The church we want to be

Good morning. Let’s pray:

Heavenly Father, thank you for your living Word, and for the gift of your Holy Spirit who lives among us and in us. Speak to us, we pray, through your Word, change this church, and change us by it. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

This slow process of coming out of lockdown that we’re stopping and starting our way through does have one advantage. It gives us a good opportunity to stand back and think afresh about what the life of our church should look like. What kind of church does God want us to be? There is so much that’s tremendously encouraging about this church, JPC. And we thank God for that, because anything and everything that’s good about this church is his doing, by the work of his Spirit. However, it also remains true that we’re a long way from what God wants us to be. Of that I’m sure. This morning in our series on ‘Seven weeks that changed the world’ from the early chapters of the Book of Acts we come to 2.42. It says this:

And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

But let’s back up for a moment. Where have we got to so far? The risen Jesus has commissioned the disciples with the words (from Acts 1.8):

“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

He’s been taken up to heaven to rule all things at the right hand of his Father. He has poured out his Spirit on the disciples on the Day of Pentecost. Peter, full of the Holy Spirit, has stood up and proclaimed Christ to the crowd. Many of them were cut to the heart and responded with repentance and faith. So, Acts 2.41 (just before our passage starts):

So those who received [Peter’s] word were baptised, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.

They had started the day with 120. Now suddenly there’s a church of over 3000 and growing. For us, it’s not likely happen overnight – but we do need to pray that we’ll see that kind of thing happen in this church, and in other churches in this region and up and down this land. Let’s be absolutely clear, we cannot make that happen. That, or anything like it, can only happen through a profound and widespread work of the Holy Spirit, and through a church that is evidently full of the Holy Spirit, as this new church was in Acts 2. And here in these verses at the end of Acts 2 there’s a pattern of church life that we need to see among us as well. This is not a blueprint. Some of the detail is specific to that time and place and not relevant to us. But there are key characteristics of this early church that we want to be true of us. Just here in Acts 2.42 there are three. What kind of church do we want to be?

1. We want to be a church that loves the Bible, wholeheartedly learning from and living out its teaching

Look at the start of Acts 2.42:

And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching…

How do I get from that to the Bible as a whole? The New Testament (the post-coming-of-Jesus part of the Bible) was either written by or directly reflects the teaching of the apostles. Both the apostles and also Jesus himself teach us to love the Old Testament as God’s very word. So if we devote ourselves to the apostle’s teaching, we inevitably devote ourselves to the teaching of the whole Bible. The teaching of the apostles, remember, was unique. They were not like any other Christian teachers. Why? Because they were divinely commissioned eyewitnesses and interpreters of what they saw and heard. This early church got the point. The apostles had seen and heard Jesus. Jesus is God made flesh. Through the testimony of the apostles we are able to encounter God in Christ. There is no other way to do that than through the Bible’s teaching. That teaching might come to us in the first instance through the words of someone else, just as you are now listening to me talking about what the Bible says, but everything a Christian teacher says must be checked constantly against the Bible itself.

Somebody once told me that one of reasons he loves to spend a good deal of time reading the Bible is that he “can make sure that what you guys tell us is true”. To my mind, that’s great. If what I teach is not in line with the Bible, I want to know about it, because if it isn’t, it’s utterly powerless. What’s meant by saying that the church was ‘devoted’ to the apostles teaching? Two things, I think: First, self-motivation. They weren’t coerced from the outside to pay attention to the apostles. They didn’t just do it out of duty. They did it out of desire. They wanted to learn from them. You can imagine them saying: “Tell us again. Tell us more. What did Jesus say? What did he do? Why did that happen?” A Spirit-filled church is marked by that self-motivated hunger for the Bible’s teaching. Secondly, that devotion meant not just self-motivation but continuation, perseverance, endurance. It wasn’t there for a day or two and then gone. The hunger never left them.

The nature of an individual Christian’s hunger for the Bible inevitably changes. In the early years you’re often hearing and learning totally new things. After a while, you may be going over old ground. And yet it’s always new, because the Spirit of God who is speaking it is living and active, and because the circumstances of our lives in which we hear it are always changing. We need to hear old truths in new ways. But as for an individual, so for a church – it’s all too easy for the central place of the Bible to slip or be lost entirely. In JPC’s history there was a long period in the last century when that was sadly so. We need to be vigilant all the time. The Bible is like food for the church. If we don’t get enough of it, and digest it (internalise it) properly, then we starve spiritually and ultimately we die. The Bible is like light in the darkness. If we don’t use it and pay attention to what it shows us, we lose our way and go wrong. The Bible is like seed. Without it, we can have the most wonderfully prepared farm full of beautifully weeded, ploughed and fertilised fields. But not a thing of worth will come up. There will be no life and no growth. Dig under the surface of every ministry of JPC, and we must find Bible input at the core of it. And that Bible teaching must not just be for learning. It must be for living. We want to be a church that loves the Bible, wholeheartedly learning from and living out its teaching.

