20/20 Vision from AD 30

Good morning and welcome to Dishman Baptist Church. Please open your Bibles to Acts 2, Acts 2. The popular Christmas song Deck the Halls says Fast away the old year passes, hail the new year lads and lasses, sing we joyous all together, heedless of the wind and weather, fa la la la la la, la la la la. It is amazing how fast this last year went and here we are on the cusp of a new one. This season is always so rife with possibility. Around the nation there are two type of sermons taking place this morning - one has to do with prophecy updates or a look at what the Bible says about the end of time and trying to choose or bend events to fit prophecy. The second is a vision casting sermon - especially relevant this year with the impending start of 20/20. What better number to have than 20/20 to start a New Year.

We have accomplished a lot as a church this year - and we will be getting together in a few days to celebrate those accomplishments. A year ago, on the last Sunday of the year we gathered together and looked at 1 Corinthians 2 and how Paul informed the Corinthians that he had resolved to know nothing among them except Christ and Him crucified. And that is what we have done as well - we focused on the person of Christ as we studied the book of Colossians and then studied through some Messianic Psalms during the summer, finishing up the year going through the first few chapters of the book of Mark. We will return to that study next week.

But this week we’re going to look at the vision that we should have in 2020 by looking back at what the first century church and even in fact what the first church had as their vision. And honestly this has been a hard week for me in preparation for today. Not only has my house been ravaged by sickness - Jeremiah was sick on Christmas morning and then the next day Bekah was in urgent care with strep throat. But it has also been a hard week for me because I have kind of been kicking against the goads a bit. I kept asking God what He would have me preach this morning and this passage kept coming to mind - and yet I’d say God there must be something else I can preach. But here we are looking at our passage - and then we’ll have a challenge at the end as we seek to apply what we’ve learned in this new year both individually and as a church.

So please look back at your Bibles with me at Acts 2 and we’ll be studying verse 42 this morning. I’ll read Acts 2:42-47.

Acts 2:42–47 CSB

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and signs were being performed through the apostles. Now all the believers were together and held all things in common. They sold their possessions and property and distributed the proceeds to all, as any had need. Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple, and broke bread from house to house. They ate their food with joyful and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. Every day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

When you think of vision one term almost immediately comes to mind - 20/20. This is the benchmark standard it seems for vision - and yet it is only a measure of clarity. How much can you see at a distance of 20 feet. A mark of 20/20 means that you can successfully see what should be seen at that distance. So as we look at this passage this morning we’re going to get a comprehensive view of the original church, including their clarity, to understand what we as a church in 2020 should be doing. We’re going to see their clarity as they adhere to the apostles teaching, their focus as they devote themselves to prayer and their overall healthy growth as they fellowship and break bread together. So let’s start by looking at their clarity.

Clarity

It would have been hard for this iteration of the early church to have anything less than perfect clarity of the Gospel. The disciples had just spent 3 years with Jesus and had been witnesses to His arrest and crucifixion. It was really the time after the crucifixion, when Jesus had risen from the dead and appeared to His disciples that they had really understood the full implications of His advent.

They finally started listening to Him as they followed His orders for the first time. Just before His ascension Christ gave them orders to remain in Jerusalem.

Acts 1:4–8 CSB

While he was with them, he commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for the Father’s promise. “Which,” he said, “you have heard me speak about; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit in a few days.” So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, are you restoring the kingdom to Israel at this time?” He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

And of course they do receive power on the event chronicled just before this passage when the Holy Spirit comes upon the during Pentecost and Peter preaches the wonderful sermon that produces explosive growth. Luke tells us that the early church devoted themselves to the apostles teaching. This teaching would have been the whole counsel of the Word of God. It was the whole counsel of the Word that had been written up until that time. Peter’s sermon on the day of Pentecost quoted from Joel to demonstrate the prophetic nature of what had happened that day. And he tied it to Christ’s death and resurrection. The apostle’s teaching then is what is now contained within the bindings of our Bibles. We can completely trust that what we have now is what they had then - as far as the Old Testament goes and then as new books were written it didn’t take long for them to be placed on the same standard of Scripture. In his letter 2 Peter, Peter wrote this:

2 Peter 3:15–16 CSB

Also, regard the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our dear brother Paul has written to you according to the wisdom given to him. He speaks about these things in all his letters. There are some matters that are hard to understand. The untaught and unstable will twist them to their own destruction, as they also do with the rest of the Scriptures.

