Acts 2:41-47
Please remain standing and turn
in your copy of the word of God to the New Testament book of
Acts. Our reading will be chapter two, verses 41 through 47. Before we read God’s word, let’s
ask for his help and blessing. Pray with me. Our Lord, we want
your word to do its work this day. So still our minds and calm
our hearts. open our eyes, unstop our ears,
unclench our fist, and make us willing and ready to hear and
to receive your word with joy and gladness. But most of all,
may we leave the place, this place, this day, and go and do,
go and live as you have called us. Through Christ, our savior,
we pray. Amen. Here, the word of the living
God, Acts chapter two, beginning at verse 41. So those who received
his word were baptized. And there were added that day
about 3000 souls. And they devoted themselves to
the apostles teaching and fellowship and the breaking of bread and
the prayers. And all came upon every soul.
And many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles
and all who were together had all things in common. And they
were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing
the proceeds to all as any had need. And day by day, attending
the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received
their food with gladness and generous hearts, praising God
and having favor with the people. And the Lord added to their number
day by day, those who were being saved. Amen. This is the word
of the living God. You may be seated. There’s a television channel,
I’m not sure which one it even is, but from time to time I find
myself maybe a Saturday afternoon landing there. It’s an auto channel. There’s an auto auction and they
sell all kinds of new cars, old cars, and in-between cars. It’s
fascinating to see some of the custom vehicles, some of the
options, some of the motors, the abilities of these cars.
It’s really interesting to see so few miles, such little use. These are obviously prized possessions
of the owners and the potential buyers. And from time to time,
they’ll show a really old car, maybe something from the 20s
or the 30s or the 40s. And it’s usually the case you’ll
hear this comment. Well, you could get any color
you wanted in that car as long as it was black. Some of you
may remember those days. Cars were, well, they were black. That was all you could get, black
exterior, black interior. Now you go to the dealership
and there’s a smorgasbord of colors. And they’re not red and
white and blue and yellow and green and purple. It’s forest.
Mocha. worse than the Crayola crayon
box. And I’m afraid the church has
become much like the car industry today. It used to be back in
the day, even in an old town square where there was a Methodist
church, a Baptist church, a Presbyterian church, and an Episcopal church.
You might have could have said, well, the church, churches were,
well, had all these options as long as you, well, liked the
Bible. As long as you liked hymnody, as long as you liked reverence. Today, you flip through the yellow
pages. Well, I suppose we don’t do that
any longer, but we flip through the internet websites and we
look at the wide variety of churches, not just denominations, there
are thousands of them, but the wide varieties of worship. There’s
ancient worship, future worship, contemporary worship, traditional
worship, We have so divided up the church that it’s almost,
well, it’s hard to pick and choose. Several years ago, I think it
was in the fall of 2017, so right about four years ago, We sat
as a congregation in the fellowship hall. We were struggling to find
our identity. We had some old and some new
and some in between, and we wanted to find a common goal. What do
we want to be as a church? What do we want to do? And it
was a real blessing. We passed out these note cards
and we asked people to write down one word that best describes
our church and what it means to you. Now, we had a complaint
or two. That’s usually just the way it
goes. But I would say 99% of the note
cards had words like Bible, reverence, worship, friendship, support. We had wonderful words of what
our church is and what it means to each who were there that day. I have those note cards. They’re
in a folder. And I get them out this time
of year. It was especially helpful to
think through those note cards as we think of this passage from
the book of Acts today. You take those note cards and
you take the scriptures. Do these words have something
in common? You know, so many churches today are, well, they’re
like the world. And how’s the old saying go?
You can win the world in worldly ways or you can win the world
in God’s ways. There’s the old saying from James
Montgomery Boyce, what you win them with, is what you win them
to. And so many churches these days
have all of these side shows and it’s not wrong to have this
fellowship and that fellowship and it’s not wrong to help mothers
and do consignment sales and all these little side things
that happen in churches. But what begins to happen is
we eclipse the main things. Oh, I go to this church for the
women’s ministry. My children go to that church
for the youth ministry. My husband goes to this one for
the men’s ministry. I go here for the preaching.
He goes there for the music. These are things I’ve heard as
a pastor. You see a family just utterly
divided on Sunday going nine different ways. The church is
supposed to unify us. The church is supposed to bring
us together, not just one another, but families. as well. And so as we think on the life
of the early church, we want to think today on what was dear
to them in those early days. Now, let me issue a little word
of caution. You hear some people these days
say, well, we’re a New Testament church. And what do they mean
by that? Well, we do it like they did
it back in Jesus day. Well, that’s all well and good.
But what we must remember is this. This is the church developing. This is what two days into Pentecost. The Holy Spirit does not come
upon our churches these days in these radical ways and make
us speak in tongues and bring in the nations and thousands
upon thousands added. God was doing this in a sense
to gather the nations, to give them Jesus. And then as they
go back to their home places, what do they take with them?
