Do you ever wonder what heaven is going to be like? Well I have a feeling Jesus wanted us to experience a little taste of it through the church. We hear things like he has made us a Kingdom of Priests for God His Father, when speaking to the seven churches in Revelation. And again in Revelation 5, “For you were slaughtered, and your blood has ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and nation and people. And you have caused them to become a Kingdom of priests for our God. And they are reigning on the earth.”
In Matthew, Jesus says the Kingdom of Heaven is near, and he also makes several references in the gospels that at least the partial Kingdom is present on the earth now. I believe he’s saying in all this, that the church is to be a representation of heaven on earth, where a Kingdom of priests ministers to each other with love and worship for the Lord.
So today I want to talk about what the Bible suggests a gathering of believers should look like, and the effect we should have on the world around us. Way back in Leviticus three we read of what is called the fellowship or peace offering, and it was a shared meal that usually followed another burnt offering for atonement or cleansing forgiveness. Therefore the fellowship offering was a participatory meal that represents peace with God through atonement, and peace with each other as recipients of that atonement.
Forgiven believers who have found peace with God are to share time and fellowship together, and we see this illustrated in detail in Acts 2 where I want to point out several characteristics of Christian fellowship. Before that though, I want to show you what a group of believers actually is, what the church is supposed to be made up of.
In Acts 2:1 we see that all the believers were meeting together in one place, but we need to know what it means that they were believers. Peter begins his sermon in verse 14 and look at how he addresses the crowd that was made up of devout Jews from every nation and all different languages, that the Holy Spirit spoke to in their own languages at Pentecost. (Show video clip)
He says, listen carefully all of you. Then he says “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved”. Then he basically preaches the Gospel and ends with, “Each of you must repent of your sins and turn to God, and be baptised”. The promise of the Holy Spirit which is the seal of the members of the Church of Christ, is for everyone, and those who believed Peter were baptised.
So let me give you a definition of a I. true member of the capital C church of Christ. It consists of people who have called on the name of the Lord for forgiveness of their sins, repented and turned to God, and been baptised. The church is a group of people who believe the saving work of Jesus and have been baptised. If you don’t meet those qualifications, you are not a member of the Church, and no other scripture passage will refute this.
Now obviously many people who do not meet these qualifications attend church, but they are not yet the Body of Christ to which the Bible refers when it talks about the church. Let me refer you to our statement of faith which comes from early Baptist councils hundreds of years ago… that is a representation of what we hear in Acts.
So what we are going to talk about today are the II. characteristics of Christian fellowship that apply to true members of the body. And I would go so far as to suggest that if you do not desire these things you may not have completely joined, there is a little lack of belief, little lack of repentance, and/or lack of baptism. Because these things we hear in Acts are not commands, they are natural out workings and desires of saved believers.
So what are they, what is the church supposed to look like when a group of truly saved, baptised believers gets together? Let me read Acts 2:42-47, and then we’ll look in more detail at the specifics.
So the first one we see there is that all the believers devoted (they didn’t do it begrudgingly or in a half-hearted way), they devoted themselves to learning God’s word. We don’t have the apostles but we have their writings, their teachings. Now when it says “all the believers” we need to take that as a clear directive that all believing, repentant, baptised people are to be involved in community with other believers unless you are completely unable. The majority of the activities we read about here can only happen in community.
The second thing listed is fellowship or Koinonia, which literally means partnership with participation. It reflects a life of close mutual relationship and participation in life together. If we think in terms of the metaphor of the BODY we see how this is perfect, because a body has no choice but to participate in life as a whole. You can’t send your hand off to the store can you?
Now sharing in meals including the Lord’s supper is a part of this, but only a part. So they also shared food with each other. They had potlucks and everybody came and enjoyed, or they ate together in each other’s homes as it says in verse 46 after they worshipped at the Temple. And they shared these meals with joy and thanksgiving.
Obviously they worshipped together both at the Temple and in their homes praising God and enjoying the goodwill of all the people. The only people their praise and worship seemed to offend at this point was government and religious non-believers. We’ll talk more about worship in a moment.
The fourth thing we see in verse 42 is prayer. Learning, fellowship, eating together and prayer together. They had more prayer meetings than anything else by the looks of it. The beginning of chapter 3, Peter and John went to the temple for the three o’clock prayer service. What were the believers in the next chapter doing when Peter and John were being threatened and imprisoned for preaching about Jesus? They were praying together. In the first several chapters of Acts we see almost nothing else but preaching and praying.
