If he had come back, everything would be changed, but I want to submit to you that things can still be changed in the way we live for Christ. Will we make a new or stronger commitment to follow Jesus in this New Year ahead of us? Because the fact still remains that we could be gone, at any moment.
This week I was recalling the first Christmas. We know the first people on the scene were the Shepherds, we talked about their response to tell everyone what they heard and saw last week. We also know that sometime later the three wise men came. They had left home to travel many hundreds of miles on camels with only a legend and a star to go by. What did they do when they got there? They saw the baby Jesus, fell to their knees and worshipped, gave Him very expensive gifts, then went all the way home.
Think about that? Week’s riding on a camel, come see the baby Jesus, worship for a few minutes, give him the most expensive things they could find, and leave for another long camel ride. I think that’s how we should view church. We walk or drive a few minutes, fall on our knees and worship because we know the significance of what we get to do every Sunday, and every other day for that matter, and we give Him the very best of what we have.
I think the early church got it too, so I want to look at the first two chapters of the Book of Acts this morning. Jesus had just spent 33 years on the earth, he was crucified and he was resurrected. Then we see beginning in verse 6 of the first chapter of Acts, how he leaves (Read vv 6-9).
He says to them, I can’t tell you all the details, but I can tell you that you are going to receive power from the Holy Spirit to be my witnesses.
I. In the Meantime They Met Together and Prayed (1:10-14)
Why are you standing there? The angels say. Go get doing what Jesus told you to do. You will know when he comes back because it will be the same way he left, so get on with it.
So they did the only thing they knew. They didn’t just sit around, they didn’t go back to their jobs, they stayed put in one place together and prayed constantly. They did get a little business done through this prayer as they chose a new twelfth person. They either knew that there was some significance to having twelve of them, or they simply thought because Jesus chose 12, maybe they ought not mess with that.
Notice the qualification for this choice was only that the person had been a witness through the entire ministry of Jesus. They believed Jesus and obeyed him by simply staying in Jerusalem and waiting to:
II. Receive the Power (2:1-11)
We can do very little of true importance for the Kingdom of God without the Holy Spirit, the gift that God promised to all believers. Why is that? Way back half way through the book of Luke in chapter 12, Jesus is talking about acknowledging Him publicly on the earth, and he says that you don’t need to worry about how to defend yourself or what to say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour what to say.
You see the Holy Spirit is like a spiritual heart transplant surgeon. Here’s what it says in Ezekiel 36:26-27, “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put in you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.” Notice it is God that does all this, through the Holy Spirit.
Getting saved is just the beginning, and transformation is the process that is started at the point of salvation. It is this new heart that causes us to make following God our priority and have a heart for other people. The Spirit, the Word, and prayer, those are where all spiritual power comes from. Do you have new heart from God, is His Spirit in you? On of the best ways to tell is whether or not your love for God and other people is growing.
We see evidence of this right away in the Bible when Peter gets up to preach at Pentecost, and when Stephen is about to get stoned to death. The Holy Spirit is our helper, counsellor, advocate, he is the God with us when God is physically not with us in the form of Jesus. And he gives both Peter and Stephen the boldness of love and the very words to say.
We’re told in several places that the wisdom of God is foolishness without the Spirit. This is said best in 1 Cor 2:6-16. And that is why we should all be able in some respect to:
III. Preach the Word (2:14-21)
Peter simply knew the word of God and spoke it in response to the people’s questions. All the disciples did it, but some were more public than others. We consider the Word to be the Bible and that is true, but the Word is also Jesus Christ as John says. So we must always be preaching Christ and Him crucified. That’s what the rest of Peter’s first sermon is about, and what all the disciples talk about when they are scattered from Jerusalem. Stephen preaches a summary sermon about practically the whole Old Testament in Acts 7 ending with:
“You stiff-necked people, with uncircumcised hearts and ears. You always resist the Holy Spirit like your fathers did. They killed the prophets that talked about the coming of the righteous one (Jesus) and now you have murdered the very one they predicted”. It’s all about Jesus and what he has done for mankind.
Notice all these ministries don’t start with a church building, ministry programs, soup kitchens and so on. They all begin with preaching about Jesus Christ. Preaching is not necessarily a sermon, it simply means to herald or proclaim. This is what it means to witness. Yes we need to live good lives and do good, but that is not witnessing, that can help lend credibility to our witness, but witnessing is giving our verbal testimony about Jesus Christ and his salvation. We all need to ask ourselves, do I have something to witness about, do I really know and believe Jesus?
Notice that is all Jesus tells them before he ascends, be my witnesses to the ends of the earth. At the end of Matthew it’s basically the same command but in more detail. “Go make disciples or followers of Jesus in all nations”. How do we do that if we don’t tell them about the one they are to follow? Now once we tell people about the work of Jesus Christ and who God is. The next step that both Jesus and Peter gave was to:
IV. Repent and Be Baptized (2:37-40)
Repentance is intimately tied to obedience. So when Jesus says teach them to observe or obey all that I have commanded, there has to necessarily be repentance, or a turning from the way we have lived, and turning to live the way Jesus says. Earlier in his ministry Jesus mentioned the importance of repentance when he said that unless you also repent you too will perish.
