Sermon Cloud

TEXT

Acts 2:40-47: “And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, ‘Save yourselves from this crooked generation.’ 41 So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. 42 And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. 43 And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. 44 And all who believed were together and had all things in common. 45 And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. 46 And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.”

INTRODUCTION

The last few weeks we have embarked on a journey touring through the great book of Acts.  In doing so, I have used a word in every sermon that up to this point I have not officially defined.  Some of you may have simply assumed that I didn’t hit spell check on my computer the first time I used it until you saw the word again in each message.

I guess in some ways I have given hints to the idea behind the word so that it isn’t that perplexing for you.  But for the sake of those that were not here during the message on Galatians, I thought I’d offer a brief explanation.

The reason I’ve chosen this word to describe our goal is simple.  I’m very concerned that when we think of being transformed by the Gospel, we typically think of this transformation as beginning and ending with our individual lives.  We certainly are seeking deep, deep transformation at the core of who we are.  It’s good that we have this desire, to have our hearts so gripped by God’s grace that we are experiencing true Gospel transformation.  But, the Gospel becomes obscured when we see it only in terms of our individualistic benefits.  If we see the Gospel as that which gives us a get-out-of-hell-free card, we are missing the point of what God is doing in saving a people for Himself.  We end up with a static Gospel which goes no further than our individual lives.  In other words, we end up with personal salvation that has no desire to see salvation come to the ends of the earth. 

My first conviction is this:

You can have transformation which ends in a cul-de-sac. 

This means that we do not see the Gospel beyond ourselves.  We think the Gospel is about me rather than God.  We think the Gospel ends with me rather than through me to the world.  It is an error to assume we are saved in isolation without a care to exist for mission.   

So, Gospel transformation is incredibly important, but true transformation isn’t self-oriented and static, but dynamic and moving.

We also picked Acts as the next book to study after Galatians because we wanted to show what the Spirit and the Gospel does after it transforms someone by grace through faith. 

This brings me to my next conviction:

You can have mission without a transformed heart by grace.

It is possible to be incredibly excited about justice for the oppressed, mercy for those who have been marginalized, and healing for those who are suffering, without having a heart transformed by the Gospel.  I gave the example of Julius the Apostate, the Roman Emperor who was so infuriated by the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire.  He recognized that the primary spread of Christians’ influence came from their generosity and love for those who were radically different than they were.  He then attempted to create a welfare system which would rival Christian charity, but the purpose was not out of love and care for Roman citizens, it was out of hate and spite of Christians.  He was willing to care for the poor but with a heart that was utterly hardened and hateful towards the Gospel and Christ. 

As we will see in this passage, the worship of God and praise for Him as we come into contact with Him by grace act as the fuel for our mission to this world.  Without a transformed heart we will not truly be missionaries for God’s purposes for this world but our own. 

This is why I’ve chosen the word “transformissionary” because it best describes you and me as those transformed who see this transformation as the fuel and call to live out our transformation primarily in the context of a missional life. 

If the title of the true story of the Bible is “God and His Glory” with the subtitle “Getting His glory through the redemption of all things,” we then have to read it with that in mind.  God is on mission to this world through those He has already reached by grace. 

Now, with that said, we have looked at this incredible event at Pentecost where the promised Spirit invades the Church to empower and equip the Church as transformissionaries to this world. 

After Pentecost, Peter delivers the Gospel by preaching of Christ’s life, His death, His resurrection, His exaltation as He sits at the right hand of God as Lord of all creation and King of His people.  Peter preaches the offer of salvation for all who would lay down their agenda (repent) and believe in Jesus Christ.  Two gifts are promised to those who trust in Christ by faith: the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Spirit.

Peter preaches this message to a large group and the church grows in one message from 120 to 3,120.  In the days following, Peter preaches again and another 2,000 come to faith in Christ.  This explosive power didn’t stop there.  For the next 250 years, the Gospel swept the most powerful empire in the world and turned it upside down without war, without political power, without economic strength or social status. 

Acts is the historical document the shows us what happened during the early formation of the church so that we might look back and ask ourselves if we carry the same marks as the early Church. 

