When my cat was about a year old he developed a urinary infection. A friend of mine who was a veterinary assistant brought home some sample medicines that I administered to the cat for several days, and the problem seemed to be cured.
A week or two later however, the symptoms came back. He wouldn’t eat, he was lethargic, he lay around moaning a lot, and in the litter box he cried out in pain, and produced hardly any urine.
It was a Saturday when the symptoms returned, and when I talked with my friend on the phone she said I should take the cat to the vet on Monday. She knew I was broke financially and would hesitate to spend the money, so she pointedly reminded me that this was an inflammation, an infection, and would not go away on its own, without antibiotics.
That evening, as I was preparing dinner, my three year old daughter was laying on the kitchen floor, petting the cat who was curled up under one of the kitchen chairs.
As he moaned, she asked, “Daddy, what’s wrong with the kitty?” I told her that he was sick and needed medicine because his tummy was hurting. As I went back to cooking, I heard Briana say, “Jesus, please make my kitty all better”, and she continued to softly stroke his fur.
The next morning, the cat was running around, stalking imaginary prey, jumping on the furniture, clawing the curtains and Briana’s forearms... everything seemed back to normal.
Today that cat is 18 years old. He is blind, arthritic, unable to jump and no longer interested in clawing Briana or the curtains... but he has never, in 17 years, had a urinary infection.
Briana had never been told that miracles don’t happen any more. She didn’t know anything about the doctrines of the Christian faith... knew nothing about the great debates of the church... nothing about denominational distinctives... and had no qualms about praying for a cat.
She only knew that Jesus was the One to pray to when you need help, so in childlike simplicity she did, and as promised, Jesus answered.
Today I’d like for us to look at the brand new church of Acts chapter 2 in this light, and see what they, in their wide-eyed, innocent, infant state, have to teach us sophisticated, enlightened, information-saturated 21st century believers.
Let’s read Acts 2:43-47
The day of Pentecost had come. Pentecost is one of the Jewish high holy days, and is celebrated on the 50th day following the feast of First Fruits. It is one of the few holy days that required the faithful to actually be in Jerusalem for the festival if possible; because of that, many who came to the city for Passover simply stayed around for the next 50 or so days, to celebrate Pentecost.
So it is not a stretch of reason to say that most of those thousands in Jerusalem on this Pentecost morning, had been present and had first-hand knowledge of the events of Jesus’ crucifixion. In addition, their ears had to still be buzzing ~ their minds spinning, over the continually spreading news that He was no longer in the tomb.
In fact, droves of people must have come to the garden daily to witness the emptiness of that tomb.
Now I won’t take time today to go into a teaching on these holy days, but please note that Jesus rose from the dead on the day of the feast of First Fruits, as the first fruits of the resurrection.
And whereas the feast of Pentecost, 50 days later, is a day of bringing sheaves of the harvest into the temple to honor God for His abundance, so on this 50th day after our Lord’s resurrection, God brought 3000 souls into His house as the first sheaves of harvest, if you will; the beginnings of the harvest of souls that would continue until He comes again.
The eleven Apostles and Matthias (the new guy), and approximately 108 others had been gathered in an upper room praying, when the promise of the Holy Spirit was fulfilled, accompanied by the noise of a great rushing wind and tongues of fire that lit on each of them there.
They had stepped out to the street to meet the crowd that was gathering there, having heard the sound themselves and come looking for its source, and Peter preached them the first sermon of the Church.
He quotes the prophet Joel, telling them that these passages from the prophet that are so familiar to their ears have now come to pass, in the pouring out of God’s Holy Spirit on men. Of course that message of necessity begins and ends with the gospel of Jesus Christ, and as a result, those many are saved and the new Church is off to a fiery start.
So as we catch up with our verses of study today and narrow the focus, I want you to be observant of the very first snapshot the Holy Spirit gives us of the new church.
You know, the color on a wall is never so clean and rich as when it is first painted. A meal prepared by a top chef is never so fragrant and appetizing in its appearance as when he first arranges the food on the plate and sends it to the table. A new puppy is never so clean and sweet smelling as those first days out of the womb, and a little baby is never again so pure and innocent and undefiled as when he is in his first days and weeks of life.
