THE CHURCH YOU’VE ALWAYS LONGED FOR:
“CAPTURES THE HEART OF THE COMMUNITY”
TEXT: Acts 11: 19-30
Sunday, September 15, 2002
How would you answer this phrase, “I like church, but....”? Over time, what have been those “buts” in your life? When I was young, for me it was that the service was boring. I liked church, but it was boring. It was too quiet–you could hear a pin drop. As I grew up, I attended other churches and other “buts” entered my mind. “I like church, BUT I find some churches irrelevant.” Or, “I like church, BUT people lack passion for God and for making his word known to others.” In other churches, I’ve discovered that the issue was money. In others, they had turned inward and focused on themselves too much. Scripture wasn’t central to the life of the church. In other churches, I’ve discovered that Christian people are too critical and are very unloving.
What has been your experience. You like church and you love the Lord, BUT ....” What are some of those “buts”? From September through November, we are going to take a look at becoming the church that we’ve always longed for. What would that be like? If I were to draw a picture of the perfect church, what would it look like? What is the church of your dreams? Perhaps the real question is, “What type of church does God dream about? What type of church does God desire?” We are going to look at this question.
What’s God’s vision for his church? Not my vision or your vision but God’s vision for his church and for White Clay. Perhaps his vision will create for us the church of our dreams.
This morning, we will look at a church that I think really captured God’s heart because they captured the heart of their community–the church of Antioch. This is found in Acts 11: 19-30. Historically, Antioch was the third largest city in the known world at that time. It was extremely secular, but it was also extremely religious. They had a lot of churches. There was the church of men, a Greek deity, the church of Astart, the church of Artemis. A lot of people were going to a lot of churches. The culture, however, was very immoral and very worldly. In spite of a missionary’s worst nightmare going to a foreign culture that was extremely anti-God, within 40 years the Christian church became the dominant force in the culture, so much so that the center of Christianity moved from Jerusalem to Antioch. How is that possible? How could they capture the heart of the community like that? It would be like White Clay converting the entire city of Newark within 40 years, so much so that it becomes the dominant force in the society and the city.
TEXT
What did this church do to capture people’s hearts and attention? The first thing they did was that they could not keep their mouths shut about this man Jesus. In fact, the word “Christian” was coined at Antioch because these people could not keep quiet about this “Christos.” In vs. 19, it says that these people came from Jerusalem which was under severe persecution. They lost everything. They had to move from their homes because of their beliefs and their profession in Jesus Christ. They lost their jobs and incomes, they had to leave their friends and the community of which they had been a part for such a long time. Under that intense pressure, you would think that they would learn to shut their mouths, that they would be afraid to tell other people what God had done for them. Yet, they didn’t. They couldn’t keep quiet.
This challenges me because when I talk about God to other people, they might roll their eyes at me, they might tell me they don’t want to talk about it, but I haven’t lost my job. I haven’t been forced out of my home and lost my possessions. So often, I keep quiet about my faith. Why am I so afraid to tell people what God has done for me when it doesn’t cost me anything. For those for whom it cost everything, they still couldn’t keep quiet about him. That’s a challenge.
I wonder sometimes whether the myths in our heads are really true. The myths in our culture are that people don’t really want to hear about Christianity. People are satisfied with their lives. They have everything and they don’t need the Lord in their lives. They have another religion, and they don’t need us to convert them. I wonder if those words in our heads are a lie. When I look at the church in Antioch, they always professed Jesus Christ. Throughout the history of the church, people have discovered that they need him. People have listened and they will listen. People have responded and they will respond. They responded in Antioch in great numbers, and every time the church caught fire and talked about their faith, people began to listen.
I think the key for us to capture our community is simply to say that the myths in our heads are a lie because they are. People cannot respond unless we talk about our faith with others.
Why couldn’t these people be quiet about who Jesus was in spite of the persecution? The answer is that the message of Jesus Christ is fantastic news. Do you believe that? One thing I discovered over time is that the longer that we are Christians, the more out of touch we are with how good the good news really is. The people who know that best are people who live without God in their lives, the most secular people–they are the ones who tend to be the most turned on. Do you know people like that? Maybe you came from a completely secular family and you heard the message and God touched your heart and changed you.
Some of these people are nuts and a little obnoxious because they realize what God has done for them. It’s like a light has come on, and they act as though the faith began with them. They look at us and ask why we are not more passionate about our faith. They challenge us because they have experienced what life is without God, and then when they experience God they know there is a difference.
Sometimes we become too tame. The phrase, “Familiarity breeds contempt” is so often right. In fact, you see this in Antioch. Who are the most responsive and the most passionate in the faith? It was not the religious Jews. In fact, they became a real obstacle to the Christian faith. They were not far from the light of God, and so they never really experienced what separation from God is like. You see this in the disciples who were leading the church at that time. These Christian people are sharing the good news, not with religious people, but with Gentiles, people who had never heard this before, people who were very secular. The Christians in Jerusalem sent Barnabas down to Antioch to find out what the Christians there were doing.
