Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] We just finished up this five part series looking at the work of the Holy Spirit, going from Genesis 1 all the way through the Bible and looking to see how the Spirit works to both to fill, to form and to fill. That's it. To form and to fill us.
[00:00:22] This morning I kind of wanted to go back and look at this. Before we did the sermon series, we did one looking at the origin of the church, all the way up through Pentecost to Acts chapter two. Then we took this time and we looked to see the work of the Holy Spirit and how the Holy Spirit has worked throughout history. And I wanted to end this sermon series looking at the Holy Spirit, seeing how the Holy Spirit worked in the origin of the church.
[00:00:51] And I wanted to just kind of set the stage for putting yourself in the place of this church, imagining us as that church.
[00:01:03] We talked about how the church functions as a body and the body requires each other.
[00:01:11] You are necessary to everyone around you in ways that I don't understand.
[00:01:17] The Holy Spirit has built you in certain ways and placed you in certain, in certain spots because he intends for you to be useful for the people around you.
[00:01:26] He has work for you to do. And Paul says, you can't say that you are not necessary to me. And I can't say that you are not necessary to me. Neither of us.
[00:01:38] If either of us assume that you are not necessary or that I'm not necessary, we are making a judgment call about we're putting ourselves in the place of God and assuming that he did not have intent for you in this place.
[00:01:52] It's a very arrogant thing to think so. If that's true, then as God is forming his church, as he is bringing His Holy Spirit to bear, he is forming and filling these individuals, building a church around them, then he has an intent for every single one of them. And I think it's been appropriate to ask, if everyone in this church were loving as I love, what would this church be like?
[00:02:19] If I were, if this church, if am I formed in the Spirit of God, that is, I'm coming to take on the image of God. And we talked about how that shows up in the fruit of the Spirit. All the fruit of the Spirit comes back to love.
[00:02:40] If I am loving in a particular way, if everyone else is loving that way, what would this church be like?
[00:02:46] And the same with the fruit of the Spirit. If I am serving in a particular way, if the entire church serves as I serve, what would this church be like?
[00:02:59] I said that I was trying to think through, like how can I begin to think, am I appropriately appreciating my responsibility in the church, like not giving myself the freedom to be lazy or to be useless, but to presume that God has intent for me and that I have responsibility based on his intent.
[00:03:27] And the best way I could think, like, how can I know if I'm honoring that?
[00:03:34] I would need to imagine a church of people taking their faith as seriously or as not seriously as I am. What would that church be like?
[00:03:44] Would that be a church that I would want to be a part of?
[00:03:48] I want you to have that in mind as we're thinking about this first church, as this church is starting and is forming, and the kind of things that is happening inside this church. Even their response to the Gospel message from the very start. In Acts, chapter two, starting with verse 37, the Holy Spirit has come on all the disciples. Peter has just explained to everybody, this whole massive crowd gathered what Jesus was about and what's just happened. They heard the message of Jesus Christ, how he came, what happened about his death, about his resurrection. They heard that entire message, and this is what was their response. Now, when they heard all that, their hearts were cut to the quick.
[00:04:31] And they said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, brothers, what do we do about this?
[00:04:38] When they understood who Jesus was to them, they wanted to know, what can I do about it? How should I respond?
[00:04:46] And Peter said, repent and be baptized, every one of you, into the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.
[00:04:54] And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. There's a lot going on in this one sentence.
[00:04:59] The first thing he says is to repent. That is to quit.
[00:05:04] To stop striving, to quit. Assuming that you are the one that knows what's right, that you know what's wrong.
[00:05:13] Presume that you need to just stop thinking that you're the one that has the answers.
[00:05:21] Presume that you are the one that needs to be rescued from bad answers. That I've been formed, my spirit, my mind has been formed to constantly make it in a world that's fighting against me, and that it's doggy dog. And it's perfectly acceptable for me to do things that I otherwise don't think are good to do because that's what people have to do to survive.
[00:05:43] That's what it takes out here. You don't understand how tough it is.
[00:05:47] Your heart becomes hard and callous in such a way that you're willing to do things that you would otherwise think a person isn't good if they did those things and you just have to say, that's not true anymore. I don't have to be the one to protect myself. I actually have a savior who is protecting me. I don't have to be hard that way. Quit.
[00:06:07] Stop being that hard hearted person trying to survive out there.
[00:06:13] Repent. And he said, instead, be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. That is receive a new identity. Baptism is similar to like a marriage ceremony where you say, I'm taking on your name, I'm taking on your identity. It's two people becoming one. But instead of two people becoming one, it's I am being, it's like you're being adopted as a son into that family and you are, I am taking his name.
