Thrive | Enjoying God And Each Other (January 31st, 2021) - Mike Armstrong

All right, well, let's get into the Word of God.

We have been in Acts chapter two, of course, over the last little while, uh, talking about our series called Thrive.

How do we thrive as a church in general, but kind of thinking specifically, how do we do that now when we are meeting, you know, either at home or at the office, or there's a small group of us even here at ANOVA right now, uh, running this service.

And so we don't want to just uh kind of use this season of life in a pandemic to uh take our foot off the gas and coast and be in neutral.

We know that that uh drift happens spiritually uh when we do that.

And so we want to focus and be as uh intentional and as intense as we possibly can be to truly thrive and grow as a church.

And so that's really the topic that we have been tackling.

We've got this week and next week, uh we'll finish up this great passage.

But Acts 2, uh verse 46, and the first part of verse 47 is where we're gonna spend our time today.

Now, as you're you're probably there already, uh, but as you're getting yourselves ready, I really want you to uh take a second here with me and and picture something that you really enjoy doing.

Maybe a way to frame this up is is is what how would how would you describe your happy place?

Right?

What's something that you love to do?

Maybe it's maybe it's something really simple, right?

Like just you know, reading a good book sitting by the fire.

Some of you that just that gets you.

Uh others, it's it's it's baking, right?

It's it's getting into the kitchen and baking treats for your family and friends.

And I know uh my happy place these days has been enjoying uh Ang's uh homemade everything bagels.

Clearly, I've been enjoying them maybe just a little bit too much, but that is something I have been uh absolutely loving.

Other people, it's it's maybe just missing some of those things that you would normally love to do, like going out to uh a restaurant mask-free with uh with friends and family.

Maybe uh your mind drifts towards the cottage and getting out on your dock uh in the summertime, or it's it's getting to the beach and a vacation and being able to travel around and go do things.

For you, it could be something like knitting or getting to the golf course or the hockey rink.

These are just things that we enjoy doing.

Again, this maybe is for you, your your kind of happy place, one of those things, or something, of course, that I didn't mention.

Now, I I I know we all know that life has been uh certainly more difficult these days.

It's been harder lately with everything uh kind of going on in the world.

Uh, but I want us to remember here this morning, take a few moments and remember that enjoyment is really supposed to be a key component of our lives as believers, as his church.

Okay, with all of the really important sermons that we hear and books that we read and conferences that we attend and conversations that we have with people about things like the trials and the difficulties and working through the pain of life, I mean, I mean, as good as it is to talk about those things and figure out how to handle those things as believers, um, it's it's really good, I think, for us to maybe take a few moments to shift the balance just a touch or tip the scales a little bit into the direction of the topic of actually enjoying the Lord, right?

Enjoying the community that God has given us, enjoying this Christian life.

It's certainly what we see this very first church doing here in the book of Acts, and it's absolutely something that you and I should be striving towards.

I wonder if we think about that enough, though.

Are we too focused on the difficulty and and and working through just trying to endure and persevere through the hard times when the reality is you read through the pages of the New Testament, and even when life was difficult and challenging, there was so much joy in these people.

I mean, you think about the tone of Paul or Peter or John in the New Testament, there was there was always this sense of how much they appreciated the Lord and appreciated uh the local church.

So that's what we're gonna look at here today, and and and very quickly, here is our big idea this morning.

It's this it's a a thriving church seizes the opportunity to enjoy God and each other.

Okay, and so let's just start at the beginning of our passage as we've been doing each week.

Verse 42, here's what it says.

It says, 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 all things in common.

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

Okay, now this, verse 46, that we're gonna zero in on, it says this, and day by day, okay, so so here's kind of what they experienced, generally speaking, on a daily basis as a church community.

Okay, it says that they were, first of all, attending the temple together.

Yeah, we've talked a bit about this, but this is where we're referring to to their public or corporate gathering together to worship the Lord.

Okay, and this is what they would do.

Okay, but there's maybe this is also referring to, it could be, to how they would use the temple courtyard as like this, their their gathering spot, their meeting zone where they would come together and enjoy fellowship together and perhaps go from there into uh each other's homes, which is certainly what you see in the next part of the verse.

Look what it says.

This is what else it is.

And breaking bread, okay, in their homes.

Okay, breaking bread is referring to communion, which we're actually going to do uh together for the first time in a while, praise the Lord, uh, here in just uh a moment.

But they would gather, they would, they would do communion.

They would often do this as they celebrated, just kind of eating food together, a meal together.