Then both of them mention baptism. How is it that so many Christians see this part as an optional “when I feel ready” kind of thing? I am so proud of all the people who got baptised this past year, because really it is the first external thing we are required to do when we believe. You show me a person who has been a real born again Christian for any amount of time and isn’t baptized, and I’ll show a Christian who treats the whole Christian walk as something that they’ll do when they feel like it.
We are so careful to say that baptism itself doesn’t save you, and that is true, trust in Christ does. But I think that attitude reflects the overall way Christianity is going, that we don’t want to offend anyone by saying you should obey Jesus. We don’t want to put any pressure on anyone. A large percentage of Christians just want to comfortably enjoy Sunday morning services. What do you think Jesus would do with someone who said they wanted to follow him but didn’t do the first simplest thing he asked them to do?
But there’s another part of baptism that pertains to the Holy Spirit. At the end of Matthew Jesus says baptize them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - all of God. In Peter’s sermon he says to repent and be baptized, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
The Bible seems to indicate that baptism is an important aspect of how your relationship with the Holy Spirit will be. Repentance causes us to surrender to the Holy Spirit and increasingly obey the will of God. Baptism is the first visible sign of repentance and surrender to God.
Now if we take all of this, we see that the results are to:
V. Grow and Be the Church
So we meet together, pray together, receive the power of the Holy Spirit, which helps us to preach the word and witness about Jesus Christ to the world. Of course this happens when we repent, believe, and are baptized. Then the final thing we see in these 2 chapters of Acts is really the result of all this, growth and being the church together, as we read after Peter’s sermon (Read 41-47).
Let me just highlite what the church did in those days and I ask you to compare it to what the church does today. Granted the setting and culture is quite different, but with that in mind just compare. We are not meant to necessarily copy what they did, but we can look at the principles that apply to our context.
They devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching (basically the New Testament, which wasn’t written yet but was being spoken daily by the apostles). The fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers. OK, I think we could say that we do all of that at least to some degree, but I want to emphasize that word “devoted”. That word is a past tense of to be earnest toward, persevere, or be constantly diligent.
It wasn’t just rushing through a daily devotion, it was a continual diligence. Perhaps that is one of the differences of today. We say, “Wow they mustn’t have had any lives”. But I don’t think that’s true, I just think they made their faith the number one priority in their lives and permeated all aspects of it. If we go on, we see why this was possible.
It says awe came upon every soul, and many signs and wonders were being done through the apostles. Now here apostles likely refers to the twelve, but in general apostle simply means a sent ambassador. Anyways, everyone was in awe, and I suppose we are not too awestruck by the workings of God anymore, when we look at how little of any real awesomeness happens around the church. But God hasn’t changed, so we might ask why that is the case?
Is it because we don’t wait for and pray for the power of the Holy Spirit? Is it because we are not totally devoted to the things that they were devoted to in those days?
Here’s another reason why they didn’t need to focus on “having lives”. All who believed were together, and had all things in common. Does that sound like today’s church? To the extent that people would sell things they had to distribute the proceeds to anyone who had need. I’m sure it wasn’t much different back then to now in terms of there being some who had lots, some who had little, and many in between.
The thing is that whenever you get large groups of people together, there is more than enough for everyone if people are willing to share and do their part whether that be through sharing resources or sharing spiritual gifts and abilities. Day by Day, they attended temple and ate together in their homes praising God and having favour with all people.
As I look at that passage, which by the way was shown to me in my sleep just days after I had become a believer. I notice that a few things are missing in the church today here in our culture. One is the lack of devotion to all the things they devoted themselves to, and especially notable are prayer, Bible, and eating together. But I also think what they prayed about was very different. We see that throughout the book of Acts, the primary focus of their prayer was for God to give them strength and boldness to do what Jesus left them there to do. Think about what most of our prayers centre around. Is it for power and boldness to witness?
Secondly I think the power of the Holy Spirit is very neglected. The other thing they would be praying for constantly is for this power to fill them, and be manifest around them. For instance, after Jesus ascended, they sat for days, most likely ten days, waiting and again devoting themselves to prayer with one accord, probably primarily for that filling of the Holy Spirit to come.
If Jesus promises believers, and it is His will that the Holy Spirit will live in them and through them, we have to believe that if we devote ourselves to praying for that, we will get what we ask for, because he promises that as well.
Finally there’s the part of this passage that often gets glossed over. Every day they attended temple and ate together in each others homes. I imagine these were like potlucks, where large groups of them would get together to share food and fellowship with each other. And I imagine the conversation would be very focussed on Christ and what he was doing in and through them, because that’s what their whole lives were about.
