Please e-mail me with any comments or if you use any part of this at your church at Mail4ChrisR@aol.com. I would love to hear about it. God Bless! - Chris
Think about this for one second. What are the priorities for the church. When we do that we can’t help but have a long list of things the church needs to do. You know like
The number of people – growth
Nice building
Youth and children’s ministry
Tithes and offerings
Missions – local and global
Music – traditional or contemporary
Address social issues in the community, state, and nation
The are all essentials that the church must do… but guess what these are not priorities.
So you ask … “Ok Chris, these are all very important things, where do you get the idea that our church should not make these are priorities?”
Well, I will tell you. We have to look at what God intended the church to be .. and what better place to look than at the first Christian church in the book of Acts. Here the disciples are building that first church. And if I am going to be a leader in the church the model for that church has got be this first church.
So Let’s read the passage. Acts 2: 41-47
So here we have the first church .. with 3,000 brand new members. Let me tell you folks if 3,000 new member join New Burlington church next week … I might just quit while I am ahead.
3,000 brand new members … babies of the church. That is a frightening thought. I can’t help but think of little Bethany. It is a frightening thing being a new parent. I just think of all the hurts and mistakes and heartbreaks and accidents and illnesses. But I can also think of all the good and great things that she will do for God one day. This is the church. The were set up to make mistakes.
So what is the first thing they did? They were ready to go out and do God’s work. Did they go form a committee to explore the needs, perhaps where a church should be built, make a nominations committee to appoint leaders? Look into who would start the coffee in the morning and who would be on nursery duty? No!
They did 4 things – Look at verse 42. They devoted themselves to the 4 priorities of the church that God set before them. They devoted themselves to Learning, Fellowship, Worship, and Prayer.
So let’s briefly discuss each one, then in the following 4 weeks we study each one on greater detail.
If you have a pen or pencil and you like to write in your Bible for study do this.
God’s inspiration of the Bible is incredible. This is great.
- Circle the word teaching and draw a line down to verse 43
- Circle fellowship and draw a line to 44 and 45
- Worship goes with 46
- and yes, prayer with 47
SO we go back to teaching. These 3,000 babies had no tradition, doctrine, past experience, no seminary trained leader – nothing – In fact, listen to this, they did not even have a building to go to.
But what’s even more striking than that is that they did not have a Bible. Can you imagine Christianity without a Bible? So the questions has to be asked – how did they know what was truth? How did they know a true teacher from a false teacher? Simple, look at verse 43. Because they had signs a wonders.
They knew because God was blessing the apostles – the true teachers – with miracles to affirm the truth.
I used to teach Sr. High Sunday School and one of the greatest perks from doing that is to see the truth click. I would be teaching the lesson sand kids would be falling a sleep, drool hanging out the side of their mouths – and then boom! – one of them gets it. Their eyes would light up and they would understand the truth and how it relates to them.
This is that same sense of awe. And you know that we still have this problem today. Our post modern society has many perverted forms of “truth.” Like that psychic hotline garbage and the zodiac and horoscope trash, or Ms. Cleo crap!
This is why learning is the number one priority. We get the apostles teaching in this book. We must devote our selves to studying it daily. And we should defiantly bring it to church with us on Sunday. But we should use it the other 6 days a week too. Or else, how will we know the facts from the fiction?
So what else – fellowship. You know get together after church for lunch or a football game. Maybe a church picnic. No, that’s not what were talking about here – although that is good fellowship.
Fellowship is best described by looking at the Greek used by Luke to define fellowship. Listen to this one – Koinonia
Koninia is the word for fellowship in verse 42. Kononia means a commonness … sharing. It means to have a deeply involved loving compassion for one another. It means taking time to be common and get engaged in the needs of each other. So lets look at verses 44 and 45.
That’s koinonia -- they had everything in common. They got involved in each other’s lives. To know and to help meet those needs. Sharing is an important aspect of koinonia.
These 3,000 had Christ in common and they made a point to be a common people in a common place.
So they were a learning church and a sharing and loving church.
What else?
They devoted themselves to the breaking of break. This is worship. Let’s read verse 46.
They broke bread in their homes – here they are not just talking about eating together – they are talking about worshipping with each other with glad and sincere hearts.
They went and visited each other. They got into each other’s homes. That takes us back to definition of the church. And look at this – they meet how often. Someone shout out how often they met.
That’s right – everyday. Sunday religion did not exist. They worshipped daily – 7 days a week worshipping with glad and sincere hearts.
Do you do that? I cannot help but praise God everyday when I wake up and look ino the eyes of my lovely wife and my beautiful baby. I give God all the praise and it is my chance to connect with God – Like prayer.
Prayer is perhaps the best part of these priorities. You have to love God’s inspiration to save the best for last. Lets look at verse 47
Everything we do should be filtered through prayer. All of these other priorities should be filtered through a devotion to prayer. Our gathering of people – like the 3,000 should continually look to God in good and bad times.
All of my teaching and preaching must go through God first. I need to ask God what message He wants to bring on Sunday morning. Only then can I know what words to say – when the Holy Spirit uses me and is in me and you in this place. The same for all of our teachers in the Sunday school. We should give all of ourselves to God so that he can use us to teach.
Fellowship and Worship must go through prayer first. Uplifting God in our music, liturgy and sacraments with a devotion to prayer.
We should pray for each other – that koinonia.
The scriptures tell us to pray with out ceasing – giving all to God in prayer and petition.
In the Greek Islands there is place where you can seek out the home of the famous Hippocrates – the founder of modern medicine. There you will find an olive tree that supposedly dates back to the days of Hippocrates. That would make the tree nearly 2,400 years old.
The trunk of the tree is huge but completely hollow. It has an occasional leaf here or there and might produce a few olives each year. There are poles holding a few of it’s branches up.
The tree of Hippocrates can by definition be called a tree. By nature it still shows the essentials of an olive tree. But it has long since fulfilled it’s function.
Tourists files up from all over every year to inspect this ancient tree – having some link to a dim history.
But in all the fields around the tree are hundreds of olive groves in all directions. The strong healthy young trees with narrow trunks are full of leaves and produce thousands of olives each year.
Do you see the challenge for the church. The church must keep it’s distinct characteristics. It must be a church by its nature but it cannot stop functioning. We must ensure that the church is more than just an honorable relic of the past. The church must be more than that. We must produce good fruit each day of the year.
We must meet these four priorities. And as we read the end of verse 47 we see hat God will continue to use the church, to bless the church and to produce and add to our numbers daily.
So we must keep our devotions on:
Teaching – Biblical teaching of the apostles
Fellowship – Koinonia – loving compassion with time to engage in other’s lives
Worship – a daily sincere praise to God
And Prayer – the filter through which we know God is with us.
Teaching, Fellowship, Worship and Prayer.
