Acts 2:42-47: Worship-- Gather and Scatter

Please turn to your Bibles to Acts chapter 2.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

You'll find the text printed in your bulletin.

Well, if you'd like to follow along there.

Appreciate your prayers for the preacher's voice this morning, struggling with a lot of allergies.

Probably some of you are too.

It's ragweed is bad.

But thank you for just your prayers for me this morning.

You're the word of God.

And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching in the fellowship.

The breaking of bread and the prayers.

And awe came upon every soul.

And many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles.

And all who believed were together and 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 glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people.

And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.

This is the reading of God's holy, powerful word.

Father, thank you.

We thank you that Christian worship and Christian fellowship and Christian discipleship is all your idea, not ours.

We thank you, Lord, for what you did in explosive ways in the early church.

But Lord, you're still doing it today around this world.

We pray that you would do so even in this sanctuary this morning.

Holy Spirit, set our hearts on fire.

Set our minds on the truth.

Oh Lord, we pray that we would submit to wherever you lead us in your word this morning in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So this morning begins a new sermon series.

The sermon series is serving our city and our world in the name of Christ.

I hope that sounds familiar.

If you're new here, and many of you are, it's in our dismissal each Lord's Day to remind us of our calling to go and serve in the name of Christ.

The next few weeks, we're going to take a closer look at what this means to serve our city.

And when I say city, I don't mean just Alexandria, DC, Arlington, Fairfax County, PG County, wherever you live, wherever you go.

We're going to unpack that in the coming weeks.

We will study the Word of God and we will seek the Lord's leading and how we do that more effectively.

How he wants us to serve.

It's really his city.

It's really his world.

How he wants us to serve.

Our passage shows us today the connection between worship and service, between worship and mission.

It really kind of carries on from last week in a sense, as we looked at David's worship life.

The connection when we magnify the Lord, you know, you can't magnify the Lord without the aroma of grace dripping over you.

They just go together.

As we saw last week.

We're going to continue to see that a bit this week.

We are blessed to be a blessing to others.

We're not cul-de-sac.

You know?

It's kind of like my street.

I live on a very busy street.

Cars are always coming up and down and going, but people are going somewhere.

And the blessings of God are meant to go somewhere.

May I say it again?

We're not blessed just to be blessed, but to be a blessing to our city and our world.

To be a blessing to those 25 children in the DRC.

Boy, that touched my heart to hear those children sing praise to God and offer their prayers and for us.

You know they're praying for you.

Did you know that?

Those little children, they're being nurtured in the Lord.

They're being brought up hearing the good news of the gospel.

This is just the kingdom of God.

What we see in our text today stands squarely on what precedes it in the whole chapter, chapter two of Acts.

We didn't print it, we don't have the space, we don't have the time to go into that, but I have to tell you, this is my first point.

This morning we're going to look at three things: the empowering, the gathering, and the scattering.

But it starts with the empowering, and we didn't read that this morning.

But you know about the day of Pentecost, after Jesus ascended and told his disciples, you wait, you wait until I send the Holy Spirit.

And the Holy Spirit is going to fall on you in a new way.

And the Holy Spirit is going to go with you.

And he's going to take you to places you would never go on your own.

And he's going to do things that you would never be able to do on your own.

Greater works than these, Jesus promised, will you do in the name of Jesus?

As D.A.

Carson, the theologian, put it, when Jesus ascended to heaven, sitting right there now at the right hand of the Father, from his exalted position of his ascended position, the eschatological door just swung open.

The power of God mushroomed because Jesus is now giving orders from heaven.

But not through his body.

When he was on earth, he did it through his physical body.

And now he's doing it through his brothers and sisters.

He's working through the body of Christ.

This is what we see in Acts chapter 2.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

The empowering, chapter 2, verse 4.

And all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.

The two gifts that are highlighted in Acts chapter 2, forgiveness and the filling of the Spirit.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

Forgiveness.

Only the Holy Spirit can convince us of God's forgiveness.

You'll never ever convince yourself.

You'll never ever convince anybody else what it means to be forgiven.

But the Holy Spirit.

And then the filling of the Spirit.

I know I've been a Christian a long time.

I know that lots of Christians love this passage, Acts 2, 42 to 47.

And for good reason.

But you cannot understand this paragraph if you don't understand the whole chapter.

The empowering is what made these accounts so remarkable.

Apart from the Spirit's work, worship is bland.

Teaching reaches only our heads, not our hearts.

Apart from the work of the Spirit, fellowship is superficial.

Prayers are weak, and witness is almost non-existent.

This describes many, many churches.

Apart from the work of the Spirit, that's what church is like.

