Different denominations in this country have different characteristics. Sometimes these characteristics are stereotypes but there is a real difference. It would be difficult to confuse Southern Baptists with Roman Catholics. Episcopalians are generally considered to be an educated, cultured crowd. It tends to attract people of that sort. One reason we're spending so much time in Acts 2, is that in Acts 2 we get behind all of these denominational differences and get a glimpse of the Church as it looked and felt when God first gathered it.

 

In one day the Church went from 120 members, the number of believers listed in Acts 1:15, to 3120 members. Notice, the text doesn't say, “Peter added three thousand to their number through his stirring eloquence and charm.” It doesn't say that the “disciples, through their personal warmth and compassion and loving attitude, added three thousand to their numbers.” The credit for adding 3000 people to the church is not given to Peter or the disciples. In fact, in verse 41, nobody is credited but if you look down to the last sentence of verse 47 you'll see that it reads, “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” The reason no one is credited with adding to the number of believers in verse 41 is because it is understood that God does the adding and that understanding is made explicit in verse 47.

 

And the principle is this: God uses human beings like Peter and the disciples and you and me as instruments to turn hearts, but God alone does the turning. I don't credit my faith to the preachers and teachers and friends who shared gospel with me. I don't even credit myself. I'm not a Christian because I'm wiser or smarter or more righteous than those who are not. I was dead in my sin, says Paul in Ephesians 2, when God made me alive by his power. He added me to those who believe. And, likewise, if someone listening to my sermons comes to believe, I can't credit myself. I can't put a notch on my belt. As Paul says in 1 st Corinthians 3, “neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who makes things grow” (1 st Corinthians 3:7). Someone planted the gospel in your heart like a seed. I don't know who it was, it doesn't matter. That seed, the gospel, the word of God, germinates, is made alive, grows in your heart by God's power alone. Others will come along and water that seed through teaching and preaching but, ultimately, it is God alone who makes that seed live and grow.

 

This is a crucial thing for churches to understand. We don't make believers. We don't have that power. We plant seeds and then we water them. We do what the Church in Acts 2 did. First Peter proclaimed the gospel faithfully and fully to any and all who would hear it, he spread the seed, and then God, working through and in his proclamation, added 3000 to their number. God made it grow. One sign that the gospel is being faithfully proclaimed and shared in a church and that God is growing a church is that the growth is out of the church's control. And I don't necessarily mean out of control in the sense that 3000 are being added daily. I mean “out of control” more in the sense that God, rather than the church, is determines who comes and who doesn't.

 

Look at the three thousand that God added here. There were Jews from all over the known world in that 3000 who were saved, people of every sort. And we know this caused problems.

 

Jews of Greek ethnicity didn't get along with Jews of Hebrew descent. The Jews of Rome and the Jews of Jerusalem felt a sense of superiority over other nationalities and they were resented for it. Read the rest of Acts and you see that had the disciples planned it rather than God, they would have been far more selective about who they let in. If God had only cared enough to ask them who should be saved, the church would have run a lot more smoothly. But he didn't. In one day, God gathered into this one local church people from all over the world, with all of their various differences and hatreds and prejudices and he stuck them all together.

 

The contemporary church has nothing like this. There are Asian churches and African-American churches and white churches and Greek churches and so on but in the beginning, here in Acts 2, there was just the Church; a multitude of races and ethnicities all beautifully and wonderfully gathered by God as one.

 

And, in case you're wondering, we know that this is precisely how God planned it because not a single one of the 3000 made an insincere commitment to Christ. The Greek in verse 41 actually says 3000 “souls” were added. We can't know whether all 2000 people who came forward during Franklin Graham truly gave their hearts to Christ. But in Acts 2, we can know. God added them. God saved them. God brought them together and he didn't bring Greeks together with Greeks and Hebrews with Hebrews and Ethiopians with Ethiopians. That would be the way we would have designed it. We're an Anglican church, let's go out and find more Anglicans. We're a white church, let's avoid those black people who live across the street and reach out to the white ones. But when God builds a body, he doesn't let us get away with that. Part of God's plan to restore this fallen world, this messed up world, is to restore relationships between human beings. And he's decided to accomplish that, not by getting the church to compromise its faith and water down the gospel so that it doesn't offend anybody and we can all be one happy family, but rather by calling the church to proclaim the gospel to everyone so that he can gather those he wants to gather under Jesus Christ in the setting of the church. The Church is supposed to be setting in which God brings his peace among nations.

