Set Apart Together
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Before I get into today’s sermon, there is something very important that I have to say, and I want to say it here in front of everybody:
Happy Anniversary, Annette! I love you more than ever, and I’m so thankful that God brought us together.
Eighteen years ago today, Annette and I pledged our faithfulness to one another, and we became husband and wife.
We have had 12 happy years together since then.
HA! I’m KIDDING.
But the fact is that not all the time has been happy, and I can guarantee you that there have been many times that my dear wife has wondered why she ever said, “I do.”
And yet, she has always been faithful to me, whether in good times or in bad ones.
Some people say that marriage is a 50-50 arrangement. But the truth is that 50-50 marriages often do not work. A wife or a husband who is faithful only 50 percent of the time is not faithful at all.
For a marriage to be healthy, both partners must be willing to commit themselves completely to making it so. For us, that has meant committing ourselves to loving one another no matter what and committing ourselves to working things out, no matter what.
There’s a historical account of a man named Agathocles that sheds some light on this idea of commitment.
When Caesar landed on the shores of Britain with his Roman legions,
Agathocles was a tyrant who, during the 4th century BC, ruled the city of Syracuse in what we know as Sicily. During the time of his reign, the armies of Carthage, which is located in the African nation we know as Tunisia, held territories on the western part of the island of Sicily.
In 311 B.C., Carthage sent a force of 14,000 men to march on Syracuse, along with a fleet of ships to blockade the city from the sea. But instead of confronting those forces directly, Agathocles left his brother in charge of defending Syracuse.
He then sailed with a fleet of 60 ships carrying 14,000 of his own troops across the narrow strait that separates Sicily from Tunisia, hoping to cause enough trouble in Africa to make the Tunisians withdraw from Sicily.
Perhaps he knew that many of his troops would be struggling with the idea of having left their hometown in such dire straits, because after landing in Africa, the first thing that Agathocles did was to burn the ships that had brought them all across the Mediterranean Sea.
The message was clear: They would either gain victory or they would die trying.
That’s commitment. That’s being all-in for a cause.
That’s the kind of commitment that makes marriages strong. And that’s the kind of commitment that makes churches strong.
It is no coincidence that this is exactly the kind of commitment that we see in accounts of the first church, in the Book of Acts.
While you are turning to Acts, Chapter 2, let me remind you of what the political situation looked like in Jerusalem at the time of Pentecost.
This was just 50 days after the resurrection of Christ and 10 days after His ascension into heaven. Remember that the Jewish religious leaders had demanded Jesus’ crucifixion, despite the fact that Pilate had found no guilt in Him.
Also remember that the disciples had been so afraid for their lives that they had scattered after Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane. Peter himself had three times denied that he even knew Jesus.
This was a dangerous time and place to be a follower of Jesus.
The disciples and many of those who had followed Jesus recognized that He was God’s only Son, sent to bear the sins of the world on a cross. They knew that He had been raised from the dead on the third day. And they knew that He had been taken up into heaven to wait for His Father to send Him back to take home those who had followed Him in faith.
What they did not know was when that would happen. What they did not know was how they would carry out His command that as they waited they “go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you.”
But now, 10 days after Jesus had ascended into heaven, the promised Holy Spirit had come to help them in their task.
4 And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit was giving them utterance.
There were Jews from the whole known world in the city at the time, because this was the time of one of the great feasts of the Jewish people.
They heard the sounds of the men from Galilee speaking in many different languages, and they were amazed by what was happening, even accusing the men of being drunk at 9 in the morning.
But then Peter, the one who had so recently denied even knowing Jesus, stood up and began to preach, and in Verse 36, he brings home his main point.
36 “Therefore let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ—this Jesus whom you crucified.”
We know the Holy Spirit was alive in the disciples at this time, but the following verses make it abundantly clear that the Spirit was also working on those who heard Peter’s message.
37 Now when they heard this, they were pierced to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brethren, what shall we do?”
38 Peter said to them, “Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
39 “For the promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call to Himself.”
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40 And with many other words he solemnly testified and kept on exhorting them, saying, “Be saved from this perverse generation!”
41 So then, those who had received his word were baptized; and that day there were added about three thousand souls.
As I’ve prayed over and considered my preaching plan for this month, I came to recognize just this week that much of this month’s teaching is on basic principles of the faith.
