Acts: How To Be a Gospel-Centred Church (2:42-47)

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Our second reading this morning is from the New Testament, the Book of Acts, chapter 2, 42 to 47.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

And they don't 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 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 the 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.

The word of the Lord.

The church devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

So, church, let's pray.

Lord God, truly you are a God of our salvation.

We come before you perhaps with hearts heavy from our weak, perhaps hearts that are jubilant from our weak.

Wherever it is we're coming from, I pray that right now, through your word and through the work of your Holy Spirit, we would know that your kingdom is at hand.

That you're calling us to turn away from what harms us and towards your life.

And your life.

And so, Lord, would you give us eyes to see what it is you're doing in our own hearts and in our midst?

Call us deeper into this mystery of the good news of Christ.

And it's in His name we pray.

Did we see it?

So what I'm about to share is going to come as a shock to no one, to any, it's not going to come as a shock to anyone who knows me with any degree of knowing me.

I am not much of a baker.

I'm not much I'm not much in the kitchen, really, all together.

Baking requires a certain precision and uh exactitude that I just must read my lap.

Um so this would have been a while ago, and I've been sort of racking my brain trying to remember what it was.

Maybe Rachel didn't remember what it was, but I forget what it was that I was setting myself to make.

Why it was that I made it so.

But I remember getting my ingredients all together in the boat to mix them all up.

And Rachel just in in a box time and walks through the kitchen just quickly enough to catch them about baking soda and not baking powder into the mix.

And when Rachel pointed that out, I asked, is there a difference?

And that's my experience.

Someone was sharing with me recently an experience at Thanksgiving dinner, and after a lavish feast of turkey, they pull up the pumpkin pie, which is always really important to write.

And it wasn't until the first couple of bites that everyone dove in, they realized it's not sugar that's been used here, it's salt.

But it's not pumpkin pie.

Whatever it was that I was making myself.

There are essential ingredients in that works.

Sometimes if we miss out even on one of those, or we substitute or swap one out, we might be left with something that resembles the real thing, but we no longer have the real thing.

Go and tell disciples, you will be my witnesses, is the risen Lord Jesus' commission to his disciples for his ascension.

And that is a commission that we, in every generation of the church, carries forward.

It's not an option.

It's not something for elite Christians who really want to take it seriously.

This is our mission as a church to bear witness to the hope and new life that we find in the resurrection of Jesus.

And last week Matt took us through Acts chapter 2, where the Spirit descends on the day of Pentecost.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

And we saw that it's the same spirit, the same empowering spirit that dwells in Jesus, who dwells in us and empowers us for that mission to go and be his witnesses.

In other words, Jesus hasn't just thrown us back on ourselves to try our best, to work hard.

He's actually empowered us with the spirit that we need to fulfill the mission that he's given us.

This calls us to be go and tell disciples.

That's what Acts is all about, being go and tell disciples.

And having seen such remarkable works of God in history, in Jesus' mission, in his ascension, and the descent of the Holy Spirit, filling all of the apostles to proclaim God's word and the good news of Jesus in all kinds of different languages, all these amazing things are happening.

The result of all of this is what we read in Acts 2, 42 to 47.

The result of God's remarkable work in history, these exceptional, extraordinary things he's doing, sets up exactly what we read in these verses.

One scholar describes this as a cameo of the first church.

This is checking in with what the church is about.

The reality of Jesus' mission, his ascension, his sending of the Holy Spirit, here is the state of the church.

They devoted themselves to the apostle teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and the prayers.

In other words, this is the regulative, normal life of the church.

This is what a spirit-empowered resurrection of the church looks like.

And sometimes I think we have an idea that a healthy church looks something extraordinary and sensational.

And sometimes it does.

And there are those moments.

But here we have on the other side of God's extraordinary work in history, you have the life of the church settling into a gospel-centered life.

Characterized by the apostles' teaching, the fellowship, the break with the bread, and the prayers, four essential ingredients of what it means to be a gospel-centered church.

Without those, without any one of those, you have something less than a gospel-centered church.