This is like their kind of their small group style ministry that they would do uh in each other's homes again, where they where they it says actually verse 42 tells us what they did.

They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching.

It was a deep fellowship and uh relationship with each other.

There's the breaking of bread again, that's communion.

So it mentions it twice in this passage.

Okay, and of course, prayer.

Okay, if you keep going, it says that they receive their food with, notice the joy here, glad and generous hearts.

Okay, you get this sense of enjoyment.

It says there, verse 47, the first part of it we're gonna look at, it says, praising God, okay, and having favor with all the people.

All right, so you see here that there is this culture of enjoyment, okay, that that that permeated everyday life for these Christians.

Okay, they enjoyed their God, right?

They enjoyed the salvation that he secured for them.

They were appreciative and were glad about the very many blessings that they had as a church community.

Again, it says that they were filled with gladness, right?

They they praised God, they were generous uh towards and and had favor with, it says, each other.

Again, there was this deep unity that happened there.

And so what we're seeing here in these verses is just like a window into the soul of a church that enjoyed the life that God had given them.

Okay, despite, as we know, we've been we've been studying through Acts for quite a while now, despite the many challenges, the persecution, the fears and the concerns that they would have had, none of that disrupted and ruined the enjoyment that they had in their God and uh and in each other.

They loved and delighted in the Lord immensely, deeply, and and naturally that just spilled out into their love and enjoyments that they had for each other.

Okay, no, no, missing this here.

Enjoyment is a defining characteristic of a thriving church.

Now, obviously, there's a lot that we could say about enjoyment and and and how to do this, and and I love thinking about all of those things.

How can we express our enjoyment in the Lord and in each other?

And of course, I would encourage you to think, and as we've been talking about over the last few weeks, get creative and how we can love each other and care for each other and just enjoy the life that God has given us.

And I'll leave that to you to let your minds dream and and and your hearts lead you into action in enjoying these things here.

But for today, for these next few moments, I want us to really focus in here on one of the very, very key ways that we are to express our enjoyments.

Okay, and that of course is, as the text says, the breaking of bread.

Sometimes we refer to this as the Lord's Supper or or or most commonly, just communion as a church, that's what we call it.

Okay, now communion, again, it's been a while since we've done this, but communion, kind of simply put, is remembering the Lord's death until he comes.

Okay, Jesus himself really put it that way.

We know that the night that he was betrayed by one of his own disciples, Judas, he had one kind of final meal with his disciples, and they gathered in this room and they had a meal together, and during that meal, Jesus explained communion and told them, I want you to remember this, I want you to do this and remember me until I come, referring to his second his second coming.

Now, they they, of course, hadn't put the pieces all together yet.

They didn't exactly know what was about to happen and everything that Jesus was talking about when it was all happening here, but but he was referring to his death, of course.

And he he took uh a few moments to to grab uh a piece of bread and say, This bread is representative uh representative of my body that is about to be broken on the cross for you.

He says, This this cup of wine, he took that and he said, This is uh is representative of my blood that that is that is to be shed.

And and in all of that, it is really uh a reminder to us of what Jesus has done, what Jesus did to sacrifice himself so that we could be forgiven by our God, so that we could go free.

And so every time that we take communion as a church family, typically we do this uh once a month.

It's an opportunity for us to focus in on Christ's death.

It's to remember, it is to f it is to it is to remind our hearts and our souls, which gets so easily tied up with with ourselves and so inwardly focused and caught up in other things, but it zeros us, right?

It it brings us back into, oh yeah, this is this is what happened to to get me into a relationship with my God.

Jesus had to suffer so that I wouldn't.

His blood was spilled so that mine would not need to be.

The wrath of God towards all sin was satisfied through the sacrifice, through the substitutionary death of our Savior.

Now, maybe when you hear that, you think, wait a second, here I thought we were talking about enjoyment, and what about the you know, the hype and the excitement of enjoyment, and you know, feeling like you're or or focusing in on the death of Christ, that that kind of seems like maybe not the same thing as enjoyment.

Is it kind of strange to to celebrate a sense of enjoyment in the death of Christ?

Well, I would say this.

I would say whenever we focus on the death of Christ, it's always within the context of the resurrection of Christ.

Right?

You and I, we we we focus in on what Christ did, and is is often a uh a solemn and and a serious thing, and it has that tone uh to it absolutely.

But we know, right, we know in the back of our minds that three days later he would rise again, defeating death, defeating sin entirely.

