What is a church?

Let me invite you to stand as we uh read Acts chapter 2, starting with verse 36.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

Let all the house of Israel and therefore know for certain that God has made him Jesus, both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.

Now, when the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, Brothers, what shall we do?

And Peter said to them, Repent and be baptized, every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit for the promises for you and for your children, and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.

And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, Save yourselves from this crooked generation.

So those who received his word were baptized, and they were added that day about three thousand souls.

And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to 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 everything, 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 sincere hearts 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.

Listen to the reading of God's Word, let me ask him to bless us as we open it and study it.

Well we pray that you would be pleased, Lord Jesus, you would be pleased, Holy Spirit, you would be pleased, Father, to minister to the people who have been redeemed to the blood of Christ today, and to call others to see the importance of salvation and of the church.

Would you bless us and be with us?

And Lord, would you be with me this time?

Weird week this past week.

So many things going on, so many pieces.

And I pray, Lord, that you would give me the focus I need to communicate the beautiful things to your people from your word.

Bless me, bless us, we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Have a seat.

So on Monday of this week, the session of the church, the leaders in the church uh got together with uh a person online and we talked with them, with this person, about the possibility of building a building in the future.

It was a really encouraging conversation.

So we have some some focus as we're moving forward.

But one of the things that we discussed is the idea that people have is you're not really a legit church until you have a building.

It's like Pinocchio, I'm a real boy.

You know, it's like all of a sudden we're a real church because we have a building.

Uh, but that's not really what the church is.

And the way that we use church quite often is is kind of wrong.

So when I was starting the church planting journey with the church here years ago, people would ask, Oh, are you in the villages?

Well, we came here to plant the church.

And the response I would often get from people was this, are you going to have your own church?

And inwardly I was going, no, it's Jesus church.

That's not the way that this it was like it was a franchise for dominoes or something.

I was coming in and have my own franchise, church franchise.

Uh it's not a franchise.

Sometimes we use the word church as a place we go, as a location.

Uh I'm going up to the church.

Uh we can't say that because we this is not ours.

This is a barn.

I'm going up to the barn, maybe, but it's not the location.

Sometimes we use it as an event.

Are you going to church this morning?

And what we mean is, are you going to an event this morning?

But when you go to the scriptures and the scripture talks about the church, the church is not the way that we often use it in the modern word.

The church is people.

It's the people.

The church is always the people who have experienced the grace of God in Jesus Christ, believe in Jesus Christ, and live together in the world for the glory and the purpose of Jesus Christ.

Or to put it succinctly, church is a community of grace on mission, which is our motto.

That's who we want to be, is a community of grace on mission.

That's why we chose that as our motto.

Edmund Clowney, who is a biblical writer and author, said this the church is, first of all, made up of those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, who are joined to Christ, and who have been engrafted into Christ.

So it's about Christ.

And I know a lot of people in our culture say, I need to go to church because I need to become more moral.

But that's not really what church is about, becoming more moral.

And church is not really about becoming more religious.

It's not.

The church is about living in a united relationship with Jesus Christ, with his people.

That's the church.

So what does the word Christ mean?

That's an interesting word.

We use Christ as not a last name for Jesus.

Christ, as he, as Peter used the word here, refers to a title or an office.

Kind of like we would use the word president or mayor.

It's referring to a title.

And Christ or Messiah, those one's a Greek word, Christ, one's a Hebrew word, Messiah.

It means the same thing, the anointed.

The anointed.

And so when we refer to Jesus as the Christ, we say he's anointed.

Anointed by God to do what?

Well, he's anointed to be the sovereignly appointed king over everything, over the cosmos.

So what was Christ anointed to do?

And oftentimes we think about the world as God's plan is to get rid of the world, because the world is a problem.

That's not what God's plan is.

God's plan is to redeem the world.

There'll be a new heavens and a new earth, and we will be here.

And his plan is for all of the qualities and characteristics of Jesus to be manifested and to characterize that new world that he has in mind.

So Jesus, in his majesty, nobility, his grace, his glory, his love, his peace, his righteousness, his generosity, his wisdom, all of those things will characterize life in the world that God is redeeming.