So, here's what we're going to do today for someone.

We're going to have a look at what it means to be a gospel-centered church.

This is a phrase we use a lot, isn't it?

We're probably very familiar with the phrase gospel-centered church.

And maybe we've wondered, what does that look like?

How do we put that into practice?

And I want to suggest that the blueprint we want to follow is right here in Acts 2.22.

We want to go back and look at the very first, the prototype of the gospel-centered church, the church of the apostles, the church of the disciples of Jesus Himself.

And we want to check in and we want to say, how are we doing in this mission?

Are we carrying out that mission of being a gospel-centered church that is devoted, that is faithful, that is steadfast in the apostles' teaching, fellowship, and breaking the bread, and in the prayers.

Why these four things?

Could Luke, the author of Acts?

Can you just name four things at random that kind of characterize the church?

You know, the church devoted themselves to church popmucks.

You know, they devoted themselves to, you know, games nights.

Maybe they did something like that.

I'm pretty sure they did something like potlucks.

But he names these four things in particular because these four are essential expressions and experiences of the life of God in our midst.

God is making himself known in our midst through these seemingly ordinary means.

But these are God's chosen means of revealing himself, of working reconciliation and our hearts of drawing us to himself.

Apostles' teaching, fellowship, breaking with the bread and the prayers.

This is the normative life of a Christian and the Christian church.

They give expression in their experience of the life and love of God.

So, if we want experience of the gospel, an experience of the life and love of God, if we want to dive deep into what it means that God loves the world and that he has worked salvation through the death, the resurrection, ascension, promised to come again of our Lord Jesus, then we need to dive into these four things together.

So, how to be a gospel centered church?

A gospel centered church is a learning church, a gospel centered church is a loving church, a gospel centered church is a eucharistic church, E-U-C-H-A-R, I S-E-I-C, if you're making notes.

Not Eucharistic.

Why?

And finally, it's a praying church.

Learning church, loving church, eucharistic church, praying church.

Let's have a look at these new songs and let's ask, how does our life reflect what it means to be a gospel-centered church in our mission of the disciples?

How to be a gospel-centered church?

First off, a gospel-centered church is a learning church.

It is devoted to the apostles teaching.

Now, first then, verse 42, right off the bat, we probably want to start asking a couple questions.

One, we want to ask the question, well, what is an apostle?

The church is devoted to the apostle teaching.

What is an apostle?

There's two senses in which the book of Acts in the New Testament uses this word apostle.

One is a general sense of being sent.

That's literally what this word apostle means.

It's a sent one, it's a commissioned one, it's a messenger.

But the second way the Gospel of Acts uses is a little bit more particular, and sometimes it's not immediately obvious which way it's being referred to, but you can sort of susit it out by the context.

The second sense in which apostle is meant here is this.

An apostle is an eyewitness to the risen Lord Jesus, who is uniquely commissioned, or authorized by Jesus, to proclaim the good news.

Let me say that again, because it's a little wordy.

An apostle is an eyewitness to the risen Lord Jesus, who is uniquely commissioned, or authorized by Jesus to proclaim the good news.

His death, his resurrection, his ascension, promise to come to be.

The ministry of the apostle is validated by signs and wonders.

God's extraordinary work in their midst.

We see that in verse 43, and we can still perhaps recount stories ourselves of seeing God at work in miraculous ways amongst us.

But the apostle's ministry isn't defined by miracles or signs or wonders.

Those bear witness to the truth of the gospel.

They validate the gospel message.

They aren't themselves the gospel message.

Do you see the difference?

Otherwise, we're chasing after signs and wonders when the signs and wonders are meant to point us towards the goodness of the gospel.

Okay, so it's it's this installation, it's this commission, it's this authority that matters so much in the normative uh um ministry of the apostles.

And this is what we see with the installation of Matthias.

If you've been reading through the gospel, or pardon me, the book of Acts with us, you read about the installation of Matthias maybe last week.

