Note: Although my outline is very similar to a great sermon by Medford Foskey on this same passage, I only read his sermon after completing most of the work on mine. However I did "steal" his opening story.
“It is a sin to be good if God has called us to be great.”
That is the first line from Thom Rainer’s book “Breakout Churches”. When I first read those words several months ago, I knew that God was speaking those very words to me and to our church. Let’s read that statement out loud together:
“It is a sin to be good if God has called us to be great.”
I think that we have a good church, but I also think that God wants us to be a great church. So the question is, “how do we get there?”
Rainer’s book is based on research that was done on 13 churches throughout the United States who met some very strict criteria that Rainer and his staff established in order to identify churches that had gone from good to great. And in his book Rainer provides some very helpful information that can help a church move from good to great. In fact, our Elders have been reading the book and using it as a tool as we make some long range plans for our church.
But if we really want to have a great church, it seems to me that we need to see how God builds great churches and then join Him in the work He is already doing. So for the next seven weeks, we’re going to go on a journey with the early church and see how God was working then and see if we can learn some principles that will help our church go from good to great. We’ll look at the first four chapters of Acts and see how we can join God in the work of building a great church.
This week I read a story about a group of travelers were being made to wait on their airplane, which was late due to another flight being canceled. The crowd looked horrible and impatient as the time went on and on. Finally an angry passenger pushed his way to the front of the line, slammed his ticket down and said, “I must be on this flight now and I must be in first class”. The flight attendant, trying to be nice said, “Sir, we will get to you as soon as possible, but you must wait in line like everyone else”. He quickly said, “Ma’am, do you have any idea who I am?”
Without hesitation, she smiled, picked up her intercom microphone and said, “We have a passenger here at the gate WHO DOES NOT KNOW WHO HE IS. If anyone can help him find his identity, please come to gate 17.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m not very good at waiting. And I’m convinced that God has a sense of humor because He has this way of always putting me in a place where I have to wait.
I go to the grocery store and inevitably end up behind the guy that can’t count and has 32 items in the 10 items or less express lane. Or even worse, the guy has 11 items – just one over the limit, but of course the “10 item or less” sign doesn’t apply to him. And then, when the cashier totals up his order, he pulls out his check book and starts to write his check even though the sign he didn’t read also reads, “No Checks.”
And then there is driving. I can’t believe all the idiots on the road. You know the ones I mean. The snowbirds driving in the left lane 10 miles an hour slower than the speed limit. The cars in the left turn lane not paying attention and leaving too big of a gap between them and the car in front of them so I end up having to wait for the next light. The people talking on their cell phones, totally oblivious to all the traffic around them.
And then when I’m hungry and in a hurry, the lady ahead of me in the drive-through can’t make up her mind what she wants to order. And when she does finally order and pull up to the window, she has to search her purse for the money to pay for the order. And then, of course, she has to hand out all 5 Happy Meals to the kids in the back seat before she can pull away from the window.
Aah, I see from your reactions that I’m not the only one who hates to wait. But as we begin our study of Acts this morning, we’ll discover that was the very first thing Jesus called on his followers to do as they began to build a great church. He commanded them to wait.
Read Acts 1:1-11
Luke records for us that Jesus spent 40 days with his followers after His resurrection. On one of those occasions – we don’t know exactly when – He commanded his followers to wait for the Holy Spirit that He had previously spoken about. His followers were apparently a lot like us – they weren’t really into waiting. They were ready for Jesus to usher in His earthly kingdom right then. But Jesus told them to wait, because He knew what they would soon receive would be worth the wait.
For us, the wait isn’t always worth it. Have you ever wanted something so bad, but you had to wait to get it? And then once you got it, somehow it didn’t really live up to your expectations. It wasn’t worth the wait. But when Jesus told his followers to stay in Jerusalem and wait for the Holy Spirit, it was definitely going to be worth the wait.
WHY IS IT WORTH WAITING ON GOD?
• Because we receive His power
Jesus’ disciples were ready to go out and do whatever Jesus commanded them to do. But Jesus knew that if they tried to do that in their own power, they would fail miserably. So he told them to wait for the Holy Spirit. He knew that they would need the power of the Holy Spirit in order to be able to be witnesses for Jesus in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and points beyond.
I believe that in our journey from good to great, our church is in the midst of one of those times when God is telling us to wait. He wants us to wait on His power so that we will be adequately equipped to do the work He calls us to do.
