Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

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.

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.

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:

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

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

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

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

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.