And Matthias uh is is the re is the choke apostle chosen by the eleven apostles after Judas's uh betrayal and and and his taking his own life.

Well, now we need a twelfth apostle who is going to carry the message forward.

And uh book Peter addresses the eleven and uh and he says what we need to do is we need to uh find someone who has been uh witness to Jesus' ministry since the very beginning, since his baptism, and someone who has been a witness to all of Jesus' uh life and and work and teaching and all of these things he's accomplished, and then we install that person as apostle who's going to faithfully proclaim Jesus' message to the world.

He's going to carry that forward, and Matthias is the person selected uh to uh carry that office forward.

Here is the defining characteristic of Matthias's ministry, of the defining characteristic of an apostle's ministry.

Peter says this to the eleven.

He says, one of these men, you know, the candidates for the open position of apostle, one of these men must become with us a witness to his resurrection.

Which is to say the ministry of the apostles is to bear witness to the reality that Jesus who died on the cross is now alive on the third day, that the tomb is empty, and that this opens up to us the way of everlasting life.

This is the apostle's ministry, the ministry to proclaim good news, not to offer life advice, right?

Not to sort of say, Hey, have you tried doing this?

It's to announce what God has accomplished in Christ.

We're tracking.

Okay.

So important.

So important.

Okay, that's what an apostle is.

What does an apostle teach?

Pardon me, I just I'm getting ahead of my own notes.

One of these men must be a witness to his resurrection.

There you go.

There you have the apostle's teaching.

Uh the apostle Paul fleshes out a little bit more of the content of that message when he writes in 1 Corinthians 15.

Uh, he's addressing this church as as as with the authority of an apostle trying to correct uh some of the bad ideas that have kind of crept into the life of this congregation.

He says to this congregation, I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received.

And it's this that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, that he appeared to Cephas, that's Peter, and to the twelve, that he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, and then he appeared to James, and then to all the apostles, and last of all, as when untimely born, he appeared to me, and whom Paul goes on to describe himself as the least of the apostles.

And that's because he spent the early part of his life persecuting the church of God before he was called into God's service to bear witness to the resurrection.

So the teaching of the apostles has everything to do with the person and work of the risen Lord Jesus, and it's bringing this reality to bear on the lives of individuals, on the life of the church, and the life of our world.

It's bringing that good news to bear because that good news changes everything.

The fact that death has now given way to life in Jesus changes everything.

And the apostles are the ones who are working that good news out in real time.

Apostles aren't just dealing out moral advice.

It's true they've got moral exhortations to make, but it's moral exhortations that point us towards that good news, not the other way around, right?

Okay.

I'm really getting into the thick of this here because it's the ministry and the uh the proclamation of the apostles that is foundational for everything that follows.

And if we miss this, then we miss the essence of the other three essential ingredients in the church.

So let's not miss what it means uh to be all about devoted to the apostles' teaching.

A gospel centered church is a learning church that's devoted to what the apostles teach.

It's a pillar is in the apostles, is what uh Paul writes in Ephesians chapter 2.

Ephesians 2 · chapter mention

Now we live in a time where all the apostles, the apostles of the New Testament are no longer walking on earth with us.

So we might wonder: well, do we no longer have an apostolic church?

Do we no longer have apostles to follow?

Can we no longer be devoted to the apostles' teaching?

And the answer is this that the apostles gave us the deposit of their teaching, gave the church the deposit of their teaching in the scriptures themselves.

So when we open up our Bible, we don't just do that to learn some interesting trivia facts.

We do that in devotion to the good news that the apostles are proclaiming in their time, and we're carrying that forward.

For us, when we devote ourselves to the reading and the meditation and the contemplation of scripture, we're devoting ourselves to the apostles' teaching.

That's why we have not one, not two, not three, but four Bible readings every Sunday.

Because we want to bear witness that the whole of Scripture points us to Jesus, and we want to devote ourselves to the Jesus that the apostles make known, that they bear eyewitness to.

So if we want to wrestle with who Jesus is, no better place to start than to go to those eyewitnesses who saw his person, who saw his work for themselves, and inquire of them.