One of the questions we’ve been asking as we look at this explosion is why?  Why did the church have such a different impact in their day?  We’ve noted that the reason was that the Spirit came in great power to a waiting people who realized that the world was never going to be the same.  They expected more of the Spirit than we do.  They experienced more of the power of the Gospel than we are.  And it isn’t because they were closer to the events of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.  This would assume that with time the Spirit loses energy and gets tired.  It’s because their view of the world and what these events meant were seen as comprehensive in scope and not compartmentalized into a nice neat box to open when they felt a spiritual urge. 

For them, everything had changed and they no longer saw their lives for themselves, but for God and for this world.  The idea of a comfortable little privatized faith was simply absent from the Church because the view of Pentecost and of Jesus’ Lordship and reign had a cosmic impact.

So, since this is such a great litmus test for you and me to examine our own lives and church, we are looking for signs of their life to see if those same signs are in ours.

Since we are in verse 40-47, we see the results of these new Christians who were cut to the heart and in that incision were given new life.  

The question we have to ask ourselves when we look at a passage like this is simple but profound, “how do we know the new life is here?”  “How do we know we’ve really been cut to the heart?” 

This passage is filled with signs of transformissionary life through which we could easily preach five weeks as we break them down. I don’t want to do that though; I want to put them all together since they’re meant to be together.  I want us to see them as inseparable.

Last time we were in this passage we looked at the truth and this week we’re looking at the love.  Truth and love go hand in hand in this passage. 

So, what is the sign of deep love?

STUDY

verse 44: “And all who believed were together…”

There is another place in verse 46 that says they attended the Temple together and broke bread in their homes.  But what this passage says is that they “were together.”

Where did they meet together?  Everywhere.

When did they meet together?  Every single day, continuously.

These people who had been cut to the heart met together everyday in the Temple and couldn’t get enough of each other so they went back to their homes to be together.  You couldn’t keep them apart.

These people came together constantly because they were hungry for each other’s company.  This is why the word, “together,” wasn’t so much something they did, it was something they were; they were together.  Not just that they came together, or met together, they were together.  They entered into an entirely different form of existence.  They came together when once they had been apart.  It changed how they saw life and community.  Christ became the center of everything.

Now, over the years you may have been subjected to preachers who guilt you into not coming to church enough especially on Easter and Christmas.  What I find so incredible about the early Church is that they didn’t need to be pressured or manipulated to be together because that’s who they were; they were together, you wouldn’t be able to stop them.  They wanted to and came after one another.

This is a sign of life.  You don’t tell a baby to cry, it does so as a sign of life.  In the same way, we shouldn’t have to be told that this is important; it should be a sign of life.  If a baby is alive, it cries and if people have been cut to the heart and have new life they’ll have to come together.  They don’t come together out of a duty or command, even though it is a duty and is a command.  They have no other choice because they have life and this is a sign. 

Now, if you’re sufficiently convicted that you don’t have this sign, it’s good to admit it and recognize that it’s not there.  If it is not there at all and never has been, you may not be a Christian.  If it was there at one point in a small measure or is waning even now, thank God for His grace because He’s bringing this to you this morning for you to see, which should cause you to seek after His grace and forgiveness.  Either way, we have to deal truthfully with ourselves. 

Let’s probe a bit deeper in this text as we seek to understand this sign of transformissionary life.  Let’s ask three questions of this passage:

      1-Who came together?

      2-What did they do when they came together?

      3-Why did they really come together? 

1-Who came together?

Who were these people that could not get enough of each other? They were in each other’s home every night; they were breaking bread together and rejoicing with glad and generous hearts. 

Whenever they got together there was great awe upon them (v. 43).  They celebrated and basked in God’s presence.  There was awe and intimacy. 

Who were they?  We have to go back a little further in this chapter to see who it was.  At Pentecost we see that there were “devout men from every nation” (v. 5) represented.  Acts 2:9-11: “Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,  10  Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome,  11  both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians…”

People were in Jerusalem from all over the world.  There was an incredible diversity gathered at Pentecost.  This flies in the face of modern thought which tells us that religion is a matter of temperament and geographic upbringing and culture.  In other words, people believe the Christian story because they grew up in a Christian society. 

