"People With a Purpose" Part II

Sermon: Fourth Sunday of Easter year A

The Rev. Matt Kennedy

The Church of the Good Shepherd

Last Sunday we left off in Acts 2 verse 41, “Those who accepted his message were baptized and about 3000 were added to their number that day.” That verse describes the result of the first sermon by the first pastor, Peter, of the first church; ON the basis of that proclamation the Holy Spirit brought 3000 men, women, and children, from the darkness of life apart from God into the light of being children and servants of Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit, God himself, living in their hearts.

We said last Sunday that proclaiming the unvarnished gospel; not hiding the full depth of human sin or the infinite mercy of God found in Jesus Christ is the first and foremost task of the church and that task cannot be compromised or watered down in an attempt to make it more appealing to the world. It must be proclaimed in full. And if you’ll look to the passage itself you’ll see that all the other tasks found in Acts 2 listed in verses 42-47 depend upon this first one modeled in Peter’s sermon that begins in verse 14. So the first church was born through the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

But what happens next? We’ve talked about how the church is called to proclaim the gospel to the lost that’s the first task, but once a church proclaims that gospel, what is it supposed to do if, or rather, when, people hear and believe? What’s the role of the church in the life of believers? This is not just a question for us here at Good Shepherd to consider as a body, it’s also a very personal question. Once you’ve found new life in Jesus Christ, what next?

I want to start by moving away briefly from Acts, we’ll get back to it in a moment, and talk about an encounter with Jesus recorded in the gospel of John. Does anyone know who Nicodemus was? Nicodemus was a Pharisee, one of the few Pharisees who actually listened to what Jesus said and believed in him. Well, one night Nicodemus arranged to meet with Jesus (he had to do this at night because he didn’t want his Pharisee friends to see him with Jesus) and in the course of their meeting Jesus said this, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again” (John 3:3). Jesus compared the process of coming to faith, of committing your life to him to the process of being born. The change God makes in your heart is so fundamental and so deep that it’s like you are a brand new person. You’re like a new baby. I’m sure you’ve all heard the term before.

Well, applying that term to the church in Acts chapter 2. You’ll see that following Peter’s sermon the church had 3000 newborn babies on its hands. What are some things we know about babies? They can’t take care of themselves can they? Babies are absolutely dependent on the people around them to get the nourishment and care they need to grow up.

Well, in the same way a mother provides nourishment for a child, the church is the God-ordained vehicle through which he works to nourish all believers from the time of their birth, their initial commitment to him, all the way through to maturity in Christ, which by the way no believer ever really attains in this life.

We’ve gotta be careful here. I’m not saying that the church is the source of this nourishment, but that the church is called to facilitate God’s nourishment. God alone is the source of both salvation and growth. He alone is the source of a believer’s nourishment through his Holy Spirit who lives in every Christian heart. The church is the simply entity God established to facilitate or to be the primary (there are others) conduit of that nourishment. We’re not God. We don’t bring salvation. Our word is not The Word. We simply make God known by passing on clearly and effectively what we have received. We don’t change it, or add to it or take from it in any way. We pass it on to hungry believers.

WE get a great picture of this “passing on” role in the gospel accounts of the feeding of the 5000. Jesus was teaching a huge crowd of people who had come from far away to hear him and around lunch time they got hungry. Instead of sending them away, Jesus took some loves of bread and multiplied them in a miraculous way so that there was enough for all 5000 to eat and be satisfied. Now, who created the bread? Jesus. The disciples gave Jesus the few pieces of bread they could find but it was Jesus who multiplied it and satisfied the people’s hunger. In the same way, it is Jesus alone who nourishes believers, not the church.

This is not in any way to lessen the role of the church. On the contrary. Jesus made the bread, but who passed it out? The disciples right? Jesus didn’t need them to do this, he could have just created the bread in everyone’s stomachs and satisfied them that way. But he decided, he, chose, to use his disciples as messed up, imperfect, and human as they were.. In the same way, he has decided, he has chosen to use his church, that includes Good Shepherd, no matter how imperfect we may be, as the primary means through which to distribute his nourishment to his people. This says something very important both to us as a church body and to you and me as individual believers.

