Rick Warren - Real Christianity The Model of the First Church—Part Two

Hey everybody, thanks for stopping by today on Pastor Rick's

Daily Hope. And today Rick will continue his message called

Real Christianity, the Model of the First Church. And in

this message, he guides us through a deeper look at

what authentic faith looks like. Rick explores how the early

believers lived, worshipped, and supported one another, and what that

means for your life today. And now, here's Rick with

part two.

Now, God brought you here to this church because there

are people only you can reach. And there's a language

that you speak that will reach those people. You say,

wait a minute, I just speak English or I speak

Spanish or I speak Vietnamese or Korean. I'm not talking

about your international language. I'm talking about the other languages

you speak. For instance, some of you speak MOPS, Mothers

of Preschoolers Speech. If you've ever been around mother's preschoolers,

they got their own lingo. They talk about jumpy jumper

and baby diapers and bottles and I'm going, I haven't

the slightest, you might as well be talking hip hop.

I wouldn't know what they're talking about. In fact, some

of you do speak hip hop. And you can talk

and you can reach people who speak hip hop. Some

of you speak CEO. Some of you speak accounting. Some

of you speak truck driving. You know mechanical terms. Some

of you speak retirement because you do. You are retired.

Some of you speak the languages of art and some

of you speak the languages of music and some of

you have a craft or a hobby and you know

all the phrases and turns in that hobby or you

speak the language of sports, golf terms or whatever. Everybody's

got their own language. And God says, real Christianity, everybody's

language gets used. Whether it's a sport or a hobby

or stage of life or whatever, you use your language

to reach people only you can reach with the good news.

Number three, real Christianity uses everyone's gifts, uses everybody's gifts,

and we've all got different gifts. In the Bible times,

there was no such thing like what we're doing right now,

where one guy talks to a huge group. That just

didn't happen. There were no audiences, there was only an army.

There were no spectators, there were only participators. There were

no consumer Christians who come to church, listen, go home

and do nothing about it. No consumer Christians. Everybody was

a contributor. The audience was an army. The spectators were participators.

100% participation. Every age group, every race, every gender, you know,

all stages of life. It was a multicultural, multi-gender church.

Everybody was involved. Look at the next verse. Verse 14,

it says, then Peter, the apostle Peter stood up And

he starts to explain what's going on. All of these

people have seen these people speaking in languages they didn't

understand an hour ago. And they've got these little flames

over their head, and they hear the loud noise. Peter

stood up and said, these people are not drunk, as

you might suppose. It's only 9 o'clock in the morning. Now,

this is actually quite humorous here. He's gone, friends, it's

only 9 a.m. The bars aren't open yet. These guys

aren't drunk. They may act like they're drunk, but they're

not drunk. And he says, this is the Holy Spirit.

He says, God says, I will pour out my spirit

on everyone, circle on everyone, on everyone. He says, your

sons and your daughters will proclaim my message. In other words,

everybody's gonna be a preacher. Your young men will see

visions and your old men will have dreams. He says,

even on my servants, both men and women, I will

pour out my spirit in those days And they will all,

circle all, they will all proclaim my message. Everybody is

a messenger. Everybody is a missionary. Everybody is a minister.

Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord

will be saved. Now, if you're taking notes, I want

you to circle some things here. I want you to

circle sons and daughters. He says, your sons and daughters

are going to proclaim my message. I want you to

circle young and old, visions and dreams from the young

and the old. And I want you to circle men

and women. Sons and daughters, young and old, men and women. Now, question.

Who does that exclude? Martians. That's about it. It includes everybody.

He's saying everybody gets... You're never too old to be

used by God. You're never too young to be used

by God. You have gifts and abilities and talents God

has put in you. And he says everybody is going

to be used. Every person... Every age group and every gender.

Every woman being mobilized, every man being mobilized. We call

it every member's a minister. Your kids are ministers. Your

spouse is a minister. You are a minister. Not everybody's

a pastor, but the Bible says God calls everybody. This

is how they grew from 120 people to dominating the

Roman Empire in 300 years. Just a little group of people. Why?

Because everybody was involved. Everybody was included. So let me

just be honest with you, somebody who loves you. If

you passively just wanna sit around in the next 10

years and just waste your life on things that don't last,

you probably wanna find another church. Because you're not gonna

really feel comfortable here. Because if you're in this church,

I'm coming after you. To be mobilized. On the other hand,

if you want your life to count, for the purpose

for which God created it, you're in the right place.

Because we're gonna mobilize you using your language and your

gifts to do what God wants to do with your

life for God's purposes. He wants to do that. Number four,

real Christianity not only has supernatural power, uses everybody's language,

uses everybody's gifts, but it offers life-changing truths. Real Christianity

offers life-changing truth. That is the truths that transform people.

