Devoted
Notes
Transcript
Introduction (10 mins)
Introduction (10 mins)
Jab 1
Last week we talked about a birth. We talked about the beginning of the Christian church and how the Holy Spirit came upon the people and that 3000 people were born into this new life with Jesus. And it is really exciting when this happens.
But then all of a sudden we have this very large group of people who are wondering what to do. They need to be cared for. They need to be brought up.
Its like having a baby. I remember when the baby came and we were in the hospital and they hang out with you for a couple of days and they have you doing stuff but the Dr’s and the nurses are there as a resource for you. And you can’t wait to just get home.
But then you get to go home and I was so happy to get out of the hospital and Rachel and I are packing everything up and we are putting the baby in the car seat and then all of a sudden I kind of panicked in my head.
We are going home. Where will the nurses be? Where are the Dr’s gonna be? We are gonna be on our own with this little being that I don’t know how to take care of.
But then
All of a sudden I am thinking that they never really offered a class on how to take care of babies.
What do we do when we get home? Home didn’t sound so good all of a sudden.
It was scary. There is all this new that surrounds us that we have never experienced before and we are kind of thrown head first into this new responsibility. This new adventure that never goes away.
But we were there. We were there for the long haul. We were devoted to this new little life and we were not going to quit on it.
We started this series where we are looking at the book of Acts and the first New Testament church.
Jab 2
I think that those leaders of that first Christian church might have felt very similar. What do we do with this group of people that God saved? How do we take care of them? What are we supposed to do?
Jab 3
Just to go back to last week for a minute. If you missed it please go to the website or the app and listen to that message because it talks about how the Holy Spirit came and was poured out on the church and the apostles started declaring the great and marvelous things of God in that upper room. And all these thousands of men heard these different languages and it got their attention.
Peter stands up and preaches Jesus to these people who respond to that message that Jesus was the promised Messiah and that they had crucified him.
Can you imagine for a minute what that must have been like? 50 days after the Resurrection.
Jesus appeared during 40 of those days to over 500 people. It is getting around that the guy who was executed who claimed to be the Messiah has come back to life!
Can you imagine for a minute the perspective of the people listening to Peter.
Oh no, Oh no. He REALLY WAS the Messiah? He was REALLY the promised one to come? Oh no!
Oh no, what do we do?” What do we do? And at that Peter says Repent and be baptized, all of you.
And they did. 3000 of them in one day. The first church was a Mega Church!
But now what? Now you have 3000 brand new Christians. What do you do with them? How to you take care of them. How do you train them? This is called discipleship. This is what the church exists for.
And man, right off the bat they have this huge church and they have to figure out what they are going to do.
And this is where we are too. We are a church that belongs to Jesus and if we believe that then we want to do our very best at being a New Testament church. What did THEY believe? How did THEY act? That is why we are going through the book of Acts, to look at the source of the information about the first Christian church.
Let’s look at a short description of them.
Left Hook
42 And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. 43 And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. 44 And all who believed were together and had all things in common. 45 And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. 46 And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.
:
Tension
It’s really exciting to read this about the first church and how they acted and the way that they got along. Its really pretty cool.
Do we see something in that first New Testament church that is missing in our church? Is there something that they did that maybe we are missing?
There is a word that is used in this little piece of Scripture that sums up what the first church looked like. The word is devoted. They were devoted. What were they devoted to?
Explanation (10 mins)
Explanation (10 mins)
The first Church was devoted to worship
42 And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.
42 And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.
They are devoted to worship. Which means something different than most people think. Worship is more than coming to a building or a school on a Sunday morning, sing three songs, take communion hear a message, sing another song and leave. That is not a definition of worship.
Worship is so much more than that. I took a definition from a worship leader named Austin Stone who says that “Biblical worship is the full-life response-heard, heart and hands-to who God is and what He has done.”
Sounds a little funky but it comes from the words of Jesus when we talked about worship and said in
37 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.
Matthew
In everything you do you involve the bowing to God. Everything. At work, when you play, when you watch movies, when you talk to your friends. All of it involves God and God is with you if you have surrendered to Him anyway, so whether you like it or not God is with you in everything, everything that you do.
