Sermon of the Month - June 2010
Community: Equipped
Introduction
Acts 2:42-47: not just the Jersualem church, the first Christian church, but the way Luke shows it in this passage it is the way church should be. So that is what we are going to look at, this morning. And for Hinckley Baptist Church, this is something vital. When we looked at The Purpose Driven Life last year, out of the five purposes that Rick Warren talks about as vital in the life of the church, two of them, evangelism and discipleship, are our weak points here at HBC. We need to strengthen our work in evangelism. And that is going to mean more than Pathways, because Pathways is mainly our social action, it’s our major means of expressing love for our neighbour. We’ve done some work with Alpha, and that’s helped people in the past. Maybe it will help again,. Or maybe it’s run its course – but things like Alpha only help if as a fellowship we get fully behind them, and bring along the people who might be open to Jesus. We’ve made a new start with Captiv8, and God is blessing that. But Captiv8 is deliberately set up to help a certain slice of society, the people for whom church as we normally do it doesn’t help. So it can only provide part of our answer. Evangelism: we have hardly scratched the surface as a church. And we must return to it as a church, to see how we can move on from our current position, which is that most new people come come to the church only if they invite themselves. We need to have more of what’s sometimes called ‘gossipping the gospel’ – ordinary members of HBC sharing aspects of our faith in an infectious and encouraging way.
But today we move on to discipleship. It’s not that there aren’t good ideas about discipleship here, but that we need to choose one good way of doing discipleship and actually do it: do it consistently in such a way that the members of the church no longer feel vague and unsure about the faith, unsure whether they are Christians, unsure what being a Christian is, unsure about how Christians live, what we believe, how we get the strength to live out our faith, how the faith should shape our lives, what is sometimes called our spiritiuality, and what an earlier century would have called holy living, and how we share that faith individually and together.
What is this discipleship? What are we missing? What are the foundation stones, that we need to put in place, and invite everyone in the church to be part of?
Above all it is Jesus, of course. In Colossians 2:6-7, Paul says: So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. Acts 2:42-47 spells out just how we can be rooted and built up in Christ, how we can be strengthened in the faith, and overflowing in our faith with thankfulness to our Lord and God.
There is so much in this passage, that we can open it up in many different ways. This morning, I am going to take four headlines from it, that show us how we might grow in our discipleship, in our faith and life as Christians.
1. Inner Growth
The first church, and the ideal church shows personal growth in the lives of the members of the church. Have you grown as a Christian in the last year? How have you grown as a Christian in the last year? There should be a good answer to that. If there isn’t, then you know that you are in need of something that helps you get a more positive answer instead.
Acts 2:42: They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of prayer and to prayer. If you want to grow as a Christian, your growth will come as you have the same experience. That’s how the first church grew. What does that mean? Four things:
a) the apostle’s teaching. They had the apostles, we have their teaching in the Bible, in the New Testament. If you want to grow personally as a Christian, you need to gain regular access to receiving this teaching. In practice this comes in a variety of ways: by you reading the Bible, perhaps with notes, to help you apply them; by sharing in a life group, by receving teaching through sermons in the morning and/or evening services. And through reading books that help strengthen your faith. If we let the apostles’ teaching guide our lives then we will be secure in the truth of the gospel. If we hope to get this teaching by remote control, our hold on the faith will be vague and insecure.
b) Fellowship – this is the evocative and powerful word koinwnia (koinonia) in the Greek. It has several meanings. Here the sense of everyday sharing together is top. We need to share our lives together, supporting and caring, interested in and helping each other.
c) Communion – the breaking of bread. That’s another side of koinwnia. This expresses our unity in Christ: Because there is one loaf, we who are many, are one body, for we are all partakers of the one loaf. Communion is a prophetic act, declaring our unity in Christ.
d) Prayer. Here the context of of shared prayer. The Bible teaches that we should spend time on our own in personal preayer with God. But it also teaches here that we should pray together. That’s another side of koinwnia. Our togetherness in Christ includes common shared prayer. There are of course 100 ways and more praying together. But we need to do it, not just talk about it. God doesn’t mind how we pray. But he does mind that we pray.
That’s inward growth, a kind of horizontal growth
2. Upward Growth
Acts 2:43: Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonder and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. If inner growth is horizontal, this is vertical. Here we look upwards: Set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God (Colossians 3:1).
There was a sense of awe. That comes as we meet God. If you go to church, and we simply meet each other, it can be nice. We can experience a degree of fellowship. But if we meet God, if God meets us, then we have a sense of awe.
When did you last meet God? When did God last meet you? When did that last happen in a church service?
