What Does a Church Do? (Acts 2:42–47)
Notes
Transcript
Handout
Introduction
Introduction
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Good morning, church,
If you would turn your Bibles to Acts 2:41-47 as we bring our series on “What is a Church?” to an end.
When we first started this series, the first thing we addressed was the purpose of the church—We addressed: What is the goal or the end of the church? We don’t define what that purpose is—God does. He is the Creator of the Church, He is the Commissioner, He is the One who purchased the Church through the blood of His Son, He is the one who Empowers the Church with His Spirit.
And, as with everything that He has created in the universe, the purpose of all things—the birds flying overhead, the mountains to the east, the blob-fish, the northern lights, as much as I hate to say it—the mosquitos, mayflies, and giant spiders on Antelope Island—the billions of galaxies out there that we may never see with our own eyes, and, along with all of these, His Church, His redeemed people—the purpose of all things is to glorify God.
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.
For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.
And specifically, speaking of His redeemed people,
In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory.
Nothing that was made in the universe that exists that wasn’t made with this single purpose in mind: to glorify God.
And how do we glorify God?
Well, as we studied in the first week of this series, we can see through His Word that the purpose of the church can be summed up as this: “To glorify God. . .by making faithful disciples.”
Making faithful disciples—that is intentional language;
The church is specifically charged with glorifying God by sharing the gospel and making new disciples, but also equipping and sharpening those who are already disciples.
Some people would pin it in this nice alliterative way saying the purpose of the church is to:
- Exalt the Savior,
- Equip the Saints, and
- Evangelize the Sinner
We have been combining all these in a phrase we can remember:
- The church exists to “glorify God by making faithful disciples.”
Ok, now how to we do that. How do we “glorify God by making faithful disciples?”
In essence, the very practical question asked is “What do we do?” — “What does a church do?”
That’s what we hope to answer this morning. And, again, as with everything, we must go to the Word of God to find the answer. Let’s take a look at what the very first church did in Acts.
Context/Text
Context/Text
If we can recall, Christ just commissioned His disciples and ascended in to Heaven at the opening of the book of Acts. The disciples were commanded to wait for the coming of the HS who came and filled the believers in Acts 2, prompting them to tell of the mighty works of God in a variety of languages. Jews from all across the lands were there, witnessed the outpouring of the HS on the disciples, were amazed, and wondered what it all meant. Peter then preached to them the gospel from the Scriptures and called them to repent and be baptized. Let’s pick up there in the text starting at verse 38.
Acts 2:38–47 (ESV)
And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.”
Now here we begin our text this morning, how did the crowd respond? . . .it says that
. . .those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.
Pray
The first line of our text tells us how the crowds responded to the call of the gospel that Peter presented.
About 3k of them “received his word. . .were baptized. . .[and] were added” to the membership of the church.
This shows us the entry point for the formation of the first New Testament churches. This is what we talked about last week when describing the 2 qualifications, or the prerequisites, for members of our church, of any church.
Believe in the gospel/follower of Jesus
(included in that following Jesus) Believer’s baptism
That’s what we see in v. 41. The gospel was preached and those the Lord called received his word —that is, they accepted his message.
But, It didn’t stop there. They chose to publicly identify themselves with Christ’s body in His death, burial, and resurrection through baptism. Baptism follows acceptance. It is the outward display of the inward transformation that happened to these believers after receiving the word and trusting in Christ.
In this way, the text says, “there were added that day about three thousand souls.” Added to what? To their number. This shows a recognizable membership. They knew who was in and who was not. The church is open to minister to all people but it is exclusively formed around those who have followed the Lord and publicly confessed their faith through baptism.
This is why we have been talking so much about membership at North Davis.
For the health of the church, it is good that everyone in the church, including the pastors, knows who has committed to walk with each other in this journey—in this journey of seeking to glorify God together by making faithful disciples.
Now, it is evident that the narrative shifts in verse 42 from a description of particular events on a particular day to a general description of the inner life of this new Jerusalem church—what did it look like? What were they doing?