Another observation about this text is who shared the faith? It wasn’t the professional evangelists. It was simple, average Christians who shared in their workplaces and in their lives about what God had done for them, and people listened. They went outside the four walls of the church and talked not to religious Jews, but to irreligious people, people who were apart from God. That’s our challenge. If we want to capture the heart of the community, we need the conviction that these people had. That conviction is that people need Jesus Christ.
From the outside, I’m sure we would have concluded that these people had every material desire met. They had every sensual desire met. They had every religious desire met, and yet they were empty because they did not know Jesus Christ. Do we have the conviction and belief that without Jesus Christ, nothing satisfies?
I find it funny that as Christians we can get all excited about a new restaurant. We can tell our friends and neighbors to eat at this wonderful bistro. We get excited about a movie or a sports team. How is it that we can’t talk about our great Savior, a wonderful God? A restaurant will only satisfy you for about three hours. It will produce a good meal, but you will get hungry again. Jesus Christ will satisfy you for eternity. Why aren’t we bragging about him?
As a church, we spend $400,000 to provide the ministry of the word here. Who knows about it? Who in our community outside our four walls knows what we are doing here? Nobody. What are we to our community? We are a little church in the middle of a graveyard. Isn’t that a wonderful image? Why are we keeping this to ourselves? That’s not what the church in Antioch did. They couldn’t help but tell people and invite them in. Shouldn’t we do the same.
Look across the road. People are passionate about hammers. The hardware store across the road has a huge sign that says “Come in and buy hammers.” They are passionate about a massage. “Come in and have a massage.” They are excited about playing billiards, so they promote it on big boards. Yet, we have the good news of Jesus Christ, the most fantastic news of all, and what do we do? We have a wooden sign that people can’t read because the print is too small. There’s something wrong with that–that hammers get more promotion than Jesus Christ and his work.
The second thing I notice in this text that helped people capture the heart of their community was that they lived grace in practical ways through random acts of kindness. You see this as a pattern in the New Testament church. There was a predicted famine that hadn’t yet happened, and yet the believers in Antioch were so burdened for others that they took up a collection and sent it to strangers, people they never knew, people who didn’t do anything to deserve an act of kindness. The church in Antioch expressed grace. Grace means “unmerited favor.” When they saw a need, they met it.
Have you ever experienced grace from a stranger? Maybe you were driving down the road and your tire went flat. Someone who didn’t know you helped you fix it, and you don’t know who they were. Have you ever experienced unmerited favor, a good deed done by a stranger only because they loved people.
I was on a mission in Israel for one summer. I had an unspoken burden in my mind. I was going to fly back to New York, but I didn’t have enough money to get from the airport to the bus terminal, and I didn’t have a ticket to get from the bus terminal back to Pennsylvania. A friend had promised me that the ticket would be there by the time I arrived, but my problem was that I didn’t have the fare to get from the airport to the bus terminal, and I didn’t tell anyone. I am looking at Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, and a stranger came up to me and said, “God spoke to my heart, and I want you to have this.” She handed me $20 and then left. I had never met this person before. God told her my need and she met it, and I will never forget it. That’s grace, unmerited favor.
A new church in Cincinnati decided to see if grace would work in our society. A pastor started a church with 35 people. They would reach out into their community with acts of kindness. They were stupid things that couldn’t possibly work. They would wash people’s windshields and tell them that God loved them. They would offer free car washes to the community. People tried to pay, but they refused, saying that God loved them and they wanted to express that love to other people. They handed out soft drinks on hot days. They handed out hot coffee on cold nights. They wrapped Christmas gifts at the mall for free. They raked leaves in their neighborhood. They gave away free newspapers. They had birthday parties at nursing homes, and they offered tutoring afer school. They bagged groceries at the local grocery store. They had reduced gas prices at the local gas station and paid the difference. They did hundreds of different things, and they wrote a book with hundreds of ideas that were practical hands-on acts of kindness.
You know what happened? After experiencing this grace, people began to ask why. They answered by saying that they had experienced God’s goodness in their lives and wanted to share it with others. People were drawn to the church which went from a membership of 35 to 3,000 to 6,000 in 20 years, all because they applied Acts 11 and gave people an experience of grace. I wonder what would happen in our community if White Clay with 350 people in attendance were turned loose in our community and once a month as a church we did an act of unmerited kindness to our neighbors. I wonder if we would still be a little church in the middle of a graveyard, or if we would become a church who loves people and who caused them to experience the grace of God in their lives.
Antioch did two things. They spoke about Jesus Christ in their lives, and they expressed his love through simple acts of kindness. I think this would touch people’s lives today. One thing I like about this act-of-kindness movement is that it is simple, it is do-able, it helps those who are shy in talking about their faith because instead of talking about Jesus Christ you show others his love, it is an expression of grace, it is nonthreatening, it causes people to ask, and it is limited. Imagine what God can do through a church that turns from being focused inward to being focused outward to serve their community. God can only imagine it. Let’s dream as well.
Let’s pray
