Being an Acts Church: Part One
A sermon based on Acts 2:42-47 preached at Queen Street Baptist Church. You can listen to the audio here.
Introduction
When my mother was getting near to the end of her life, one of her thoughts was about the things that were going to be passed on to me. To be honest, she didn’t care about most of the things, as it was just stuff. But her most precious belongings were what she called the memory books. These are photo albums that go back to when she was young, but include even more about my time growing up. There are pictures of me with my cousins, pictures of me as a student at the old Glen Merritt school, pictures of me in cubs and scouts and so much more. Now that both my father and mother are gone, those books are very precious to me. I can look back at them and remember all of the ways that my parents showed me love and helped to prepare me to be a good person.
We continue this legacy today, although in a different form. We have not put together a physical album in a long time, but we have many pictures of our family that we keep on our computers or online. I enjoy looking at them, watching the development of my children and celebrating the story of our family.
Looking to the past can be and should be more than just nostalgia. We should be able to look to the past and learn from it. Not to duplicate it, at least not exactly, as contexts change. But looking at these snapshots of the past can help us to remember what is important and where we should be spending our time.
The same is true when it comes to the church. We want to be a church that is relevant for today and is looking to the future. But in order to do that, we cannot ignore the past. We need to look at what was important.
Now obviously we don’t have actual photographs of the early church in action. But we do have little snapshots of the church and their activity in Acts. In a way, all of Acts is a memory book of the early church, but even within the book, Luke provides us with little pictures of what the church was like and what it was doing. It is one of those snapshots that we are looking at today. Again, this is not just for the longing of the good old days, but as a way to remember what is important and what we should be doing. We will be dividing this into two parts.
Apostles’ Teaching
This is our first snapshot, with Peter just having preached his Pentecost sermon and three thousand people being added to the church. But once all the excitement died down, it was time to start being the church.
The first thing about their new role as the church that we are told is that they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching. What was the apostles’ teachings? They were the traditions passed down by the apostles about what Jesus said and did. This is what would become our New Testament, but at the time existed only as oral tradition.
Why would this be so important that Luke would say they were devoted to it? Think about this huge influx of people into the church, the majority of which knew nothing about Jesus other than that he had been recently executed. The information that Peter passed on in his sermon was enough to convince them to follow Jesus, but it was not enough to teach them how to live as a follower of Jesus.
These early believers would have been all Jews. The study of Scripture has always been a part of their traditions. Even though much of their religion was based on the sacrifice of animals in the temple, they still emphasized study of the Scriptures. That is why, almost forty years after these events, when the Jerusalem temple was destroyed, that Judaism could survive as a book-centred rather than a temple-centred faith. This is a part of the Jewish legacy that we have as Christians.
What would happen if our government shout down all the church buildings and banned anyone from taking on the role of a professional pastor or preacher? All we could do would be to meet privately in homes. Are we devoted enough to the apostles’ teachings that we would be able to feed ourselves spiritually through our own study of the Scriptures? I love preparing and preaching sermons, but I do not want you to rely only on me when it comes to the study of the Bible.
I would like to share a story that I have heard from Ravi Zacharias.
I was ministering in Vietnam in 1971, and one of my interpreters was Hien Pham, an energetic young Christian. He had worked as a translator with the American forces, and was of immense help both to them and to missionaries such as myself. Hien and I traveled the length of the country and became very close friends before I returned home. We did not know if our paths would ever cross again. Seventeen years later, I received a telephone call. “Brother Ravi?” the man asked. Immediately I recognized Hien’s voice, and he soon told me his story.
Shortly after Vietnam fell, Hien was imprisoned on accusations of helping the Americans. His jailers tried to indoctrinate him against democratic ideals and the Christian faith. He was restricted to communist propaganda in French or Vietnamese, and the daily deluge of Marx and Engels began to take its toll. “Maybe,” he thought, “I have been lied to. Maybe God does not exist. Maybe the West has deceived me.” So Hien determined that when he awakened the next day, he would not pray anymore or think of his faith.