His qualities will shape and characterize all things.

So he who fed the five thousand will feed everybody.

He who calmed the storm will remove all fear and all worry.

What described him will describe this renewed world so that all that is evil, all that is destructive, all that is painful will be cast out.

Because that's what Jesus did in his earthly ministry, and that's what God has in store for our future as his people.

All that is holy, beautiful, loving will flourish, and this will be our home with Jesus and with one another.

So Jesus is the centerpiece, the divine agent that God has sent into the world to be the answer to all of our prayers.

He's going to bring them out.

We may not see it in this life right now, but our prayers will be seen answered fully in the future when Jesus comes back.

All of our prayers to redeem.

And so the confession of the church is not we need to be more moral, we need to be more religious.

It even the primary thing is not about getting saved.

That's a big part of it.

That's a big part of our experience.

But when you start talking about the church being built, the church is built on what Peter says here is Jesus as the Christ.

He's the expected promise Christ.

And Peter knew this all too well.

If you don't know the story of the of uh Peter confessing Christ as king, Jesus as Christ, probably like Mark 9 would be a good place for you to go and read later.

Because in that, Jesus says something, he says, Who do people say that I am?

And Peter eventually says, You are the Christ.

You're this appointed, anointed figure that stepped into the world.

And then Jesus says to him, He says, I tell you that you are Peter.

And on this rock, this confession that you've made right here, on this rock, this very moment, I'm going to build my church.

So it's not morals, it's not religion, it's on the identity of Jesus.

That is the main confession.

That's the main thing in the church.

Jesus as the Christ.

And if you read through this first sermon in Acts chapter 2, the first sermon after the resurrection of Jesus, the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, it's not a big sermon about how to get saved.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

It's not.

Up to the point we read in verse 36, it's been about the identity of Jesus, who he is.

It's about, it's not about how we're sinful or morals or being good people, it's about the identity of Jesus.

And the point in the sermon that is the crescendo, where it calls for a response from people, is when we read in chapter 2, verse 36, let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him, both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.

That's where he says, This is the point I've been making.

Jesus is the Christ, and you killed him.

In chapter 2, verse 37, we read, This is where they were cut to the heart.

When they heard this, they were cut to the heart.

I have a note that's telling me that something about uh there we go.

On my iPad, sorry about that.

When they did that, what they deserved settled in.

They were brokenhearted with guilt and they repented, displaying a willingness and readiness to respond properly to the reality of what they had done.

And what they found is when they were repenting, the message that came back to them was they were expecting judgment without hope, but what they found was hope without judgment.

Because they were, he said, you were forgiven.

They experienced the radical and unimagined grace of God.

In Jesus' name, they found full forgiveness.

So what is grace?

J.I.

Packer put it this way.

He said, The grace of God is love freely shown towards guilty sinners, contrary to their merit, and indeed in defiance of their demerit.

It is God showing goodness to persons who deserve only severity and who had no reason to expect anything but severity.

So it's not just that we don't deserve God to do us good, we deserve the opposite.

But in his grace, God chose favor to those who do not deserve his efforts or affections.

And this was the establishment of the New Testament church.

It was grace at the center, a community of grace on mission.

That's why we chose this title, this motto for us.

We properly put grace at the center because grace infuses everything we do.

It's our motivation, it directs everything we do, it informs everything we do, we bring it into every sphere of life.

Grace is the engine that drives everything in the Christian life.

Our theology, our knowledge of and relationship with God in his grace towards Jesus, moves us.

And so when he says here to them in this passage, save yourselves from this crooked generation, he's talking, yes, about the whole world.

That's in verse 240.

Save yourselves from this crooked generation, but he's talking to a group of religious people who are there for a religious festival.

And he's saying to them, this is a crooked generation that you're participating in is a crooked generation.

And to save yourselves from the crooked generation means to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.

These were very religious Jews.

And he calls them to do something that we don't really understand.

We understand it from our perspective, but not from their perspective in the first century.

Two things.

They say, what must we do to be saved?

What must we do?

He says, one, repent.

Now, repent here means to not stop doing bad things because that's not what he's been talking about in the sermon.

He's not saying you've been doing bad things, turn away from the bad things.