This simply does not fit when we look at Acts.  Acts is the story of the Holy Spirit breaking into new cities and towns that had not previously heard the Gospel.  There were hundreds of religions and philosophies all vying for ascendancy. 

There were various classes, various cultures, and various temperaments gathered at Pentecost.  These people seemingly had nothing in common.  They didn’t have a common culture, they didn’t have a common history, they didn’t have a common class, and they didn’t have a common temperament.  And yet, these are the people who immediately began to meet in each other’s homes every night.  They were together!  How can this be explained?

We live in a country that is divided into different types and temperaments of people:  people from the South who people from the North make fun of because of their southern drawl and slow pace, people from the Midwest who make fun of people from California because of their fascination with plastic surgery, people from California who make fun of people from the North East because they sound like they’re straight out of Godfather.  Different values, different upbringing and culture, different climates, and a different dialect—our country is incredibly divided by all of these various factors and yet it is nothing compared to what we see here at Pentecost and yet you couldn’t keep them out of each other’s homes. 

This is a historical fact.  A couple of weeks ago I mentioned Kenneth Scott Latourette, a historian from Yale who made some interesting observations about Christianity in the first three centuries.  One thing he said was this:

Christianity’s success is to be found in its absolute inclusiveness.  More than any other of its competitor religions it attracted all races and classes.  The Pagan deities, for example, were often tied and confined to certain regions and nations.  Even in the days of its most active proselytizing activities Judaism never overcame its racial boundaries because its converts had to become culturally Jewish.  Christianity, however, gloried in its appeal to Jew, Gentile, African, and Barbarian.  The philosophers to Greece and Rome, on the other hand, appealed to the educated only and could never win the masses.  It was one of the charges against Christianity that it drew the lowly and uneducated multitude that its essential teaching was so simple that anybody could understand.  Yet Christianity also developed a philosophy that converted some of the greatest minds in the society.  Christianity too was for both sexes and women were active in its work while two if its main competitor religions were almost exclusively for men.   Finally, the mystery religions were mainly for the rich and initiation was very expensive.  There was no other religion that took in all groups and all strata of society.  The one tenable explanation of Christianity’s inclusiveness was probably its teaching of the uniqueness of Jesus Christ.  For if Jesus was not a teacher showing the way of salvation, but the Son of God who accomplished salvation, then members of both sexes and all races, the learned and unlearned, the high and the low, the able and the non-able, might all be able to share in the salvation made possible in Christ. 

This is a fact.  This happened.  The thing we most want in our society actually happened.  There is nothing else like it that does this. 

Martin Lloyd-Jones, the doctor in England who became a preacher, was from an educated and wealthy class in the early 1900’s of London, which was far more stratified then than any of our cities today, and he realized after becoming a Christian that he would rather spend his time with and speaking of Christ with an old fisherwoman than in the company of his elite friends who didn’t know Him. 

Think of the Apostle Paul who was a man of incredible intellect and yet he wrote with great affection, tears, and love to slaves and lower class Pagans.  Paul said he longed to be with them.  Paul was an intellectual giant who longed to share his life with the unlearned and uncouth of his time.

This doesn’t mean that a man like Paul, who knew the Greek poets and philosophers didn’t enjoy a good conversation every now and then with someone who was a deep thinker.  But Paul knew that it wasn’t fellowship.  He knew the difference between real oneness and sharing vs. exciting conversation.  Do you? 

Do you have fellowship with brothers and sisters now with whom you would never have had friendship before meeting Christ?  Not just acquaintances on Sunday or at some event, but real, deep, and meaningful relationships with different types of people.  Do you have a group of people like this with whom the Gospel has brought you into close connection, who before you would have despised?  People with different temperaments, people from different sub-cultural groups, people who like country music when you like Snow Patrol, yes even country music!  That’s how you know the Gospel has gone deep into your heart you now can have fellowship with Garth Brooks fans!  That’s deep, deep grace.  How about people from different races?  Asian, black, white, or Hispanic.  How about different types of workers like blue collar laborers or white collar executives?  Do you have people in your life who astonish you because you love them even though they are so different?

2-What did they do when they came together?

They always did these things whenever they came together: 

1-They studied the Apostles’ teaching.  We looked at this two weeks ago.  verse 42: “And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching…” They wanted to learn what cut them and who cut them and so they got together to dive deep into God’s word together. 