2. We want to be a church of close fellowship, showing through warm hospitality

I’m referring here to the middle part of Acts 2.42:

They devoted themselves to…the fellowship, to the breaking of bread…

What is this fellowship they were devoted to? For a start, it was grounded in their fellowship with God himself – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So the apostle John says in 1 John 1.3:

…that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.

And in 2 Corinthians 13.14 the apostle Paul prays:

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

So what creates the bonds of fellowship between believers is that we’re all united with God through faith in Christ. And I think we can understand the nature of fellowship better, too, if we think about some of the language that the Bible uses to describe how we relate to one another. We are members of one family – the family of God, with God as our Father. So we are brothers and sisters. We can’t and don’t choose one another. And the link we have isn’t created by friendship or working together or however else we get to know one another. We are closely related to one another in Christ. Nothing can change that. If we’re not getting on, that doesn’t change the fact that we’re brothers and sisters.

Put another way, as the Bible does, we are members of one body – the body of Christ. Some of us are feet, some hands, some no doubt internal organs – though I would hesitate to say who. But we belong together, and if we’re all playing our part in a healthy way, we function well together. God combines us just as we need to be combined so he can use us to do what he wants us to do.

Put yet another way, we are fellow soldiers in an army – God’s army. At their best, close-knit military units display great cohesion and mutual commitment. I read about the battle for the island of Iwo Jima in the Pacific during the Second World War. One battle-hardened 25-year-old Marine sergeant called Mike Strank was the leader of a unit that was to be on the front line of the planned lethally dangerous amphibious landing. He was noticed by his superior officers and was offered a promotion that would have taken him out of the front line to relative safety. He refused the promotion, saying that he’d promised to his men that he would be alongside them during the landings and he wasn’t going to let them down. He did land with them, and later in the battle he was killed. He had predicted he would be. What Mike Strank demonstrated is an illustration of the kind of devotion to fellowship that the Holy Spirit creates in his church. We need to pray for that. We want a church that exhibits the same kind of devotion to fellowship.

As with the church’s love of the Bible, it will be a self-motivated and enduring devotion. Perseverance is needed because devoted fellowship isn’t always easy, any more than devotion to the members of your family is always easy. We can be hard work, can’t we? But there can be no giving up. We want to be a church marked by unfailing love. One important element of the fellowship of the early church was what Luke calls ‘the breaking of bread’. That points to two things. First, the importance of food – of hospitality centred around the sharing of food. And secondly, the importance of the Lord’s Supper. There is almost certainly some reference to that here. The apostle Paul says about the Lord’s Supper (or Holy Communion as we also call it) – this is 1 Corinthians 11.26:

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

In other words, a regular sharing in the Lord’s Supper, according to Jesus’ command before he died, is something the Holy Spirit uses to make sure that we keep the Gospel right at the heart of our fellowship. We won’t be able to forget the cross and the second coming of Christ. We’ve been doing that online during these pandemic months. God-willing we’ll be back to doing that in-person before long. So, in the church we want, there will vital roles for small groups, and ministry teams, and food, and the Lord’s Supper. We want to be a church marked by close fellowship, showing through warm hospitality.

3. We want to be a church that prays

Back to Acts 2.42 again, which says:

They devoted themselves to…the prayers.

The Holy Spirit within us, combined with devotion to the apostles’ teaching gives rise to constant communication in the throne room of our heavenly Father. Do we rejoice in all he’s done for us in Jesus? Then we should be telling him, again and again. Do we need something, for ourselves or for others? Then we know that he is the one who provides, so we go to him with our request. And we don’t let up until either we have what we need, or God has changed our understanding of what we really do need. Dig under the surface of every ministry of JPC, and every small group, and every individual life, and we must find prayer at the core of it.

So there’s the beginning of a pattern of the church we want to be – the church God wants us to be. There’ll be more in the weeks ahead, as work our way through the inspiring vision of church life in these verses. Remember, as I finish, that there’s no place for what we might call ‘ecclesiastical sinless perfectionism’. In other words, there never was and there never will be a perfect church. What happens in Acts 5 with Ananias and Sapphira makes it crystal clear that this early church was far from perfect. But there is a direction that we need to go in. And let’s be crying to God that he’ll take us in that direction faster and faster. Let’s pray:

Heavenly Father, we praise you that you have called us by your grace into your family. Please Lord, be powerfully and constantly at work among us, making us into the church you want us to be – loving your Word, loving one another, loving you, and pouring out our hearts to you. Give us, we pray, more and more of your Holy Spirit, that these things will become ever more true of us. For the honour and glory of your name. Amen.