I used to define worship as singing, or music, or even a particular kind of worship. Like the slow song at the end was the “worship song”. That is the way I used to think.
I remember going to a workshop where I got to meet a famous Christian band and they were my favorite band and I was so excited. And it was a question and answer thing. I remember asking the question to them. “Do you guys keep your set lists open to do more worship songs if you feel like that is going to work better that night?
One of the guys kind of snapped at me saying that worship is a lifestyle and that it got kind of awkward right there. But he was right. Worship is a lifestyle, and it is not compartmentalized into a song or a period of time or a place.
Because that would mean that if it isn’t 10 on a Sunday, at AG Waters Middle School, you can’t worship? Of course not. Worship is life and life is worship.
And that first church excelled at worship.
This was something new, but not really new. That first church was going to be made up ofJews but now they are Christians which means you are like a Jew 2.0.
It means that they are taking what they knew, what they grew up with and you need to know that for them, to understand and to really get what is going on with Jesus they need to have the dots connected.
So the apostles are teaching and basically going to all that Scripture on the Old Testament and they are filling the name Jesus in whenever the promised Messiah is mentioned.
So the apostles are teaching and basically going to all that Scripture on the Old Testament and they are filling the name Jesus in whenever the promised Messiah is mentioned.
Connect the dots for us Peter, Thomas, John, all you guys that were with Jesus, fill in these blanks for us because we are hungry for this. We need this information.
Connect the dots for us Peter, Thomas, John, all you guys that were with Jesus, fill in these blanks for us because we are hungry for this. We need this information. They are hungry and the Words says that they were devoted to this teaching. They needed it. They had to have it!
They are hungry and the Word says that they were devoted to this teaching. They needed it. They had to have it! And they were committed to it.
And listen, again, worship involved everything they did. They lived together, they ate together, they prayed together.
Not just Sunday
Their worship of God was not just personal, but it was corporate. They did it together.
Do you look at your life as a life of worship? Maybe you should. And so the church was devoted to worship.
2. The first Church was devoted to generosity
44 And all who believed were together and had all things in common. 45 And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.
45 And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. 46 And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts,
This is unique. This church, this gathering. Remember that the word for church is the word gathering. They became a big family where no one had possessions of their own and everybody shared and was generous.
And I think that we should stress the point this morning that I don’t believe that this means that Christians are supposed to live in communes and sell everything they have and live under the same roof. I don’t think that is what is being taught here.
I believe that we are to look at the generosity as an example of a response. It’s not a formula, but a response. Honestly, a formula would be much easier. Give this or that and this or that will happen. It’s not a formula but a picture of how this church reacted to the love and grace of God.
Not a formula (that would be easy) but a response
But this generosity is voluntary. Not everyone sold everything. And they weren’t looked down on because of it. It says they were meeting in homes so obviously some folks held on to their homes. The idea is that they were generous.
What it shows is that this church is generous. They gave to those who had a genuine need. So much so that verse 45 it says that if there was a need then someone sold something and helped them out monetarily.
We see this principle throughout the New Testament.
17 But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?
He is saying that generosity and the love of God in your heart coincide. Meaning that if you can ignore someone who has a true need do you really have the love of God in your heart?
There is a story in about a man named Zacchaeus.
Zacchaeus
He entered Jericho and was passing through. And behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was rich. And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was small in stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully. And when they saw it, they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.” And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”
This is supposed to be the norm for the Christian.
When Zacchaeus experienced the love of God, or Christ, his response is generosity. Not the other way around. Zacchaeus didn’t give money and then get Jesus’ approval. You cannot buy your way into the family of God. You cannot buy your friendship with Jesus.
Zach experienced the unconditional love of Jesus as a man who would have been dishonest and disgusted by those around him. When he experienced that love of Jesus his response was to give it away. He said half of his possessions to the poor.
Are we a generous church? Do we look like that first church in the way that we spend or not spend?
They were devoted to generosity.
3. The first Church was devoted to the fellowship.
42 And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.
46 And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.
46 And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts,
If we look at this brand new church we see that another big facet of it was that they were devoted to fellowship. What is the fellowship?