What do they make of Jesus?

That's where we want to start, and that's where we want to go deeper and deeper.

Begins to think biblically, begins to experience the renewal of our minds.

Suddenly we're no longer just thinking through issues of life or or, say, for example, of our vocation, of our job.

We're no longer thinking through issues of marriage or or identity or even death.

All of these things are in dialogue with the good news of Jesus.

These aren't things we're just sort of thinking of in a vacuum anymore.

When we are encountering the apostle teaching, devoting ourselves to the apostle teaching, when we are biblically grounded, we start to look at these issues in life and we start to say, how does the gospel come to bear on what it is that I'm reflecting on?

How is it that the good news that Jesus is no longer dead but alive change the way I think about death, for example?

And one of the things we're going to do in the coming weeks is take some time in our new program called the Learner's Exchange to ask some questions about what the resurrection of Jesus means for how we think about death, and particularly this cultural moment where we're wrestling through the implications of medical assistance and dying.

How does the gospel cause us to think differently about our cultural moment?

How do we think like Christians?

That's what it means to be devoted to the apostles' teaching.

We see the connection between the gospel in all areas of life.

You know, suddenly marriage or or sex is not just sex.

Suddenly, this is a greater reality.

We're being called into a union of Christ and his church, for example.

We're starting to see some of the significance of what we would otherwise miss.

And that's because we're thinking through the implications of the gospel in each and every part of life.

Does that make any sense?

Right on.

Okay.

So if we miss this, we miss everything that follows.

A gospel center church is a learning church.

We're devoted to the apostles' teaching.

Now I think I've set up my other uh points.

I don't think we have to go into as much detail, but if we miss that, it's like we've missed the foundation.

I don't know.

Are there like when we start baking, is there like a base thing, like flour or something?

Yeah, that's right.

See how much I know?

If we miss the base, then everything's gonna follow from that.

So this is why we as a gospel center church are devoted to our biblical faith.

Because we believe this is the announcement of the good news that we cannot miss, that our community needs it so desperately.

A gospel center church is a learning church devoted to the apostles' teaching.

A gospel center church is a loving church devoted to the fellowship.

And what do we mean by fellowship?

The word used here is pretty loaded.

It's a word in Greek that goes koinonia, which is just a wonderful word to say.

It means a sharing, it means a participating in, and it there's there's kind of a twofold sense in which we have uh koinonia in which we're devoted to the fellowship.

One is a sort of vertical sense in which we're devoted to the life and love of God for us.

Again, the Apostle Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthians, he signs off the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship, the koinonia of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

In other words, the life of the church is caught up in the life and love of God.

It's not as if we're talking about the life and love of God as something that's distant, something that's abstract.

We're talking about God.

We are entering into God's presence to experience the life and love of God as we as we come and hear his word, as we come to his table, as we gather with one another, we're entering into that life and love of God for ourselves.

That's the fellowship of the Spirit.

It means that vertical sense also means a horizontal sense, a life and love of Christian community, which is shown especially in our generous self-giving towards one another.

In 2 Corinthians chapter 8, Paul uses the same word koinonia to describe the uh kind of monetary provision of the of one church for another.

2 Corinthians 8 · chapter mention

One church is in trouble and they're receiving a financial donation.

He describes that as a koinonia.

What he's saying is this is your generous self-giving.

This is an expression of your love, of your sacrifice of your means for the sake of your sisters and brothers in Christ.

Maybe a sacrifice looks like a financial sacrifice, maybe it looks like a sacrifice of your time, your attention, right?

Maybe it looks like a sacrifice of a cup of coffee, right?

Maybe it looks like a sacrifice of taking the time to encourage, whatever that is, it's taking the time to give of yourself generously for the sake of the other, and that is the Essence of Koinonia.

That's why you see such radical generosity in verses 44 and 45 of our reading.

The church is giving itself over to the life of koinonia, of fellowship, more than just sort of, you know, having some orange drink and coffee.

