THE CHURCH FAMILY LIFE - PART 2

Psalm 110:3 (KJV) — 3 Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power, in the beauties of holiness from the womb of the morning: thou hast the dew of thy youth.

Luke 4:21 (NKJV) — 21 And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Acts 19:20 (NKJV) — 20 So the word of the Lord grew mightily and prevailed.

2 Thessalonians 3:1 (KJV) — 1 Finally, brethren, pray for us, that the word of the Lord may have free course, and be glorified, even as it is with you:

Jeremiah 23:29 (NIV) — 29 “Is not my word like fire,” declares the Lord, “and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?

Isaiah 55:11 (NIV) — 11 so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

Out of many

Revelation 7:9 “After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, with palm branches in their hands,”

We are supposed to be one. “We are not divided, all one body we,” we sing, but sadly, the community of the saints is not united too.

Psalm 133 (NKJV) — A Song of Ascents. Of David. 1 Behold, how good and how pleasant it is For brethren to dwell together in unity! 2 It is like the precious oil upon the head, Running down on the beard, The beard of Aaron, Running down on the edge of his garments. 3 It is like the dew of Hermon, Descending upon the mountains of Zion; For there the Lord commanded the blessing— Life forevermore.

Is unity possible? Yes. It is a fruit of community, but genuine community can only be established by Jesus through the power of his kingdom

Unity is a gift from God.We are sinners, and one of the first sad marks of sin is that it separates, creating disharmony and hostility. It takes God to overcome sin and bring harmony again. All real unity—at least all lasting unity—is from him.

Unity is for the small and great alike. When a country, a church, or even a family is at peace, it benefits not only the most prominent or most important persons but also everyone. All are blessed, especially the small, the unimportant, and the weak. Likewise, disharmony hurts everyone.

The blessing of unity flows from one person to another. ”In the same way, a person who is at peace with himself or herself or a people who are united are a blessing wherever he, she, or they go. They tend to win people to their unity and spread it.

Unity is a foretaste of heaven. The final verse of the psalm speaks of “life forevermore.” Some things are good for us but not pleasant. Other things are pleasant but not good. But the unity we have as God’s people is both good and pleasant. It is even a bit of heaven now.

There used to be a time when people cared for each other, but nowadays people care only for themselves

Sadly enough this is also creeping into the Church where people no longer honour and respect each other

If I want something, even if it is a good thing, I want to get it at all cost and I dont care how it affects my brother or sister, this ought not to be so

The pursuit of self affects our relationships to other people too, because, in spite of what humanism seems to promise, it makes our world inhuman. A failure to relate to other people hurts not only them, but also us.

Are our churches exempt? Sometimes perhaps, but not everywhere and not always.

Our churches are one of the last bastions of community, and yet, they do not escape individualism.… Many of us drive to church, listen to the sermon, say “hello” to our circle of friends, and return home without ever having really experienced community

“I Will Build My Church”

We have already seen that unity comes from God. It can be rediscovered and reestablished in the church, but only as men and women get outside of themselves and submit their own selfish individualism to a higher and more worthy cause than self-indulgence.

The Bible shows the way. As far back as the Garden of Eden we find God looking at the world he had made and observing, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18). God wanted man to live with relationships and in harmony; so he created a woman with whom the man would be able to share God’s bounty and the joys of the work God gave to our first parents. Adam and Eve shared in bounty and joy, until sin caused mutual accusations and disharmony.

In the New Testament when Jesus established the new people of God, he did not abandon to themselves and their own devices those who are saved from sin but brought them into a new fellowship: the Christian church (Matt. 16:18). Jesus prayed for the church, and one thing he prayed was for God to give his people unity.

My prayer is not for them alone [the original disciples]. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me (John 17:20–23).

This is not an artificial or an enforced unity; it is a unity based on a common participation in Christ and his gospel. It is analogous to the unity that is in God.

