Great Grace

Great Grace

Acts 4:32-37

Good morning.

In the C.S. Lewis book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Mr. Beaver said, “Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion."

"Ooh," said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man.

Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion"..."

Safe?" said Mr. Beaver, "Who said anything about safe?

'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.”

We serve a Great God, who loves us, and gave Himself for us.

Because we belong to Him, He offers us Great power and grace if we surrender to Him and allow Him to live in and through us.

Please open your Bibles to Acts 4 as we continue that study.

As we have studied Acts 3 and 4, we have learned about many Great things that happened on a day in the life of Peter and John.

According to the Greek Lexicon, the word Great is the Greek word “megas” (English for Mega), meaning big, exceedingly great, large, high, loud, mighty, or strong.

It all started with Peter and John heading to the Temple during the hour of prayer and they happened upon a lame man who was begging for money at the gate, who had a Great ailment.

Peter, instead of a handout, offered the lame man an introduction to our Great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, and the man received healing from his life-long ailment.

The man followed Peter and John to Solomon’s porch and the crowd was greatly amazed by his healing, so Peter preached to them how the Great healing was performed by Jesus.

Peter also preached to the crowd how they could obtain a Great salvation in the name of Jesus as he reminded them about the Great plan of God, throughout Israel’s history.

Peter and John were arrested and gave a Great defense in front of the religious leaders.

The religious leaders then warned Peter and John with Great threats, not to preach Jesus anymore, and then released them.

After being released, the Disciples got together and prayed, the place where they prayed was shaken, and they were filled with the Holy Spirit to speak the Word of God with Great boldness.

Today, we will see how the move of God’s Spirit created unity, peace, supply, and how Great grace was given to the believers.

I. A great number of believers had sharing hearts.

Read Acts 4:32

Now the multitude of those who believed.

After all the great things that happened, many receive Christ, as Multitude means a great number. Who are all of these people?

In Acts 2:41 we learned how 3,000 people came to Christ after Peter’s first sermon and then in Acts 4:4, 5,000 more came to Christ when Peter preached about the healing of the lame man.

Guzik said in Acts 4:21, 2,000 more came to Christ, so along with the 120 disciples in the upper room waiting for Pentecost, there were now thousands of members of the early church.

And all those who believed were of one heart and one soul.

Being of one heart and one soul tells us these early believers were interested in the same things, believed the same things, and were completely unified as if they were one body in Christ.

These Christians were knit together, not only with their beliefs, but they were actually of one heart and one soul.

This unity in the body of Christ can only happen by the Holy Spirit and notice the effect it had on these early Christians; they began believing people were more important than possessions.

Notice, “Neither did anyone say that any of the things he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common.”

This is very similar to what happened when the Holy Spirit fell on the original 120 at Pentecost. Acts 2:44 Now all who believed were together and had all things in common. NKJV

We learned several weeks ago that most of these early followers were hated by their families and communities, so they were excommunicated by their synagogues for accepting Christ.

The early followers were also hated by the Romans for refusing to worship the emperor as a god so, for these early followers, Christianity was not a religion or even a duty…

The early followers believed in Jesus with all of their being, and they were hungry for more of the LORD.

The early followers didn’t entangle themselves with things of this world, so it was easy for most of them to sell off their worldly possessions to help other followers.

Today, we are fortunate enough not to be under that same obligation as the early church was. But we again are pendulum people and so the church has swung to the other extreme.