As believers in Jesus Christ, we no longer have to wait for the Holy Spirit Himself. The Bible is very clear that at the very moment we receive Jesus as Lord and Savior, we also get the Holy Spirit in our lives. In Ephesians Paul describes the Holy Spirit as a guarantee of our salvation and he makes it very clear that every believer has the Holy Spirit in his or her life. But there is a sense in which we need to wait on the power that the Holy Spirit wants to bring into our lives in order to enable us to do the work God calls us to do. Many times in Scripture, the Holy Spirit is connected with the concept of having power. For instance, here is what Paul wrote to the Ephesian church:
I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us…
Ephesians 3:16-20 (NIV)
Notice the three times in that passage that Paul uses the word “power”. You might even want to underline that word. And what is the source of that power? God’s power comes “through his Spirit”. So it’s worth waiting on God because when we wait, we get God’s power
I don’t know about you, but when someone talks to me about waiting, I get this idea that I just sit around until something happens. But I’ve found that throughout Scripture, waiting usually is much more dynamic – it involves action on the part of the one who is waiting. And that is certainly true for this passage. The rest of Chapter 1 is an account of what Jesus’ followers did while they were waiting for the power of the Holy Spirit to come upon them. As I look at these verses, it seems to me that there were three main things that these disciples did while they waited. And I’m convinced that we ought to be doing these same things while we’re waiting on God
HOW TO WAIT ON GOD:
Read vv. 12-14.
1. Persist in prayer (vv. 12-14)
Notice very carefully what Luke writes. Not only were the believers praying, but they were doing it constantly. That shouldn’t be a great surprise to us, because Jesus had taught them many times about the importance of persistence in prayer.
For instance in Luke 18, Jesus told the parable of the persistent widow:
Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up.
Luke 18:1 (NIV)
But maybe even more importantly Jesus demonstrated the need for persistent prayer in His own life. Even though He was fully God, Jesus often waited on His Father. And while He waited, He prayed. There were times He would pray all night before an important task or decision. Other times, he would get up before dawn to pray. While Jesus waited, He persisted in prayer.
Paul did the same thing. Just look at his letters and see how often he writes about his persistent prayers for the churches to which he was writing. And in several places, Paul also commanded his readers to be persistent in their prayers. Perhaps the most familiar such passage for many of us is this one:
pray continually
1 Thessalonians 5:17 (NIV)
Since I believe that our church is currently in a time when we are waiting on God we need to be persistent in our prayers.
One of the things that really impressed me when I first came to Thornydale Family Church is that the church leaders here were committed to praying. And I really believe that is still the case. Each week Denny and I meet on Wednesday mornings. We drink some coffee and do some planning, but I think the most important thing we do is that we pray. We pray for the needs of the people in our church. But we also spend quite a bit of time praying for God to reveal Himself, His purposes and His ways for our church. We ask Him to guide us as we decide what to teach and preach. On Thursday mornings, a group of our Elders meet to pray. And once again, we pray for God’s guidance and His power. And when our Elders meet periodically, we also spend a good deal of our time praying.
But it’s not just the leaders of our church who need to be praying. We need every one of us here this morning to be persistent in our prayers – specifically our prayers asking God to reveal His plans for our church and to pour in His power to enable us to accomplish those plans. This morning, I want to challenge all of us to join in that effort. I’d like to ask all of us to pray hours a day for our church, but I understand that’s not very realistic. So I’m going to ask that everyone would devote just 10 minutes each week to pray specifically for God’s guidance and power for our church. Some of you may do that in one ten minute session. Or you might choose to pray for 2 minutes at a time 5 days a week. I know that’s not much, but I’m convinced that if we’ll all do that, even that little bit of prayer time will make a tremendous difference in our journey from good to great.
And just one word of encouragement to some of our senior citizens. From time to time some of you have come up to me and said, “I’d like to do more to serve in this church, but I just can’t do some of the things I used to do.” I’ve got news for you, most of us can’t do many of the things we used to do. Believe it or not, I once had a 30” vertical leap, but now it’s more like 30 millimeters. But I know one thing you can do, and that is pray. And we need some prayer warriors who will be committed to praying for God’s guidance and power for our church. In fact, I’m convinced that is one of the greatest needs of our church and that your prayers can be the most important factor in whether or not we reach our goal of being a great church.
So the first thing we need to do as we wait on God is to persist in prayer.
Read vv. 15-20.