The next morning, he was assigned the dreaded chore of cleaning the prison latrines. As he cleaned out a tin can overflowing with toilet paper, his eye caught what seemed to be English printed on one piece of paper. He hurriedly grabbed it, washed it, and after his roommates had retired that night, he retrieved the paper and read the words, “Romans, Chapter 8.” Trembling, he began to read, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him….for I am convinced that nothing shall be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Hien wept. He knew His Bible, and knew that there was not a more relevant passage for one on the verge of surrender. He cried out to God, asking forgiveness, for this was to have been the first day that he would not pray. Evidently God had other plans. What his tormentors were using for refuse—the Scriptures—could not be more treasured to Hien.
This man had discovered the value of Scripture and after this find, he volunteered to continue to wash the latrines, just so he could get his hands on more Scripture.
I need to make it clear that the purpose of being devoted to the apostles’ teaching or reading the Bible, is not just to gather knowledge, or even to find hope in the Bible. The foundation of Christianity is not the Bible, it is Jesus. It is through the reading of the Scripture that we find Jesus and hear his voice. In my conversion experience, reading the New Testament played a huge role. Even though my reason for reading the New Testament was to try and prove some people wrong, Jesus bypassed my bad motives and revealed himself to me.
My intention as your pastor is to provide as many opportunities for you to study and learn about the Bible as I can. But I can’t make you to devoted to it. I can’t make you want to study the Bible or to be excited about how the Bible intersects with our everyday life. That is something that only you can bring about.
Fellowship
The second point that Luke brings up is the role of fellowship. But what is fellowship? Is fellowship sitting beside each other on a pew in church? Is it about saying hello if you see another person from the church in the grocery store?
The concept of community and fellowship often played a bigger role in the ancient world than it does in the modern world. When I started attending church again after university, I heard a lot of people talk about conversion as having a personal relationship with Jesus. There is truth to that but the early Christians would probably prefer the phrase joining the family of God. Being a Christian is not just about having a connection with Jesus, it is also about having a connection with every other follower of Jesus. There is a reason why Jesus taught to pray our Father who art in heaven and not my father who art in heaven.
I sometimes hear people ask if it is okay to be a Christian and not attend church. If they are asking, can you have your sins forgiven and have the promise of eternal life, yes you can have that without attending church. There are sometimes circumstances, health or otherwise, that prevent us from going to a church building on a Sunday morning, but we all still need to have Christian fellowship and community.
But fellowship is so much more than just showing up. It is about being connected. It is about caring about what is happening in another person’s life. It is about trying to encourage one another. It is about celebrating with one another and mourning with one another. It means when we ask someone, “How are you?” that we are prepared to listen to a real answer.
Luke tells us that the fellowship of the early church included selling your possessions so that others would have what they needed. We do not need to do that exactly, but we should not lose the principle. What is it that we could sacrifice for the sake of our Christian fellowship? True fellowship usually costs something, whether that is time, comfort, or something else.
Imagine if every Sunday morning we asked ourselves, what I could do today to deepen our fellowship?
Conclusion
We do not live in Jerusalem. We do not live in the first century. There has much that has happened and developed within the Christian church over the past two thousand years. But there are some things that have not changed.
We still need Jesus. We get Jesus through the study of the teachings of the apostles, of the New Testament, and even of the Old Testament. We need more than just a casual glance or even paying attention during the weekly sermon. We need to devote ourselves to the Scriptures, not because we worship a book, but because we worship the Jesus found in the book.
We still need fellowship. We should not think of our Sunday morning gatherings as a collection of individuals, but rather of a getting together of family. We are all sons and daughters of God. We are connected to each other through Jesus. We need to realize that and act on it. True fellowship does not happen by accident. We need to work at it and even be willing to sacrifice for it.
That is part of what it means to be an Acts church.