A variety of things (show graphic with these things):
Devoted to teaching
fellowship
breaking bread
prayers
met regularly together
gave to the needy
praised God
had favor with all the people
added to their number
India
India
We can sum these up into five main categories, which we will do in a minute, but first I want you to travel with me to India, where I served with the International Mission Board in West Bengal, particularly in Calcutta for two years.
show pic of India,
then of me there
My work was a Trainer. I had the privilege to lead five church planting trainings every month of pastors, evangelists, and church planters who were actively reaching the unreached peoples with the Good News of Jesus.
show pic of planters
These trainings were all outside the hub city of Calcutta in where I lived and all across the state. One training was as far as a 10+ hour overnight journey by ’sleeper’ train! We meet in a central location each time - a location to which the leaders would come from outside villages hours away, unreached villages that they were faithfully working in.
video of guys
another pic of planters, taking notes
The vision of our training was the fulfillment of Matthew 24:14
And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.
Believing in faith that the Lord will accomplish His purposes through His Church (Mt. 16:18), we sought to go to the unreached villages where there are no churches, to spread the seeds of the gospel (Mt. 13), and, through their receiving of His Word, to start new churches there.
This training gave them tools, support, and accountability to continue to earnestly finish the task given to us all by our Savior (Mt. 28:19).
As we studied how to go about the work of planting new churches, we covered much of what we have been covering here at North Davis the past couple weeks—that is, defining what is a church. Who is in a church and what does a church do.
To help us remember these things and share with others, we used what we called the “Handy Guide to a Healthy Church”—because we used our “hand” to remember it.
It went like this. To a healthy church there is/are
One Head — Christ
Two authorities — Word of God and the Spirit of God
Three servants — pastors, deacons, and (we can say members)
Four Marks of maturity — I’ll save us time on that one
and then
Five functions or, we could say, ministries of the church.
answering the question of what does a church do
We can base these in our passage this morning in Acts 2, summing all these things up into 5 ministries that the church carries out.
Show graphic with the 5 ministries.
Teaching/discipleship
Fellowship
Worship
Service
Evangelism/mission
Rick Warren, in his book The Purpose-Driven Church, showed us that we can also see these through the lens of The Great Commandment and The Great Commission.
And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
So, essentially, Love God and Love people.
1. Love God in worship
2. Love followers of Christ in fellowship
3. Love unbelievers in service.
And the others can be based in the Great Commission
Matthew 28:19–20 (ESV)
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. . .”
So, right there is the church’s ministry of...
4. Evangelism/Mission
5. Teaching/Discipleship
Through either of these lenses, we see clearly what the church is to do.
MPS
MPS
MPS: What Does the Church Do? We glorify God by making faithful disciples. . .through the ministries of teaching, fellowship, worship, service, and evangelism.
If you’re here as a guest and you don’t know Christ,
We are glad you’re here.
What I hope you see from this text and our time here together this morning is that we are not a perfect people, but we worship a perfect Savior. And He is worthy of all praise and worship. He is worthy of all of our lives. And the beautiful thing is we are not left alone. He has not only given us Himself, which is certainly enough, but He has given us His Church, this community that we can walk hand-in-hand with through joy and through trial.
Our hope is that you would know that you were also made to know the God who created you, who made a way for you to know Him through Jesus, and who invites you into this community.
(PAUSE)
Let’s look back at our main text.
Acts 2:42 (ESV)
And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.
Now some would take this transition verse as a summary in itself, that is fleshed out in verses 43–47 and some would believe this verse lays out the elements of what formal worship services looked like for the early Christians:
1. Teaching
2. Table fellowship
3. The Lord’s Supper (breaking of bread) and
4. Prayer
I think both are possible, but what is clear here is that the whole paragraph is summarizing what life looked like in this early church and how the disciples related to one another in a variety of contexts. I would say it is not simply telling us what happened when they gathered for what we might call ‘church’ or ‘the gathering’.
This text is a helpful reminder that we are not only the church on Sundays. We don’t cease to be the church when we leave this gathering. We are the church 24/7—this is who we are and this is what we do!
(PAUSE)
Teaching/Discipleship
Teaching/Discipleship
The first to note is that the early disciples “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching.”