The church is giving themselves wholeheartedly to one another as an expression of the gospel because God has given himself wholeheartedly to us.

Hasn't he?

So, a gospel-centered church is a loving church.

It's devoted to fellowship, to a life lived together, to a life of love.

And this means that there is no such thing as a lone wolf Christianity.

There's no such thing.

It's an oxymoron to say, I'm a Christian, I just, you know, kind of do it on my own.

That just doesn't jive.

At least it doesn't jive with a gospel-centered vision of the Christian life.

And I just think this is especially important for us to consider in a moment of time in Canadian culture 2024 where we're just so individualistic.

We can be so individualistic.

And I think this was especially true during, we discovered this to be true during COVID, didn't we?

Because suddenly we discovered that, okay, we can't gather as the church, but suddenly all the resources that I like about church are online, aren't they?

You know, and that's always been true, but we just became conscious of it in the last couple of years.

It's like, well, if I want to sing worship music, I can go to hear some of the world's best worship music on Spotify, right?

I can do that, the songs I like, I don't have to deal with the songs I don't like that you know the church sings.

And, you know, sermons, maybe I want to, maybe I want to learn from you know the apostles' teaching.

I can go and listen to the world's best Bible teachers at a click of a button talk about what I want to hear about, not just whatever the preacher's going on about this week, you know?

Everything's, we can just curate a whole individualistic, you know, quasi-Christian experience online, but here's the thing: no one can truly learn apostolic biblical Christianity without personally entering into the school of loving fellowship with other Christians.

Let me say that again.

No one can truly learn apostolic biblical Christianity without personally entering into the school of loving fellowship with other Christians.

We can find expressions of that in all different kinds of ways.

But one very simple place where I think that starts is uh uh our coffee and tea hour.

Um I was talking with someone recently who is describing um just just a kind of dawning of uh uh significance of what it means to get together after service.

It's so easy to think service ends with Amen and we'll see you next week.

And sometimes life happens and we gotta get somewhere.

I totally get that.

But what we do in coffee and tea hour is not just, well, we're feeling a little thirsty, we can use a little snack and then pig perk up our blood sugar.

Maybe that's true.

But what we're also doing is giving opportunity, giving occasion for us as brothers and sisters in Christ to come along one side and another and say, How are you doing?

You know what I mean?

Which makes fellowship time an expression of our discipleship, not just something we do after service.

But if we can't make coffee and tea time, that's okay.

Make the point.

Call someone up, find fellowship, join a small group, do something regular and committed that is going to form you in fellowship and loving self-giving towards other Christians and where they do the same for you.

Because a gospel centered church is a loving church devoted to fellowship.

Okay.

Gospel centered church is a learning church, it's a loving church, and it's a Eucharistic church.

It's devoted to the breaking of the bread.

I use this word Eucharistic because I couldn't think of anything else.

Uh I don't know what other adjective to use here, but Eucharist is one of these words that we uh we use to describe the the Lord's Supper, or alternatively, we may call it the Holy Communion, or our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters might call it the Mass.

Umarist is is a comes from a Greek word that means thanksgiving.

And don't we start the Eucharistic liturgy with let us give thanks to the Lord our God?

And it is Thank you.

I've got the old prayer book liturgy in my brain, which it's meet and right so to do, and I'm like, we don't say that.

Okay.

But what we're doing is we're we're entering into a moment of thanksgiving.

We're recognizing God has done something amazing for us in Christ, given Himself completely for us, and so when we come to the Lord's table, we celebrate this with great joy in thanksgiving.

Why the breaking of the bread?

Are we surprised that that's listed in these four things?

It's like maybe if your church experience is like mine, three of these make sense.

It makes sense that the apostles' teaching is there, you know, the authority of the Bible, you know, that that's very important.

Maybe it makes sense that fellowship is there.

Of course, church is a shared experience.

Maybe it makes sense that prayers are there, because what else are you going to do at church?

But breaking of the bread, they're devoted to that.

They give themselves steadfastly to that.

They continue in that.

Does that surprise you?

Why would they devote themselves to the breaking of the bread?

