The Comfort and Challenge of Our Common Life in Christ

Labor Day weekend marks the beginning of a new preaching calendar for us at Crosstown Church. Today, I want to introduce to you a theme I have for us over the next year of study together. For most of the next year, our plan is to study and preach through the book of Acts, and today’s sermon is also meant to serve as an introduction to this intriguing New Testament book.

There are two specific subjects we will encounter in Acts that we will also plan to take a deeper look at this year. During the Advent season, we will study the meaning and significance of the temple in the Bible. And, of course, as we study Acts, we will be learning quite a bit about the Holy Spirit, so after we finish Acts we will do a study together on the Holy Spirit as we move into the summer months.  

The theme I offer to you for this next year of sermon studies is The Comfort and Challenge of Our Common Life in Christ. Central to Christian identity is the promise of possessing God’s Holy Spirit and the comfort we receive from him. But the Holy Spirit also challenges the Christian to live in the reality of God’s kingdom which has already broken into the world through Jesus. So, comfort and challenge, yes. But the Holy Spirit does his comforting and challenging work from within the common life that Christians have together in Christ, in the Messiah.

Let’s consider these three things as we get an introduction to Acts: comfort, challenge, and our common life in Christ.

Comfort

First, comfort: the comfort of our common life in Christ. To belong to Jesus, to be counted among his people, his family, ought to bring us comfort. We should find assurance in the Christian faith that we are in the right. Being a Christian comes with the promise and the guarantee that we are on the right side of history, that we are going to inherit the eternal kingdom of God, that, in the end, all will be well for us.

Luke, the Historian

We can say, at least, that this kind of comfort and assurance is what the author of the book of Acts is trying to give to his audience. Comfort is one of the main reasons why he wrote this book.

Now who wrote the book of Acts? The author doesn’t give us his name, but there are strong clues. We are told right off the bat that Acts is something of a sequel to “the first book” the author has written. And that first book is the Gospel of Luke, which is clear from the similarities we see in the introduction to both books. It is virtually undisputed that Luke (Loukasin Greek) is the name of our author, which is a shortened form of a few variations of a Latin name. There are at least three different people in the New Testament who go by this name. The author of Luke/Acts might well be “the beloved physician” that Paul mentions in Col 4:14, but we can’t be absolutely certain of that. What we do know about the Luke of Luke/Acts is that he was with Paul on at least some of Paul’s missionary travels.

When we go back to the introduction to Luke’s Gospel, we read this:

Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught. (Lk 1:1-4)

Notice what Luke says he has set out to do. He aims to “write an orderly account” of certain “things that have been accomplished among us,” just as others have also tried to do. In other words, Luke is attempting to write history. But he is writing about fairly recent events—things that have been accomplished among us—so we should probably think of him more like a newspaper reporter than someone we might today call an historian.[1] At any rate, his concern is with facts, things that have happened. And he claims to have carefully investigated such things. Here is an important point we must never forget: the Christian message is grounded in the soil of things that have taken place in real time and space. We are concerned about what really happened. And Luke wants those who read his work to be certain about the things that have in fact happened.

Theophilus, a Young Christian

Who is Luke writing to? In both Luke and Acts, we find that he had a specific individual in mind, a man named Theophilus.

Who was Theophilus? In the introduction to the Gospel of Luke, Luke calls him “most excellent Theophilus,” and that honorary form of address suggests that Theophilus was a prominent person, someone with a high social status. He may well have been a Roman official.[2]

We can see from the introduction to both Luke and Acts that Theophilus is at least inclined toward the Christian faith. He has been instructed in it already according to Luke 1:4, and yet Luke writes in order to help him “have certainty” about such things. The best supposition is “that Theophilus was a socially significant recent convert” who, though he has been taught about the Christian faith, “still had some confusion and questions.”[3] Perhaps you can relate to Theophilus. If so, then while Acts was not written to you it certainly is written for you. The comfort and assurance Luke wanted to give Theophilus can also be given to you.

The Significance of Recent Events

Luke has written Luke/Acts to clear up as much confusion and to answer as many questions as possible. Luke is careful to deliver the facts, but he is also not claiming to be neutral about those facts. He himself is a believer, intending to guide his readers into a clearer understanding of the things that, he says in Luke 1:1, “have been accomplished among us.”