The phrase “they devoted themselves” is one word in the Greek and normally means ‘to occupy oneself diligently with something’, ‘to pay persistent attention to’, ‘to hold fast to something’, or ‘continually to be in’ (it is used in the last sense in 2:46 as it is translated as “attending”—they were “continually attending” the temple together).
There is an ongoing nature here, indicating that it wasn’t just a once a week thing. They were holding fast to the teaching in the temple and in the homes, both serving as meeting places for them as a church.
For us, as believers in the 21st century, though the apostles are gone, their teaching remains for us in the form of the New Testament—and since they also accepted and taught the Old Testament—we believe together the Old and New Testaments serve as the Word of God meant for the ministry of teaching in and through the church.
The importance of this ministry of the church is shown throughout the New Testament.
Jesus Himself carried out the ministry of teaching as He traveled from place to place.
We call ourselves disciples of Christ, meaning learner.
He commissioned His disciples, including us, to make disciples, which as we saw a couple weeks ago, involves “teaching them to observe all that [Jesus has] commanded”.
And as we saw last week, the only qualification that was required of a pastor other than just being a mature believer was that he would be “able to teach” (1 Tim. 3:2).
Nathan, as a pastor of this church, and, if you affirm me to be one of your pastors, I are committed to the ministry of teaching. It is one of the main responsibilities of pastors as they are called to “equip the saints for the work of ministry” (Eph. 4:12). When Paul wrote to Timothy, a young pastor, he told him to “preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Tim. 4:2).
To another who was in the work of pastoral ministry, Titus, Paul would tell him that pastors should be able to “give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.” (Titus 1:9) and, in chapter 2, would tell him to “teach what accords with sound doctrine.” (2:1)
The ministry of teaching in the church begins with the preaching of the Word by the pastors, but it does not stop there. Paul would command, not the pastors, but all the believers to “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom” (Col. 3:16).
This is essential in our mutual discipleship of one another—to be devoted to teaching and reminding each other the Word of God. We want to follow the example of the early church in “being devoted” to the ministry of teaching in our church.
So, what does that look like practically at Redemption North Davis?
For starters, it means the pastors are held accountable to and supported in the exposition of the Bible as part of the weekly gathering. This is one of the commitments that you make to us as part of our covenant together—to hold us accountable to teaching sound doctrine.
We ought to be tethered to the text, not teaching our own ideas or hopping on our own hobby horses. We are to be devoted to the faithful teaching of the Word so as to equip the saints.
Another avenue we hope to introduce as a way to foster the ministry of teaching further in our church is through the Equipping Hour that we hope to start in January.
We plan to launch these Equip classes at 9am on Sundays, before our worship gathering at 10am, as a way to provide age-appropriate teaching for everyone in the church. We plan to have a nursery for the babies and toddlers much like we do during the worship gathering where we have some hands on learning through the Gospel Project curriculum; we plan to launch an Equip class for our elementary kids, lower and upper; and we plan to have an adult Equip class as well. (Our middle and high school students will join the adults for this time, considering they already meet on Sunday nights for equipping and fellowship.)
If you desire more equipping, make every effort to join us for these times.
I also want to take this opportunity to say that if you feel that you have been gifted in the area of teaching and would be willing to be a part of the teaching of one of kids’ equipping classes, please do reach out to me or Nathan. We’d love to talk through what that might look like. — Also, we NEED volunteers!
These are two avenues to carry out the ministry of teaching in the church, but as we read earlier, we are all to be devoted to this ministry of teaching and admonishing each other. And that’s why we put great emphasis on being a part of one of our Community Groups.
As we grow in number as a church, it is vital that everyone is connected to others through more intimate relationships that foster fellowship, accountability, and encouragement from the Word of God.
These are life-on-life contexts that are great for mutual discipleship as we seek to teach and remind each other of God’s Word so that, as Paul writes in Colossians 1:28, “we may present everyone mature in Christ.”
(PAUSE)
Fellowship
Fellowship
Not only were the early church devoted to the apostles’ teaching, the text implies in v. 42 that they were also devoted to pot lucks. They were devoted to gathering in their Fellowship Halls and have their Fellowship Suppers. They were good ol’ Baptists.
Some of y’all I know for a fact are cringing right now.