They take with them Christ Jesus. And so we’ve got to be a little
careful and not idealize some of these things. But what we
have in our passage is a continuation of the work of the risen and
exalted Christ. He sent his Holy Spirit upon
the church. The Holy Spirit came with a mighty
rushing wind, the noise of which attracted crowds. The tongues
of fire rested on the Galileans. The disciples heads, they spoke
with languages they had never learned and did not know in order
that the gathered nations in Jerusalem for Passover might
hear the gospel. Those naysayers said they were
drunk. Peter says, no, it’s the promise
from Joel and Jesus is the Lord and Christ. And what you are
seeing is the ministry of the word through Peter and its effect
on the church. He has told these folks they
are sinners who crucified Jesus. They come under conviction, they
repent, they are baptized, they realize the two promises of Peter.
With repentance and baptism comes the forgiveness of sin and the
outpouring of the Holy Spirit. And we looked last week at the
question, what shall we do? When they were cut to heart,
when they were convicted of their sins, what shall we do? Repent
and be baptized. So today I want to think of that
question again. Once you’ve repented and are
baptized, what shall we do? And so dear Christian, you have
believed on the Lord Jesus Christ. You have repented of your sins.
You’ve been baptized. You’ve been added to the church.
And there are a number of words that pop up in our passage today
that we ought to think on. They were devoted. They were
serious. They lived out the reality of
their new life in Christ, their old nature gone. They were a
people of repentance and faith, a people who turned from their
sins because they understood the reality of sin and the glory
of God’s grace. And now they’ve entered into
his church. And so what ought we think of
this early church? Well, let’s think of those four
things to which they were devoted. The first was the apostles. teaching,
the apostles teaching. We think in Ephesians chapter
four, it says when Christ ascended on high, uh, in his victory march
back to heaven, uh, he did not as a King receive gifts for his,
uh, valor and his victory, but he gave gifts and he gave gifts,
uh, to the church. Uh, the apostle Paul goes on
in Ephesians four to explain one of the gifts of the church
is the pastor teacher. And so when we come to church
now in the tradition of the apostles, through the ministry of the elders,
through the teaching of the pastor or pastors, if you have a staff,
we continue to do what the early church did. We sit under God’s
word. The spirit does its work. We’re
good Bereans. We study the scriptures to see
that the things are so. It’s the voice of Christ. It’s
a continuation of the school of Jesus. Remember the apostles
for 40 days after Jesus’ resurrection and before his ascension, they
were in Jesus’ school. They were learning the Old Testament.
They were learning the way to proclaim salvation. And we continue
that today when we pick up the Bible and we open the Bible and
we read the Bible and we proclaim the Bible and we explain the
Bible. First Thessalonians chapter two,
verse 13, the apostle Paul writes to the Thessalonians, he says,
I thank God when I remember you in my prayers, that when we came
to you and you heard the word of God, you received it as what
it really is, the very word of God. And so we believe, our theology
teaches us, we believe the Bible says it and it affirms this truth.
When the word is faithfully and accurately both read and preached,
God’s voice is among you. God is speaking. That’s a pretty
weighty, practical theological thing that we believe. Paul affirms
it when he writes his two letters to Timothy. He tells Timothy,
go to Ephesus and start a sports program and you’ll get more families. Go to Ephesus and start a singles
club. Go to Ephesus and Make sure the
coffee is ground just right. You know, that’s what you hear
today in modern church leadership circles. You got to have the
right coffee. You got to attract families the right way. There’s
a place for some of that. I get that. Now, what does he
tell Timothy? You labor in the word, you read
it, you preach it, you proclaim it, you exhort, you tell and
warn the people of God with the word of the living God. Well,
they’re not only devoted to the apostles teaching, they are devoted
to the fellowship. Now, when we think of the word
fellowship, we immediately smell fried chicken or pancakes or
coffee or some delicacy. But this word fellowship is a
special word in the Bible. It’s a word that means partnership.
And if you trace the use of the word fellowship throughout the
New Testament, it very rarely speaks of food. Now we fellowship
fried chicken, two Fs, it works for us. But the apostle Paul
says in various places in the scripture, we fellowship in the
sufferings of Christ. We partner with Christ. We fellowship
with him in his sufferings. He’s in heaven. He’s on the throne
of glory. And so the people on earth who
hate him, guess what? They hate us because we are in
Christ. And so he is up in heaven. He’s
not able to receive. uh, the sufferings, but we are
his body. We are his representatives on
earth. And so we fellowship in his sufferings. We, we fellowship
in his graces. We, we fellowship, uh, in the
common goal of taking the gospel to the ends of the earth. We,
we hold things in common. It’s another way to look at this
word. We, we fellowship, we fellowship in the necessary task and duties
of the church of the living God. Well, there’s a third thing.
They’re devoted to the apostles teaching. They’re devoted to
the fellowship, but they’re devoted to the breaking of the bread.
Now, this phrase, the breaking of the bread, also appears down
in verse 47. And it’s best to understand these
two references in two different ways. One would be the official
Lord’s Supper, which we’ll be participating in together very
soon. But the other would be that they ate together. I don’t
know what your church experience has been, but I’ve always been
in churches that eat together. That’s a blessing, isn’t it?
