A few weeks ago we began looking at the book of Acts, when the Christian church first began, and the power of God’s Spirit was with the people. I want to challenge all of you to read the book of Acts during the summer. It’s 28 chapters long, if you read one chapter a day, you could have it done in less than a month. Normally I would give you a month, but I realize it’s the summer so I’m giving you a break, I’ll give you the whole summer. Why the book of Acts? Because over time we begin acting as though God only works today in the ways we personally have experienced God in our past and therefore we limit what God wants to do through us right now. Yes, we believe in our heads that God does wonderful things because we’ve read it in the Bible, or we’ve heard of His Spirit working in other people’s lives and places around the world, but because we haven’t experienced it, we don’t really believe in our hearts that it will happen here at our church or with us. If we haven’t experienced a miraculous healing, we don’t expect much of God now even though we pray for it. If we haven’t seen God change or transform people in a long time, we just assume people will continue to trickle in to the church if at all and maybe find faith. If our experience of church in the past is not even close to the love and fellowship the first Christians experienced, we think all churches are this way. Or perhaps we don’t want it to be that way because we are afraid it might require us to change our ways or priorities. Reading the book of Acts will inspire you and challenge you by raising your vision for what could and should be if we allow the Holy Spirit the freedom in our life and the church.
In this morning’s verses we see what happens when people allow the Holy Spirit to work in their life. In the previous verses we are told the Christians were together praying, particularly for boldness and for God’s healing, miraculous work, and the place they were meeting shook, and it says “they were filled with the Holy Spirit”, and they all they spoke the word of God boldly. The Holy Spirit came, people prayed for and received the filling of the Spirit and what happened? Did people get healed? Did people start speaking in tongues?
In our passage this morning there are two marks of people filled with the Spirit; 1) we are of one heart and mind, and 2) we do not consider any possession as our own, rather we give to those in need.
1. Being of One Heart and Mind Together
It seems like it’s the nature of human beings to be self-centered. We like to have things our way, and when they don’t go our way we get upset. We like to have our opinion and share it, and when people disagree with us we like to argue.
This passage is remarkable because you have over five thousand Christians together filled with the Holy Spirit, and not only are there no arguments, bickering, whining and complaining, they are actually getting along with each other, and enjoying each other’s company. Think about it, when was the last time you got your own family ready for church without an argument? Imagine getting all the Christians of Emmet County together for worship, eating together, day after day after day. Sounds great doesn’t it, well maybe for about the first day or two, until people start complaining; why do all the Catholics want to keep sitting, standing, and kneeling all the time, could someone tone the Pentecostals down, they’re so excited they’ve been singing for the last hour straight, would the Baptists quite talking about getting everyone saved, then the others are complaining about us Methodists because we want to start a committee to look into the complaints and report back in a month.
We can joke about our differences, but do you see what I’m saying? Even as Christians we don’t seem to be able to get along with and work together. And yet Jesus’ prayer for us shortly before his death was that we would be one. This is part of Jesus’ prayer:
John 17:20 "My prayer is not for them [disciples] alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.
Jesus’ prayer was that we would be so close to each other, that we would be one, as close as the Father is to the Son. How close is that? He also prayed that we would be in him, which is to say we would be in close relationship with God. The loser we are with God, the closer we are with other Christian believers. It’s impossible to be close to God and out of sync with our brothers and sisters in Christ. However the closer we are with each other, Jesus said it would prove to be a witness to the world because they would see there is something different about our relationship with each other that they would believe Jesus truly is the Son of God because it is impossible to explain the behavior in any other way.
Being of one heart and mind is the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit unites us, and draws us closer together. The Spirit is not divided. He leads us in the same direction. He doesn’t tell one person in a church one thing, and something else to another.
When people are filled with God’s Spirit, God does a work in our heart where our self-centeredness and pride is replaced with love for our brothers and sisters in Christ. Our focus is shifted away from ourselves, and onto God and what his Spirit is leading us to do.
This is not to say Christians will never have conflicts, but that conflicts should drives us to God so his Spirit can give us guidance and clarification if we are willing to listen and submit ourselves to him. The problem is we tend to dig in with our beliefs. Even among these early Christian it didn’t take long before there was a divide between the local (Hebrew) Jewish Christians and the foreign (Greek) Jewish Christians. Then a while later there was a divide among Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians over which of God’s OT commandments must be followed. Yet God’s Spirit guided them through their conflicts to bring unity and peace once again so they could focus on the mission of making disciples of Jesus.
If we continue to be at odds with other Christians, whether they are in our church or another, we will not experience the power of the Holy Spirit. And we will not see people come to know Christ. Think about it, any time you have seen, experienced, or heard of a church divided, how many people come to Christ?
a. Among Churches
Elk River Story (Elk River, MN)
When the power of the Holy Spirit is moving, churches begin to work together to accomplish the mission of making disciples rather than to be distrustful of one another, and fight over turf. Other Christian denominations are not our enemy. To be of one heart and mind doesn’t mean we never disagree. But it does mean we are on the same page, working together. When churches do their own thing and work separately it doesn’t bring honor and glory to Jesus, it hurts God’s witness in the world. People look at Christians and say, “they talk about God’s love but they can’t even get along with each other.”
[New Hope] Churches working together for the youth in the Pellston & Levering communities.
