Sermon Tone Analysis

*The Makings of a Great Church*

*Acts 2:41-47* \\ \\

What is the average American looking to get out of life?

Is it wealth, fame, or control over their destiny that most people are after?

A 2005 Barna survey reported that 44% of adults say that having a satisfying family life is their highest priority in life.[1]

Almost half of the respondents said that their highest priority in life was to be satisfied with their family life!

18% of respondents in that same survey said that completely understanding and carrying out the principles of their faith was the highest priority in their life.

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You might expect me to lament the fact that more than twice as many Americans wanted a good family life than want to completely understand and obey the commands of Christ.[2]

This would be a great lead-in to a fire-and-brimstone sermon about wrong priorities.

Here’s the funny thing, though: I think that these two responses, which together comprise the most important priority for almost 2~/3 of the people Barna polled, aren’t contradictory.

Rather, I think that they are complementary.

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How can they complement each other, you might ask?

The answer comes when we see our church like an extended family, and as the training grounds to have both a clear understanding of Christ as well as the ability to follow Him and have the fulfilling family life that so many of us long for.

I have been at churches that were good at one but only passable or even substandard at the other.

Certainly it takes a great church to fill these important needs.

How can we become a truly great church that satisfies these two crucial desires in our life?

I think Luke gives us a picture of a model church, a church that gives us what we need to serve the Lord and have a fulfilling life.

In Acts 2:41-47, Luke paints us a picture of the makings of a truly great church.

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1.                  */A Great Church has Great Priorities (2:41-42)/:* What an amazing beginning to the church of Jesus Christ we have recorded for us in the book of Acts.

Jesus ascends to Heaven in Acts 1:9, and the Apostles “huddle up” and wait for the great empowerment of the Holy Spirit that Jesus promised them in 1:8.

At the beginning of chapter 2 the Holy Spirit comes upon the gathered disciples such that they begin evangelizing the gathered Jews in each person’s native language[3], which causes quite a commotion!

Some of the gathered crowd was perplexed, but some mocked the Apostles and thought that they were drunk.

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In the midst of the commotion the Apostle Peter stood up and gave an impassioned speech, explaining the signs and wonders taking place and making a powerful case for Jesus and His resurrection.

Peter, the coward who had denied the Lord in the face of the religious authorities, became in an instant the fiery and eloquent defender that we find in Acts 2!  And his speech had amazing results.

The response to his fantastic speech was overwhelming.

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At the end of Peter’s speech we pick up in Acts 2 with the very first description of the new Christian church.

These followers of Jesus for the first time have the indwelling Holy Spirit empowering them and giving them gifts, and here we find the infant church just trying to figure out what it is doing and why.

There hasn’t been time for refinement, or politics, or worship wars.

What we instead find in the earliest church at the very outset is a set of great priorities.

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/41So then, those who had received his word were baptized; and that day there were added about three thousand souls.

42They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer./

(Acts 2:41-42) \\ \\

Holy cow, can you imagine being around the next few weeks?

Think about it in this manner: Luke tells us in Acts 1:15 that there were about 120 people all-told that were in the fellowship of the Apostles.

These were the people who were waiting for the empowering of the Holy Spirit to fulfill Jesus’ command to go and be witnesses.

That’s about the size of the WG on a typical Sunday morning.

Now imagine if we had a big outreach, and God blessed it so amazingly that about 3,000 people came to know Jesus Christ as their Savior.

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What would our response be?

I have to tell you, the thought makes sweat bead up on my forehead!

How would we begin to disciple them all?

How would we try to make connections with each one, and help them start the initial steps of walking in obedience to Christ?

For that matter, where would we be able to hold worship services on Sunday?

We would have to have a dozen or more worship services!

We would, in short, have a logistical nightmare.

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 Thankfully Luke records for us the priorities of the earliest church in verses 41 and 42.

The church in Jerusalem had the same kind of logistical problems we would have!

These new believers no doubt placed a great strain on the resources of the early church, probably even more than they would place on us.

This church shows us how to “major in the majors.”

Sure we need to make sure things are in order, but Luke shows us that we must always remember that “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

A great church is built first and foremost on great priorities.

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At Pentecost the disciples had a mission: preach the gospel to the people in Jerusalem.

Jesus told them their first mission would be in Jerusalem[4], and they believed Him.