So how is the freshness, the sweetness, the newness, the purity of the infant church defined? They kept feeling a sense of awe. Many wonders and signs were taking place through the Apostles. There was an uninhibited sense of community and sharing. They were constantly together, fellowshipping, worshiping, praying, praising God, remembering Christ through the breaking of bread (meaning the Lord’s Supper).
Now it is not long before the newness is sullied. Men are still men and the sin nature did not die on that day in Jerusalem. We only have to go to chapter 5 to find the first spot of sin on the new baby. The puppy has messed on the carpet. The food has sat too long on the plate and lost some of its savor. There is a crack in the wall and some of the paint has chipped. The color has faded ever so slightly. Ananias and Sapphira have succumbed to greed and selfishness and deceit and the results are tragic.
From that day on, ever so slowly, step by step, inch by inch, the world has crept into the church.
There is an account recorded somewhere, about Thomas Aquinas visiting Pope Innocent II once when the latter was counting a large sum of money. “You see, Thomas”, said the Pope, “the Church can no longer say, ‘Silver and gold have I none’.” “True, holy father”, replied Thomas, “and neither can she now say, ‘Arise and walk’.”
And though the church will emerge triumphant, though all those called and redeemed and preserved will stand clean and whole and made finally like their Christ, and none shall be lost, ~ still, something happened to the church that day that will only be completely purged and overcome eternally, when the church eternal is at home in her eternal place.
So if we want to study the state of the church in its new, pure and undefiled state, we must find it in Acts 2-4.
But we lay the glass on verses 46 and 47 of chapter 2 today and settle our focus there.
Over the past few decades there has been much talk about going back to the first century church. The trend flares up every so often, in different places; different pockets of church community.
I remember the idea being very prevalent for a while in the ‘70s. “The church has lost its effectiveness, because we need to go back to being what the first century church was; gain back what they had.”
Some groups even went so far as to cease meeting in church buildings, and met only in their homes. Some tried the communal ‘thing’ of making all their possessions commonly owned, so that none of them had exclusive rights to anything. Their homes, their cars, everything was commonly shared. You can just imagine how long that lasted before the fights broke out.
As is always the case though, when man attempts to recreate in the flesh what God has done in the Spirit, the results are pathetic, ineffective, often humorous and all too often disastrous.
What I’d like for us to look at today, is not the things they did, exclusively and for the sake of modern adaptation, but the reason behind the doing of them.
In verses 46 and 47 I see three things that we would do well to seek after daily and allow to guide us, as individuals and as a church.
I know... a typically Baptist, three point sermon. I’m sorry... but I just gotta do it.
First: They were of one mind.
“And day by day continuing with one mind in the temple...”
Now we see that they were in the temple. That is a thought that might strike us as a little odd. Hadn’t they been converted to Christianity? Didn’t they now believe in Jesus as Messiah, and didn’t those beliefs run diametrically opposed to those of the Jews who had rejected Him...who still controlled temple worship?
Yes indeed! But the temple was more than a place for coming to worship and offer sacrifice. It was also the center for the exchange of philosophies, debate over points of law, discussion of the prophets and their predictions for Israel’s future.
It was the perfect place for the new, on-fire followers of ‘the Way’, to meet with fellow Jews and convince them of the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets in the person of this Jesus of Nazareth, whom they had all seen crucified and now heard that He was risen from the dead.
And remember ~ they were of one mind.
Church, what if the community of true believers from Fruita to Ouray were of one mind?
We’ve been made united in Christ by the Holy Spirit. Listen to Ephesians 4:4-6
“There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all; “
So one of the things we’ve lost that the new church had, it seems to me, is being of one mind.
The church has divided, and divided again, and divided again, until right down to each local body of believers there is so much division and petty squabbling and a strong spirit of self-defense, that oneness of mind in spiritual matters is a virtual impossibility!
This single topic alone is such a large issue that it overwhelms me. I cannot do it justice here. I can only exhort you to take a look around you and observe.
In our own community there is a shallow, surface cooperation between some of the churches; but is there oneness of mind as existed in Acts 2:46? NO!
In three years of living here, I have never heard a report of a condition of ‘oneness of mind and purpose’ driving believers from different churches to meet with the public in a Spirit-led evangelistic crusade. Is that going to happen? If it did, would they then fight over what church the new converts are going to attend?