Fellowship is a common word among Christians, but what does it actually mean? Can it only be done over a meal? “Breaking bread” does follow the word fellowship in the text... Is it just another term for socializing?
The English word fellowship comes from the Greek word “koinonia”. Say that with me. “koinonia”
When I was in college, at the Univ. of TN, I lived in the building owned by our Baptist Collegiate Ministry. It was every bit of a bro-haven. Just a handful of Christian college guys hanging out, skipping class at times to play what we called “nerd-ball” which was basically ping-pong but you had to let it hit the hard floor before your return.
My friends and I would throw this word “koinonia” around whenever we wanted to put some spiritual bonus points to our hanging out.
- “Let’s hit the gym and koinonia.”
- “Wanna play some late-night nerd-ball and koinonia?”
“I’m feelin’ some Mcdonald’s and koinonia right about now.”
We said it in jest, but we were actually partially right at times.
The term “koinonia” itself means “a participation or sharing in common of something with someone else”, “joint-participation”, or “communion”.
It is more than just “hanging out” and it is deeper than “friendship”.
One person would describe it as “a divinely intimate, holy unity among believers—and between believers and the Lord—involving everything from spiritual oneness in the Holy Spirit, community life, sharing contributions from money to food, and the communion partaken in the body and blood of Christ Jesus.”
This is actually the first use of the word in the Bible up until now, implying that koinonia was impossible to have prior to the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and Jesus told us in Jn. 7:39 that the Spirit wasn’t given until He was to be glorified.
What all this means is that genuine Koinonia between humans must be preceded by Koinonia with God, “who embodies fellowship in His triune nature, created humans for fellowship, and bestows fellowship on His people.” (Hammett)
Fellowship with God was made possible through the death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Christ our Savior.
And those who experience fellowship with Christ are filled with His Holy Spirit.
The Spirit then joins believers together and grants them fellowship with each other.
Php. 2:1–2 declares, “if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation (koinonia) in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind”
Koinonia is being in agreement with one another, being united in purpose, and serving alongside each other.
1 Jn. 1:6-7 says,
If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.
Our koinonia with each other is based on our common koinonia with Jesus, our joint-participation in Christ with others through the Spirit.
This explains how believers from all kinds of backgrounds, ages, ethnicities, etc. can experience oneness in Christ; what we have in common outweighs our differences.
Our oneness is then expressed in a corporate life of love and service to one another as was the case here in the life of the first church in Acts 2.
The church is the place where Christians carry out the dozens of “one anothers” in the New Testament as we commit to be devoted to one another, honor one another (Rm. 12:10) , live in harmony with one another (Rm. 12:16), Instruct one another (Rm. 15:14) , Be kind and compassionate to one another (Ephesians 4: 32), Encourage one another ( 1 Thess 5:11) , spur one another on toward love and good deeds, (Heb. 10:24), and, as before, teach and admonish one another (Col. 3:16).
This is how the early church lived, though undoubtedly imperfectly. They did everything in community. So much so that the text even says...
And all who believed were together and had all things in common.
The life of the church is a life of koinonia as we fellowship—we participate—with Christ together.
Will we be, committed to true fellowship here at North Davis? Are you committed to this kind of fellowship?
Unfortunately, as the author/theologian and my former professor John Hammett would point out, much of our American culture presents obstacles to the fostering of fellowship in the church. Our county is one of the most individualistic cultures in the world.
We value self-reliance, we make our own decisions on what is best for me—we see ourselves as first and foremost individuals rather than members of a group.
This overlapped with our deeply rooted consumerism leads many American Christians to see themselves, whether consciously or unconsciously, as consumers of religious goods and services provided by churches.
We “pay” for the goods and services by their presence, participation, and giving, but they always retain the right to go elsewhere if they find a producer (church) that offers better goods and services.
They justify leaving their church because“it isn’t meeting our needs.”
How different is the perspective of the New Testament!
The church is like a family, and we don’t just hop around from family to family ;
the church is like a body, and one amputates a part of the body only under extreme circumstances.
Joining a church is an expression of a commitment to the fellowship, not a commitment to having one’s needs met.