We don't offer pop psychology in this church. We don't

offer self-help in this church. We don't offer polite little

moralisms and inspirations in this church. We offer the gospel.

It is God's word that changed. Jesus said, it is

the truth that what? Sets you free. Only the truth

will set you free. And until you know the truth

about you, The truth about God, the truth about life,

the truth about death, the truth about what matters in life.

Until you know the truth in every area, you're enslaved.

You'll be a slave to the culture, slave to the

expectations of others, slave to people's approval, slave to peer pressure.

You'll be enslaved to habits, addictions, and all kinds of things.

It is the truth that sets you free. Now the

church offered the truth of God, which you can't get

anywhere else. It was transforming truth. No other organization, no

other group of people has the truth that says your

past can be forgiven, you get a purpose for living,

you get a home in heaven. Where else are you

gonna get that? Nowhere, nowhere. So no other message changes

lives like the good news. No other message changes a

guy from a wife beater to being a loving, responsible husband.

It's when that truth gets in him from God, he changes. Now,

Peter in Acts chapter two gives the very first Christian

sermon at the very first day of the very first church.

And in verse 14 to 40 is Peter's sermon. I

don't have time to get into it. I could spend

a couple hours just on that sermon. But let me

just summarize it for you. Notice here in verse 14,

Peter addressed the crowd. He says... Let me explain this

to you. In other words, he's seeing everybody talking in

other languages. They're going, what's going on here? Let me

explain this to you. Listen carefully to what I say.

This is that. He says, this is that which was

spoken by the prophet Joel. And Joel had said this,

I will show wonders in the heaven above, signs on

the earth below, and everybody who calls on the name

of the Lord will be saved. Who's Joel? Joel is

a prophet in the Old Testament, near the end of

the Old Testament. Got a very short book, just a

couple chapters. In fact, I want you to go home

today and read the book of Joel. I want you

to read it so that when you get to heaven,

you're not embarrassed. Because I don't want Joel to come

up to you and say, hey, how'd you like my book?

And you go, oh, oh, Mr. Joel, I didn't even

know you were in the Bible. So really, you need

to go home and kind of like read these guys

so at least when you get to heaven, you're not embarrassed. Oh, yeah, Joel,

love the book, love the book. Great book. Now, Joel

had predicted hundreds of years earlier what was going to

happen on the day of Pentecost when God sends his

Holy Spirit and this church, Christian church, begins. And he says,

there's going to be all kinds of signs and wonders

and miracles. And when Peter gets up to speak, he says, okay,

you guys, You see what's going on right now? This

is that. This is that. This is what Joel was

talking about 100 years ago, predicted it was gonna happen. Well,

guess what? It's happening. This is that. Now, how does

this relate to your life? Listen, you will never understand

what God is doing in your life until you know

how God has worked in the past. This is why

we study the Bibles. This is why we look at

church history, because you don't have the slightest idea how

God is going to work in your life until you

know how he's done it in other people's lives in

the past that's why we study the Bible and then

you go oh that's how God does it for the

last six weeks we've been looking at the in our

small groups the six phases of faith you get a

dream you make the decision on the dream you And

then there's the delay. And then there's the difficulty. Then

there's the dead end. And then finally there's the deliverance.

How do we know God works that way? Because we

read the Bible. Because that's the way he worked in

Abraham's life. That's the way he worked in Moses' life.

That's the way he worked in David's life. It's how

he worked in everybody's life. It's how he's worked in

history of the church. It's how he's worked at Saddleback

over and over the years. So we go, oh, well,

that's how he does it. So then when you hit delay,

you go, it's no big deal. And when you hit

difficulty and you hit dead end, you're not freaking out

because you know that's how God works. It's to build

my faith. This is that. And if you want to

grow in your spiritual life, you've got to know how

God has worked in the Bible and in the last 2,000

years of the church. You've got to know church history

and you've got to know scripture. He shares the gospel.

Peter shares the gospel in this message. What is the gospel?

The gospel is just the good news. Gospel is the

old English word for good news. And there are eight

parts to the gospel. And Peter covers all eight of

them in this sermon. Again, I don't have time to

go through it all, so turn your outline over. And

here it is summarized. Here is Peter's Pentecost sermon summarized

from verse 22 all down to verse 42. Here's what

he says. He said, number one, the good news is

Jesus is God and all the miracles he did prove it.

That's good news. God has come to earth to show

us what he's like. Second, Jesus died on the cross

for your sins. He said, that's good news. That's the gospel. Third,

God raised him back to life. He didn't stay dead.

That's good news. He said, this gives us gladness, it

gives us joy, and it gives us hope. That's good news.