[00:06:41] I am not the one that gets to decide what's right and wrong here. I'm a part of your household God, and you get to say what's right and wrong. I believe that you're smarter than me about the way I should respond in the face of enemies, in the face of struggle, in the face of want, in the face of worry. The things that you have to say, what you have to say about the way I should live.
[00:07:04] I trust that that's taking his name. That's what it means to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. You are literally receiving his spirit.
[00:07:14] I am casting aside repenting from my spirit and I am instead receiving your spirit. I'm agreeing with you about all things.
[00:07:24] I am baptized in his name for the forgiveness for sins. And in that we receive the Holy Spirit.
[00:07:33] God is always, always faithful to forgive us our sins. He's not like a person that's.
[00:07:42] Sometimes people wrong us and we get to the point that we're thinking like, I'm not, I'm no longer going to hate you, but I'm not going to love you either kind of thing. You heard that, like, I can forgive you, but it doesn't mean I'm ever going to like or something. I don't. There's something like that.
[00:07:59] It's not like that at all with God. He literally forgives and casts your sin aside similar to the way that you're going to be with somebody that you deeply love.
[00:08:12] Your goal, your desire in life isn't just that that person is no longer a nuisance to you, but that they're close to you, like, like a child, like your child.
[00:08:26] Your desire is to have that loving relationship. And so when he forgives you your sins, it's not just like, well, okay, that's fine, we can move on.
[00:08:35] It's not that it is. We are close now.
[00:08:39] I want to be your father, and I want you to be my son or my daughter.
[00:08:45] And you receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. That's what we've been talking about the last two weeks, last several weeks that we are formed and filled by the Holy Spirit. He literally remakes us in us and new. And he gives us the tools it takes to do new things in the world.
[00:08:58] Okay, so that's his response. He says, what do we do? That's what you do. Your job is to repent.
[00:09:06] You receive forgiveness, you receive the word of God. You receive, but your job is to repent.
[00:09:12] And then he says, the reason we do this is the promise that this promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off. He's talking about us. These are words that were written 2000 years ago. When. When these people 2000 years ago said, what should we do? This answer was correct then. And this answer is correct for your kids. Their kids, their kids, People here, people far away, everyone everywhere. The response is the same. Brothers, what should we do? Repent and be baptized, every single one of you. And with many other words he said he bore witness to and continued to exhort them, saying, save yourselves from this crooked generation.
[00:09:51] How do you save yourself?
[00:09:54] You repent, you quit, you lay down your spirit and you receive the spirit of God.
[00:10:02] Okay, so that's what he said to do after he says this, after he.
[00:10:08] After he says, gives this message about Jesus Christ. These people were cut to the quick. Their hearts were broken. They wanted to know how they should respond.
[00:10:18] They responded this way. Several of them. It says 3,000 people did repent. They became connected to, submissive to the Father through Jesus Christ. They became the church together.
[00:10:34] Then Luke, the writer of Acts, does this really cool thing where he gives us this little vignette, this little sketch of what a church looks like. A church full of people who have done this thing. What does it look like? So you've got, like, you've repented and you've repented. You repented, right? And you're baptized. Like you took on Jesus name. You've become this new person. You've quit being who you were, and you've become this new thing. So what happens when a whole bunch of people do that together? And they come together and they form this new community, this new bond of people. What is this new family?
[00:11:08] And he gives this little sketch of what this church family looks like, what they do, what their normal course of action is. And I Want you to look at what this church looks like and see if you can identify parts of it within yourself, if you are a part of this church that he's describing. That was for them and for their children and for people far away.
[00:11:32] He says these people that repented, they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and to fellowship and to the breaking of bread and prayers and awe came upon every soul. And many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles.
[00:11:52] And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all as any had need. And day by day attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people.
[00:12:11] And the Lord added to their numbers day by day, those who were being saved.
[00:12:17] Let me go back and identify some things and see if it sounds at all familiar. The first thing he says is that they were a learning group when they repented and they stopped being something, they. They become something new. And they were very curious about who they were becoming. They knew, they said everything that I thought that I knew about how to protect myself and to save myself from this crooked generation.
[00:12:42] I don't think that I've got the right answers. I instead think that I should look to Jesus to be my savior in that world.
[00:12:48] And if he is my Savior, then I want to learn more. I've got to relearn, I've got to re. Educate myself about how to respond to the world.
[00:12:57] I need to be constantly learning how to unmake what this world has taught me about being human.
[00:13:04] And so they spent. They devoted a lot of their time to what the apostles were teaching about Jesus. They spent not a lot of time out of like, you know, like a duty or a drudgery, like, oh, I need to read my Bible or whatever.
[00:13:21] They woke up thinking, I need to think differently about how I'll orient my life.