[Epsilon] deciding at our annual planning retreat several of us felt as though we needed to partner with the Country Bible Baptist church to work together to reach our community for Christ through prayer and outreach/evangelism.
When people are of one heart and mind with each other and with God, the Spirit moves and God’s work gets accomplished.
Paul says it best, NLT Ephesians 4:3 Always keep yourselves united in the Holy Spirit, and bind yourselves together with peace.
2. Our Possessions are not our Own
The second demonstration of the power and presence of the Holy Spirit is probably even harder than the first, at least for us Americans. The second half of verse 32 says, “No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.” We live in a society and culture which values itself based on the amount of possessions we have. I think one of our mottos is, “I possess therefore I am.” In our current US culture we seem to take pride in what we own, and how much, and we do have a lot of stuff. Sometimes I think we’re still like two year olds who declare “mine,” with everything they own. Like my two year old and four year old nieces playing together, ‘share’ doesn’t seem to be a common word in their vocabulary.
It’s not just about our willingness to share, it’s about the attitude we have of our possessions. Are they ours or not? Our gut reaction is to think, “of course they are mine, I bought them, I paid for it with my own money, with money I earned working, perhaps I even saved for it.” However the Bible says everything is God’s, we own nothing. David wrote in Psalm 24:1, “The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it.” How can that be? Let’s use this example, let’s say there’s this pharmaceutical company, and they have a really smart scientist who invents the cure for cancer while working at the company. He realizes this could make him a fortune so he goes and selling the cure. So what would happen? He would get his pants sued off by the company, why? Because even though it was his brains and ability which created the cure, he did it on company time with company equipment. The company owns the patent to the cure.
The truth is God owns it all and he has let us borrow his stuff to use it for a while. God created it all the raw materials on earth, and he created us the way he wanted us. So what God desires is for us to use what he has given us the way he wants it to be used. The Biblical word for this is stewardship. We are stewards or managers of God’s stuff. It’s a radical reshifting of how we think about our possessions, that they aren’t ours at all, but God’s, and quite honestly it’s a hard shift for us Americans to make, and when we use the resources we’ve been given the way we desire it inhibits the power of the Spirit.
Instead the Holy Spirit works to realign our thinking about our possessions in two ways: 1) Help us realize we have become slaves to our stuff. Do we own our possessions, or do they own us? 2) Helps us realize we have been blessed so that we might share with those in need, not to keep it all to ourselves. If you want to check how much you are effected by your possessions, how much they have a hold on us, think of the favorite thing you own, a boat, a vehicle, a computer, a house, a gun, a computer, a television, an outfit, whatever. Imagine God were to ask you right now to sell that item so you could take the money and help another Christian meet her needs; perhaps with food to eat, place to sleep. How hard would it be for you to let go? Perhaps it may seem impossible. That is a certain indication we are slaves to our possessions. They own us.
That was exactly what was happening among these Christians. They were so filled with the Holy Spirit that they didn’t care about their possessions. Some of them sold houses and property and gave the money to the Apostles so it they could give it to the needy Christians.
Jesus came to set us free, including freedom from the things which own us.
If you can honestly say, “I could sell anything I own and give the money away if God asked me,” congratulations. The Holy Spirit is powerfully working in your life. For the rest of us, who thought of that item, and went “no way.” Like the old MC Hammer song, You Can’t Touch This. I remember when the Cunningham’s, missionaries we support in Haiti, were here last summer. I felt God asking me to give them our video projector for their ministry. My initial thought was no way, that’s mine, I paid for it with my own money. I use that (truth be told I used it for large screen movies and video games, not exactly spiritual). But the more I thought about it, the more God brought to mind that I didn’t really need it. And God brought to mind passages like ours this morning, “they considered no possession as their own,” and there was this battle in my heart. Reluctantly, and with Amy’s permission, (which by the way I noticed she didn’t struggle very much with it) I handed over the projector. But I did feel better knowing I had done what God wanted me to do.
When we are of one heart and mind with our Christian believers, and we think of our possessions as God’s, it frees us up to be like the first Christians who gave generously to those in need in their own community because it wasn’t theirs to begin with. They saw a need and they met that need even if it required sacrificing and selling some of their stuff to do it. It says there were no needy persons among them, no one went without food, clothing, shelter. Notice what they were able to do when the Holy Spirit empowered them, they eliminated poverty, hunger, within their own Christian community. When we truly care about and love each other, it causes us to reprioritize our resources.
NIV 1 John 3:17 If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?
It’s easy for us to look at our own church and think, “there’s no one in need here, I don’t need to give.” We feel a kind of a relief. But we must remember that the church isn’t just in Epsilon (Levering & Pellston), it is global. We have a responsibility to Christians worldwide who suffer from poverty, lack of food, shelter, education, adequate healthcare. Even in the book of Acts we read that when the Christians in Jerusalem were going through a famine, Paul was encouraging the churches in Greece and Turkey to help generously provide support, which they did (2 Cor. 9:1-15). We are our brother’s keeper.
Conclusion
Is there some Christian you are not of ‘one heart and mind’ with? In order to be filled with the Spirit and experience God’s power in your life, are you willing to work with them, forgive them, humble yourself and seek the Spirit’s guidance? How possessive are you of your possessions? Think of the favorite thing you own? If God asked you to give it up for the sake of his work in the world could you do it? The answer to these two questions helps us identify the work of the Spirit in our life.