Let us fully press in to the kind of fellowship we have been called to, the kind of fellowship the first church had together in which fellowship was in and through everything they did.
From our Sunday morning worship of God together and all that it includes—singing, reading the Word aloud together, sitting under the exposition of the Word, praying, taking of the Lord’s Supper, and even the conversations before and after—to our
Equipping hour,
Community Groups,
informal and spontaneous dinner and coffees together,
phone/text/Slack conversations,
all of it—is part of fellowshipping together, part of our joint participation in Christ and the unique Spirit-indwelt community He has created.
Let us see it for what it is, be thankful for it, and live that out to the fullest, by His grace.
(PAUSE)
Worship
Worship
Implicit throughout the text, though not mentioned explicitly, is that a third function—or ministry—of the church is that of worship.
God’s people are a people who worship Him—it is part of our identity, our nature.
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
Again, Eph. 1, we, God’s people, live to the “praise of His glory”.
We worship Him because He is worthy of all glory, honor, and praise.
We worship Him out of an overflow of thankful hearts who are in awe of who He is and what He has done.
What is worship exactly?
Wayne Grudem would define worship as “the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices and hearts.”
Psalm 29:2 (ESV) would frame it as “ascribing” worth to Him
Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name; worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness.
We worship Him together as we do every week in song, prayer, fellowship, teaching, breaking of the bread, etc.
But as we see here in Acts 2, it isn’t only together on Sundays that we worship Him. New Testament worship is distinct from that of the Old Testament.
Christ, in His death and resurrection, tore the veil of the temple and gave us access to the presence of God, the Holy of holies. Through His Holy Spirit, God now dwells in every believer, such that Paul would say now that, by the mercies of God, we live as “living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God” which is our spiritual worship. (Rm. 12:1)
We live to glorify God in every part of our lives, together and apart.
It is all meant to be continual worship to Him. The first church here in Acts praised God—v. 47—in the temple together and in the breaking of bread in their homes.
Worship was and is an essential function of the church.
(PAUSE)
Service
Service
For the sake of time, let’s look at the fourth function briefly: Service.
And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.
Acts shows us the radical way the early believers served one another: they didn’t withhold anything from each other. They ensured each of them had what they needed and willingly gave up what they had to provide for each other.
But, it also seems likely that their service extended beyond the boundaries of their own church, which might be the reason v. 47 would say they had “favor with all the people.”
The love of Christ———as well as His command to them———would compel them to serve their neighbor, whether believer or not.
Jesus said in Mk. 10. . .
For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
And, as we read earlier, the second greatest commandment He gave us was to “love your neighbor as yourself.” After which, He told us who our neighbor was through the parable of the Good Samaritan.
From that story, we can understand that our neighbor is anyone in our proximity with whom we can share God’s love.
Paul would say in Galatians 6:10
So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.
Paul puts emphasis on serving those who are in the church, but not to the neglect of those outside of the church as we have opportunity to do so.
God has always intended His people, from OT Israel to the NT Church, to be a “light for the nations that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isa. 49:6) and
Christ would reiterate for us in Mt. 5:13ff that we are to the “salt of the earth” and a “light of the world.” He would continue by saying, “A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”
Thankfully, caring for those in need has a long heritage in the church.
From hospitals, to food programs, to organizations that build wells to provide fresh water where there is none, to crisis centers,
to the impact of Samaritan’s Purse who organizes the Operation Christmas Child program that some in our church have been prepping for, and much more,
the social impact of the Church on societies in our own country and across the world is insurmountable.
Take Philly for example:
Hammet:
Two University of Pennsylvania sociologists conducted a study of all the churches they could contact in the city of Philadelphia, seeking to find out all the social ministries being carried on by all these churches. After carefully evaluating and trying to quantify the financial value of all that these churches were doing, they concluded, “Conservatively, the financial replacement value of all congregational social services in Philadelphia is $246,901,440 annually.” Such service is motivated by the love of Christ.
That being said, we want to make every effort to not only show Christ in our works, but also tell of Christ our word.
If we provide for the physical needs of our neighbor without addressing their greatest need, the need for their sins against a holy God to be atoned for—their need for a Savior—we aren’t really loving them to the fullest extent.