A Model Church

When we pass beyond the Gospels to the Book of Acts, the history of the early church, we find that Jesus’ prayer was answered in the community formed in Jerusalem after his resurrection and ascension. It is written of that church, “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer” (Acts 2:42, italics added).

Let’s think about that church, since it is the New Testament counterpart to the community pictured in Psalm 133. It was an inner-city church, for one thing. It was also a large church, and it had a multiple-staff ministry. It needed the latter because of the 3,000 people who were added to the church at Pentecost, making the total number of believers 3,120 (there were 120 in chapter 1). It began with the twelve apostles, but when the twelve found that there were not quite enough people to do the work, they asked the church to elect seven deacons. However, the church grew because all the people (not just the nineteen) shared in the ministry.

A church this large had its problems, of course. All churches do. It had hypocrites. It had doctrinal errors. It had sinful human beings of all types. Yet it was a model church in many respects.

One of the most striking things about this church was its commitment to fellowship, which means unity. Fellowship has to do with holding something in common. Christian fellowship means “common participation in God,” and it is this that had drawn the early Christians together. Someone has said, “The stronger your vertical fellowship is, the stronger your horizontal fellowship will be.” That is right, and this church is a good example of it. These believers had strong relationships with God. Therefore, they also had strong relationships with one another.

There are four specific elements mentioned in the description of the church in Acts 2.

The apostles’ teaching. Real unity or community can be established only around a common set of convictions and beliefs, and what drew these believers together in their fellowship was a common devotion to the teaching of the apostles. This is the first thing Luke, the author of Acts, mentions in this passage. He stresses that in these early days, in spite of an experience as moving as that of Pentecost, which might have caused them to focus on their experiences, the disciples devoted themselves first to the apostolic teaching. It could have been a temptation for the early believers to look back to Pentecost and try thereafter always to focus on the past. They might have remembered the way the Holy Spirit came and how he used them to speak so that those in Jerusalem each heard them in his or her own language. They might have longed to experience something like that again. They might have been praying, “Please, Lord, do something miraculous again.” This is not what we find. They are not revelling in their past experiences. Instead, they are revelling in the Word of God.I suggest that this is always the first mark of a Spirit-filled church. A Spirit-filled church always devotes itself to the apostles’ teaching. It is a learning church that grounds its experiences in Scripture and tests them by the Word of God.

The fellowship. Love of the Scriptures led these believers to love one another also, which meant that they had genuine unity as God’s people. The most important thing about them, both individually and as a community, was their devotion to the teaching. Because of it, they cared for one another. They even shared their material possessions and gave generously to all who were in need.

The worship of God. In this early church there was “the breaking of bread” and “prayer.” “Breaking of bread” stands for the communion service; and prayer, although it is something we can do individually and at different times, is in this passage actually the formal exercise of prayer in the assembly. In the Greek the definite article occurs before the word “prayer,” so the verse actually says, “to the prayers.” These Christians devoted themselves “to the breaking of bread and to the prayers” (italics added). They got together to observe the Lord’s Supper, pray, and praise God.

Acts 2:46 says that they did this “in the temple courts.” “they broke bread in their homes” (v. 46). It is a deliberate repetition. In Acts 2:42 “they devoted themselves to the breaking of bread.” Then in verse Acts2:46 “they broke bread in their homes.” They had formal worship, and they had informal worship too. The informal worship included, and perhaps was largely centered on, the communion service.

The Heavenly Ideal

We have followed the biblical ideal of unity and community from Genesis 2, through Psalm 133, to Jesus’ prayer for his church and the example of the first, model church in Jerusalem in the days of the apostles.

Hebrews speaks of it as a place of “joyful assembly” (Heb. 12:22) and “an enduring city” (Heb. 13:14). Revelation calls it “new Jerusalem,” in which there will be no sin, no evil, no pain, and no death, and in which there will be no disharmony because the desire of every one of God’s redeemed people will be for God’s glory and for the glory of the Lamb, who is Jesus Christ (see Rev. 21:1–22:6). We sing,

an anticipation of that perfect future unity that will cause us to seek and to maintain our unity now.