Last week, for instance, we talked about how baptism is a public profession of faith in the power of the shed blood of Jesus Christ to save us from the punishment we deserve for our sins.
That’s what we see here in verse 41. Those who had received Peter’s word — in other words, those who had accepted his message as truth, those who chose to give their lives to Christ in faith — they were the 3,000 people who were then baptized.
Baptism was their immediate public profession of faith.
We do no know how many believers there were prior to Peter’s sermon at Pentecost. We know, of course, that the 11 disciples believed, and we know that Jesus’ family came to believe after His resurrection, and we see throughout the Gospels that there were pockets of followers who believed. But we’re never given a number.
We do know there was no church prior to this event. And we can see from the verses following, along with the rest of Luke’s account from the Book of Acts, that the church formed very quickly on the heels of what we might think of as the first camp meeting.
Three thousand new Christians that day. It’s an amazing thing to consider. And these were not people who simply walked down the aisle and prayed a prayer and then went on about their lives as if nothing had happened to them.
42 They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
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Do you see that? They were “continually devoting themselves to” the things that spoke of their new lives in Jesus Christ: the teaching of the apostles, fellowship with other believers, the breaking of bread (probably the Lord’s Supper) and prayer.
That phrase, “continually devoting themselves to,” comes from a single Greek word that has the sense of attaching yourself to something.
If you’re attached to something, then you have to be pried away from it.
These folks were all in.
For much of this nation’s history, there has been some social benefit to calling oneself a Christian. Especially in the 20th century, being part of a church generally contributed to one’s social and business standing.
Things are changing, of course. Today, some people in some parts of the country might snicker behind your back or from the cover of social media because you call yourself a Christian. But there is still no part of our country where it is dangerous to publicly proclaim you are a follower of Christ.
But there are many places around the globe where the danger of doing so is very real, where doing so can cost you your life.
In North Korea, Christians who are discovered in the underground church there are deported to labor camps as political criminals or even killed on the spot.
In Afghanistan, which is an Islamic state by constitution, converting to Christianity is considered an act of treason, a betrayal of family, tribe and country. Anyone found to be simply exploring some other faith than Islam is subject to torture and even death.
In China last year, 15 days before Christmas, one of the largest house churches in one province was raided by Chinese police. The raid continued for days, and more than 100 Christians, including one of the nation’s best-known pastors, were detained.
Churches there are required to be registered with the government, and their services are regularly monitored by closed-circuit television and spies. Church buildings have been closed and even bulldozed for failing to be registered or for preaching from Bibles that have not been rewritten to reflect the Communist values of this atheist nation.
Just last month in Algeria, at least two Christian churches were closed by the police. At one of those churches, police officers beat many of the 300 Christians who were there as they dragged them from the building. They had to be pried away from the fellowship by the police.
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As I’ve read these reports during the past few weeks, I have wondered how many of us would have to be dragged away from this fellowship if it came to that.
The truth is that for many of the people who call themselves members of this church, someone would have to drag them INTO the building in the first place.
But for some reason, we insist on calling them members anyway. And I’m not just picking on Liberty Spring Christian Church. This is a problem for churches all over America.
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But I’ll bet it’s not a problem for the house churches in Algeria, or China, or Afghanistan or North Korea. Those Christians understand something about following Jesus Christ that we seem to have forgotten in our freedom.
We are called to do this Christian life in a community of believers called a church, an ekklesia. That’s the Greek word from which we get “church,” and it means “the called-out ones.”
We have been called out or set apart from the world, but we have not been set apart separately. We have been set apart together.
We claim to want to see God work miracles through the church, but we’re unwilling to faithfully devote ourselves to it.
Just as the crisis in American marriage comes down to an unwillingness to be faithful to our vows, the crisis in the American church comes down to an unwillingness to be faithful to our Savior.
We want to use His name, because it still gains us certain social benefits here in America, but we don’t really want to be faithful to Him.
Some years ago, Norman Cousins wrote about encountering a priest from India who said he wanted to come to America as a missionary.
Cousins figured the priest wanted to come to convert Americans to Hinduism, but the man told him he wanted to come and be a Christian missionary to this nominally Christian nation.