[00:13:28] I can't do that on my own. I don't have an internal compass that tells me how I should orient myself. If I did, I wouldn't need a savior. Instead, that spirit needs to be remade in the image of God by learning more about him.
[00:13:42] And so they wanted.
[00:13:45] They spent time studying, learning, exploring what it meant to follow Jesus because they were very curious about these new people they were becoming.
[00:13:54] And so the first thing that was a marker and indication of the Spirit filled church was that they were a learning church. They enjoyed learning because they wanted to become these new people. They wanted to have the content that told them how to become the people they wanted to be.
[00:14:12] The second thing is that says they were in fellowship. A good way to think of fellowship is loving. Fellowship doesn't just mean, like, hey, we show up and we're very social together.
[00:14:22] It's very much like family.
[00:14:25] We have this oneness of character.
[00:14:28] That means that I take great joy in your joys, and I am distressed by your distresses.
[00:14:38] Something we do when we pray together in my groups. I like to ask, was there anything that happened this last week that brought you great joy that the rest of us can. Like when you tell us something that was joyful for you, the rest of us will enjoy that with you. And was there anything this last week that was a great burden? It will be burdensome to us as well, because we love you. Because we are a loving church. When you share your joys, we are all joyful. When you share your burdens, we are all burdened. We share that burden, and we're looking for solutions to that. Like, the same way that you want that thing to go away, we want that thing to go away, and we're a part of the solutions and helping to fix that if possible.
[00:15:19] That's an indication of a church that is in fellowship, not just like, eating together, but like, living together in such a way that we really care about each other's outcomes.
[00:15:30] That's a fellowshipping church.
[00:15:33] It says they devoted themselves to the breaking of bread. That is, they. They shared their meals together. The common things that they did. It was very common. It was very common for them to say, sure, come on in and share this meal together. They didn't think of their position. Now, you got to understand in their context, you worked that day for the food that you had that day. Like, they didn't have excess.
[00:15:57] So to share their food would be like you sharing something that was like a limited good for you. Like, it was tough, you know, so you were willing, you were happy to share your things with that person because you loved them like family.
[00:16:12] I don't think, like, am I going to share this thing with Allison or not? It's ours.
[00:16:17] We are in fellowship. Like, of course we share this thing. Of course I'm going to. You have a need. Of course you've got this thing going on. Of course I've got these things. I'll let you use them, you know, of course we're in fellowship.
[00:16:31] So breaking of bread. And it was a praying church.
[00:16:36] As they gathered together, they didn't neglect the conversation with their father.
[00:16:43] God was always A part of this family that was forming.
[00:16:48] I think sometimes church can become a social situation because we only think about what it means to love each other. And we even think about following Christ almost as like a set of precepts. We're just trying to get like, we want him to tell us the script, like the responsibilities and we neglect actually sharing the joy with our Father, like to actually communicate with them, to listen to them in prayer.
[00:17:15] We should do a sermon series on that soon because to some of you, that might sound kind of weird.
[00:17:22] It's beautiful.
[00:17:24] Praying to God and listening to God is a sensually orienting thing in the life of a Christian. It's. It's very powerful.
[00:17:37] They were praying church as a result. It said awe came on every soul. They were.
[00:17:45] They found things beautiful that other people would have found very mundane. They were very happy about things that other people would have been like, well, sure, whatever. I'm entitled to that.
[00:17:56] Like children, the way kids are often at awe of things that we adults kind of just take for granted or kind of blow past and ignore.
[00:18:06] The whole world became much more interesting to them because they stopped seeing it through the eyes of these. Of this crooked generation that was constantly trying to get by. And they instead saw the world through the eyes of their Father that was constantly looking to give them a good life. And instead of, like, constantly protecting themselves, they were open to seeing what was possible.
[00:18:29] They were constantly in awe of what was happening.
[00:18:37] Sons are beating the apostles and all who believed were together and had all things in common, and they were selling possessions and belongings and distributing proceeds to all as any had need. Now, you have to understand, they didn't have bank accounts. They didn't have, like, if you had a needle say, if somebody in the church has a need and everybody's like, we want to help them out, how do you do that? If you don't have, like, savings, if you don't have, like, you know, you don't have. You can't. You're not. You can't be like, oh, I'll write a check for that. You actually have to go sell something. You've got to be able to help something else, somebody else. If they have something. It's very similar with us. If.
[00:19:14] If there's somebody in this room that has this need and we're like that. I can definitely see that was something that was unexpected that comes up. And I don't want you to bear that burden alone. We all want to chip in and help with that.
[00:19:28] That's what they did.
[00:19:31] And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes. They received their food with glad and generous hearts.
[00:19:39] They had an attitude of generosity and gratitude and happiness.