What are the III. outcomes of this Koinonia? We see in verse 43 that there were many remarkable healings and miracles. It says the apostles performed these, so we might be able to say that these will not be a part of the church today. The problem with that philosophy is that it does still happen today, and later in Acts we see people other than the apostles performing miracles. It’s the Holy Spirit that performs the miracles and He is in all believers, so I don’t think we should believe that these things could not happen in our gatherings, and in fact they do.
Next is sharing and generosity. Verse 44, “they met together in one place (the church) and shared everything they had. They not only tithed, they sold their property and possessions and shared the money with anyone who had need. We see more about this in chapters 4 and 5. How is this different from communism?
First of all the giving was voluntary, it didn’t involve all property, only what was needed, and it was not a membership requirement in order to be part of the church. And this social structure attracted people. Now we might not be able to completely follow this model in our current culture, and it is not a command, but the principle that nobody in the body of Christ should go without necessities still stands.
And because of this unusual love and togetherness, and generosity, the Lord added to their numbers daily. Should that be a characteristic of the modern church? Yes it should, but look at the criteria: they had favour with all the people, they had a good reputation. What is the typical reputation of most churches in their community today?
Is it that of a loving, welcoming, healthy, generous place, or is it often viewed, accurately or not, as a judgmental, stingy place where people can’t even get along, and they don’t live anything like the saviour they worship and say they believe in, and where rules and traditions are more important than people?
When you develop a bad reputation, you have to work all the harder to rebuild it, it’s hard to shake, and people need to have opportunities to change their opinion. Do you think anyone was inviting other people to these meetings in Acts? Obviously, but would they if they knew it was a sick place to bring people, where nobody’s life would really be changed?
What about worship. We see partly from the Bible and more from extra biblical history, that they gathered at the temple, and what we know about these gatherings is that they were primarily meetings where Scripture was read and commented on usually by a rabbi, there was prayer, and there was singing, often of the Psalms. But we also see in Acts that many of their gatherings to worship were in homes praising God, probably primarily through prayer, singing and talking about what they were learning from the Apostles teachings, the Bible. And of course eating, which is one of my favourite celebrating activities.
Part of this worship and fellowship was also for helping each other spiritually. Ecclesiastes 4 says, “Two people are better than one, for they can help each other succeed. If one person falls, the other can reach out and help. But someone who falls alone is in real trouble.
Likewise two people lying close to one another can keep each other warm, but how can one be warm alone. A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can stand back to back and conquer. Three are even better, for a triple-braided cord is not easily broken.”
And there’s a famous Proverb chapter 27:17 declaring that: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another”. We can’t do this alone and in fact we shouldn’t want to. Again the writer of Hebrews says in chapter 10:24-25, “Let us think of ways to motivate each other to acts of love and good works. And let us not neglect meeting together as some do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near.” The last thing you should do when there is trouble in your life is isolate from the fellowship and not go to church, yet this is what many do.
So let’s talk more about the hospitality and true Christian fellowship. I want to emphasize this because this is where the Kingdom really manifests itself. Whenever Christians are gathered in any way, it should look as close to heaven as we can get here on earth.
Let me use some visions from the book of Revelation to demonstrate. In chapter 4 John sees the throne of God and it’s obviously impressive, but what are all the beings around the throne doing? Day and night they were saying “Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God almighty who was and is and is to come.”
Then they fall down and worship and lay their crowns at the feet of the throne and say, “You are worthy O Lord our God, to receive glory and power. For you created all things, and they exist because you created what you pleased.”
Now follow me for a minute. What do you think would happen if we worshipped outside let’s say in the green space and there was a cross standing in the middle of the field. And we gathered for several hours every day and night and just chanted Holy… .
And every once in a while we offered our lives at the foot of the cross and chanted You are worthy… .
Do you think anyone would take notice, do you think God would save anyone who happened to come across this? Basically those chants describe the Gospel that God as the creator has always been, he still is, and he is coming again.
In the next chapter we see more about Jesus atoning sacrifice. The Lamb that has been slaughtered is present and they proceed to sing, “You are worthy… (verses 9-13).
I want you to notice something. As a few start really worshipping and giving their lives to Jesus, thousands and millions of angels start chiming in, and the next thing you know, every creature in heaven and on earth, and even the dead under the earth start singing and praising God.