They had glad and generous hearts, praising God, and this one is important. They had favour with all the people. Do each one of us have a good reputation in our community? Do we collectively have a good reputation and favour with all people? I’m sorry to say that sometimes I hear of people who will not set foot in this or any other church in town, because of how the Christians in that church treated them.
Now regardless of whether they have issues or not, that should never happen. How do you look at people? What do you say to people? Do you ignore people? I hate to say that I have seen rolled eyes, cold shoulders, and behind the scenes gossip about others that is just unacceptable for people who call themselves Christians. You don’t have to like everybody, but you should be able to be civil to and respectful of everybody.
We all have huge logs in our own eyes, and we better be looking at removing those before we judge others. Because as soon as we judge someone else just for who and how they are, we are flat our poking them in the eye with our own log.
So what now? Let’s just summarize all this, and take away some practical things that we could do in our context, modelled after the early church. That church that was also waiting for Jesus to come back, by the way.
Witness. Now this doesn’t mean you need a big conversion story of your own. It simply means that you have believed with your heart all the things that God says in His word, and you are simply willing to talk about it like you would with any other important news you might have.
How many of you would keep it a secret if your child won a Nobel prize. How many of you would keep it a secret if your child came down with cancer. You see our witness is related to our belief, and our selfishness. If we don’t really believe that what Jesus did is the most amazing thing that has ever happened, we probably won’t share it very much. If we do really believe that it is the greatest thing ever, another reason we might not share it is because we don’t feel comfortable sharing it.
The truth is that for each and every one of us, I believe God will put at least one person in our life, where we may be the only person in the whole world who is put in that person’s life to tell them about Jesus. And that is really the only mission that Jesus left us with, “be my witnesses”. So if the story of Jesus doesn’t get you so excited that you have to tell people about it, or if your comfort is more important than another person’s salvation or your desire to do what God saved you to do. Is saying grace before every meal more important than witnessing to lost people?
That leads to the next thing, and something that I am going to take responsibility for. That is I will be desiring and praying for the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives. On our behalves I will be praying regularly for the power to witness, and for the signs and wonders that only the Spirit can perform through us. You see if we even pray nothing but that, then all our other prayers for health and every other little detail that we pray for, will be included.
If we want healing, how is that done? Through the power of the Holy Spirit. If we want safety when we travel, how is that accomplished? Through the power of the Holy Spirit. If we want direction and guidance in our lives, how is that accomplished? Through the power of the Holy Spirit. Do you see what I’m getting at? Let’s all make a point of asking for the power of the Holy Spirit on a daily basis, and for opportunities to manifest this power through our lives each day.
I also want you to know that I am willing to make it possible for all of you to attend the Temple and get the apostles teaching more often. I realize that practically based on our lifestyles and work schedules, I will not be able to provide times when everyone will be able to attend these things.
But I encourage you to look at ways you might be able to reengineer your life in such a way that you can. Realizing that it will not always be fun. It will not always make you feel good, it will not always leave you saying “I got something out of that”. But that you would commit to doing it anyway because you believe that God is going to do something. Those of you who absolutely can’t be devoted to that, I encourage you to set up your own personal or family discipline that allows you to have regular feeding from the Word of God and prayer outside of Sunday morning.
And I think we should also have potlucks more often (not just on Sundays after church), where we can all have the opportunity to meet together informally and invite others from outside of the church to experience our love and acceptance. And I would encourage those who have made a habit of not attending these gatherings to reconsider.
Again if you absolutely can’t attend these potlucks, what about providing them at your home when you can? Not just with your “friends” from church, but also maybe some that you don’t know well. It’s amazing what can happen when you invite someone you don’t know and maybe haven’t even really wanted to know, and you learn about them and they become more than just “that person at church”. Sometimes you find that you have more in common than you ever imagined, if you are truly willing to get to know them. And often they have some wisdom, or skill, or resource they can provide you with that you never thought possible.
Now are we always going to feel like doing all these things? While there may be some excitement, I can tell you that the answer is probably no. Certainly not all the time. I’m as selfish as anyone else and like my time to do with what I please. But I also realize that that is not why I’m here on earth, and a lot of what I do for myself is a waste of time anyway, it’s not why Jesus died for me, and in my heart I really feel the Spirit compelling me to be more like what he wants me to be, and I believe that if I continue to increase in obedience and become more and more like a biblical Christian, the Spirit of God will provide all the satisfaction I need.
And who knows, if we do this, perhaps we will see signs and wonders even more amazing than seeing 21 people baptised and over thirty people stick it out for an 8 week Bible study. I greatly desire to see people you never thought would ever be captured by Christ, get saved and become disciples. And to see people experience miracles in their lives
I encourage you all this New Year to come up with a personal plan for yourselves based on what you see in the apostles teaching, and what you’ve heard today. So that’s the “what now” and I will be providing all of you with a letter that summarizes my vision for 2013 and details on how I am going to implement my part of the deal in the coming weeks.