And so when we when we humble ourselves and and we confess our sin and we remember what Jesus did, we can also do that with a sense of of joy.

Right?

On top of that, I mean, even Jesus himself said we are we are to celebrate this, we are to remember this until he comes, which gets our minds thinking to the second coming.

Jesus is gonna come and and and and and gather us together with him and bring us into glory, into heaven with him for those who know him as savior.

And so as we focus on the death of Christ, it is absolutely something that we can, yes, we want to be serious about, but we can also enjoy because through Christ's death we have been given life.

Of course, this is a thing that we do to express our unity as a church together.

It is the key thing that unifies us, that it is our commonality.

And so we want to celebrate that here this morning and enjoy, if I can say it like that, communion.

And so, what we're gonna do is um we're gonna do that together.

I know it's a little bit different.

Uh, many of you are watching this online uh at home, and maybe you want to just take a moment here and and pause the video and go gather the elements uh from your your kitchen and get yourselves ready and then resume with us.

If you're over at the office right now, you'll see on a table these these cups here and just a couple of quick instructions about that.

There's basically two layers to peel uh off the lid.

One layer will give you uh the wafer, and then you peel back the second one, and that is uh the juice.

And again, those are representative of Christ's body and Christ's blood.

And so I want to say this as we go to communion here in just a moment and take these elements.

I do want to say that communion is for Christ's followers.

That's what it is.

And I and I would urge you, if you are a guest with us here as a church or or or our church is even your church home, uh, but you are not yet in a relationship with God, I would say, I would say make sure that is happened first.

I would say spend the next few moments getting your heart right with the Lord, confessing your sin that deserves God's wrath, your sin that has you headed towards hell and recognize that what Jesus did on the cross was to redeem you and to rescue you out of that, out of that destination and to bring you into a loving relationship with God.

If you would confess your sin and believe that what Jesus Christ did through his death and through his resurrection, you would be saved.

Okay, that is such an important thing to make sure that you have done first.

If you have not done that, spend the next few moments thinking about these things, praying through this, reach out to somebody and ask questions about what it means to know the Lord first.

I would say that that taking communion, drinking some juice, and eating a cracker, that that's that doesn't do anything for you to get you closer to God.

Jesus Christ brings you close to God.

This is simply something we do because it has been commanded.

It is something that we do uh to remember.

And so as John comes now, we're gonna spend the next little bit here getting our hearts right.

There are gonna be some prayer requests, uh prayer uh items on the screen, some points that you can work through that can help channel, guide you uh through this neck next little bit.

Get your heart right with the Lord, confess the sin that's been creeping in there that you haven't been dealing with.

You you wanna make sure that you've got that stuff cleared out so that you can truly enjoy uh this time of communion together.

Make sure that you're praising the Lord for his sacrifice.

Even as you're praying, rejoice in the life that Christ has saved you into, the community of believers, the church that God has given you, that you get to be a part of.

Okay, and so as you have spent some time and the song is playing in the background, then you can take the elements uh on your own time.

Uh for those who are watching this at the 9 o'clock service, our 9.50 uh Zoom prayer time is still going to happen here.

Um so maybe spend some time taking communion.

And then if you need prayer, uh I'll see you in uh a few moments' time at 9.50 on our Zoom uh prayer time.

So I want to pray, and then we're gonna go to communion.

You are loved, but join me as we pray, Lord.

We thank you for this time together, Lord.

We thank you for the extreme blessing, Lord, that it is to celebrate communion.

Lord, we know that it has been uh far too long since we have done this, Lord, and the communion is or sorry, the pandemic has certainly shown uh thrown a curveball at us in these things, but we're thrilled to be able to get this going again, Lord.

And and Father, as we do this, I pray that you would unite your church even in strange days like this, where we're all kind of in different locations, Lord.

I pray that you would bind our hearts.

Uh Lord, I pray that as we uh think about the death of Christ, Lord, I pray that we would be absolutely solemn and serious about this and and worshipful and and and filled with gratitude as well and joy as we think about all that you did to live the perfect life that we couldn't have possibly because we're all sinners.

Lord, you lived it for us and then you died the death that we deserve.

Lord, I pray that we would not make light of these things.

We would spend the next few moments focusing our minds, thanking you, praising you.

Lord, as we take communion, unite your church, Lord, give us a sense of joy in this life that you have given us, Father.

Lord, I pray that your spirit would enable that enjoyment of coming, no matter what it is that we might be facing in.

Father, you are able.

All that you have promised to do.

We pray everything in the right name.

Amen.