When the people who were “pierced to the heart” in v. 37 responded in faith, the church responded with assistance.

Everyone who accepted Peter’s speech was baptized.

They didn’t wait for six months to make sure that the people were really serious about Jesus, or make them take a bunch of classes to see if they had a biblical worldview before they would allow them to be baptized.

No sir!  Every person who responded to the message of Peter was baptized.

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I’m not sure how they managed to make it happen, but it looks to me like they baptized those people that very day[5].

And that day began a habit of activity in the life of the early church that we must model ourselves after at the WG.

If we hope to “raise up a godly generation one family at a time” then our priorities must match theirs.

Peter, the Apostles, and the rest of the disciples were interested in bringing people into the fellowship of the church.

They weren’t as interested in the past as they were in the present and the future, and they sought to include as many as they possibly could in the activity and function of the church.

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I want to start our discussion of verse 42 by saying that I don’t think that it describes just the worship service of the church.[6]

Rather, this section of Acts 2 looks like a description of the whole life of the church.

As we unpack it and look at the description Luke gives us we will see a lot more going on than just Sunday morning.

And the priorities that drove the church are laid out for us in 2 parts, with a little explanation.

This section describes for us the activities and attitudes that the earliest church began with[7].

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a.  *“The Apostles’ teaching”*: The first priority of the early church was “/the apostles’ teaching/”.

Most of these people had never had the opportunity to meet Jesus and know Him, but they had His disciples with them.

Because Peter and James and John and the other Apostles had sat at Jesus’ feet for three years they could pass along what Jesus taught and who He was to these new Christians.

And I have no doubt that the Apostles taught these people the whole message of Christ, from first belief in Him as Savior to the rigors of discipleship to the glory to come for those who hang in there and serve Christ with their life.

The first priority of the church was to teach people the truth about Jesus, and the truth about their life in light of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

That is what we do here on Sunday morning.

In our singing, our offering, our studying, and our togetherness we focus on the teaching of the Apostles about the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord.

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b. *“Fellowship”*: The second priority of the church was “/fellowship/”.

This word is pretty “churchy;” it sounds very pious and religious.

The term, though, only means “a close association involving mutual interests and sharing.”[8]

By definition the word can apply to a church, a school, a co-op, a fan club, or any gathering of like-minded people to share a mutual interest.

In the case of the church Luke gives us a little bit of amplifying information right at the end of verse 42 by unpacking what he means by “fellowship”.

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Luke tells us that “fellowship” means “the breaking of bread and…prayer.”[9]

If we look down a little further in our text to verse 46 Luke will give us a little insight into what focus this fellowship had: \\ \\

/Day by day continuing with one mind in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart,/ (Acts 2:46) \\ \\

First let’s look at “the breaking of bread.”

In verse 46 Luke clarifies that this took place “from house to house.”

In other words, the first mega-church in history had a great small group ministry!

The church didn’t feel like they had to meet with the entire congregation all the time; rather, they knew by necessity and by common sense that we grow in smaller gatherings like we just can’t in big groups.

When there are several thousand people around, we can get lost in the crowd.

Even with a hundred people on Sunday it can be very easy to miss seeing someone and not realize it.

In a group of a half-dozen or a dozen, though, you remember every person.

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The fact that they were “breaking bread” is very important in the culture and time that we are looking at today.

In America we can sit at the same table as some virtual strangers at Costco and eat a hotdog.

In Jerusalem, though, having a meal with someone was a very special event.

It implied togetherness, not only physically but socially.

When Jesus “broke bread” with tax collectors and sinners it got Him in hot water with the religious nuts, because in their culture it implied an approval of the person and an acceptance of their hospitality.

This means that the church focused on individual growth, acceptance, and accountability.

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Small groups weren’t the only time on the agenda, though.

Luke also tells us that they met for prayer.

The Greek text actually has this in the plural, “the prayers,” and verse 46 tells us that these were the temple prayers.

The temple was the largest building in Jerusalem, so it would be the natural place to have a large meeting.

The most natural time to have that meeting would be when there was already a reason to be there, and Luke tells us that time was the time of morning and evening prayer that was a part of temple worship.

Not only was the church focused on helping people grow relationships with small groups and friendship, they were interested in coming together as a large body for time together.