Sermon Tone Analysis

*The God Who Acts* Acts 2:1–2

     I have pinpointed the two verses above, but we shall be considering together the first twenty-one verses of Acts chapter 2. We are going back to this book of Acts because it is the only authoritative account that we have of the beginning, the origin, of the Christian church.

Let me remind you that I am calling your attention to this because I believe that the most vital need of the world today is the need to know exactly what the Christian message is.

And that in turn leads us to seek to know what the church is, the church that delivers this message.

There is a real confusion today about Christianity and about the Christian church—her nature, her task, and her message.

This is a great tragedy.

Think of the problems harassing people today, individually and collectively.

Think of the unhappiness, the heartbreak and the cynicism and bitterness in life.

We are all aware of these human problems, as they are called.

But if only people were truly Christian, most of those problems would immediately be solved.

And it is the same with our international tensions and difficulties.

Hate and war and strife are due to the fact that men and women are in a wrong relationship with God, and they will only find out how to enter into a true relationship by knowing, believing, accepting, and submitting themselves to the message of the Christian church, the message of the Gospel.

We have seen that the great message of the church is, as Luke puts it here at the very beginning of Acts, a message about the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is Christianity: “/all that Jesus began both to do and teach”/—/what He is doing and what He is yet going to do/.

So now we continue from there because we see that our Lord addressed these men, these apostles of His, and gave them a commission.

So we come, in this second chapter, to the origin of the Christian church.

This is what throws light on the nature of the church, what it has been commissioned to do and how it does it.

And here it is emphasized that the whole thing is the action of God.

This is not something that was done by this handful of people.

We are told so often about them and so often they say about themselves that they were nobodies.

We never tire of hearing how they were dismissed by the learned people, by the authorities, as “unlearned and ignorant men” (Acts 4:13), and that is what they were.

It seems to me to be simply ludicrous to suggest that such men, without learning, without any influence or authority, without any money behind them, with none of the means of propaganda that we are familiar with today, that such men by their own efforts and abilities could succeed in doing what we read of in the pages of this book.

How did it come about?

There is only one answer.

The world was turned upside-down not because of what they did, but because of what God did to them, in them, and by means of them.

And that is the essential message concerning the Christian church—her meaning, her function, her message, her purpose.

So here before us is the beginning, but if you take the trouble to read the long history of the Christian church, you will find that it has continued in the same way.

Indeed, I want to show you that the history of the church has been a great fight between two ideas: the false human idea as to what the church is, and the true one, which is God acting in the church.

So let us look at all this in the light of what we are told in these first twenty-one verses of Acts 2. What is Christianity?

What is the church?

First of all, we must remind ourselves of what it is not, and oh, how urgently this reminder is needed today!

I am more and more convinced that the masses of people are outside the Christian church because they have a totally wrong conception of what it is.

Hear me—I want to be honest—I do not blame them.

They just believe what they are told, and that is the false view that I shall put before you.

If they only knew what the church really is, if they only knew what is being offered them in the Gospel, they would not be outside.

Like the people at Jerusalem, they would come crowding to listen.

First, Christianity is not dead religion.

The greatest enemy of true Christianity has always been religion, and this is as true today as it has ever been.

It is religion that confuses the minds of men and women.

They would be right to reject Christianity if it were a religion.

But it is not.

Christianity is not a state religion; it is not an official religion in any sense at all.

But that is the idea that many people have of it.

They identify the church simply with what happens on certain great ceremonial occasions—a wedding or a funeral.

They did not think about Christianity at any other time; but when things go wrong and we were losing every battle, then there is need for prayer.

But that is religion; it has nothing to do with authentic Christianity.

I almost feel like summarizing it like this: Christianity is not what the media seem to think it is.

I am second to none in my admiration of human greatness, but a man is not necessarily a Christian just because he is a great man.

And the Christian church does not revolve around any person, however great and distinguish.

That is religion, something entirely different.

We must get rid of this notion that the church is a national institution or any other form of human institution.

It is not a club or a society where people meet together and do certain things.

I never like to hear people referring to a building as a church.

“I’m going down to the church,” they say.

But the church does not consist of a building; it consists of people, living souls with the Lord in their midst.

We must get rid of this external notion, this idea of just paying a kind of formal visit upon God and then forgetting all about Him.

That is religion, the very enemy of the Christian faith.

Any notion that Christianity is mainly the result of something that we do is always completely, fatally wrong.

We must cast off any idea that the Christian church is the result of our action and that we are perpetuating some tradition.

If that is our view of Christianity, it is false.

That was the curse of the Jews who finally crucified the Lord Jesus Christ.

They were traditional religionists, and such have always been—and are today—the greatest enemies of the true church and of the true Christian faith and message.

But how much of so-called Christianity is just this!

Let me ask you a serious question: Why do you attend a place of worship?

Have you thought enough about it even to ask that question?

Are you going simply because it is a tradition?

People, you say, have always gone to church on Sundays.

But church attendance is something you do.

You are simply perpetuating a tradition.

Large numbers of people have gone to church out of a sense of duty, hoping each week that the service will not be too long.

Each week they have felt nothing at all; the service has been absolutely lifeless, the singing miserable, the reading of the Scriptures boring.

There has been no power, no vigor.

And because they have thought that is Christianity, they have turned their backs upon it.

And they are perfectly right to do so.

That is the logical step.

God knows, I myself did that many years ago.

And I would not be in a Christian pulpit now but for the fact that I saw through that false view.

You cannot fit that into the book of Acts.

That is traditional, formal religion, whatever form it may happen to take and in whatever denomination it may appear.

Let me be still more specific.

There are some people who seem to have seen through the formality and who compensate for it by producing an exciting kind of worship and have stunts and entertainment to make services lively and bright.

But that does not make the slightest difference because it is still men and women who are organizing it.

True Christianity is always the activity of God.

/“Suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind”/—God.

So, bright services and an entertaining and varied program is not Christianity either.

It is livelier, but the life is not the life of the Spirit.

Anything controlled by us, whether lifeless or lively, is not Christianity.

Christianity is that which controls us, which masters us, which happens to us.

My second negative is that in Christianity the God who is worshiped is not an unknown God.

But the God of religion is always an unknown God.

A classic description of this is given by Luke in the seventeenth chapter of Acts where he describes the visit of the great apostle Paul to Athens.

Paul saw the place cluttered with all sorts of temples to Jupiter, Mercury, and the rest, but he came across an intriguing and fascinating altar that had a most peculiar inscription over it: /“To the unknown God.”/

Having accounted for the gods of love and war and peace and so on, the philosophers felt there was still another power they could not overlook.

They did not know him, so they said he was the unknown god, and he seemed to be the most powerful of all.

And Paul said, (Acts 17:23)./

“Whom therefore you ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you”/

The god of religion is always unknown.

There are many people who have never really thought about God at all.

I do not usually adopt the language of people whose views I totally dissent from, but they are perfectly right when they say that large numbers of people are worshiping a “father figure,” making some idea of fatherhood their god.

It is possible for us to say our prayers mechanically without even thinking about God and who God is.