and never start again.
Temperance. Self-control.
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Start with why it has to come here, in this exact spot, and nowhere else.
If a man refuses to live a moral life, he is not going to want to learn what God says. We talked about that. And if a man refuses to accept God's definition of what is right and what is wrong, he will never practice self-control, because self-control is only obedience to a standard, and he has not accepted the standard yet.
Temperance is impossible as long as we are still arguing with God about what is right.
That is worth sitting with a minute, because most of what we call a self-control problem is actually an argument we have not finished having. We are not failing to resist. We are still negotiating.
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Now let me get to the practical part, because this is where the rhyme starts preaching.
When the old lady swallowed the spider, it wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.
That is exactly what knowledge does.
When we take the Word of God down inside of us, it does not lie there quietly. It moves. It stirs. It wakes us up at two in the morning. It tickles at us right in the middle of something we were enjoying. It says: this is right. This is wrong. This is the way, walk in it. Do not go back.
Knowledge stirs the conscience. Every believer knows the feeling.
But here is the trouble, and it is the whole reason there is a fourth step. Knowledge by itself cannot control the flesh. Knowledge is a sign by the side of the road. It tells you which way is right; it does not drive the truck. A sign has never once turned a steering wheel.
So the old lady swallows a bird to catch the spider. And the bird has something the spider never had.
The bird has wings. The bird can get out of there.
Temperance is that bird. Temperance is what gives a man the ability to escape.
There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it (1 Corinthians 10:13).
There it is. God makes a way to escape. Temperance is taking it.
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Now let me tell you what temperance is not, because this is where most of us have had it backward for years.
Temperance is not wrestling with temptation. Temperance is removing it.
You know the old advertising slogan. Nobody can eat just one. And whoever wrote that line understood human nature better than most preachers do. If the bag is open, and the bag is within reach, and you are sitting in the chair where you always sit — you are going to eat the chips. That is not a prediction. That is a fact about you and about me.
So listen to how God says to handle it. Enter not into the path of the wicked, and go not in the way of evil men. Avoid it, pass not by it, turn from it, and pass away (Proverbs 4:14-15). Read that list again and count the verbs. Avoid it. Do not pass by it. Turn from it. Pass away from it. That is four different ways of saying the same thing, and not one of the four is "resist it while standing right next to it."
God never once tells us to manage temptation. He tells us to get away from it.
But that is not what we do, is it. We say:
I can handle it. I will just have one. I will stop before it gets out of hand. I will put a rubber band around the bag. I will fold the top over. I will move it to the top shelf where I have to reach for it.
Temperance is not folding the top of the bag over. Temperance is throwing the bag away.
❧
Now I want to take this one layer deeper, because underneath every failure of self-control there is something older and uglier, and it goes all the way back to the garden.
What exactly was the first sin? We usually say it was eating a piece of fruit, and that is true as far as it goes. But underneath the fruit was something else. Eve decided, in that moment, that she was going to define good and evil for herself. The serpent's whole pitch was that God had been holding out on her, and that she was perfectly capable of deciding for herself what was good.
That is what we are doing every time we refuse temperance.
Our wisdom says: I can manage this temptation.
God's wisdom says: No, you cannot.
And every one of us has enough personal history to know which of those two has been right so far.
❧
There is a reason I like to preach this step in a service where we are about to observe the Lord's Supper, and I want to tell you why.
Paul says, Let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup (1 Corinthians 11:28). Now that kind of examination takes temperance. It requires a man to look honestly at his own life and name what he finds there.
And I do not believe a man can examine himself honestly while he is still holding onto the bag of chips.
We come to that table the way we come to the supper table at home — we wash our hands first. That is what James is getting at when he says, Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded (James 4:8). Confess it. Turn your back on the hypocrisy. And do not just close the bag and set it on the counter for later — actually throw it out.
❧
Temperance is the hinge the whole staircase turns on.
Look at what stands above it. Without temperance, patience is impossible, because patience is only self-control stretched out over years. Without patience, godliness is out of reach. Without godliness, brotherly kindness is inconsistent, and charity is so far up the stairs you cannot even see it from where you are standing.