That's why people are leaving churches in droves.

Consider this.

Had Peter preached this sermon only days before, the results would have been drastically different.

You know what I mean, right?

Without the filling of the Holy Spirit, he would have preached the same sermon.

Did Peter have notes?

I don't know.

He would have preached the same sermon, the same words, the same crowd, and it would have been drastically different.

It would not have been the response that we see.

Who made the difference?

Peter didn't go to some seminary over the weekend.

Peter didn't all of a sudden become a great preacher on his own.

The Holy Spirit came down and filled him.

And everything was different.

And my friend, I want to tell you this morning, that's not just for then and there in the first century.

That same Spirit is working powerfully today, and he's looking for people he can fill.

And I keep telling my Presbyterian friends, I keep telling my Presbyterian friends, we need new fillings.

We need fresh fillings.

The scripture is very clear about that.

We quench the Spirit in so many ways.

We resist the Spirit.

When we do that, we will not be this kind of Christian community.

You will not be that kind of Christian.

The empowering is essential.

Fresh feelings.

Lord, where am I stiff arming you?

Where have I turned you down?

Where are you just white noise in my life now when I read your Bible?

We can't be this if we're doing that.

And the Holy Spirit says, let me speak in your life.

But you're going to have to surrender that things are getting in the way.

Your heart has to soften.

Holy Spirit can't use hard-hearted Christians.

No.

Jesus told the disciples in John chapter 5, verse 39, he said, you, he's speaking to the Pharisees, people with their heads filled with Old Testament truth.

John 5:39

You diligently search the scriptures, yet you refuse to come to me for life.

You can study the Bible and miss Jesus.

Happens all the time.

You can have the right answers, a form of godliness, yet no spiritual power.

We can have fellowship and it can be quite superficial.

It says here that they had much in common.

We get that word right.

What we have in common, what brothers and sisters in Christ have in common, not only with each other, but with Jesus, our union in Christ.

This is what this word really means.

What you have in common is not just that you go to the same church.

It goes much deeper than that.

What you have in common is that you have the same Savior.

You've been washed by the same blood of Jesus.

Let that sink in.

This is what fueled this church.

Many have observed that most churches today do not resemble this early New Testament church.

Why not?

Perhaps we're not empowered as we could be.

The New Testament is clear.

Jesus offers all of his kingly power to all who empty themselves so that they might be filled.

And that's hard to do, isn't it?

Our pride is a beast.

We want to do it our way.

We want to do it in our time.

And the Holy Spirit can't work with that.

Can't do it.

And so we want to be a congregation.

Always rejoicing in the gospel, always repenting of what's getting in the way.

They're not mutually exclusive, they're twins.

If you're really rejoicing in the gospel, you're going to be repenting the gospel.

That's just the way it works.

I heard a pastor tell this story decades ago.

I still remember it.

He said his friend and his wife were listening to a religious worship service on the radio, and their child was playing on the living room floor with his toys.

And as the father and the mother were listening to the liturgy over the radio, I believe in God the Father, Christ Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and they were going through the liturgy.

The little boy on the floor was playing with his toys.

I believe in God the Father.

He was just kind of mimicking what he was hearing in the background.

Why do I tell you this story?

You can't worship playing with your toys.

In this room, the toys in our mind.

The things that we're thinking about more than the things that we're thinking about other than Jesus and all of his beauty.

You can sit in a sanctuary and you can be playing with your toys.

The Holy Spirit's the only one that can open us up.

The Holy Spirit is the only one that can lift us out of ourselves and lift us by faith to heaven itself as we enter the heavenlies, as Paul tells us in Ephesians.

This is worship.

This kind of life, this kind of lifestyle begins with spiritual empowering.

Secondly, the gathering.

These early disciples gathered together day by day.

Did you notice two places?

In the temple and where else?

In their homes.

Day by day.

Most likely in the temple was the Gentile courtyard of the temple.

A massive space.

Jim Boyce estimates that they could have perhaps held 200,000 people in that courtyard.

Huge.

They met in that courtyard worshiping together.

They were fearless.

Their master had just been crucified weeks before.

And here these Christians are publicly meeting downtown Jerusalem.

They had no fear.

They had no pride.

They were there to worship their God together.

Encouraging one another to live out the gospel.

But it wasn't only publicly together.

Yes, remember, magnify, let us magnify the Lord together.

That's why we're here this morning.

But also in where?

Their homes.

No doubt they heard spirit-filled preaching.

No doubt they heard songs of praise, confessing their sins.

And listen to this phrase in our text.

I just can't stop thinking about this.

And awe came upon every soul.

That's what we need.

We need a sense of awe.