Both service and evangelism should go hand-in-hand.
That leads us to the last function, or ministry, of the church: Evangelism/Mission.
Evangelism/Mission
Evangelism/Mission
The interesting thing here in this text is that, though we saw Peter’s example of preaching the gospel to the Jews to which they responded in faith earlier in v. 38, when we transition to this summary of the ongoing life of the first church in v. 42, we actually don’t see anything about them preaching the gospel.
There is no verse in this summary that says, “and they preached the gospel to their neighbors”.
And yet, the text says, “the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.”
Of course, we know by reading the rest of Acts that they did, in fact, go about preaching the gospel—that’s evident on almost every page and we studied that the last time that I preached when we looked at what happened with the church after Stephen’s stoning when the church was pushed out into the areas out of Jerusalem and they preached the gospel wherever they went, beginning to fulfill Jesus’ promise in Acts 1:8 that they would be His Spirit-empowered witnesses to the ends of the earth.
We also are consistently reminded of Jesus’ Great Commission to make disciples of all nations and we remember Paul’s words in 2 Cor. 5:20 calling us “ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal [to the world] through us.”
Still, though this passage is obviously not meant to be an exhaustive list of all that the church did in its early days, you would think Luke would add something about that here.
But, and I want you to hear this, it’s as if Luke wants us to see that, really, everything the church did and does proclaims the gospel! That is,
All the other functions/ministries of the church that we have mentioned this morning involve to some degree a proclamation of the gospel.
The ministry of teaching involves an explanation and defense of the gospel, whether in the Sunday morning or over the dinner table.
Genuine Christian fellowship displays the power of the gospel in human relationships and
has certainly been one of the most effective means of drawing people to faith in Christ as people are drawn to the love we have for one another based on the love of Savior.
The gospel is, of course, central in Christian worship.
We sing of the Lord’s greatness and goodness in the gospel.
The Lord’s Supper proclaims Christ’s death until he comes.
Baptism is a confession of faith in the gospel and illustrates death to sin and resurrection to newness of life involved in a response to the gospel.
Service puts on display the love of God described in the gospel.
We, the church, proclaim the gospel in all we do.
For this reason—and I’ll close with this—one of the most effective ways that we can reach our unbelieving family member, friend, or neighbor with the gospel is to do evangelism in community, introducing unbelievers to others in your gospel community so that you can show and share Christ together.
If you’re currently in a Community Group—and, if you’re not already, I do encourage you to visit one next week—you notice that we set aside time for what we call “Life-Involvement.”
It is a time set aside to share with each other opportunities to invite other believers into relationships that we have been building with those far from God but close to us.
This could look like having your neighbor over for dinner and inviting someone from the church as well.
At the end of the month, Lauren Green, Desiray Young, and others from the church are throwing a Kids Halloween Festival in Shae and Desiray’s neighborhood and inviting everyone at North Davis as well as their neighbors to come together and bump shoulders.
Evangelism is a team-sport; while we certainly want to look out for and pursue every opportunity the Lord gives us to share with our lost friends and neighbors, let’s make every effort to work together to see Christ be known in our community and among the nations!
(PAUSE)
Reflection
Reflection
I’m going to ask Branden and the band to come up as we prepare to close out in musical worship.
I want to ask that we take a step back and reflect on what we’ve heard this morning from His Word.
Consider again why we exist as a church—to glorify God.
The God who created all things, including us and who, in His mercy, has made a way for sinful man to be reconciled to Him through the death and resurrection of His Son, and has united us together in Him through His Spirit.
If you’re here and you’ve placed your trust in Him, I want you to consider how the Lord might be leading you to respond to His Word this week, with these five ministries to which we are all called and involved in.
That might mean asking
Who can I encourage with a Scripture this week?
Who in the church can I get to know better this week?
What are some ways that I might live more conscious of the fact that every aspect of my life is to be worship to God?
Who can I serve this week?
and Is there anyone in my life who is far from God that I can talk with this week about the Lord? Is there anyone in this church I can invite to come along with me in that?
If you’re here and you do not know Christ, we want to invite you to know this God, to be reconciled to Him, and to experience joy in Him and in the gift of this community.