He's saying your whole understanding of who you are before Jesus has to change.

You have to change how you think about Jesus and the world.

So the idea is not turning from immorality to morality.

The idea is turning towards Jesus Himself and a willingness and readiness to respond properly to the reality of who Jesus is and what he's done for us.

And he says, repent.

And then the second thing he says is to be baptized into the name of Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins.

Now, he's talking to Jews here, and I really didn't know this until I started really studying the passage.

And when we think about baptism, we just think, well, that's that's a New Testament thing.

But it was actually something that was practiced by Jews at this time.

For somebody who was a convert from another religion, ethnicity or something, and becoming Jewish and worshiping the Lord God of the Bible, the Jews not only would circumcise the males, but they would have any adherents be baptized and washed.

So when John the Baptist is performing baptisms in the wilderness, he's not performing a Christian baptism, he's performing ritual washings like they would do in the Old Testament for Jews coming to in repentance.

There were lots of those washings.

But this particular kind of baptism was for a proselyte from another religion coming into Judaism.

And so what Jesus is telling, what Peter is telling them about Jesus here is you who are Jewish have to be baptized into the name of Jesus.

Not to be saved, but as part of your repentance.

And what that image is is saying, you have to come as empty-handed to Jesus as any pagan who comes to the Lord God.

None of your works could save you.

None of your works will ever be able to save you.

None of your religious works that you've done to the Lord God have ever been able to save you.

You have to come empty-handed into the presence of Jesus just like everybody else.

They had to be baptized to say, I have no more righteousness than anyone else.

But I believe that Jesus has enough righteousness for us all who come to him in faith.

So, here again we see grace.

What is grace?

This is from Martin Lloyd Jones, who was a British pastor.

He says, It's grace at the beginning, and grace at the end.

So that when you and I come to lie upon our deathbeds, the one thing that should comfort and help and strengthen us there is the thing that helped us in the beginning.

Not what we have been, not what we have done, but the grace of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.

The Christian life starts with grace, it must continue with grace, it ends with grace.

Grace, wondrous grace.

By the grace of God I am what I am, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.

So it really is all by grace that we come.

And so we we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.

And in accordance with his grace, God loved us, sent Jesus.

And what he's communicating is God doesn't love you because you believe.

God love you believe because God loved you.

And this is what he says.

So God is coming to us and he's pressing into our hands a salvation that Jesus has earned, has purchased, and says, Here, this is for you.

So he doesn't love us when we become Christians, he loved us before.

And he comes to us, and that changes us and brings about that response.

And so he calls us to see that it's not our performance, it's all by grace in Jesus.

It's all about Jesus.

But then Jesus does something else.

It's not just a community of grace, it's a com it is a community.

What is Christian community?

It's a deep shared belief that the love of God creates a loving community that binds people together and draws people in.

So this is in Acts 2.39.

For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off.

Everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.

God calls people to himself, and we don't put out an advertisement saying, hey, we are looking for people to come.

God calls people and he calls people of all types into his church.

And so the church is a people united to one another in Jesus.

The church is a community of people holding on to one another as Christ calls us to himself.

So church is a word, it's an identity term like spouse or family.

It's a relationship, it's a community.

It's a 24-hour a day, seven-day a week, 365-day a year identity that we live out when we're together, but also when we're elsewhere.

But this passage is focusing largely on the together part of that identity.

So in chapter 2, verse 44, he says, All who believed were together and had all things in common.

So it was an experience of unity, of mutual affection, being knit together, and something larger than yourself binding you to people that you never would have chosen to be in your family.

Ever.

You ever had that?

We uh we are we were at a uh we were at a school for years uh that happened to have won a couple of national championships.

You know, I didn't have a thing to do with it, but I got to participate in some of those, which was fun.

I knew people on the team.

So Clemson won the national championship, and uh my daughter was at Clemson the year they did, and uh she kind of nobody was there.

People went to the game, they were elsewhere.

But she happened to be in her apartment, and she left her apartment and went downtown to Clemson.

And in downtown Clemson, they had put up a huge screen, and everybody was watching, like not everybody, but everybody who was in town together were watching the game.