It was this new family that they had together. It was the togetherness, the oneness that they shared. That word for fellowship is the greek word koinonia.
Invested in time together.
It is the close association that people have with one another. It is a togetherness. Another definition I read called it a proof of brotherly unity.
The fellowship was the unity that this gathering had.
They ate together, they prayed together, they gave to one another freely. They were displaying probably exactly what God intended for his people while on the earth.
What must that have looked like? What must it have been like to have 3000 plus together for one purpose and all being like minded?
If you read these few verses here and if you really give it some thought you have to get a little bit excited about it. I mean what would it look like to get a bunch of people together who have just become Christians for the first time?
A new commited follower of Jesus is excited. They aren’t hum drum, they aren’t lame, they are truly and genuinely excited. They want to learn, they want to learn everything and they love spending time learning about God.
They want to be around other people who know the Lord and they want to tell the people they love about Jesus.
Imagine that times 3000. It must have been an amazing time.
They were devoted to the fellowship, the koinonia together.
When I was a teen-ager I worked at a Bible Conference called Sandy Cove down in North East, Maryland. I spent my summers there from 9th grade through graduation. And if I will be perfectly honest I probably wasn’t the most mature Christian. I gave my life to the Lord at a young age, went to church every week, attended youth group.
But this camp that I worked at was a Bible Conference. What was a Bible Conference? Well, this camp was a place where people came for vacations. To hear speakers talk about the bible. There were services in the morning and services in the afternoon and services in the evening! That’s a lot of services!
I have to be honest and tell you that I couldn’t believe that people would come to a place like this for their vacation! I mean, wouldn’t you want to go to the beach? Or to an amusement park? Or hiking in the mountains?
No, they wanted to go to the bible conference and listen to teaching and eating together and play putt putt together. I thought it was kind of weird.
But when I think about that now I think that maybe the people that spent their vacations at this Bible Conference were much like the people who were at this new gathering, this fellowship.
They spent their days together and they were unified. And this gathering grew, and grew and grew.
Application (10 mins)
Application (10 mins)
It seemed like
the church was also devoted to evangelism. They were so excited about what happened in their lives they wanted to share that with others.
They were devoted to one another. They invested in one another.
The apostles were doing exactly what Jesus told them to do: “To go and make disciples...”
That is why our vision is to Be Disciples and Make Disciples. That is the goal. And yes, we need to focus on our own relationship with Jesus we really do, but part of that means that we are bringing others along even if we don’t know everything.
If your knowledge of the bible is holding you back, if what you don’t know is keeping you from sharing your faith I have sone news for you.
We will never know enough, we will never have enough knowledge, we will never be fluent in every apologetic argument. We won’t ever feel comfortable sharing our faith with someone else unless we start sharing our faith.
This gathering of 3000 just men. They only counted the men grew very quickly to 5000 men. And it wasn’t because of just those disciples that Jesus commissioned, it was from the people who were experiencing Christ in their lives.
The church doesn’t grow because of me, the church grows because of you, and what God does through you.
Tell people your story. What did your life used to be like? What is it like now?
Whatever we do we want to focus on disciple making because that is what Jesus wants us to do.
Discipleship.
The First New Testament Church was unique but it doesn’t have to be.
I believe that the church even today needs to be devoted to the same things they were devoted to.
They were devoted to the teaching of the Word. That is what we do here every week
They were devoted to being generous. We have the same opportunities to be generous here in this day and age to. You know at this church we tithe to local projects like Our Daily Bread and Deep Roots. We can have a great impact on our community through generosity and I appreciate how generous many of you are, because there really are some generous people here and that is so encouraging.
When I see those bags of items for Deep Roots left here on Sundays. You are directly impacting people who need life’s basic things.
How else can we be devoted? We can be devoted to our fellowship. To get to know one another better not just through our fellowship time after church but through our home groups. Maybe you want to go out to lunch with another family after church or plan a time for you to get together. That is how we grow in Discipleship.
Finally we can be devoted through evangelism. Show people the love of Christ. Point them to Jesus. Take some cards off of the table and give them out to people you strike up conversations with.
That first church kept going and kept going and they are the source from where we get our church today. How are you going to be devoted? How will you use the life God has given you to help this world?