Scholars of Luke/Acts are often impressed by Luke’s work. The opening verses of Luke’s Gospel are often considered to be the best Greek in all the New Testament. Luke has carefully constructed his work not simply to report the facts but also to make an impression on his audience.[4]“Hey, this stuff is important and really worth your attention!” he seems to be saying.

What impression is he trying to make? Well, he wrote his Gospel not simply to tell us about the life of Jesus of Nazareth, but to tell us how the life of Jesus fits within a much wider historical framework. Luke wants us to see how everything the Old Testament hoped and dreamed for, everything it promised and prophesied about, has now begun to be fulfilled “by means of the dramatic and surprising intervention of God in Jesus.”[5]

So Luke’s purpose is not simply to tell us that something has happened but more importantly to tell us why it matters.[6]

Challenge

And that is especially true when it comes to the book of Acts. Because when we turn to the prologue to Acts, we can see what Luke is up to in volume 2 of his work. He wants to impress upon his Christian reader that comfort isn’t the only thing to take away from the faith. There is an implicit challenge that awaits the one who has accepted Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament hopes and dreams.

A New Venture

Luke says that what he set out to do in the first volume is something similar to what others had set out to do. No doubt he is referring to at least some of the other New Testament Gospels. Luke’s first volume is meant to be read and associated with these other works. But he says nothing like that at the beginning of Acts. It seems that Luke is setting out on a new venture when he writes his second volume.[7]

Volume 1, Luke says, “dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when he was taken up.” In other words, the Gospel of Luke is concerned with events that happened during the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth, roughly 30 years. The book of Acts begins at the time of Jesus’s Ascension and ends with Paul’s arrival in Rome, again a period of roughly 30 years.

Just as Luke saw the period up to AD 30 as significant, so he saw the period up to AD 60 as also significant—here we see “the growth and development of a remarkable historical phenomenon, early Christianity,” and Luke believed that is was all to be explained by a “divinely initiated social change.”[8]

If what Jesus of Nazareth “began to do and teach” was so significant, then what else might we expect than to see that Jesus’s words and actions continued to make an impact in the years following his lifetime? Luke wrote Acts to tell us about this impact.

Commands to the Apostles

Because before Jesus was “taken up,” Luke says here in verse 2, “he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen.”

It cannot be stressed enough that Christians today remain in constant need for the sort of thing we encounter in the book of Acts. We rightly celebrate what Jesus has accomplished, but what Jesus accomplished is not just the end of a very long story but the beginning of another one, another one which must always remember its continuity with the previous one.

Now that Jesus has done his work, and achieved his great victory, we can’t just sit back and relax. There is more work to be done. Of course, we must never forget that the work that remains to be done is not because Jesus had failed. Rather, the work to be done is the implementation of the victory that Jesus has most certainly accomplished.

He gave “commands . . . to the apostles,” all of which have to do with the implementation of his victory. We will read about this implementation through the apostles in the book of Acts, but the book is not primarily about them. What matters most in Acts “is what was said and done” and not so much “the personalities or virtues of the Christians who did these things.”[9]So, while your Bible may call this book “The Acts of the Apostles,” for Luke the “dominant actor” is “God in the person of the Holy Spirit who guides and directs the words and deeds especially of the main protagonists in the narrative.”[10]

At the same time, it should be no surprise to us who have been tracking with the biblical story that God usually does his work through his people, which is why we can speak of Acts as challenging for Christians in all times and places. God wants us to be participants in his work; the promise of the Holy Spirit to all who are in Christ is about our place in God’s great work.

The Kingdom of God

What is this work that God has started in and through Jesus and intends to continue in and through believers in Jesus by his Holy Spirit? In short, it is the work of the kingdom of God.

Luke tells us in verse 3 that the resurrected Jesus “presented himself alive” to the apostles, “appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.” Now, the “kingdom of God” is not a phrase that appears often in Acts, but it is no doubt at the heart of everything Luke has told us about. Here we read about it in the third verse of the book, and the last verse of the book tells us that Paul, having arrived in Rome, “lived there two whole years . . . proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ will all boldness and without hindrance” (Acts 28:31).