So hundreds, maybe a thousand people were standing out in the street watching the game on this big screen.

And finally, when the uh game ended, the entire street erupted, and everybody was cheering and doing something that is not really proper to do most days of the week.

They were hugging everybody around them, including my daughter.

She doesn't like for people she doesn't know to touch her and come into her space, but she's like hugging and they're all hugging, they're all cheering.

And it's because there's this thing outside of them that united them, that pulled them together, and they're cheering.

We have something in common that binds us together, and that is what he's talking about here.

And as you read through what's taking place, they're bound together with something bigger that unites them, and that enables them to dwell together in a unity they wouldn't have had otherwise.

Because we try as human beings to just come together on something, but eventually it just falls apart.

Christ is the only one who can really unite us.

This is from A.

W.

Tozer.

He said, Has it ever occurred to you that 100 pianos, all tuned to the same fork, are automatically tuned to each other.

They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow.

So 100 worshipers met together, each one looking away to Christ, and in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be, were they to become unity conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship.

When we look to Christ, all of us together, that's what binds us together.

And we we crave that.

I crave, and you crave, that connection to other Christians.

We did a mission strip to Salamanca years ago, and there's this one man who had, young, one young man who had become a Christian before he came, and he was looking for fellowship.

And finally, when he found our group on this mission strip, he latched onto us and spent all of his time with us.

You probably have done that.

When I was in college, I worked at Disney World for a bit and uh lived in the uh the kind of dormitories for people who are college students, working doing an internship there.

And the whole time I was looking for Christian fellowship.

I wasn't finding it with people who were there.

And then finally, the last week I was there, I met a young man named Mark.

Who had been doing the same thing I'd been, looking for somebody who shared his faith.

So then the day that we met, we stayed up till three in the morning in the stairwell, talking and praying for each other.

I needed that.

He needed that.

We craved that.

And that's what these Christians are doing.

This togetherness was constant, day by day aspects of the community.

People were meeting together.

They were meeting together in the temple.

They were meeting together, it says, in each other's homes.

There's lots of commentary discussions about what he means when he talks about they committed themselves, devoted themselves to the breaking of bread, because he mentions breaking of bread twice in the passage.

One, the first one, might be to communion, but some commentators are even divided on that.

But at least one of those is to the idea that they got together in each other's homes.

They showed hospitality to one another and had people in their homes, and there was an intimacy that broke down barriers between them and other people.

They didn't just have people who were like them come into their homes.

They had other Christians of various backgrounds come into their home and they shared meals together.

This is what Francis Schaeffer said.

He said, a compassionate open home is part of Christian responsibility and should be practiced up to the level of capacity.

Which means that if you have little ones in your house, that's super hard.

And so you don't put all this artificial pressure on yourself to do that.

But he's saying that, and I think he's right, that we're called to be as closely connected to people as we can.

And he says that they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers in verse 42.

And he says, we're on mission.

Mission flows from a deep belief that God calls all Christians to minister to others in their families and in their churches and in their broader communities because of what we believe that God has called us to come alongside all sorts of people in various areas.

So what we want to do as a church is equip to provide opportunities for people to get together and use their gifts, for you to be able to serve one another, to help one another grow.

But also, we want you, want all of us to be looking out for the people in our community and saying we want them to come to an understanding of Jesus.

And uh so our their mission was not just towards one another, their mission was towards the whole community.

Verse 45.

And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all as any had need.

They took care of each other.

So there's deep gratitude, there's deep generosity, and uh, there's they felt a freedom in caring for one another.

And so this was all the Christians.

They didn't say this is what our church does, but saying this is what we're all called to do in a variety of ways.

And they enjoyed the favor of all the people, which means that other people held them in very high regard who are not Christians because they could see them loving and serving in the broader community, not just their own people, but others.

There's a person in church history called uh Julian the Apostate, which is probably not a way you would want to be known.

Apostate means it's somebody who's abandoned the faith.

He apparently grew up in the home of believing Christians, but he has the uh distinction of being the last non-Christian emperor of Rome.

So that means that at an early age he was in uh he abandoned his faith, poured himself into Roman culture, and eventually he was the emperor of Rome.