Well, if I continue on I’ll simply enter into a tirade of negativism and criticism of the church in general and that is not my intention. Use your imagination and your own powers of observation; let them branch out to our region, our state, our nation; the church in the world today. Is there oneness of mind? You can only come to one conclusion.
But I will say that if there is a possibility, {and with God, nothing shall be impossible}, of the church ever regaining the power and effectiveness that this early church had, of reaching people on a large scale with the Gospel and seeing them respond favorably, she must go forward in oneness of mind.
Second: Their worship, their fellowship together; these things they were doing, in meeting house to house and sharing meals and partaking of the Lord’s Supper, were all done with gladness and sincerity of heart.
There was joy in the Holy Spirit, and there was true, spiritual worship from sincere hearts.
This is a topic I’ve touched on several times in recent months, and it is not a pleasant thing to say, but I see an ever-increasing need to address it openly and frankly, as a warning and an urgent call to safety, to those in this very dangerous place: being a church-goer ~ a church member, but not necessarily a regenerated child of God.
Here again, the church in general has fallen down on the job in this regard. So powerful has been the temptation to resort to the world’s thinking and the world’s methods in growing the organization, that people have been drawn to the church for all the wrong reasons, and have settled in, become involved, learned the behaviors and the dialect and the methods, and have never been challenged to face the sin issue; never been born from above.
To compound the problem, the church has been so increasingly focused on forms and rituals; the calisthenics of the worship service, the programs of the church, the administrative functions that bring folks around to looking at the church as a business that must be run like a business...
... that the joy is gone, or severely lacking at the very least.
And when gladness of heart is missing, true, spiritual worship from a heart of praise is out of the question.
Now all of this may sound very negative to you today, listener, but I cannot point to a solution if I do not first address the problems.
These folks in the infant church; and I’d like to remind you here that we’re not talking about 12 apostles... we’re not talking about 120 from a room of prayer... we’re talking about over 3000 people who before the day of Pentecost had very little in common at all,... these folks teach us the very basic, foundational truths that the church was built on, and their example is one that it is certainly within our grasp to implement and practice today.
Not in going house to house to worship, not necessarily in the sharing of meals (although that’s always a welcome idea to me), not in the communal dividing up of property: but in oneness of mind, in the doing of all things with gladness and sincerity of heart.
I want you to observe, as we go to point #3, the result of their spiritual condition and its resulting behavior.
Third: They were praising God. Day by day, not just on Sunday morning, or when good news comes in the mail, or the mechanic says “I found the problem and it’s not expensive”, but day by day, of one mind, joyfully and in sincerity of heart, they were praising God!
People, in a time when the popular religion says ‘don’t offend’; ‘be open-minded and tolerant’; when the ‘moment of silence’ has become the acceptable form of public ‘prayer’ because it is the way we can stand shoulder to shoulder with the prophets of Baal and not offend them...
This is the time, if no other time in history, this is the time that we should be openly praising God; with our mouths, with our resources, with our behavior before the world, with gladness and sincerity of heart.
Now here are these results I referred to a minute ago, and they are astounding if you think about them:
Verse 47 says, “...and having favor with all the people...”
Wow! No! Wait a minute! That can’t be right!
Jesus said, “If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”
John 15:18,19
Jesus said, “In the world you will have tribulation”. Paul said that the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.
The history recorded right here in the book of Acts proves that the early Christians did not have favor with all the people. Stephen was stoned! Peter and Barnabas were whipped and imprisoned.
Favor with all the people? How do we reconcile that with the terrible ordeals we have recorded for us, both here in scripture and in history itself?
I think it is this.
I think that the general populace of Jerusalem, who can easily, on a general level represent any community of people today, because fundamentally people are the same and do not alter that much from culture to culture... or century to century...
... were observing these people, who were feeling a sense of awe, because they hadn’t forgotten the wondrous things that had happened in their midst over recent months. They were in awe, that a loving God would come down and shed His blood and die to save them, and raise from the dead to give them life.
They were in awe, because they didn’t have Masters degrees and PHD’s and theologians to muddy the waters with divisive theories, or stiff-necked Baptists to tell them their personal habits were bad or that they could never completely rise above the sin of their past, or their form of worship was insufficient, inappropriate or flawed.