Turn back to Acts 2:42 and I‘ll show you what I‘m talking about. Read along with me in verse 42, “After these 3000 accepted Jesus Christ and were baptized they all went home and on Sunday morning they got up and walked through the forest listening to the babbling brooks and lying in grassy fields because they experience God more in nature than they do at church…” It doesn’t say that?

Maybe I’m in the wrong place? Let me try again...“After these three thousand accepted Christ and were baptized they all went home and on Sunday morning each of them got up and watched church on Television…“ Oh, It doesn't say that either? What'a going on here?

Okay here we are, “After these 3000 were baptized they all went home and on Sunday morning they stayed home and prayed by themselves and sang their own praise songs and read their bibles because that way they could experience God and never have to put up with other people, or listen to music that didn’t suit their tastes or long boring sermons.” Wow, it doesn’t say that either?

Well, I guess I’m really mixed up because instead of any of that it seems to say that the first priority for all these new Christians modeled for us here in the book of acts was to grow in their faith together as a church? In fact, if I didn’t know any better it would seem that in this passage the church is fundamental, essential, inseparable from the lives of these believers.

The text doesn’t even skip a beat. It goes directly from conversion in verse 41 to active participation in the church in verse 42. While this passage in no way denies the fact that every believer should have a daily prayer and bible study time, it does point us all toward the conclusion that the local church with all it’s faults, is primary to the life and growth of believers. WE can even go so far as to lay down the following principle: God calls lost people to new birth through the proclamation of the gospel by the church and then he brings those who believe up in the faith through the church and we can say that every Christian, new believers and mature ones, are called to participate in the church.

So we’ve seen what the church is to do, distribute God’s nourishment to the people of God, now the question, finally, is how? How does the church facilitate God’s provision and how do individual believers in the church gain access to it?

Last week I did something I’ve never done before, I gave homework. I asked you to read Acts 2 three times and identify the remaining tasks of the church. How many here did that? Would anyone like to tell me a task they found?

Well, right here in one verse, verse 42 we have four of them. “They [the apostles and new believers] devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship and to the breaking of bread and to prayer.” Those who believed in the gospel along with the apostles themselves devoted themselves, in other words they committed wholeheartedly, to four tasks: 1. to hearing or receiving the teachings of the apostles.2. To meeting together in fellowship, 3. to THE breaking of THE bread, and 4. to prayer. These four tasks, taken together, model for us four ways God calls the church raise believers, from babyhood to maturity in the faith of Jesus Christ.

Next week we’ll begin looking at all four of these tasks in greater detail. For today I hope this study of God’s Word has helped us to see two things. First: The Church, and this church, Good Shepherd, must be a place where we are both proclaiming the gospel to the lost, the first task we talked about last Sunday, and distributing the bread, facilitating God’s nourishment of the found through the four tasks we discovered today and which we’ll talk more about next week. Not only do we need to bring people to Jesus through evangelism but when they come we have to make sure that we’re helping them grow in their faith. In the words of that little statement on the front of your bulletins, we must be a place that knows Christ and a place that makes him known. The question for us is, are we doing that? And we’ll get to that next week

Second, if you’re believer, attending your local church regularly with a heart and mind ready, willing and open receive the nourishment God has chosen to provide to you through it is fundamental to your development and growth. That is true even if the worship on a given day isn’t the perfect. God has chosen to use this imperfect place and the imperfect people seated around you to nourish your spirit. That’s why you can go home on a Sunday morning even after a service where everything went wrong and just feel better about life, because God has fed you and given you nourishment for the week and believe it or not you’ve grown a little bit. If you want to be a baby Christian all of your life and never progress at all or receive the rich inheritance promised to you in Jesus Christ in this life, then stay home, but if you want to grow into maturity and wisdom and strength take part in the worship, study, and fellowship of the church, you can even come during the summer.

That’s all for this morning, next week, we’ll take up the meaning of the four tasks.