2-They loved each other.  V. 42: “They devoted themselves to the…fellowship.”

They had to devote themselves to the fellowship.  Even though they had new life, they had to work it out with one another.  They devoted themselves to it.  You have fellowship but you have to work in, work on, and work out our fellowship with one another.

When you are in relationship with someone who has been cut by the Gospel you can bear each other’s burdens, confess sins, welcome and encourage one another in the faith because you have been humbled before one another. 

3-They broke bread and prayed.  V.42b: “to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”  Scholars all mention the significance of the article here.  It doesn’t just say they broke bread and prayed, rather it says THE breaking of bread and THE prayers.  This is the Lord’s Supper.  This was the way they spoke of it. 

They were gathered in worship of the broken and risen Lord. 

They were always studying the Word of God, loving each other in fellowship, and worshipping God together each and every day.  They did this in the Temple courts and they did this in the homes.  No matter where they gathered they worshipped together as a result of the new life!

The results were astounding.  It was both deed and word.  When you look at v. 45 one of the results was deed ministry (sold what they had and shared together in radical generosity).  Down in v. 47 was word ministry (praising God and having favor with all people).

Deed ministry means they were so generous with there goods there was no poor Christian among them.  They shared what they had in such a radical and selfless way that it astounded the people in their culture.  They cared deeply for one another in deeds.  We know from history that this was not only reserved for Christians but also for non-Christians and was a powerful witness to the world.

The more they learned, loved and worshipped it made them generous.  This was so startling that every day the church grew.  V. 47: “And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.”

God added to them every day.  Why?  They had favor with all the people.  This wasn’t built around evangelistic programs.  They had such attractive lives and such an attractive community that they found people becoming converted because it was such an incredible witness of what God had done.  This is what was promised to them when the Holy Spirit came.  They were told they WOULD be a witness, and they were.

The learning, the loving, and the worship created deed ministry and word ministry and they all were happening together.  If you took one out, the witness would have been diminished.  They were all necessary and still are all necessary.  These are signs of life.  Do you have this? 

Do you have both large and small group experiences?  Are you deeply committed to learning, to loving one another in fellowship, and to continuous worship of God with your brothers and sisters?  Is this spilling out in both word and deed ministry?  These are the questions we must ask to check our pulse to see if we have the same signs of life as the early church.

3-Why did they come together?

There was a power and engine driving this kind of life.  It’s really important that we look at this. 

verses 46-47a: “And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God”

This is what they were doing when they were studying the Apostles’ doctrine, loving each other in devoted fellowship, worshipping, evangelizing, and sharing with one another.  They were praising God!

Praising God is the fuel for everything.

C.S. Lewis makes this incredible quote about aesthetics:

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise does not merely express, but completes the enjoyment.  It is its appointed consummation.  It is not simply to compliment that lovers keep on telling each other how beautiful they are.  The delight itself is incomplete until it’s expressed. 

This is so very true of our praise for God.  When we find a piece of music we love, a movie we love, a piece of art we love, even an incredible athletic achievement, we have to tell others.  Our joy has to bust out in telling someone else.  When we see something beautiful, there is something about the beautiful thing itself that makes you want to grab someone and pull them in to look or listen!  Beautiful objects demand praise.  The joy you get from a beautiful object has to get out.  This is praise.  You have to do it.  Your joy isn’t complete until it utters itself.  You’re not simply expressing your joy; you’re completing your joy when you tell someone.

If you don’t understand this, you won’t understand why we get together and why we seek after others to complete our joy.  The more beautiful the object, the more joy you have in it which has to be told to others in praise.  The higher the object, the more your appreciation of it bursts out in praise. 

This is why I struggle every week to preach to you.  I am struggling to find the right words to tell you about someone that is supremely beautiful.  I try to find the right words to express it and I search and search and wrestle with trying to get it out. 

We shouldn’t be getting together simply because we like to get together because we have some spiritual stuff in common, but because we have to join together with others who see this same beauty and we can express it together and complete our joy. 

All things must flow from the praise of God.  Learning, loving, and worship which result in great deeds and words of the Gospel must be fueled and driven by our praise of God.