And he says, now he's gone back to heaven, but

he sent his spirit from heaven, and we must repent,

turn from our ways, and be baptized, and then we're

gonna be given his Holy Spirit, he's gonna live in us,

and then we will have the power to live differently

in the world. Well, no wonder it's the good news.

No wonder it's the gospel. That's all good news. And

notice the result when you teach the good news. Acts

Acts 2:40

2 verse 40. Those who accepted his message were baptized.

And about how many were added to their number that day?

How many?

3,000.

Would you circle that? 3,000. The church became a mega

church on the first day. There was no small church

in the Bible. But the point is, real Christianity is

based on the Bible. It's not based on popular opinion

or psychology. It's based on God's word. And it says,

they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching. That's why the

church had power. And what is the apostles' teaching? It's this.

It's this right here. It is the Bible. The New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John,

and Romans. It's written by the apostles. Paul. Paul. And Peter, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John,

it's written by apostles who wrote it down, the word

of God, and we have it today. Number five. Number five,

real Christianity provides loving support. Provides loving support. In other words,

the church provides a support network when you're going through

a tough time. In the first church, they loved each other.

They took care of each other. They cared for each

other because they were all being killed by the Roman Empire.

And tomorrow you may be being fed to the lions

because it's illegal to be a Christian. And so they

banded together and they really took care of each other.

They loved and they supported each other. There's a Bible

word for that support network. It's called fellowship. Fellowship means

we care and support each other. It means we are

as committed to each other as we are to Jesus Christ.

Now the Bible says this, Acts 2.42. They took part

in the fellowship and sharing in the fellowship meals and

in praying together. CEV translation says they were like family

to each other, circle family. Over and over again, the

church is called a family. It's not a business. It's

not an organization. It's not a social club. The church

is a family. In fact, the Bible tells us that

you are to treat older men in the church as

spiritual fathers. You are to treat the older women in

our church as spiritual mothers. You are to treat other

women in the church as sisters. And you are to

treat other men in our church family as brothers because

we're in families. Everybody's sitting on the row with you

right now. You may not know them, but they're your

brother and sister. In fact, for thousands of years in

the church, the church has called each other brother and sister.

They say brother so-and-so and sister so-and-so, sister Mary and

brother John. And they use the term brother and sister

because God says, you guys aren't just members of an organization.

You're part of the family of God. You are to

treat the other people in your church as family members.

And what do you do with family? You defend them,

even if they're weird. Okay? Why? You stick up for them,

even if everybody's got goofy people, uncles and aunts, but

you know, they're part of your family, so you take

care of them, and you defend them. And they had fellowship.

It says, notice it says, all the believers continued together

in close fellowship. The Bible tells us, the message paraphrases,

so they lived in wonderful harmony. You know, the thing

about the first 300 years of church, I've been studying

what the critics of the first 300 years who hated

Christianity said about the church. So I've been reading all

these ancient documents. And you know what they said? Here's

what the critics said about the church. Those Christians, they're weird.

They're kooky. They're like a cult. They like they don't

worship all the gods they just worship one god they

don't do all the pagan practices they're weird but man

those guys really love each other the one thing that

impressed them was not how smart they were but how

much they loved each other nobody in the Roman Empire

loved people like the Christians did and love attracts when

a church genuinely loves you'd have to lock the doors

to keep people out Because everybody's looking for love. Looking

for love in all the wrong places. And what the

world has done today is the world has tried to

create fellowship out there. But it's fake fellowship. It's phony fellowship.

It's false fellowship. It's not the real deal. Everybody once

has this need for fellowship, to feel like I belong

and people accept me and love me and aren't going

to reject me, even with my warts and all. I mean,

remember the theme of Cheers? You want to go where

everybody knows your name? That's fellowship. But when the world

creates all these phony, nothing is more phony than a

singles bar where everybody's pretending they're happy, but they're not.

I mean, it's so phony. Where else in society do

you walk up to a total stranger and offer to

buy them something? Can I buy you a drink? I mean,

think that through. I mean, if you were in Sears,

would you walk up to a gorgeous woman and say,

can I get you a toaster? You know? Yeah. You

see a cute chick and Albert says, care for a

bunch of bananas? You know? I mean, it's like nowhere

else in society do you go to a total stranger

and offer to buy them a drink or anything else.

And everybody's sitting there pretending like they're having fun and

they're not. Real fellowship happens in the church because we're

brothers and we're sisters and we love each other. And

when you're in trouble, we're going to help you. And

when you're out of work, we're going to help you.

And when I'm out of work, you help me. Now

this family, the Bible says, we're to be affectionate with

each other. They showed love. In fact, several times in

the Bible, if you've ever read the New Testament through,

you know, it says, greet one another with a holy kiss.