That is why so many believers stall out right here, somewhere between knowing and doing. They know what God says. They can quote it. They will defend it in a Sunday school class. But they will not throw away the bag, and so they never take another step as long as they live.
I do not want that to be us. And I do not say that from any high place, because the bag has been in my hand too.
So the question at the end of this chapter is a simple one.
Are we practicing temperance — or are we still playing with the bag of chips?
Let us swallow the bird.
⬇ Download this booklet as a printable PDF
— Pastor Chuck Trusty, Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church • yes.areyousaved.net
Friday, August 21, 2026
What Does the Bible Say About the Church? (Chapter 5)
This is Chapter 5 of a free six-chapter booklet, What Does the Bible Say? — A Simple Foundation for New Believers. You can start at Chapter 1 or see all six chapters on The Basics page.
📘 CHAPTER FIVE — What Does the Bible Say About the Church?
Not a building, not a vague idea — a called-out people Jesus built to last
⭐ Introduction
Chapter Four opened up worship, and one of the first things worship does is bring us together — "not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together." That raises the next honest question a new believer carries: what exactly is this thing we assemble into? What is the church?
Ask most people and they point at a building with a steeple. Ask others and they wave a hand toward the sky and say, "the church is all believers everywhere." The Bible says something plainer and better than either one. The church is a people — a called-out people — that the Lord Jesus started with His own hands, that meets in a real place, and that He promised would never die. You were not saved to walk alone. You were saved to belong.
Let us ask the Book.
I. The Church Is Not a Building — It Is a People
The word the New Testament uses for "church" never meant a building. In the language it was written in, the word is ekklesia, and it means a called-out assembly — a group of people called out and gathered together. A building has no faith. A building cannot pray, cannot be baptized, cannot love a brother or carry his burden. People do those things.
So when the Bible says "church," do not picture bricks. Picture people — saved people, gathered.
Illustration — The Barn and the Herd. Out on a place, nobody points at the barn and calls it the cattle. The barn is just where the herd comes in out of the weather. The herd is the living thing. Burn the barn to the ground and you still have your cattle — they will gather under a tree. The building where a church meets is the barn. The called-out, blood-bought people are the herd. Do not confuse the two.
Simple truth: The church is people, not a place — a called-out people, saved and gathered.
II. Jesus Built It Himself — and It Will Not Die
Listen to who started the church, and when:
"And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." — Matthew 16:18
Notice three things sitting in that one verse. First, "I will build" — Jesus is the builder. The church is not a club men dreamed up; it is a work of Christ, and He began building it in the days of His own ministry here on earth. Second, "my church" — it belongs to Him. Third, "the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" — it will never be destroyed. From the day the Lord started building it, His church has never gone out of existence, and it never will. Kingdoms have risen and fallen. His church is still here.
And one word about that rock, because it trips people up. When Jesus said this, He and His disciples were up at Caesarea Philippi, standing before a huge wall of stone — a great rock cliff. He had just asked, "whom say ye that I am?" and Peter had answered, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 16:16). So when the Lord says, "thou art Peter" — and the name Peter means a stone, a little stone — "and upon this rock I will build my church," He is not building His church on little Peter. He points past Peter to the great Rock standing there: Himself, and the truth Peter had just confessed. The Bible names the foundation for us plainly: "other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 3:11). Peter is a stone in the wall. The Rock the whole church is built on is Christ.
That is a steadying thing for a new believer to know. You have joined something older and stronger than any government on earth — something with a lifetime guarantee, signed by the Lord Himself.
Simple truth: Jesus built the church, the church is His, and He promised it would never die.
III. The Church Is Somewhere You Can Belong
Here is where a lot of people go wrong today. They say, "the church is just all Christians everywhere — invisible, scattered across the world. I don't need to join a local one." But watch how the Bible actually uses the word. Nearly every time, "church" is a specific gathering you could walk into and count.