It is the kingdom of God that Luke is most interested in, and in Acts in particular we see that this is a kingdom that has already broken in on the world in and through Jesus. It is the kingdom of God that motivates and inspires Jesus’s people. It is the kingdom of God that is the foundation of all that Jesus commanded his apostles to carry out.

It is the kingdom of God which present the reader of Acts with the challenge, the challenge to live distinctively Christian lives. Christians are challenged to live right now as kingdom-of-God people.

Common Life in Christ

Now, what in the world does that mean? What is to be so distinctive about how we Christians are to live in the world today? On this matter, opinions are many. Everyone has their own idea about what the Christian life today is supposed to look like. But this is where we see the importance of our third point today: our common life in Christ. Faithfulness to Jesus and his kingdom is in many ways unique to one’s time and place in history. We have to learn to do it together.

Revolution in the Air

But learn we must! It is clear from the book of Acts that these first Christians believed that something absolutely revolutionary had just taken place. Something remarkable that would forever change the course of history.[11]How could they ever go back? Revolution was in the air!

Yes, revolution. That’s what the powers of the world are often afraid of when groups of people start assembling together. Assemblies like this can be politically dangerous. What are they doing in there? Do they have any weapons?

Oh, yes, you had better believe it! We Christians are revolutionaries like you’ve never seen before.

But here we see a rather shocking belief of the Christian community in Acts: they believed that God’s kingdom agenda advanced not by political victory but by proclamation.[12] And that proclamation was simply this: that the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth had now ascended to the right hand of God himself, enthroned as the world’s true and only Lord.

Up and Down, In and Out

As that message goes out into all the world, what Luke sketches for us is how the family of God grows and expands as Jew and Gentile alike believe this good news. The kingdom of God advances both up and down the social scale but also in and out—from within Jerusalem and all the way out to the ends of the earth.[13]There is not any kind of person who cannot be won over by this revolution. The gospel of the kingdom is for Jew and Gentile, male and female, the social elite and the social outcast, the rich and the poor. And where this good news is received, revolution happens. Literally every single aspect of life is touched and transformed, the physical as well as the spiritual. This is total salvation, and as one commentator says, “Such a total salvation requires a total response of discipleship.”[14]

And we can only know what that means by learning what it means together, in community, in our common life in Christ.

A Messy Movement

This is truly exciting, and I for one am quite excited about our study of Acts over the next year.

But let the reader be warned. When God’s revolutionary kingdom makes its impact, things often become unsettled. When pagans start repenting and turning away from their idols—I’m talking about you and me here—there can be a significant upheaval in what we had come to see as “normal.”

When God starts to fix what is broken, when God starts to put together what for too long we had become content to keep separate, well, things can get really messy. Those of us who like things to always go in a certain order—we’re going to see in Acts that it doesn’t always happen in the way we thought it should. The book of Acts will take us into some unsettling waters.

The Christian movement is messy; that’s the point we must come to see. But that’s also one of the main reasons why God has given us his Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God’s presence among and within his people, who leads them faithfully through the troubled waters.

And so, the comfort and challenge of our common life in Christ. Let’s set out on this journey together and see where God might take us.

_____

[1] Ben Witherington, III, The Acts of the Apostles: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, Co., 1998), 3.

[2] C. M. Kerr, “Theophilus,” in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, ed. James Orr (Chicago: The Howard-Severance Co., 1915), 5:2966.

[3] Witherington, The Acts of the Apostles, 51.

[4] Witherington, The Acts of the Apostles, 45.

[5] Witherington, The Acts of the Apostles, 38.

[6] Witherington, The Acts of the Apostles, 69.

[7] Witherington, The Acts of the Apostles, 9.

[8] Witherington, The Acts of the Apostles, 21.

[9] Witherington, The Acts of the Apostles, 20.

[10] Witherington, The Acts of the Apostles, 21.

[11] Witherington, The Acts of the Apostles, 10.

[12] Witherington, The Acts of the Apostles, 37.

[13] Witherington, The Acts of the Apostles, 69.

[14] Witherington, The Acts of the Apostles, 72.