Sometimes I wonder, what if we sold everything we had and in essence lived together nobody having any worldly needs, forsaking all the garbage that we think makes life worth living, and just did what I described there every day and night? I wonder if angels wouldn’t join a move like that, and I wonder if everyone who witnessed that wouldn’t eventually come to believe in Jesus Christ when they saw all that God and his angels would do in that setting. There would no doubt be healings and miracles.
You see that is how sold out everyone in heaven will be, and why do we have to wait? I think God would absolutely bless and provide for us if we declared and practiced heaven on earth. And I truly believe that everyone would eventually join us.
Now you might be saying, that’s so unrealistic. Is it? Is it impossible, or just not something we would want to do? Maybe we still go to our jobs, some in the early church did, but every other minute of our lives is worshipping God and eating with others just so we can stay alive to keep working and worshipping. Maybe we wouldn’t need jobs because God would provide as he will in heaven, and frankly does on earth in miraculous ways for those individuals who do completely sell out for God.
The only thing to me that’s unrealistic about it is that most of us would never do it, we would never give up what we have to spend our lives in worship, we just aren’t that serious about this whole God thing, so in that sense it would never happen. But what if we started small? Most of us won’t even have our fellow believers over for meals very often. How often do we open our homes in normal hospitality to each other, we’re too busy, the house is a mess? And when we do, do we even talk about God? And I’m talking about myself here too.
But I’ve got to tell you, I care less and less for this life that is going to come to an end anyway, and I would absolutely be willing to give up everything to do what I described here, because in spite of how I imagine it would be (no nice home, no stuff), I believe God would move so strongly that it would be way different than I imagine it would. There might be some persecution but I think we would see so many people supernaturally joining the Kingdom at this point, that the persecutors would be so outnumbered they would have to join us. A lot of Saul’s would become Paul’s.
I don’t care anymore about anything else other than the people I love, giving my life to God and seeing him save the world, including my children and wife and friends and family. If that’s what it would take, I would do it by faith in a minute, I’d go plant that cross in the middle of that field right now. But I can’t do it by myself, I would look like some crazy person out there. I can’t be the church by myself, neither can you. I need the church to do it with me, we have to do it together.
I like stuff as much as the next person but honestly I’m tired of TV, and all the other things we consider to make life worthwhile. I’ve had it all, been all over the place, it’s all redundant and doesn’t really bring any deep satisfaction. It just helps kill time. All that stuff does, and the things we have to do to get them, is keep us from doing what God wants and what could make the difference in the world.
Everything you have and have to do to get it, distracts us from our true purpose. And as long as we have it all, we choose it over the other more important things we could be doing with each other. Don’t think Satan doesn’t want it that way, because he knows what would happen if we did it the Jesus Way.
Let’s end with looking at a couple of scriptures, starting with Romans 12:9-16. Maybe this will give us a start. “Don’t just pretend to love others. Really love them. Hate what is wrong. Hold tightly to what is good. 10 Love each other with genuine affection, and take delight in honoring each other. 11 Never be lazy, but work hard and serve the Lord enthusiastically. 12 Rejoice in our confident hope. Be patient in trouble, and keep on praying. 13 When God’s people are in need, be ready to help them. Always be eager to practice hospitality.
14 Bless those who persecute you. Don’t curse them; pray that God will bless them. 15 Be happy with those who are happy, and weep with those who weep. 16 Live in harmony with each other. Don’t be too proud to enjoy the company of ordinary people. And don’t think you know it all!”
How about 1 Pe 2:4-5?
“You are coming to Christ, who is the living cornerstone of God’s temple. He was rejected by people, but he was chosen by God for great honor.
5 And you are living stones that God is building into his spiritual temple. What’s more, you are his holy priests. Through the mediation of Jesus Christ, you offer spiritual sacrifices that please God.”
And again 1 Pet 4:8-9 “Most important of all, continue to show deep love for each other, for love covers a multitude of sins. 9 Cheerfully share your home with those who need a meal or a place to stay.”
What if we start there? I am suggesting in your action plan this week to simply have someone in the church you have never spent time with, over for lunch or supper. And spend at least some time talking about God, worshipping him with some scripture reading maybe from the Psalms, and pray together and maybe even sing a song. Make it a time of celebration and worship as you who are Holy priests gather together. What could be more important when you gather than that?
I know it’ll feel different. That’s the whole point, we need to get used to gathering the Jesus Way. And maybe one day before we die or Jesus comes back, we can experience what I described earlier. But let’s start somewhere.