And I do think when we talk about the breaking of the bread, we're talking about the Lord's Supper, we're talking about the Eucharist because of how Luke uses it in the institution of the Lord's Supper.

The Lord broke bread and he gave it to them.

And then in Luke chapter 24, the risen Lord Jesus appears to his two disciples on the road to Emmaus, and he makes himself known, it says, in the breaking of the bread.

Luke 24 · chapter mention

I think we're talking about the Lord's Supper here and not just getting together for a potluck.

Why the breaking of the bread?

Why the Lord's Supper?

One, because it's our participation in Christ.

I'm going to work again off the Apostle Paul here.

He says in his letter, 1 Corinthians chapter 10, verses 14 to 17, he's warning the congregation, flee from idolatry, right?

1 Corinthians 10:14–17

All this false worship, all these false gods, these that mislead you, that, that, that get you off track.

And he goes on to say, flee from idolatry, the cup of blessing we bless, he's referring to the Lord's Supper.

It is, is it not a participation, a koinonia, he says, in the blood of Christ?

The bread we break is it not a participation in the body of Christ?

Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.

So Paul's point is this when we come to the Lord's Supper, we're doing more than just remembering Jesus as someone who's distant and far off from us.

We're coming to participate in the reality of Jesus.

And I love the way that our Book of Common Prayer gives expression to that.

When we come, we receive Jesus in a heavenly and spiritual way.

We're coming to receive true body and true blood and participate in the reality of what Christ has accomplished for us.

Not as though he's distant, but as one who is making himself known in our midst.

That's why we come to the Lord's table to participate in Christ.

But we also come to proclaim Christ.

1 Corinthians 11, one chapter later, Paul writes, as often, and by the way, when he says as often, I think he has often in mind in terms of frequency for Holy Communion.

But anywho, as often as you drink this bread and eat this bread, drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Which means when we get together around the Lord's table, we are making known what God has accomplished for us in Christ.

He has died, he is risen, the Lord will come again.

That's what we're saying to one another, that's what we're saying to the world.

When we gather around the Lord's table, we are making known our proclamation of the gospel.

The gospel isn't something that we do, and the Lord's Supper is something we kind of just get over with because Jesus tells us to.

No, we go to the Lord's table because the Lord's table is our experience and expression of the gospel.

Jesus' body is broken for you.

That is not hypothetical.

That's real, and we need to hear it.

We need to hear it as often as we can.

We need to hear that his blood is shed for us as often as we can because a gospel centered church is a Eucharistic church.

It keeps the death, resurrection, and coming again of Jesus at the center of everything we do and everything we are as a church.

That's why the church devoted itself to the breaking of the bread, because we're making known the gospel in it.

This is not permission to have superstitions about the Lord's Supper, right?

Of thinking, boy, if I miss communion this week, like and I get hit by a bus, then my eternal destiny is kind of questionable or something.

No, this is an experience and an expression of God's love for us that we should come to often.

But we should pay attention to how our heart regards it.

If we feel hard-hardened or hard-hearted towards it, if we feel like this is just kind of pointless, I don't really understand why we're doing it, then we need to consider the claim of the gospel a little bit more deeply.

Because this is Jesus giving himself for us and inviting us into his life.

So we score no points by denigrating the Lord's Supper.

Sometimes I worry that my fellow kind of Protestant pastors kind of do that because some traditions elevate it, so we're just going to denigrate it, and that all kind of balances out.

I just think we need to elevate it in the right way.

God is making himself known, he's proclaiming good news, he's inviting us into this as we participate in Christ together.

Okay, sorry, I'm just getting so excited about this.

Let me land the plane here.

A gospel centered church is a uh learning church, loving church, Eucharistic church, and a praying church.

It's devoted to the prayers.

I don't think there's any one biblical definition of prayer, but here's what I think is a great synthesis of what the Bible has to say about prayer from a fellow named John Chrysostom, who was the bishop of Constantinople in the 5th century.

He says this: that prayer is a precious way of communicating with God.

