Precious

Grace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. It is a great privilege to share the Word of God with the saints of Durbin Memorial Baptist Church this morning.

What is the best Christmas present you have ever received? Anyone want to share quickly? *Wait*. For me, whenever it would be a set of Power Ranger Sock-em Bop-em Robots. The memory of opening that up on my grandmother’s living room floor on Christmas Eve is about as vivid as a memory from nearly 3 decades ago can be. So that’s the best Christmas present in my mind, but what about the second best? Or third?

While I understand that not everyone has this experience, I have been blessed to have friends and family around for just about every Christmas and have received many good gifts throughout the years. But the problem with receiving many good gifts is that they start to blend together, I start taking them for granted. I forget that my wife spent time picking out that wallet and it just becomes another accessory.

In our fallen, sinful nature, as we enjoy good gifts we often begin to take them for granted. We might remember the really special gifts while the others pile up, get over looked, or start to collect dust in the corner.

When it comes to gifts, the best gift anyone could ever receive, is the gift of faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. This is the gift that we give most of our attention to here at church, and honestly we should! It is astounding that God would save sinners like you and me by being the sacrifice for our sins! That is a gift of eternal value and significance.

I want to for a few moments dwell on the significance of this gift. Listen to the lyrics of the first verse of How Deep the Father’s Love For Us:

How deep the Father's love for us How vast beyond all measure That He should give His only Son To make a wretch His treasure How great the pain of searing loss The Father turns His face away As wounds which mar the Chosen One Bring many sons to glory

We see this glorious, wondrous truth plastered throughout Scripture. I don’t have these on the screen but just listen to how God’s gift of salvation impacts our undeserving lives:

2 Corinthians 5:17 “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”

Philippians 4:19 “And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.”

Colossians 3:3 “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

1 John 2:1–2 “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”

Ephesians 1:3 “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,”

We could spend every gathering time, every Sunday, every year, and only begin to scratch the surface on the glorious gift of salvation. There truly is nothing better than being reconciled to our creator through the blood of Jesus Christ. It is my prayer that all of us hearing this message this morning would be certain that we recieved that gift. Receiving the gift of salvation is as simple as understanding your need for a Savior and seeing Christ as the all Sufficient Savior, repenting of your sins and turning to Him. We don’t do anything to earn this gift, we simply come to the end of ourselves and see Christ is Lord. We see He is worthy to be served. We see He is Lord over all. The gift of salvation is given to all who believe in Jesus as Lord and continues to be given today! Have you received it!

If at the conclusion of this message, all we learned is that the gift of salvation is the greatest gift ever given, that would certainly be enough. The incredible thing about God is that while the gift of salvation may be the best gift, the most memorable, it is not the only gift God gives.

We see in Scripture that God gives us the very breath in our lungs. He makes the sun shine on all people. Every good thing comes from Him.

For the Christian specifically, God not only gives us the gift of salvation, but He also secures that gift make sure no one or nothing can pluck us from His hand. He gives us His Holy Spirit to convict us of sin and lead us in understanding God’s Word. God has made us a royal priesthood, able to approach Him in prayer. This only scratching the surface and all of these wonderful gifts, God graciously gives His People! We sometimes take for granted all the wonderful gifts God gives His people.

Today as we finish looking at the first four chapters of the book of Acts, we will be thoroughly looking at one of the gifts that I think we take most for granted. We sometimes forget that it is indeed a gift of God. We will be looking at the gift of the local church.

If you would, turn in you Bibles to Acts 4. We will be walking through verses 32-37 and we will see four ways the local assembly of believers is a GREAT gift of God. While not greater than the gift of salvation, the local church is a great gift nonetheless. Let’s begin our look at this section with verse 32.

Acts 4:32 ESV

Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common.

To this point in our walk through the first four chapters of Acts we have seen God working through the Apostles to accomplish some incredible things. On Pentecost there was a sound like mighty rushing wind, flaming tongues, and speaking in other languages formerly unknown by the disciples all to provide an opportunity to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to the people in Jerusalem. That day 3000 men received the gift of faith! Then Peter and John healed a paralytic man, preached the gospel once more and 2000 more believed! As we saw last week, their preaching was met with persecution, but the preaching of the gospel was worth the cost of persecution.

Today where we are looking at a wide view of regular flow of the church. In many ways today’s section parallels Acts 2:42-47 that we looked at a few weeks ago. But just as a little Bible study tip: when something seems to repeat in Scripture, don’d rush through it. Marinate on it. Repetition is used to show us when something is important! So let’s not take this for granted. If God thought it important enough to inspire the pen of the Physician Luke by the Holy Spirit to twice write on the daily activity of the Local church, then we ought to take note of the contents therein.

Here in verse 32 we see the first of the four ways the local church is a Great gift from our Gracious God.