He equates Paul’s writings with the rest of Scripture. The same desire and devotion that the early church put into the study and teaching of the Bible is the same devotion and effort we should put in to it today. The recent State of Theology survey paints a picture that says the church sees the Bible as something we don’t really desire or trust. Survey respondents were asked to respond to the following statement - The Bible, like all sacred writings, contains helpful accounts of ancient myths but is not literally true. A startling 47% answered true. Somewhere along the line there are people who have lost their desire to devote themselves to the apostle’s teaching - because this is where it is found. In the Word of God, inerrant, infallible, written by the hands of men but inspired by God. Commenting on the Bible Charles Spurgeon said

If you wish to know God, you must know his Word. If you wish to perceive his power, you must see how he works by his Word. If you wish to know his purpose before it comes to pass, you can only discover it by his Word.

Another great preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones said

The promise of Jesus Christ to the disciples when He said the Holy Spirit would guide them into all truth was fulfilled in the writing of the New Testament Scriptures; and the wisdom given to the Church to deliver the canon of Scripture is that which can be traced back to the Apostles and which therefore can be regarded as the Word of God.

We will never get beyond our need for this Word and for the teaching it contains. Whether we are getting it on Sunday morning from this pulpit or we are getting it within our daily reading and personal study we must desire the teaching it contains above all else. This is not to make the Bible some sort of idol - we do not worship this book. But we do recognize that this is the primary way in which God has communicated Himself to us and as such it is valuable for knowing Him and His will.

But we must also recognize that the key to their explosive growth in the early church was their commitment to maintain crystal clear clarity on the Gospel. And it is something that we must be committed to as well. There are many challenges to the Gospel in our day. There is the prosperity gospel, the health gospel, the gospel of works, of self-esteem, and something that we’re going to see increasingly over the next eleven months there is the political gospel (the idea that a membership or voting along a certain party lines is indicative of the Gospel of Christ). But the early church was clear on the Gospel - it was what Peter preached that day of Pentecost in Acts 2:22-24

Acts 2:22–24 CSB

“Fellow Israelites, listen to these words: This Jesus of Nazareth was a man attested to you by God with miracles, wonders, and signs that God did among you through him, just as you yourselves know. Though he was delivered up according to God’s determined plan and foreknowledge, you used lawless people to nail him to a cross and kill him. God raised him up, ending the pains of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by death.

This is the same Gospel that Paul proclaimed later in same letter to the Corinthians that we looked at last year

1 Corinthians 15:3–5 CSB

For I passed on to you as most important what I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve.

This is the Gospel that we must be clear on - there is no addition to it that can happen without only achieving subtraction of the glorious truths that it contains. But just as in our vision having 20/20 clarity on the Gospel is only a part of what we are called to as we embark on this new year together as a church.

Focus

But Luke doesn’t stop there - he says that they devoted themselves to prayer. We’re going to take this a bit out of order and look at focus before we look at one thing they did to maintain a healthy Christian lifestyle because these two - the clarity of the Gospel and the Focus provided by prayer are so critically important.

Before every major movement of the Spirit or the church in Acts we see prayer involved. Following the Ascension of Christ while the Apostles and the other believers waited for the promised outpouring of the Spirt they were gathered together in the upper room to pray. When they chose Matthias to take Judas place they prayed. Before sending off Paul and Barnabas on the ministry that the Holy Spirit had called them to the church prayed. Prayer was a significant portion of the life of the church. It is unfortunate that this has changed in the life of the modern church.

I read a study once that most Christians spend only 5 minutes a day in prayer (of those who actually pray every day) and the more troubling thing is that most pastors only spent an average of 7! As we look around at the state of the modern church we wonder why it is in the condition that it is - with declining numbers and declining influence every year.

One reason is that we have neglected our source of power that is found in prayer. The first part of this is that it is a protection for the believer. Many of you saw the quote I recently posted - and I warned you that you would hear it again. J.C. Ryle said this “Praying and sinning will never live together in the same heart. Prayer will consume sin, or sin will choke prayer.” Prayer is the conduit through which God’s power flows into the life of a believer.

The other power of prayer is it helps us to develop focus. There are two types of focus that we need from our eyes - the ability to focus on the near and the ability to focus in on distant objects. Prayer works the same way in our own lives. We see this illustrated in the disciple’s prayer that Jesus teaches them in Matthew 6. Jesus taught them to pray

Matthew 6:10–11 CSB

Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread.