Well, it’s a curse, too. It’s a curse when you’re the
preacher, because everybody watches to see, did he eat my deviled
eggs or Susie’s? And so you have to try one of
each, and that’s why pastors are usually big. They have to
eat everything you give them. But most of the churches I’ve
been in, They’ve had a Sunday school service. They’ve had a
morning service. They’ve had the Lord’s Supper
together. And then there’s a fellowship meal. Many of my friends who
are in ministry, they eat Sunday lunch together. And sometimes
that’s for the same reasons here in Acts. Not because it imitates
Acts 2.42, but because people would come from a distance. And
so for those who came from a distance, hospitality was needed. And so
it was just good for the congregation to have pimento cheese sandwiches
together or sweet tea, or in their case, probably wine and
pita and hummus and Middle Eastern type foods. But they ate together. There was the breaking of the
bread for sure over meals, but also over the Lord’s Supper. We remember in our reading of
first and second Corinthians, maybe some of you were following
table talks, discussions of that, those letters, a lot of division
in the church. And Paul says, when we come together,
there ought to be unity, not division. And so one of the ways
we show unity and practice unity is in both our common meals together,
but in the Lord’s supper together, we realized we must put down
our hostilities and come to the table And then there’s the prayers. They were devoted to the apostles’
teaching, the fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers. You’ll notice in the coming verses
of Acts that Peter and John are on the way to prayer in the temple.
The disciples, the early converts, did not abandon the temple. They
went day by day. They were in God’s house as our
passage tells us, praising God. They were in the temple. Now
they probably didn’t, I’m sure didn’t participate in the sacrifices.
They were by now sure that Jesus had once and for all delivered
himself up for God’s satisfaction, for his wrath and curse due to
us for sin. But they would, they would go
to the house of prayer. They would go at the fixed hours
of prayer, but they would be together also in common prayer
together, prayer meeting. Somewhere in the 1950s or so
in America, it said that we laid down, the church did, our greatest
spiritual weapon. Many of you probably grew up
in church with a Wednesday prayer meeting. Maybe it was another
time, but Wednesday was the common time. And the church gave up
on that because of, well, soccer and dance and tutoring and other
things that have busied up our schedules. And so we can barely
keep the Lord’s hour now in the American church. But it used
to be that a church was devoted like this. They would be devoted
to the Lord’s house on the Lord’s day with the Lord’s people and
under the Lord’s ordinances. Very often churches gathered
for prayer and most of the church would return for that sacred
and important hour. These are important fixed events
in the life of the church. They’re, well, they’re in the
life of our church today. The question is, are we devoted?
There’s a word here, verse 42, they devoted themselves. They
persevered in the practice of where they remained faithful
to these things. And let me encourage you, let
me be a little pushy as a pastor today, let me go ahead and step
on your toes, let me go ahead and meddle, just fasten your
seatbelts, hold on to your hats. It’s good to order your life
around the life of the church. It just is. We need God’s gifts. We need God’s graces. And when
the elders of the church call the church together for instruction,
for preaching, for worship, for prayer, we ought to be there. Listen to your water cooler banter. Did you watch the show last night?
Oh no, but I recorded it. It’s devotion, isn’t it? We don’t miss our shows. We don’t
miss our programs. social events, but the church
kind of slides. And so let me encourage you.
Let me, let me, let me challenge you. Give, give the events of
the church when the elders call you together, give them a try
and see if, see if your life isn’t blessed. See if you’re
not living in black and white no longer, but in technicolor,
as they say. See if blessings don’t come. See if when the church prays
with you for your health or your job search or your children or
whatever your struggles are, see if those things aren’t met. We need our churches. There’s
a email string that our family is on for the local homeschool
group. And from time to time, my wife will forward one to me
and it’ll say something like this. Help, my husband’s sick. My father lives with us. He’s
dying. My children are on and on and on. Problems, problems,
problems. And so we’ll chat about it later. And the first question
I ask her is, do they have a church? They need meals. They need help.
They need sitters. They need rides. And that’s what
we do for one another. You felt this when we’re devoted
to one another in the life of the church. You get sick, the
cards come in the mail. You’re down and out because of
a car wreck. There’s help that comes. Physical
help, real help, tangible help. Verse 44 says, all who believed
were together. They held things in common. They
were buying and they were selling. What’s mine is yours. What’s
yours is mine. We’ve gotten away from that in
the life of the church. We depend on our own bank accounts.
We depend on our own resources to meet our needs. But the local
church, the early church, ought to be dependent on one another.
And so that’s the challenge to leave us with today. Are you
devoted to the church? Are you committed to the church?
Are you persevering in the ways and means God gives us to grow
in grace? Or is it, well, when it’s convenient,
when it fits in, when it doesn’t interrupt, well, something else. And it may be something else
that is good. But dear brothers and sisters, this is the greatest
good, and our God blesses when we give our attention to these
things. Let’s pray together. Our Father in heaven, we pray
that you would bless us through the ministry, through the sacred
activity of the church. May your word, may your spirit,
may our fellowship together and may our participation together The Lord’s Supper in baptism,
may it strengthen us for the journey that we all walk towards
the heavenly city. Hear us and help us, we pray
in the name of Christ, amen.