This description of the early church shows that a God-honoring church is marked by UNITY.

UNITY in the local church is the first way in which it is a gift to the believer.

We read here that the church, the full number of those who believed, that is the 5000 men who believed plus all the women and children, were of one heart and soul.

The early church had unity of heart. When you see this word heart, it is most often referring to the core of our being. The heart refers to the volition, the intellect, the desires and perceptions of the individual. “The church in Acts was united in the deepest part of its being. They shared an inarticulate bond, a great secret. They could sense a fundamental unity with other believers.”

If we really believe what we say we believe and become who Christ has said we will become, then church, we will share unity in the core of being. We will have a shared desire to give glory to the God of our salvation. This is a beautiful gift because in a world that is so divide and everyday finding more ways to segment society, the church is the place where we come together with a shared heart’s purpose! We have more in common in with other believers than any other person on this planet, because we share in the same heart!

The early church here also had unity in Soul. This goes hand in hand with the Heart and notes the shared purpose in life found by the members of the church. This early church was completely intertwined in missional purpose and existence. Unity abound.

This can sound cutesy and whimsical to us, but this is truly a gift of God. These early believers came from all different parts of the known world. They were facing opposition from the religious leaders. What should’ve been a powder keg of emotional tension, was a place where people came together!

Unity in the church is a gift of God to the believer. It is good to be gathered with people who share the same world view. But I do fear that sometimes we can misunderstand unity. We confuse unity with uniform. By that I mean, to have unity in the church does not mean that we all have to be exactly the same as one another. We don’t all have to have the same style. We don’t all have to have the same preferences. We don’t all have to have the same talents. Let me give a little example. I know some of you all like my brother Troy like to blare music singing your hearts out to Christian music as you drive down the road. While I play music here at the church for the benefit of the church, I don’t even like listening to music! I love to praise God, and that sometimes involves music, but for me personally, music isn’t my regular thing. And that’s okay! The unified church encourages believers by allowing one another to be different personality but united on faith.

“The fact is, the insistence that others be just like us is one of the most disunifying mind-sets a church can have because it instills a judgmental inflexibility that hurls people away from the church with lethal force. One of the wonders of Christ is that he honors our individuality while bringing us into unity.”

The early church was full of different personalities and backgrounds. Coming from all over the world they would have had different food tastes, clothing differences, language differences. But they shared in the united belief that Jesus is Lord.

Christ is Lord must be the ultimate unifier in the church. It is much better for all of us to be tuned to Christ rather than to my personal preferences.

I’ll paraphrase an illustration by AW Tozer. *GO GET GUITAR* When you tune a guitar, you have two options. You can use a tuner or you can tune by ear to another instrument. If I tune my guitar to Shirley’s piano and we start playing together, we will be in harmony. But if Miss Bryen tuned her keyboard off the sound of my guitar and then Larry tuned his bass off the keyboard and charlie tuned his drum off the sound of Larry’s bass, then eventually, just like when you play a game of telephone, Charlie’s drums aren’t going to be in tune with Shirley’s piano. But if all of use the same tuner, we will certainly be in tune with one another, not because we were relying on the tuner to unite us in concert! Christ is the tuner of the Christian life and the unity in the church is a gift of God!

Let’s look now at the next way the local church is great gift of God to the believer:

Acts 4:33 ESV

And with great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.

The second way in which the local church is a gift of God is that is a place of “Great power.”

Here we read the apostles gave testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus with GREAT POWER. I think this something interesting in the text that we should highlight. We’ve seen God do amazing things through the apostles thus far in the book of Acts, but here everything is tied to the greater purpose. The real power given to the apostles and even given to the church today for that matter is the power to unashamedly proclaim the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.

A hyper-literal translation here would say that the apostles gave testimony of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus with MEGA DYNAMITE!

Church, we’re not going to produce the same signs and miracles of the apostles, but we can preach with the same POWER! Remember that God makes His appeal, His call to salvation, His giving of the gift of life through us! It’s His Power! working through us!

Romans 10:14–15 “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!””

The church is the place where we come to rally together around the power of Christ. In the church we are reminded that we are on the winning team. In the church we are reminded that God is powerful. Earlier I said, in our fallen, sinful nature, as we enjoy good gifts we often begin to take them for granted. Well in our fallen, sinful flesh, we can also forget that God is powerful. God uses the local church to repeat the blessed refrain Oh Victory in Jesus My Savior Forever. The church is a gift in reminding us of the power of God.

Just a few weeks ago I was so encouraged to have Sarah get up and share some of her testimony and how God renewed her repentance and has been made a new person in Christ. That is a reminder of the power of God to make us a new creature! Church, I want to see more of that! I want to see us sharing with others what Christ has done! The church exists to spur one another on in this endeavor.