2. Study the Scriptures (vv. 15-20)
These disciples had all been very close to Judas and they must have been devastated when he betrayed Jesus. Sensing that, Peter opened up the Scriptures and he explained that Scriptures had predicted what Judas would do hundreds of years before it ever happened. He used the Bible to help the others understand that Judas had been used by God to fulfill His plans. But perhaps even more importantly, Peter used the Scriptures as a guide for what the disciples needed to do next.
On our journey from good to great, there are a lot of tools available to us. I’m thankful for books written by Thom Rainer and other Christian authors who have done research that can help us in that journey. Those types of books can really be helpful in understanding our culture and in identifying principles and methods that are most effective in reaching a lost world around us. But those other books can never become a substitute for the guidance we find in God’s Word.
The Psalmist understood the importance of God’s Word when he wrote:
By your words I can see where I’m going; they throw a beam of light on my dark path…I inherited your book on living; it’s mine forever - what a gift! And how happy it makes me! I concentrate on doing exactly what you say - I always have and always will.
Psalm 119:105, 111,112 (Message)
God’s Word is indeed his “book on living” and if we want to go from good to great then we need to diligently study the principles and guidelines given to us there. We need to let His Word be the beam of light that illuminates our path and shows us where to go and what to do. That’s the reason we’re going to spend these next 7 weeks in the Book of Acts. We need to understand how God was working when He built the early church – how He used a small group of people to reach thousands in just a short period of time. We need to see how that small group of believers – not too many more than we have in this building right now – responded to God and joined Him in His work. And then we need to take and apply those principles to today’s culture so that we can be effective in reaching others, too.
But once again, the study of the Scriptures is not something that should be limited to just our church leaders. So I want to challenge all of us to spend time in God’s Word on a regular basis, looking and searching for those principles that God wants us to apply as a church. As you study your Bible, I want to encourage you to share what you find there with Denny or me or with one of our Elders. I want to encourage you to join one of our Bible studies, where you can participate in a discussion about God’s Word and what it means for us as a body.
As we wait on God, we need to persist in prayer and we need to study the Scriptures.
Read vv. 21-26
3. Proceed with preparations (vv. 21-26)
The disciples knew that once they received the Holy Spirit they were going to have a lot of hard work to do. And now they were one man short due to Judas’ betrayal. But rather than waiting to select a replacement, they went ahead and did what they knew God had already called them to do based on what they had just learned from the Scriptures. They proceeded with the preparations that needed to happen if they were going to be ready to carry out God’s plans for them.
That’s the same thing David had done over 1,000 years earlier. David wanted to build a temple for God, but when God told him he would not be the one to do it, David still went on with the preparations that would allow his son Solomon to build the Temple. The account in 1 Chronicles 28 and 29 reveals that God had revealed to David detailed plans for the building of the Temple and how the Temple was to be run once it was built. David passed those plans on to Solomon. In addition, David gave of his own personal wealth to make sure that all the resources needed to build the Temple would be on hand one day when Solomon was ready to build.
For the last month or so, we’ve been trying to do exactly this as a church. Our ministry teams have been meeting and doing some planning for this next year. We’ve been making preparations by making sure that we have some plans and resources in place so that we’re prepared to do whatever God has in store for us. Tonight, all of our teams will meet together and lay out some basic plans for the next year. But I view that as just some preparation for what God has in store for us for years to come.
Some of the preparations that we make to day may very well just be laying the foundation for the way that God will use this church even after most of us are no longer around. Many of us here today may be the “Davids” that are just making the preparations that will allow our sons and daughters to carry out God’s purposes and plans. But while we wait, we must continue to be diligent and to make the preparations that God leads us to make.
Several centuries ago, a Japanese emperor commissioned an artist to paint a bird. A number of months passed, then several years, and still no painting was brought to the palace. Finally the emperor became so exasperated that he went to the artist’s home to demand an explanation. Instead of making excuses, the artist placed a blank canvas on the easel. In less than an hour, he completed a painting that was to become a brilliant masterpiece. When the emperor asked the reason for the delay, the artist showed him armloads of drawings of feathers, wings, heads, and feet. Then he explained that all of this research and study had been necessary before he could complete the painting.
Right now we’re doing the research and study that will one day allow God to use us as His tools while He completes the painting.
Maybe the reason most of us don’t like to wait is that we don’t have a Biblical view of waiting. But as we’ve seen, waiting on God is not just sitting around, twiddling our thumbs. Instead, it is active, requiring that we persist in prayer, study the Scriptures and proceed with preparations. That’s how we get started on the road to greatness.
“It is a sin to be good if God has called us to be great.”
