Sermon Tone Analysis
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Acts – 6
Acts 2:42-47
Introduction
Have you ever gone back and looked at old pictures of yourself and your family?
It is an exercise in humility isn’t it!?
In many of them you look awkward.
The clothes aren’t fashionable anymore (though some things come back around).
The hair.
The glasses.
I know for me, I was never fashionable or cool, so it’s even worse decades later.
Well, there is a website called “Awkward Family Photos” that encourages people to submit weird and/or unflattering family pictures.
There are some gems there.
- Picture – 1 – Fed Up Parents
- Picture – 2 - Alf
- Picture – 3 – Blonde Fro
Every family has some pictures like this, don’t they?
Not exactly the most flattering.
That paint your family in a weird light.
They may not even represent your family at all.
Could give people the wrong impression.
In a sense, I think that many people have had that same experience with churches today.
They were involved in a church where things didn’t go right – where stuff maybe got weird.
As a result, they have this bad snapshot in their mind of what the church is like.
They have a picture in their mind of a church that’s always asking for money.
They are sensitive to it because they were in a church that burnt them financially and abused that topic.
Others have the picture of an old-fashioned church, one unwilling to do (or sing) anything new since 1923.
Still there are others who carry the snapshot of the legalistic church they grew up in.
It was always judging them.
If anything looked fun, it was forbidden.
Following Jesus was defined purely by rules you had to follow.
While a lot of people have those kinds of pictures in their minds about the church, none of them are the right picture of the church at all.
Those don’t really represent what the church ought to be.
We need to help them see a better picture.
And the only way to do that is by taking them to the Bible.
TS - In Acts 2, the Holy Spirit falls upon those first Christians and great miracles occur.
A crowd gathers, trying to figure out what is going on.
The Apostle Peter leverages that opportunity to preach a powerful sermon about who Jesus is and what Jesus has done.
The response is overwhelming.
3,000 people receive his word, repent of their sin of rejecting Christ, and respond in Christian baptism.
3,000 come up out of the waters of baptism, and the church explodes into existence.
We are now immediately told what those Christians immediately did on day one.
They give us a snapshot of what the Church should be, what the Church can be, what the Church must be.
Acts 2:41-47 - 41 So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.
42 And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.
43 And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles.
44 And all who believed were together and had all things in common.
45 And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.
46 And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts,47 praising God and having favor with all the people.
And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.
Sounds like a pretty great church, doesn’t it?
There is a part of me that wants to dig into the method behind it all.
How did they create an environment where such things happened?
How did they get this done?
What else were they doing that made such an impact in the world?
But…this text doesn’t focus on programs or preachers.
It focuses on people.
It tells us how the people in the church treated one another and what activities they participated in together.
Being a healthy church, the kind of church God desires in the world, does not begin with what we do, it begins with who we are.
God’s expectations on the church have little to do with programming and ministry events.
His expectations have to do with us.
Where we tend to be concerned more about activities, God is primarily concerned with who we are and the relationships between us.
So this isn’t an issue of what the church should do, but who the church should be.
And the Church in the book of Acts shows us exactly that.
4 Characteristics of the Church:
1. TRANSFORMATION
These believers lived lives that had been transformed by the Gospel message of who Jesus is and what Jesus has done.
V. 41 - 41 So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.
The people who formed the foundation of this new church were those who had just responded to Peter’s sermon.
They had been convicted by his words (meaning they were convicted by the truth of Scripture regarding Jesus’ identity).
They wanted to know how to respond to the Gospel.
Peter told them to repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of their sins and they would receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
They were obedient in that response.
But they knew they weren’t done.
They didn’t come up out of the water and walk away.
They knew something had fundamentally changed about them.
They knew they were to stay together and follow Jesus together.
So even on the very first day of following Jesus, there is this acknowledgment that Christianity is not a solitary endeavor.
We need each other.
We need to be with each other.
We have all been individually transformed by Jesus, forgiven of our sin, and gifted the Holy Spirit…yet we are better together.
If you could be a Christian on your own, they would have gotten out of the water and gone their own way.
They didn’t do that.
The Church is absolutely necessary.
Tim Chester - Church is not another ball for me to juggle but that which defines who I am and gives Christlike shape to my life… By becoming a Christian, I belong to God and I belong to my brothers and sisters.
It is not that I belong to God and then make a decision to join a local church.
My being in Christ means being in Christ with those others who are in Christ.
We can talk much about what it means to be the Church.
But we have to start here.
Being the Church means being part of the people whose lives have been transformed by Jesus.
This is not a social club.
This is not a civic organization.
This is not a religious business.
We are a group of people who have had…and continue to have…Christ change our lives.
As a church, we will celebrate decisions to follow Jesus.
We will applaud at baptisms.
When people come up out of the water, we will rejoice together.
But our responsibility does not stop there, it begins there!
That new Christian is now part of the family.
They are now part of us.
We come together to help each other continue in faithfully following Jesus.
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