“With explosive power the early church “were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus” (v. 33). Despite all the counter-propaganda of the Sadducees, the church received divine enablement to present the fact of the Resurrection. Paul later wrote in Romans 6:4:

“We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

They themselves had resurrection life, and as a result the people who heard believed. There was hard evidence (living eyewitnesses, etc.) to prove that Christ was alive. But for many it was enough to see him living in the lives of his followers. Their “great power” was resurrection power!” Church, we have that same power. Our gathering is a reminder of the power of God to raise from death to life!

The third way the church is great gift is also found in verse 33.

Acts 4:33 ESV

And with great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.

The third way the church is great gift is that it is a source of great grace, megas karis. Grace is unmerited favor. Here we see that in the assembly of the saints there was MEGA unmerited favor being showered down upon them. “Christ came to an empty people and poured his grace upon them. We are saved by grace, healed by grace, nurtured by grace.”

Grace has this awesome effect of pouring over.

You may have heard of the recent incident at Target with UK basketball player Jordan Burks. He decided to buy the person everything in the cart for the person behind him in line at target. The lady didn’t ask for it, he just decided to do it. She ended up getting a good chunk of her christmas shopping for free! The lady then turned around bought everything for the people behind her. You may be familiar with these kinds of pay-it-forward acts that hit the news cycle every now and then.

Now if having her shopping taken care influenced this woman to take care of the people behind her, how much more should grace overflow in the church when God has taken care of our eternal sin debt and given us new life! We are not only the recipients of grace but we ought to be big grace givers!

This doesn’t mean that we have to start buying everyone’s groceries every time we go to grocery store, but it does mean that we ought to seek how to build one another up! We ought the be a church full of encouragers. Who can you encourage right now? Who has blessed you recently that you can thank? What verse can you share with them? How might God use it? Ask God to make our church a community that loves each other in specific, tangible ways like encouragement. Ask God to use you to help fan that flame. Don’t get discouraged if people don’t return your encouragement (Matt. 6:3-4; Eph. 6:3-8) or if you don’t see fruit from it (Gal. 6:9-10). Creating a church culture that glorifies God takes a long time, lots of prayer, and abundant grace. The gracious God has gifted us the church as another source of emanating grace!

There is one more way the church is a gift of God for the believer shown in this section.

Acts 4:34–37 ESV

There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need. Thus Joseph, who was also called by the apostles Barnabas (which means son of encouragement), a Levite, a native of Cyprus, sold a field that belonged to him and brought the money and laid it at the apostles’ feet.

The church is a gift from the gracious God to the believer, because the church is a source of care.

In this section we see that the people, united in faith in Christ Jesus, truly cared for one another. I mentioned this when we went through Acts 2, but this is not a proof text for communism. “Communism says practically, “What is yours is everyone’s.” Christianity says, “What is mine is yours.” This early church was marked by people that truly cared for one another enough to give up some of their personal comforts for the sake of others.

This church cared for one another materially. Here Joseph sells a field and gives all the profit to be distributed where needed.

This church cared for one another spiritually. When you combine this passage with Acts 2, you see a devotion to teaching, prayer, and breaking of bread.

The local church, when done right, is still this way today.

I try to always model honesty from the pulpit, if it comes off as weakness, that is only because I am weak. But over the last few months I have just been going through a rough spell. Some things more serious than others, but while my trust in God has not wavered, my physical and mental strength has.

But in this church, where typically I seek to be the caregiver, the undershepherd, in this local assembly of the saints, I have been cared for. Some brothers in this church have donated their time to help me with some stressful projects, though they have their own health and life concerns going on.

Then I believe it was Last Sunday, before the service I caught eyes with Miss Sharon, she came up to me and just gave me a hug. She said, “You just look like you needed it.” And truth be told I did!

Church, we are designed to carry the burdens of life alone. We were designed to be a part of community and the community was designed to be centered around God. In the local church God has gifted us caring community to gives us strength and help us press on for the glorious cause of Christ.

As we bring this series, Burning/Burnt, to an end, I hope that we see the church is supposed to be a place of unity, power, grace, and care. And that when it is, OH what a gift it is.

It is a great gift that comes from the great gift giver.

Remember what we said earlier: When it comes to gifts, the best gift anyone could ever receive, is the gift of faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. It is astounding that God would save sinners like you and me by being the sacrifice for our sins! That is a gift of eternal value and significance. As we conclude I want to reiterate one more time: It is my prayer that all of us hearing this message this morning would be certain that we recieved that gift. Receiving the gift of salvation is as simple as understanding your need for a Savior and seeing Christ as the all Sufficient Savior, repenting of your sins and turning to Him. We don’t do anything to earn this gift, we simply come to the end of ourselves and see Christ is Lord. We see He is worthy to be served. We see He is Lord over all. The gift of salvation is given to all who believe in Jesus as Lord and continues to be given today! Have you received it?

Let’s Pray