 

God warned Israel not to compromise to the idolatry of the world but he gave them a mission and that mission was not to hole up by themselves. Israel was intended to be a spiritual nation not an ethnic one. Any foreigner living in or visiting or traveling to Israel was supposed to be invited to become a Jew by repenting of his idolatry, turning to the God of heaven and earth in faith, and living in accordance with the scriptures. Israel 's mission was to call all nations back to God. God said through the prophet Isaiah “foreigners who bind themselves to the LORD to serve him, to love the name of the LORD, and to worship him, all who keep the Sabbath…and who hold fast to my covenant-these I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer...for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations…The Sovereign LORD declares— he who gathers the exiles of Israel: I will gather still others to them besides those already gathered."

 

600 years before Acts 2, God reveals his purpose to gather all the nations together in his household. In Acts 2 we see that he gathers them through Jesus Christ.

 

And we see that he doesn't care to observe or respect human tastes and prejudices. If you don't like to be around Chinese people or Jewish people or white people or black people or uneducated people or educated people, uncultured people or cultured people, then you won't like the church God gathers. And this isn't just an ethnic thing. Bishop Bena recently said that its time for Christians to take back the word inclusive. The Church is called to be radically inclusive. Drug dealers, prostitutes, homeless, adulterers, homosexuals, drunks, thieves, liars, come on in. God loves you just the way you are and he wants you to be with him forever. Now, he's gonna clean you up and we're gonna help you with that. You're going to have to repent. But he wants you. Come on in. And we as the church better be ready to welcome those God gathers.

 

God doesn't leave it up to you or to me to decide who he brings in. If he'd given Galilean fishermen that choice, the church would've been a bunch of Galilean fishermen. If he'd given Jewish Christians in Jerusalem the choice, the church would've been a bunch cultured and educated and urbane Jewish converts. If God had taken a poll of the church in 34 AD and asked whether Saul of Tarsus ought to be added to their number, he would've received a unanimous no. But he didn't ask. He just added Saul who became St. Paul and the rest of the church was really upset. But God's not much for polls. So if you like the church to be a comfortable place where people share your interests and hobbies and look like you and have your same background then for goodness sake, don't preach the gospel. Because when you do God adds who he wants to add.

 

Now, when churches loose or neglect their primary commitment to proclaim Christ and to promote the gospel far and wide, when they loose the heart of Christ for the lost, they devolve into clubs designed attract like people. Some churches become liturgy clubs. If you like fancy vestments and high mass with choral music you fit in, if you don't you don't. Or they can become music clubs; contemporary music clubs or traditional music clubs. Or they become gatherings of the rich or the poor or the in-between. When a church gets stuck on itself rather than on Christ the only people who come and stay are people just like the ones already there. Because the church isn't holding up Christ and saying we're following him, we want to be like him, we love him. They're saying this is who we are, let's look for people who fit in with us. The zeal and the earnestness and the passion isn't for the gospel and its proclamation but for the propagation of its own kind. God's not adding to their number. The church is trolling for members who fit in and making those who do not fit in feel unwelcome.

 

But when there's zeal for Christ and love for his Word and passion for the lost…In other words, when a church is filled, like the one in Acts, with the Holy Spirit, the people who fit in best, regardless of the music, the worship style, the vestments or the money, are those who are seeking Christ both believers and the lost that God is adding and they come not because of me or you or anyone or anything in the church other than Jesus Christ. Churches that proclaim the gospel are not in control of who comes. They look the DMV…a bunch of people stuck together who would, apart from Christ, never associate. But in Christ, they become one. That's what happens when a church plants seeds.

 

Then, once the seeds are planted and growing, we water. To illustrate watering God's given us verses 42-47.