You ever seen that in the Bible? It says it

several times, not just once. Greet one another with a

holy kiss. Why? Because in the Bible times, in the

first church, they literally kissed each other because they said,

we're family. I'm not talking about on the lips. I'm

talking about on the cheek. And they kissed each other

with a holy kiss, and it impressed all the non-believers.

And But then what was funny is that after a while,

after a few generations, some bishops who were a little

legalistic decided that this might cause lust. So they made

a new rule that from that point on, men should

only kiss men and women should only kiss women. And

the tradition died within one generation. Now here at Saddleback,

we don't do the holy kiss, but we do do

the holy hug. Okay? And you know, when I'm out

on the patio hugging people after the service, I hug

somebody off and wonder, I wonder how long that hug's

got to last that person. Because I've talked to many

people who said, you know, Rick, the only physical affection

I get is at church. Did you know that you

need physical affection? I'm not talking about sexuality, sensuality. I'm

talking about you need to be touched for your own health,

emotional and physical health. You need to be touched. Did

you know that babies that are not touched, their skin

isn't touched with tactile stimulation, that they get failure to

thrive syndrome? that a preemie in an incubator has to

be taken out on a regular basis in a hospital

and stroked and touched by that nurse or the mom

or the dad because if a baby is not touched

enough as a baby, it gets failure to thrive. It

actually brain development doesn't go as closely. You were wired

for touch. You need it for your own good. You know,

when I'm out on the patio, I've often thought about

going into full-time Christian hugging You know, I think it'd

be a pretty good thing. It'd help a lot of people. Now,

if you're a part of Saddleback and you don't like

to be hugged, get over it. Okay? Okay, get rid

of that neurosis. Maybe you grew up in a family

where nobody touched you. Well, get over it. You need

to be touched for your emotional and physical and spiritual development.

That's why at least twice in every service, hey, turn

around and shake hands with people. So a pat on

the back, a hug, a squeeze of the hand. You know,

when Jesus dealt with people, he gave everybody a look,

a word, and a touch. A look, a word, and

a touch. A look, a word, and a touch. And

you can change people's lives giving them a look, a word,

and a touch. Look into their eyes, give them a

word of encouragement, and give them a touch of affirmation.

People flock to loving churches. They're looking for love. They're

looking for fellowship. And the church grew because it provided

loving support. Now where did they provide it? Look at

the next verse, verse 46. They met in small groups.

Oh really? They met in small groups in homes for

communion and they shared meals with great joy and thanksgiving.

Why do we do small groups? Because that's the way

the first church did it. And in this church, we

do it the way the Bible says it.

What a great message from Pastor Rick. I hope it

touched you just like it touched me today. And now

let's end our show with a closing thought from Rick.

God has five purposes for your life. He wants you

to know and love him. That's called worship. He wants

you to belong to his family. That's called fellowship. He

wants you to grow in character, to be more like Christ.

That's called discipleship. And he wants you to learn to

serve using your gifts and talents. Serve God by serving others.

That's called your ministry. Finally, he wants you to share

the good news and your life message with other people

around the world. That's called your mission. I'd like to

close today to talk to you for just a second

about your personal mission. Did you know that the Bible

says every time somebody accepts the Lord, they throw a

party in heaven? Did you know that? It's right there

in Luke 15, verse 7, where the Bible says there's

Luke 15:7

more joy in heaven over one sinner who changes his

heart and life than over 99 who don't need to

turn to Christ, who are already there. The day that

you accepted Jesus Christ, there was a party in heaven

for you. And by the way, the day that you

helped somebody else come to know the Lord There's gonna

be a party in heaven, but there's also gonna be

a party in your heart. I wanna encourage you today

to look outward, to look around you and see the

people who need to hear about the love of God,

about the message of Christ, about the purpose of life,

about the daily hope that we have in our hearts.

The Bible says, always be ready to share the hope

that is within you. Could I pray for you? And

as we bow in prayer, you might wanna pray this

prayer with me. Say, Father, I want the joy that

you've given me to be shared with other people. And

a lot of times I'm afraid or hesitant to talk

about you to others. Would you give me so much

love for other people that the love overcomes my fears

and gives me the right words to say as I

share the hope that's in me? Allow me to help

others find you to find real hope, to find joy

through knowing you. Thank you, Lord, so much for trusting

me to help bring others to you. I want to

accept my mission, and I want to use it for

your glory and in the power of your spirit. Thank you, Jesus.

Put somebody in my life today that I can tell

about you. In your name I pray. Amen. Amen.

Be sure to join us next time as we look

into God's Word for our Daily Hope. This program is

sponsored by Pastor Rick's Daily Hope and your generous financial support.