Holy, reverent awe for the God that Isaiah saw.

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.

Ah! The transcendence of God comes down.

And all of a sudden we look small and God looks big.

God looks glorious.

Do you know that's really the purpose of worship every week?

Oh, that we would taste and experience this every week.

You don't have to go far in the pages of the book of Acts, just a couple chapters to get a very stark reminder of what that really looks like in life.

Ananias and Sapphira chapter 5.

This probably happened within days, if not weeks.

Remember what they did?

People were so caught up in wanting to be the mission of Christ in their lives.

They were selling their possessions.

Some of them were selling their homes.

Can you imagine that?

I mean, really?

Can you imagine that?

Selling your house.

That's a big give.

And giving it to the disciples because they knew that there were people in material need.

I have to say, because I still remember it.

Five years ago, in our Rise Capital campaign, I don't know.

I can't remember that anybody sold their house.

But I'll tell you what, an awful lot of people here sold an awful lot and gave up an awful lot for us to be sitting in this building this morning.

A lot of people were very generous with their money, or we wouldn't be here.

Ananias and Sapphira, they saw that people were being perhaps acknowledged.

I mean, it must have been in a good way, not a proud way, but they noticed that some people were getting some kind of attention, perhaps, and they thought, well, that would be good for us to get some attention.

Let's sell what we have and let's go to the disciples and tell them, hey, this is what we sold our property for, and we're bringing it all to the church.

The problem was that they weren't.

They kept back a portion of it.

They were under no obligation to give it all.

Their sin was deceit.

Their sin was pretense.

Their sin was pretending to be living here when actually they were living down here.

And you know what happened?

The Lord God, the holy God of Israel, struck them both dead on the spot that day.

I know what you're thinking, but thank God he doesn't do that all the time.

I'm serious.

I'm serious.

Who hasn't committed that sin?

Who hasn't?

Tried to give the impression that we're something that we're not.

The sin of pride, the sin of arrogance.

We we need to confess that sin as well.

When we're not walking the talk.

But my point is, this sense of awe, it's not just how gracious and kind God is.

It's how holy.

Don't trifle with the holy God.

Do you remember when the Ten Commandments were given in Exodus chapter 20?

Exodus 20 · chapter mention

After all the commandments are given, and by the way, the commandments were never given without grace.

Right?

Before the commandments were given, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of your slavery.

I brought you out of your bondage.

I am your Lord.

I am your God.

Look what I've done for you.

Now here are the commandments.

But then in verse 20 of chapter 20, he says this.

May the holiness of God keep you from sinning.

We need to hear that today.

That's not legalism.

May the fear of God keep you from sinning.

I heard another story years ago.

My wife says I have a crazy memory.

Some things.

I remember a lot of things I hear.

I'm an auditory learner.

And I remember hearing this story from a missionary about a tribe in eastern Africa.

And they had this lake that they considered to be sacred.

What they considered to be a holy lake.

And so what they did is every time they got in their canoes to paddle that lake, they padded the oars, the canoe oars, to muffle the sound.

I remember the first time I heard that, like, wow.

I mean, that can be done for the right reason.

And we know the really, truly holy God.

What does it look like in my life to pad the oars, to be aware of the reverence our God is due?

This is part of it.

This was happening with them.

This is part of what it means to have awe.

Their worship was reverent, but their worship was also joyful.

Every worship service is a retelling of the gospel.

How can we tell the gospel without joy?

How can we talk about what Jesus has done for us without praising him, with our hearts exploding with thanksgiving?

Only the Holy Spirit can bring down these things.

I think we we naturally tend to drift in one direction or the other, don't we?

Some people just tend to drift toward the holiness of God.

That's for whatever reason, reverence, the transcendence of God, and other people tend to just drift toward the imminence of God, the joy.

Only the Holy Spirit can bring both down into your heart so that you never forget who He is, and you don't take Him for granted, and you bow in reverence before Him while at the same time your heart can explode with joy.

And you can come before His presence and say, Father, Abba.

Only the Christian faith teaches this.

Praising God, verse 47, as they were teaching, as they were fellowshipping, as they were worshiping, in their homes, in their homes.

We call that covenant fellowship groups at APC.

We've been doing it from the very beginning.

Historically, about 60% of our congregation are involved in home fellowship groups.

That's important.

That's where we break it down.

The worship that we experience on Sunday, the preaching, the teaching, the fellowship, okay, now is you break it down in homes.

You encourage one another in this walk with Jesus.

Larry Crab has said Americans are good at forming clubs, but the formation of community is the intricate, patient, painful work of the Holy Spirit.

We cannot make community.

We can only offer ourselves to become community.

I think that's true.

