Friends Saving Friends

Last week I pointed out the fact that after Jesus had raised from the dead

• The first thing that He did when He saw His disciples

• Was to command them to go and make more disciples.

• Part of our faith

• Part of being a Christian is that we obey Christ’s commands.

• And the most important command that we’ve been given is that we go make disciples. (This is our works)

• Faith and Works working together.

• And Today we are going to at look how the Apostles did this.

The Ministry of the Apostles (Acts 5:12–16)

• What we see in today’s verses is that a Church is being Born

• A Spirit-filled church is not only unified,

• But it’s also magnified, and multiplied.

• There is no doubt in my mind that Satan wants to divide the church,

• He wants to disgrace the church, and decrease the church;

• And he gonna do it, if we let him.

• But the church described in today’s text triumphed over the attacks of Satan!

This is what has been happing in Acts so far

• Spirit comes to the Apostles at Pentacost

• They Ran out in the streets

• And they start speaking to a variety of people in their own language. –

• And since the people couldn’t understand why this has happening

• The Apostles are Accused of being drunk.

• Hearing this Peter starts preaching

• And we see Peter doing through his preaching is

• Witnessing- He was a witness to the risen Christ – It was his Testimony

• And we see him Teaching- In Solomon’s Colonnade

• This was an open area on the east side of the Temple.

• Witnessing + Teaching = The addition of New Believers

In spite of the reluctance of the unsaved to join this group of believers,

• More and more men and women believed in the Lord and were added to their number.

• Rapid numerical growth was a phenomenon of the early church

Read

Ac 5:12 Meanwhile, the apostles were performing many miraculous signs and wonders among the people. And the believers were meeting regularly at the Temple in the area known as Solomon’s Colonnade.

Ac 5:13 No one else dared to join them, though everyone had high regard for them.

Ac 5:14 And more and more people believed and were brought to the Lord—crowds of both men and women.

Ac 5:15 As a result of the apostles’ work, sick people were brought out into the streets on beds and mats so that Peter’s shadow might fall across some of them as he went by.

Ac 5:16 Crowds came in from the villages around Jerusalem, bringing their sick and those possessed by evil spirits, and they were all healed.

We see a lot of things happening in these verses

• We see that the believers are meeting together

• This Sounds like going to church.

• They were Being taught, They were Growing in their faith.

• In these early days the apostles perform many miracles,

• And huge crowds would fill the city to hear them preach

• They would come to see the healings

But The verse that I want us to look at today is

Ac 5:14 more and more men and women believed in the Lord and were added to their number.

• Multitudes of believers were added to the Lord,

• And for the first time, Luke Does something different,

• He mentions the salvation of women.

• Both in his Gospel and in Acts, Luke has a great deal to say about women

• And their relationship to Christ and the church.

• There are at least a dozen references in Acts to women,

• As Luke shows the key role women played in the apostolic church.

This is saying alot when you consider how women were viewed

In those days you had a choice as a woman

1) Be a wife, stay home run the house, and raise the kids

2) Be a prostitute

3) Or be a concubine = MISTRESS

• But here Luke says that you to can be saved.

• Gal 3:28 There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female. For you are all Christians—you are one in Christ Jesus.

God gave the Apostles power to perform great miracles.

• While it’s true that some of the ordinary members exercised miraculous powers (Acts 6:8),

• It was primarily the Apostles who did the miracles.

• These “signs and wonders” were God’s way of endorsing their ministry (Rom. 15:18–19; 2 Cor. 12:12; Heb. 2:4).

And looking back we can see that God always operated like this

• Whenever a new age started -- it has followed by miracles