Your kingdom come - that is the far off future, events that will take place a long time from now. Or it could be tomorrow - either way it is something we should earnestly desire in our prayer lives and remain focused on the reality that one day it will come to pass.

The second phrase is Give us our daily bread - that is the near focus. The events that are happening in our lives and in our world currently. This next year will be a critical year for prayer as it is a year for the election of a new president not only of the nation but also of the Southern Baptist Convention. We will also elect a governor in the state of Washington this year. The landscape of Christianity in the public sector is changing. Everywhere we turn we see the sway of public opinion turning darker and darker and this will continue to make it harder and harder to be a Christian in the workplace, in schools, and in the public sector at large.

And so we must do as Daniel did - when faced with challenges even to the discipline of prayer he didn’t respond with political appeals to Darius nor did he take to the Babylonian equivalent of Facebook to complain to all of his friends about the injustice of it all. He went up into his room, knelt by the window that faced Jerusalem and prayed - and interestingly he didn’t pray for deliverance but the text says he gave thanks

Daniel 6:10 CSB

When Daniel learned that the document had been signed, he went into his house. The windows in its upstairs room opened toward Jerusalem, and three times a day he got down on his knees, prayed, and gave thanks to his God, just as he had done before.

Here was a man who was living in captivity, in exile and had lived that way for the majority of his life and now he was in mortal danger because of this discipline of prayer and he was thanking God! His focus was on so much more than simply this world, this time and yet his focus was very much on his time as we have a prayer documented from Daniel later in the same book in chapter 9 Daniel prays for the current condition of his nation and asks God to relent. These were prayers with both a far-sighted and a near-sighted focus.

That is not to say that community is not important or that we don’t need to have a community as we go through this life.

Health

When we were stationed in Japan the community we had there was unlike any other I’ve ever seen. And the reason for this is that we were a small island of community in a nation of people who were unlike us in almost every way. We couldn’t speak the language - a fact that became painfully obvious when Jeremiah was rushed to a Japanese Neonatal Intensive Care Unit shortly after birth. I could not communicate with the doctors or nurses there.

We face an increasingly like situation as Christians in America and even here in Spokane Valley. Yes we may speak the same language as the rest of the people around us, we may share some similarities of the same culture - but we employ both as Christians in decidedly different fashions. And we truly are not citizens here anymore - our citizenship lies in Heaven and so, just like that Navy base in Japan, we here in this church are increasingly a small island of humanity in a vast nation of people who are very unlike us in one important distinction. They remain as children of darkness while we have been transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light.

The new church in Jerusalem was in much the same situation. They remained in a nation where they shared the language, some of the culture and many other similarities with the Jewish culture - yet they were now distinctly different. What Luke says to us here regarding their fellowship and time at the table demonstrates for us a bit of how we should be working together as the community of Christ here in Spokane Valley.

Luke says that they were devoted to THE fellowship. The definite article here is very important. Yes there is a sense in which fellowship means partnership with the entire church but the presence of the definite article “the” points to something more, something specific. In Philippians 1:5 Paul expresses gratitude for the Philippians partnership (koinonia) in the Gospel - their participation in his ministry and assistance in helping to further the spreading of the Gospel. It is interesting how the same concepts are repeated over and over again throughout the New Testament. This partnership, this fellowship in the Gospel is the fulfillment of the Great Commission. It is something we should be striving together and challenging one another toward.

Luke’s next description of the early believer’s practice has been one of much discussion and debate among scholars and theologians. He says that the believers devoted themselves to the breaking of bread. I think it is best in the context of this verse to take this instance of breaking bread as a reference to the Lord’s Supper or Communion.

The reason I say this is that the entire verse is a nod to spiritual practices that build up the faith of the church - the teaching, the fellowship and the discipline of prayer. While there is value to sharing a meal together (this is mentioned in verse 46 and is something we’re going to talk about in the challenge at the end of this) it doesn’t carry the same value of sharing the Lord’s Supper for the believer.

The Lord’s Supper is something that has been presented in various ways through out the churches and I think it is sad that this has become the case. Many who are not in favor of doing it too frequently would say that their concern is that it would become common place and lose it’s meaning. But my question is how could this be - if we’re devoted to Christ and we recognize the value of remembering His cross then we should desire to do it more. The Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger described communion:

300 Quotations for Preachers from the Reformation Jesus’ Body and Blood Feed and Satisfy

As bread nourishes and strengthens man, and gives him ability to labor; so the body of Christ, eaten by faith, feeds and satisfies the soul of man, and furnishes the whole man to all duties of godliness. As wine is drink to the thirsty, and makes merry the hearts of men; so the blood of our Lord Jesus, drunken by faith, quenches the thirst of the burning conscience, and fills the hearts of the faithful with unspeakable joy.