They only knew that Jesus was the One to pray to when they had a need. They only knew that He had sent His Spirit to live in them, as evidenced by the fact, FACT that they were, in their simplicity of faith, performing the same miracles He performed and simply expecting them to happen because they believed Him when He said they would.
They only knew that their lives were changed forever by the power of a risen Lord, and they were constantly sensing a feeling of awe.
They had favor with the people, because they were of one mind, which was the mind of Christ, because of their daily practice of prayer and praise, and there was no bickering among them, no vying for prominence or pre-eminence over one another, no debating or doctrinal hair-splitting, no rejecting of anyone outside the assembly because of race or hair color or style of clothing or past sins or present ideologies..
They had favor with the people, because they acted and reacted toward them as those who also had been face down in the muck of sin, and had looked up to the cross, and had been redeemed, and had not forgotten that apart from Christ they were nothing more than the folks they were witnessing to.
So when they approached people on that common ground, but with an apparent sense of joy and gladness and sincerity of heart, the response was not derision, or disgust, or anger or rejection, but favor.
“...and the Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved.”
Are you hearing this today, believer? Church-goer? You who may have questioned in the past, in your own mind, why we do not enjoy the success of the infant church?
God has not changed.
The Lord was adding to their number ‘day by day’, and they were being actually looked upon with favor by the general public as they were in the temple and going about telling people about Jesus.
Why?
They were of one mind, they were full of joy, they worshiped and witnessed from sincere hearts of praise, which they did openly, and they exuded a sense of awe as they ministered in the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit and the name of Jesus of Nazareth.
My friends, this is the pure fruit of innocence. Awe, inspired by the wondrous love of God. Oneness of mind as individually and as the people of God we are submitted to His will over our own. Open expression of joy and worship from sincere hearts, and praise in the form of song and testimony and lifestyle that the public can witness.
This fruit is not out of reach for us today. We, as believers in Christ, are indwelt by the same Holy Spirit; and to God, “Rise up and walk” is no more difficult to make come true than “Jesus, please make my kitty all better”.
Time is short. Oh, so very short. As my wife has recently said, ‘the snowball is rolling, and gaining momentum’.
Can the infant church live again? Not as an infant.
Can her power and influence be regained? Yes. It is as simple and as difficult as this, Christians, ~ through dedication and re-dedication of our lives to Christ and His purpose. Through repentance and asking God to renew in His church a sense of awe, and by the laying aside of the sin which so easily trips us up, and determining to be of one mind, seeking the mind of Christ, and letting His Holy Spirit-inspired joy permeate our beings and our lives.
By recognizing that we all began face down in the muck of sin and laying no conditions on anyone except to turn from sin to the cross of Christ and as they come, extending God’s grace to them with joy and sincerity of heart.
By loving each other with a sacrificial, Christ-like love that will set us apart as those who are His, and exercising diligence in preserving the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
This is the kind of church I want Cornerstone Christian Chapel to be, because it begins with us. We begin with having no divisions, no pettiness; allowing no non-essential issue to cause strife; laying aside selfishness and sensitive pride, praying for one another, encouraging one another, reminding one another often that Jesus is coming soon. Worshiping, together and in our individual lives, with joy and sincerity of heart, and openly praising the God of our salvation... until we’re so full of Jesus that His Spirit pours out from us and His love and compassion become an irresistible force that draws the needy and the hurting and the seeking into His eternal home.
It is possible, you know. These folks in Acts 2:46,47 prove it. And God does not change.
So the only question left to ask ourselves today is, ‘am I willing?’ Are we willing as individuals and are we willing as a congregation, to allow God to do whatever He has to do in us to renew in us a sense of awe and joy and sincere worship and open praise?
It will cost us. There is much of ‘us’ that will have to die. But if we’re willing, fellow believers, I am convinced we’ll see miracles. And we won’t be asking God to do anything He hasn’t intended anyway. We’ll simply be submitting ourselves to His purpose of making us more like Jesus, and using us to build His kingdom.
If we don’t ~ if we’re unwilling ~ He’ll find someone else. But I want it to be me; I want it to be us. Don’t you?