"Unto the church of God which is at Corinth..." — 1 Corinthians 1:2
There was a church at Corinth. A church at Ephesus. Churches in Galatia — real assemblies, in real towns, that met on the Lord's day, that a man could visit. When three thousand were saved at Pentecost, the Bible does not say they floated off as invisible members. It says:
"...the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls." — Acts 2:41
Added — counted in, joined to a body you could see. The Lord even tells us, when a brother sins, to take it "unto the church" (Matthew 18:17). You cannot tell anything to an invisible cloud. You tell it to a church that meets, that has members, that can act. The church in the Bible is local and visible — a family you can be baptized into and belong to.
Simple truth: The church is a real, visible family — somewhere you can walk in, be counted, and belong.
IV. What the Church Is For
So what does this called-out people do? The Bible gives the church real work:
- It worships and hears the Word. The church gathers to sing, to pray, and to sit under the preaching of the Book.
- It keeps the two ordinances the Lord left it. Baptism — a believer buried in the water and raised again, a picture of the death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord (Romans 6:4). And the Lord's Supper — the bread and the cup, showing "the Lord's death till he come" (1 Corinthians 11:26). Both are pictures. Neither one saves. (Chapter Four opened these, and The Ordinances page digs deeper.)
- It carries the gospel. The Great Commission — go, teach, baptize — was handed to the church (Matthew 28:19-20).
- It holds up the truth. Paul calls the church "the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Timothy 3:15) — the place that props up and guards the Word in a dark world.
- It cares for its own. The members watch over one another, bear one another's burdens, and gently set one another straight.
Illustration — The Stone in the Field and the Stone in the Wall. A stone lying alone in a field holds nothing up. The rain runs over it, and it just sits there. Take that same stone and set it into a wall with others, and now it carries weight — it helps hold a roof over people's heads. A Christian on his own is a stone in the field. Set into a church, fitted with others, he becomes part of something that shelters souls. The Lord said, "I will build" — and He builds with living stones, one fitted to the next.
Simple truth: The church worships, keeps the ordinances, carries the gospel, guards the truth, and cares for its own — real work, given by the Lord.
V. The Church Has Two Offices — Pastors and Deacons
The Lord did not leave His church without order. He gave it two offices, and only two.
The first is the pastor — the Bible also calls him the bishop and the elder; they are three words for the one office. His work is to feed and to lead the flock: to preach the Word, watch over souls, and go before the people the way a shepherd goes before the sheep. Paul lays out what such a man must be:
"This is a true saying, If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work. A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife... apt to teach." — 1 Timothy 3:1-2
The second is the deacon — a servant-office; the word itself means servant. When the first church grew and some of its people were being overlooked, men were set apart to serve the tables and carry the practical load, so the preachers could give themselves to the Word and to prayer (Acts 6:1-4). His qualifications are written down right beside the pastor's (1 Timothy 3:8-13). A deacon is not a little pastor. He is a servant who bears the load so the church runs in order and in love.
Simple truth: The Lord gave His church two offices — pastors to feed and lead, deacons to serve.
⭐ Let the Bible Explain the Bible — "Doesn't That Put Women Down?"
Read those qualifications again and you will notice something. The pastor is "the husband of one wife" (1 Timothy 3:2) — the office is filled by a man. And Paul says it plainly: "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man" (1 Timothy 2:12). The pastor's chair is for a qualified man.
Now the honest question a kind heart asks: does that put women down? Let the Book answer — a clear verse over a hard feeling.
First, worth. In the matter of salvation there is no higher and no lower: "There is neither... male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). A woman is saved exactly as a man is — by grace — and kept exactly as securely. And when the Bible paints a godly woman, it does not paint her small: "Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies" (Proverbs 31:10). Far above rubies — that is God's own valuation of her.
Second, order. What the Book gives is not a ladder of worth; it is an order of places. We all have a God-ordained place. A private and his captain are equal men, and the one still salutes the other — not because he is worth less, but because an army with no order is only a mob. A home, a church, an army: God sets each in order, and the order is a kindness, not an insult.