Have you ever tried to go without food and water for days and still remain efficient in what you were doing? This bread and this juice is spiritual nourishment for our souls. It is only a memorial yes, but it is a memorial of what Christ did for us on the cross, a reminder that our sins have been covered. It is a way to keep the realities of the cross and the forgiveness that was purchased for us there ever before our eyes. We should exult in the opportunity to come to this table. We should look forward to it. To relish it like a newborn baby relishes the taste of milk. May we never become so familiar with this table and this breaking of bread that it becomes commonplace for us. May we always rejoice in this cup and this bread and what it means for us as believers.

And so we will approach this table in a few minutes - and in so doing we will share in this meal together. It is so important for us to do this as a body today on the last day of the year as we look to the future of Dishman Baptist Church in 2020.

Challenge

How should this knowledge now spur us on to action as Dishman Baptist Church heading in to the year 2020? How should we demonstrate our clarity, our focus and our desire for overall health in this new year?

The first is that we need to maintain our clarity on the Gospel - as challenges continue to arise from within and without our denomination we need to be steadfastly determined as a church to stand on the standard of Scripture as our deciding factor in whatever is presented to us.

The second is that we as a church need to become more focused in prayer. I’m not sure exactly how it will look but we need to reestablish a midweek prayer time as well as a prayer time before our Sunday morning services. As we were committed to the centrality of the Gospel during this last year we need to be committed to the necessity of corporate prayer in this new year.

A great part of that is through our community. We must stop being a once a week church. For some of us that is exactly what we are - and there is not another relationship in your life that you attempt to live that way. I would argue that the family that we have here at Dishman is one of the most important relationships in your life - and we are allowing it to falter short of what it could be.

One of our goals is to establish mid-week home groups that will be committed to study and growth together. We have the resources to supply you - we have the Behold Your God study that was done this summer as well as the follow-on study. But we cannot do it without people who are willing to step up and lead them. It is a great opportunity for discipleship and evangelism as you share a meal with other members of the body of Christ and work through a study together. And don’t worry the mid-week women’s study as well as possibly a few midweek men’s studies and the theological reading groups are either not going away (in the case of the women’s study) or are going to get started.

We will not be doing away with our Sunday morning life groups as there is important growth that takes place there as well. We will be altering the structure of those a little bit though - we will continue to do what we are doing now until the end of May. In the next few months (by the end of February) we will publish a list of new group opportunities that will run through the summer. Some may last 5 weeks, some 8, some may last all summer. This will give you an opportunity to branch out and learn from different leaders, to fellowship with different believers and to study something that is important to your growth in sanctification as a Christian.

We’re also going to roll out a new membership pipeline class for anyone who is new to Dishman starting the first Sunday in February.

I want to challenge everyone in the area of evangelism - we have been averaging 91 in church this year. What if we trusted God to increase that by 25% this next year. That’s a little over 20 people - that we have to go out and find, witness to and bring in to our body. If you find a large family like mine we’d be almost halfway there with just one family. What could you do for God if you shared your faith with just one person a month. We’re going to be contacting the Northwest Baptist Convention and getting a study called Godspace that they will provide free of charge - I’m going to try and get a copy of the book for every member of Dishman so we can learn how to allow and welcome Godspace into our daily lives and conversations.

And the last area of challenge before we come to take communion has to do with the area of finances - what if we as a church committed to making our budget by the end of November and then every dollar brought in during December was given away to the Lottie Moon mission fund, to a specific missionary or ministry that we as a church decide on or to support a church plant. Again what could we do for God if we trusted Him with our finances this year? My real desire is to accomplish this goal by the end of 2021 - but how amazing would it be if we succeeded this year?

Those are ambitious goals because a lot of it hinges on a change of culture within the body here. We have gotten comfortable as a once a week church but I think as we look at what the early church did - and I know it is descriptive not prescriptive - we can learn much about what we should be doing. Our goal here is to see people saved, to see people mature and to see people, one day, stand before Christ and be welcomed into His kingdom. Clarity on the Gospel, Focus on short-term and long-term prayers and growing healthy together as a body is how we can accomplish this in 2020 and for years to come.