It requires a humility.

I can't do this alone.

It requires a humility to submit to other believers.

It requires an accountability.

It requires, we're in this together.

By the way, if you're not in a C, this is a great time.

We're kicking off.

You can talk to Pastor Josh.

We have new groups starting this next month.

We have new leaders.

God may be calling some of you to be teachers.

We need more teachers.

If you're going to be a teacher, I would encourage you to go to the spiritual leadership classes starting soon.

In the home.

I love the way that Julie Gorman put it.

Community that is Christian, which has been a huge blessing to me the last 10 years since I read it the first time.

Listen to what she says.

When God's people gather around God's word with God's Spirit present, our expectations can never be too high.

What she's saying is we don't get together in our small groups just so that we can have fellowship with each other, which is nice, but that's not the driving purpose.

We don't get together in our fellowship groups just to fill our heads with teaching, although we have teaching, or just to say our prayers.

Two words, spiritual transformation.

That's why we gather in these groups.

Spiritual transformation.

We're asking the Lord to change us, to grow us.

They met in their homes.

But they didn't stay in the temple court and they didn't stay in their homes.

The third point is the scattering.

Did you notice it said they had favor with all the people?

And that's not referring to just the church.

They had favor with all the people.

That's incredible.

While at the same time they were being persecuted.

Here's what I take from the book of Acts.

The church exploded in growth because there was a sweet gospel aroma that went with these Christians wherever they went.

While at the same time there were people who hated them.

And Jesus prepared them for that.

They hate me, they're going to hate you.

I say this with all respect.

Has anybody ever hated you?

For the right reason.

Anybody ever really gotten upset with you?

Not because you got a, you know, you're you're being weird.

Just got upset with you because you really are Jesus.

If you believe what Jesus believed, if you live a life after Jesus, not everybody's gonna like you.

Don't make that your goal.

These people, these people were dripping with grace.

It was fresh to them.

Their worship fueled their mission.

As they were ministered to and through worship and fellowship, after they gathered together, they scattered.

They scattered in mission and in service.

They returned to their homes.

They returned to their neighborhoods.

They went back to their jobs.

Breathing Christ, filled with the Spirit.

Jesus is still looking for such churches.

I promise.

And the Spirit is still working with such people.

I've got a question for you this morning.

Two words.

Not three.

Why not you?

Why not you?

Don't be one of these Christians that says, oh, that just that happened then.

Those days are over.

Don't live your life based on your experiences.

Live your life on the promises of God and search the promises of God, search the teaching of the Word of God, and seek the filling of the Spirit that you might become more like these people, that I might become more like these people.

Can you say amen to that?

I mean, seriously.

Seriously.

Their witness flowed out of their worship.

Day by day, people were being saved.

Wow, I want to be that church.

But it didn't just happen.

This is how it happened.

John Stott put it like this.

The Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.

He did not add them to the church without saving them, nor did he save them without adding them to the church.

Boy, we need that today.

Christians don't belong at home.

Christians belong in the house of the Lord.

He saves them and he brings them.

He does the saving, he does the bringing.

Evangelism is less about technique and programming and much more about gospel joy and Holy Spirit filling.

But here's the problem.

We have to get to the point of our extremity before we're ready for it.

We have to get out of our comfort zones.

As long as we remain in our comfort zones, and you don't feel like you really need the Holy Spirit's power, you won't receive the Holy Spirit's power.

We have to get out on the limb of the tree.

We can't hug the trunk of the tree.

Get out.

Ask Jesus, what would be a gospel risk for you in this season of your life?

To proclaim the good news of Christ.

Oh, friends, this is for us.

Fourteen times in the book of Acts, we read that they were filled with the Holy Spirit.

At least 10 of those times it says and they were proclaiming the Word of God.

The giving and the filling of the Spirit is for others, even more than you.

While they were persecuted by some, they were welcomed by many.

And so my final question is this Will where will the Lord scatter you this week?

Where is he going to scatter me?

You go back to your neighborhood.

Go back to your work.

Go back to your family.

And just ask Jesus to make you different, to give you the Holy Spirit power.

Stay in the Word.

Be in the Word.

Be in fellowship with other Christians.

Come to the courts and worship.

There's nothing magic about this.

It's just sometimes we're not very good at doing this.

And that's why we need the Spirit.

And that's why we're going to invite the Spirit now.

Join me in prayer.

Oh, Lord God Almighty.

We do ask, would you please touch us?

Anoint us.

Cleanse us.

If we need conviction, convict us.

But don't just leave us as we are.

Make us more like Jesus.

Holy Spirit, you know how to do that better than anyone.

We offer ourselves to our Lord and our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Amen.