We confuse meeting God with singing our favourite music. It’s not the same. We confuse meeting God with enjoying the service. It’s not the same. The young Spurgeon went to a different church once, he went to a boring service, and heard a useless preacher. The preacher was so bad that he almost forgot everything he was going to say, so he ended up just repeating his text again and again. But God used that uselesness, and spoke to Spurgeon through that repeated verse. ‘Yes what are you going to do about that, young man?’ And Spurgeon was converted, he accepted Christ as his Saviour. He became a Christian, the great preacher became a Christian through a rubbish sermon. But God was there! I don’t know why. Maybe several church members took time out to pray before hand. If they had they might have thought God hadn’t answered their prayer. But he did.
We need many more occasions when God turns up in power and we are in awe. The first Christians were in awe in Jerusalem and they were in awe of God. Pray that we might meet God and that God might meet us today. It can happen, it will happen, as we turn to God with passion in prayer.
The apostles did amazing miracles. There were healings. Healings did not cease when Jesus ascended to heaven. He blessed his followers with the Holy Spirit, and awesome things happened in the church. Pray for the awesome God to change lives today. Pray for him to change your life today.
3. Downward Growth
I’m going to call the third side downward growth: the faith gets deep down into our lives and changes the way we act. Acts 2:44-45: All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods they gave to everyone as he had need. This was the favourite verse in the Bible of Bede, the monk of Northumbria who wrote the first history of the English church and people. It was his inspiration to give all to his fellow Christians. Later, in the 12th century, Francis of Assissi started life as a comparatively rich man, until Christ challenged him to share his wealth, to give it up for others, and to share his all with others. For him the words of Jesus inpired: Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me. This is radical stuff. But twelfth century Europe was fed up with surface religion and surface faith. Many, many heard and accepted the radical call to give up their wealth and share it.
This is the ultimate bond of friendship – to give up individual wealth, whether material or whatever, and share it. Many of our TV programmes touch this base. The programme Friends – yes I know it plays the tensions between friends for comic value, but the bottom line is friends, people who will value and befriend us. The crew of the Starship Enterprise, they give up all to support each other. And in the Bible we see this for real. In the Old Testament with David and Jonathan, and in the New with Barnabas that great encourager, friend to Paul of course, but earlier on a friend to all as his did just what this text talks of – he gave his wealth for the common good.
Spiritual growth is not just a matter of prayer and church, nor only sharing our faith in word, it is also action, it is the changed lives of people living out the faith in practice. Jesus acted like this and he calls us to act like this. When I was hungry, thirsty, in need of clothing, pastoral care, a prison visit, you acted to help me. We can act to help others. Here in HBC [Hinckley Baptist Church] our major context for this is Pathways. It won’t be the only one. Some of you may feel challenged by the Lord to act to support Christians who face persecution, in countries like Iran, North Korea and so on. The Barnabas Trust seeks to provide support and encouragement to such vulnerable Christians today. Maybe you will feel called to take the prison visit side literally. You can do so through this Barnabas Trust, or in a different way through Amnesty International. Or you can do it locally. Visitng people in one of our local prisons – in Leicester, or in Glen Parva. In my previous church, one lady felt very strongly called to this ministry, and went visiting to Glen Parva, working with the Chaplaincy team, in visiting and in providing Alpha courses and other services for the inmates in that Young Offenders Institution. There are many ways in which our faith in Christ can and should turn practical. But we need to hear the challenge of Christ for each of us, personally, and follow it.
4. Outward Growth
Here we return to where I started: evangelism. The second half of Acts 2:47: And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. This reminds us that salvation is God’s act. But it also reminds us that people being saved is at the heart of the church.
You know we can overdo what we humans are capable of in this matter. I remember the notice in the notice sheet I saw in an International Baptist church, “The revival planned for June 24th is now postponed to 10th September.” Crazy? Revival had just become a word for upbeat meeting with better songs or something. Revival is God’s work, and it is his timing.
But you know we can underplay what we humans can do. When William Carey told his hyperCalvinist friends they should care about the Hindus of India and set up a mission to seek to save them, he was told to sit down, ‘If God wanted to save the Hindus of India, he would have done so a long time ago without you.’ But Carey did not sit down, and millions of people are Christian today because he did not sit down. Yes we should plan for mission, we should prepare for mission. But above all we should pray. Since people being saved is a work of God’s Spirit, we can and should co-operate with what God shows us he wants to do, and above all we should pray. Not pray as a substitute for mission, but prayer as the bedrock and inspiration for mission.
Conclusion
For real, continuing growth in Christian faith and life, we need inward growth, upward growth, downward growth and outward growth.
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