And he found that Christianity was growing in the Roman Empire, pushing out all the old gods of the Romans.

And he decided we need to recover our own heritage.

We need to recover our own worship of these gods.

And so, as a means of trying to unite the Romans under their gods, he began to tell the priest in all the Roman temples that he said, you need to do what the Christians do and love other people who are not just in our temple.

So you need to love other people.

And this he famously complained this way.

He said, Those Christians take better care of Romans who are in need than we do.

They not only take care of their own, but they take care of any Roman, Christian or not.

So a community of grace on mission.

So, what does this have to do with you?

This is not my franchise.

It's not my dominoes.

It is it's our church.

So church is not an event, not a destination, it's a people.

And as a pastor, I have to commend you because I see that.

Some of you do such an effective and beautiful job.

When people come and visit our church, one of the things that they say is how well you extend yourself to new people.

That's fantastic.

We have some Bible studies we're going to talk about later.

And in those Bible studies, what we uh see is it's not just people from our church that are in those Bible studies.

People from other churches and people who are not even in church are coming to our Bible studies because you make them feel welcome and you love a variety of people and you love them well.

And that's an excitement.

It's not my franchise.

Can it be our franchise together for all of us?

Uh church is not an event, it's a it's a destination, it's people, it's an identity.

365 days a year, seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

The church here, the church everywhere.

And I know.

I know sometimes you cannot be involved in the church in the way that you want to be involved in the church because of uh situations and circumstances in your life.

And that's okay.

And I love that Francis Schaefer said that, as you're able, because some of us have things we have to attend to, and those things that you're attending to is still church.

Because church is not a location and it's not an event.

Church is an identity that you carry with you as you go into all of your everything that you're going through.

So a young mom who's at home with the kids and feels like I'm not connected to other relationships because I'm doing this, she's doing church with her kids.

When you as parents are raising your kids, as you as grandparents are raising your grandkids in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, you're doing church because you're carrying that identity of Christ.

You're being devoted to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, breaking of bread, and to prayer.

You're praying for the people in your life.

So it's not just what we do here when we're together, it's what you're doing when you're elsewhere.

At work, when you are, some of you are fantastic at coming alongside of your co-workers when they're in distress.

You do a fantastic job of that.

That's doing church in the community, praying with your spouse, encouraging siblings in faith.

That's all church.

So we meet together as the church gathered, but when we leave here, we're what theologians say is the church scattered into the world, being salt and light into the world around us.

So this isn't my franchise.

This is our identity together as Christians.

And God wants you to use your gifts and be part of the grassroots movements of what he's still doing in the lives of people in the world.

And you may not think you have the ability to do that, but you do.

Because the Bible says, He says here, not only did you believe, but when you came to believe, you received the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is in you and enables you to do the work of ministry.

I had a student years ago named Anna.

And Anna came to me and did what people often do with the pastor, is she said, Would you talk to my friend?

Because she was afraid to talk to her friend.

And I said, Why don't you, Anna, why don't you want to talk to your friend?

She said, Well, because you know better what to say than I do.

And I said, No, I don't.

I said, You know your friend way better than I know her.

And she knows you way better than she knows me.

I'm just some stranger showing up and talking to her.

You talk to her.

And at this point, Anna giggled, like a nervous giggle.

Like, what are you, what are you, what are you asking me to do?

I said, no, you talk to her.

You're the one in the relationship already with your friend.

You talk to your friend.

So she did.

And I saw her next week.

The next week I said, Anna, how did it go?

And she said, It went great.

It went great.

Like she's gonna come to our campus ministry next week with me.

So, all right, this is great.

So God is at work in you.

We are a community of Grace on Mission.

And you're a part of that community, a cherished part.

And we love you, and we would love one another.

And we want to see what God is continuing to do.

And guess what?

Some we're gonna have a conversation over the next couple of months and the next couple of years about building a building.

And at that point, it's not gonna make us, we're not gonna be a real boy.

We're not gonna be it's not gonna make us a real church because they didn't have the structure either.

You're already doing what God has called you to do.

And He's calling us to continue on mission as a community of grace.

So let me pray for us.