Third — and here is the honor most people walk right past — there is something a woman can do that no man on earth ever has or ever will. A woman brings life into the world. No man has ever carried a child or nursed one. And God reached for that very gift at the most important moment in all of history: when He sent His own Son into the world, He sent Him "made of a woman" (Galatians 4:4). No man carried the Christ. A woman did. Sit with that a moment. The office of pastor is a man's to fill — but the cradle of the Saviour was a woman's, and no man will ever take that place from her. Every one of us was carried and fed by a woman; not one of us by a man. The first hand that ever fed you was a mother's.
And never think a woman's teaching counts for little. A mother and a grandmother planted the faith in young Timothy long before he ever preached a word (2 Timothy 1:5), and the Book tells the older women to teach the younger (Titus 2:3-5). The limit is one office of rule over the church — not a woman's voice, and never her worth.
Simple truth: The pastor's office is a qualified man's to fill; but a woman's price is far above rubies, and her place holds an honor no man can share — she brings life into the world, and through a woman God brought the Saviour Himself.
✨ A Word Worth Knowing — "Church"
The word behind church is ekklesia — built from two little words meaning "called" and "out." A called-out people. Called out of what? Out of the world, out of the crowd, out of walking alone — called out and gathered to the Lord and to one another. Every time you read "church" in your New Testament, hear that underneath it: not a building, not a headquarters — a called-out people. And you, if you are saved, are one of the called.
✍️ Author's Note
More than once a sincere person has told me, "I love the Lord — but I don't need to join a church. I can follow Jesus on my own." I understand the heart behind it. Sometimes real hurt hides in that sentence, and sometimes it is honest weariness with people. But let me ask it gently: on your own, where will you be baptized? Where will you sit at the Lord's table? Who will preach to you when your own heart is lying to you — and who will you carry when their load is too heavy to lift alone? The Lord did not hand His commission and His ordinances to lone rangers. He gave them to a body. To say "just me and Jesus" is, without meaning to, to turn down gifts He meant to give us through His people. We were not made to walk alone, and He knew it.
⭐ Let the Bible Explain the Bible — "The Church Is Just All Believers Everywhere"
This is the honest sticking point, so let the Book settle it — a clear verse over a vague idea. Some say the church is only the invisible total of all Christians, so joining a local one does not much matter. But look at what the Bible actually asks the church to do, and ask whether an invisible cloud could do any of it:
- It meets — "not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together" (Hebrews 10:25). You cannot assemble something invisible.
- It adds members you can count — "there were added unto them about three thousand souls" (Acts 2:41).
- It can be told a thing, and can act — "tell it unto the church" (Matthew 18:17).
- It has places — the church "at Corinth," the churches "of Galatia."
- It has officers — pastors and deacons to lead and to serve (1 Timothy 3).
None of that fits a vague, invisible everybody. All of it fits a real, local, visible assembly — exactly the kind of church the Lord started and told us not to forsake. We do not have to argue the point. We only have to read His words and let them draw the picture.
🕊️ Before You Leave This Chapter
So here is the plain application, and we put it to ourselves first. If the Lord saved us, He saved us into a family — and a family is meant to be together. Find a true church, one that holds to the Book. Follow the Lord in baptism. Take your place among the people. Be there — not to earn anything, but because that is where the saved belong, and because the brother on the next pew needs us as much as we need him. We do not gather to become Christians. We gather because we already are.
⭐ Chapter Summary
The church is not a building, and it is not a vague idea floating in the sky. It is a called-out people — ekklesia — that the Lord Jesus built with His own hands during His time on earth, that meets in real places, and that He promised the gates of hell would never overcome. It worships, keeps His two ordinances, carries His gospel, guards His truth, and cares for its own. It does not save anyone — Christ alone does that — but it is where the saved belong. You were not redeemed to lie alone in a field. You were saved to be set, like a living stone, into something the Lord is building to last forever.
Next chapter: What does the Bible say about Christian living?