It gladdens the soul and gives repose to its affections.

You should not think of prayer as being a matter of words or merely a matter of words, we might want to say.

It is a desire for God, an indescribable devotion, not of human origin, but the gift of God's grace.

Prayer is a life lived in conversation with God.

That's both informal in our own personal life, and that's formal as well, because you'll notice that they devote themselves to the prayers.

And that definite article is really important.

It says that there's a formal rhythm, morning and evening, that they're participating in the life of prayer in the temple and at the synagogues.

We read that in verse uh or chapter three of the book of Acts.

So a gospel-centered church is a praying church.

It devotes itself to regular intercession, thanksgiving, adoration, to a life lived in conversation with God, which means prayers of the people and intercessory prayer and our pray port parry.

All of these things are expressions of a gospel-centered church.

Prayer is the fire in the engine of the mission of the church.

And we need to devote ourselves to prayer if we're going to be about God's business in his world.

But what an invitation.

So here's our essential ingredients, church.

We can't do without any one of these, learning and loving, Eucharist and prayer.

We can't do without a single one of these because this is what it means to be a gospel-centered church, to dive deeper and deeper into these things, because we don't graduate from any one of them.

We go deeper and deeper into them.

So if you're here today and you're just checking out who this Jesus guy is, you're trying to make sense of them, then let me encourage you with this.

Wrestle around with the apostles' teaching.

It's so easy to be selective.

That's such an easy thing for us individualists to do.

To sort of say, well, I like this that Jesus says over here.

I like this that the New Testament says, I don't like that.

I could do without that.

Let me encourage you to do this instead.

Wrestle with it.

Because in the Apostles' mind, all of this is the good news of Jesus being brought to bear on all of life.

So if we hear something like, you know, sex for Christians is reserved for marriage, and we go, ooh, I don't know if I like that.

Well, maybe instead of just being selective and I'm going to just section that off and put it away, maybe what I'm going to do is wrestle around with how is it that the in the apostle's mind, the gospel is connected with this in this way.

Right?

Because suddenly we start wrestling around with truth and not just being selective in our own kind of individualist little worlds.

I have, you know, I'm not saying we all have to be on the same page to get together on a Sunday morning.

What I am saying is we want to wrestle around here with truth, don't we?

We don't want to just make our own little substitutions.

Let's wrestle around with the real thing.

And I have so much more respect for someone who's willing to wrestle around with the real thing and not just sort of substitute, you know, an easy alternative.

So let's wrestle around.

If you're just seeking after Jesus, that's just one example.

Maybe there's any number of examples in your life where you go, ooh, that's just that's tricky.

Wrestle around with the apostles' teaching, but do so in the context of fellowship.

Join us.

Ask questions.

Ask brothers and sisters in Christ, what's this really about, or what do you make of that?

Because we're going to discover discipleship is not something we do as individuals, it's communal as well.

If you're growing in the Lord, let me encourage you to devote yourself to the Lord's Supper and to the prayers.

This is how we give expression and how we experience the life and love of God in our midst.

If it's been the worst week we've ever had, if it's been the best week we've ever had, we come to the Lord's Supper and we hear the words that his body, his blood has given for us.

That grounds us in exactly who we are, and we need that again and again and again to grow.

And if we are endeavoring to be go and tell disciples, because we do see that evangelism is connected with all of this in verse 47, the fourfold life of the church is the expression and experience of the gospel.

The gospel isn't something that the church has, the gospel is something that the church lives out.

And it lives it out in these four ways, especially.

So, friends, Port Perry, more than anything else, needs us to be a gospel-centered church.

It needs the life and love expressed in our teaching, in our fellowship, in our Eucharist, and in our prayers.

Because when we participate in the life and love of God, it cannot help but overflow into the communities that we participate in and the relationships and networks that we all have.

So, brothers, sisters, let's devote ourselves to the apostles' teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of the bread, to the prayers, and expect to experience God's life and love in our midst.

Amen.

Thank you for listening today.

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God bless you and keep you today and every day.