“I would like to convert them to the Christian religion,” the priest said. “Christianity cannot survive in the abstract. It needs not membership, but believers. The people of your country may claim they believe in Christianity, but from what I read at this distance, Christianity is more a custom than anything else. I would ask that either you accept the teachings of Jesus in your everyday life and in your affairs as a nation, or stop invoking His name as sanction for everything you do. I want to help save Christianity for the Christian.” (B. Clayton Bell, in Preaching, May-June, 1986.)
The church needs believers, not members. And when the church is full of believers who commit themselves faithfully to sound teaching, to true Christian fellowship, to sharing the bread and wine of communion in repentance and forgiveness and reconciliation and to fervent personal and corporate prayer — when the church looks like that, then amazing things begin to happen.
That’s what we see in the church.
43 Everyone kept feeling a sense of awe; and many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles.
I heard a Southern Baptist missionary to China give a talk last year during which he described seeing miracles of healing taking place at house churches whose pastors’ only access to Scripture was the one book they had been able to tear from a Bible been smuggled in and shared among many Christians hungry for the Word.
This was not some hand-waving, tongues-speaking charismatic eager to see miracles in everyday life. This was a Southern Baptist missionary, whose denominational leaders have all but said we are no longer living in an age of such miracles.
This was a man who had attended church services in homes where the congregants all had to whisper their prayers and Psalms so the neighbors would not hear and report them to the authorities.
They were not part of the fellowship because of the preaching or because of the music or because of the social benefits of calling themselves Christians.
They were there, risking everything they had, because they loved the Lord and because they understood that loving the Lord meant being faithful to the community of His church.
This is the same thing we see in that church.
44 And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common;
45 and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need.
They were TOGETHER, and they had all things in common. Now think about your family — your blood relatives. Does this describe your family? Be honest. It doesn’t describe mine.
This community was CLOSER than kin. These were true brothers and sisters, ready to sacrifice to help one another.
Note that they didn’t give to one another out of their excess. They sold their things to provide for one another.
You don’t get that close to one another by seeing each other once a week for an hour, much less a couple of times a month or less. And you certainly don’t get that close by simply claiming membership out of some tradition.
Now, I’m certain that someone out there is thinking right now: But Pastor Res, some of our members are shut-ins, and they can’t get to church.
I’m not talking about the shut-ins. I’m talking about those who simply choose not to be a part of the church’s worship and the church’s work.
I have to tell you the truth. I find it shocking someone can be listed in an obituary as a member of this church and yet some of the people who have been here the longest cannot even remember who they were.
Even the Rotary Club has rules about attendance. If you miss more than 25 percent of their weekly meetings, then you’re at risk of losing your membership.
Now, I know I’m stomping on some toes here, but the simple fact, straight from Scripture, is that if you have decided to follow Jesus Christ, you have been set apart TOGETHER with the church, not APART from it.
The writer of Hebrews said we should “stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near.”
You see, the point here is that we individual Christians benefit from the assembly, but the assembly also benefits from the individuals. And the lost world benefits from seeing the fruit of our community.
See how that looked for the church?
46 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,
They met together day by day, and they gladly shared meals together with sincerity.
They were not playing church. They were BEING the church. They were being 100 percent faithful to Christ and to His body, the church.
They were:
47 praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved.
As they went about BEING the church, even in the political climate that existed in the months following the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, they found favor with the lost in Jerusalem.
And what happened?
"The Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved.”
In this city where Jesus had been hung on a cross just 53 days earlier, THOUSANDS were choosing to be identified with Him, and not just identified with Him but allowing everything in their world to be turned upside down in His name.
Now, THAT’S a miracle.
That’s the kind of miracle we’re seeing in places like Algeria and China and Afghanistan and North Korea.
Look back through this passage in . Do you see 50-50 Christians there? No, what you see is Christians who are 100-percent committed to Jesus Christ through His church.
I think that’s what you see in those countries where Christians are being persecuted, too.
50-50 marriages tend to fail. And so do 50-50 Christians.
We who follow Jesus Christ in faith are called to burn the ships. We are called to be all-in for Him, and that means being all-in for His church.
If you are attached to this church, do not let Satan pry you away from it. You need the church, and the church needs you.
He carried the cross from which he was hung.
And that’s exactly what He calls us to do as believers. He calls us to be all in, to burn the ships, to be 100-percent committed to Him in all we do