[00:19:44] It says, praising God and having favor with all people.
[00:19:48] The Lord added to their number all that were being saved in all of this.
[00:19:54] They weren't closed. They didn't think of their community as like, we're good together and it's just us. They were constantly open to adding other people. And whenever you do that, there's this tension between the closeness of bond that happens as you start loving other people and really sharing life together. And then you include somebody new into that that you don't know as well. There's like a.
[00:20:20] There's like a discomfort sometimes. Like, I like how close I've gotten with these people. And now here's this new person that I don't know and that I'm not close with. And that is that going to, like, make our bond not feel as strong anymore?
[00:20:37] They didn't separate those things out. They didn't think that being close together in any way involved excluding anyone else. Instead, they were building this bond together as a sign of the kingdom of God. And their bond together was evangelism. People were coming to Christ to be a part of what the church was becoming.
[00:20:58] So the church wasn't like this nice thing where people are really good together and then going out there and doing nice things and then coming back together and patting ourselves on the back about all the evangelism that we did out there? No, the church was this thing that was beautifully knitted together, open and receiving more people to be a part of that beautiful thing happening together.
[00:21:17] The church itself functioning as the church was the evangelism. People were being added into that.
[00:21:25] These were the markers. This is the snapshot that Luke gives of this first church that was forming.
[00:21:33] And so at this point, I want to ask again, if I was loving the way these people loved, what would our church be like? And if I was serving the way these people served, what would this church be like?
[00:21:50] I want to look at this first church, this.
[00:21:53] This beautiful little snapshot of this, like, baby church starting, and say, is this what our church is still like? And if not, how do I need to adjust so that I can continue to be a part of this body of Christ? Because this is not just for them, but for their children and for their children's children and for people everywhere. This is for us.
[00:22:18] So this morning I wanted to take some time, and at the end of the sermon series, looking at the work of The Holy Spirit. It's been several weeks now. Looking at the work of the Holy Spirit and looking at it played out in our church. I want to take some time for us to respond by receiving communion. Jesus says that anytime we receive the blood and the body of Christ, these elements that we receive as Christ himself, we are doing this, remembering him.
[00:22:50] We aren't just like hearing, we're taking in, we're chewing on, we're being nourished by the word of God, we're taking him in. And this morning we wanted to give the opportunity to respond by taking in everything that we've learned about being the church filled with the Holy Spirit before we did. I want to read what John has to say about this last communion. Usually whenever we talk about communion, we look at what Paul has to say in Corinthians or Matthew, Mark and Luke, and they really focus on the actual physical symbol. They focus on the meal that took place with Jesus when he says, do this in remembrance of me. But John has a really interesting take when he describes that last communion with God. He doesn't even mention these elements. He instead mentions what Jesus did with them and said to them about what it means to really be in communion with him.
[00:23:48] And I think it would be appropriate for us to look at this last communion that he shared with his disciples. From John at the end of this series on the Holy Spirit.
[00:23:58] John 13.
[00:24:01] Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.
[00:24:14] When I read that, it makes me like I want that, you know, I want to be able to say that to the end. You know, I ran that race to the end. You know, you could say he was formed by the Spirit to the very end, during supper, when the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray him. Jesus, knowing that his Father had given all things into his hands and that he had come from God and was going back to God, he rose from the supper.
[00:24:57] He laid aside his outer garments and taking a towel, he tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples feet to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him. Now the disciples thought this was insane. Like this is the work of a servant. This wasn't the work of the person, this wasn't the work of your, of your teacher, of the master. This is what you would do for the Master. This is what you did. For someone to honor them and for Jesus to do this was shocking and almost scandalous to them.
[00:25:32] It felt very uncomfortable for them to be served by Jesus. And he said, you don't understand.
[00:25:40] It's important that I do this. And at the end or later in the chapter, he says, when he had washed their feet and he put on his outer garments, he resumed his place and said to them, do you understand what I've done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am.
[00:25:58] If I, then your Lord and Teacher have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example that you should do just as I have done to you.
[00:26:11] I have loved each of you and I have served each of you.
[00:26:15] You call me master, this is what you do.
[00:26:19] You love and you serve one another.
[00:26:22] This is what it means to be a spirit filled church.
[00:26:25] Let's pray.
[00:26:30] Father God, this morning before we receive communion, Lord, I just. I pray that our hearts are stilled, that our mind is silent of anything that is a distraction of you and keeping our hearts from you.
[00:26:52] God is with deep awe and reverence that we approach you as our Father, as our good Father who loves us always.
[00:27:03] Lord, we trust you. And when you say that you love us, we believe you.
[00:27:10] And when you showed us that you love us, then we know what love really is.
[00:27:14] So God, I pray that you give us a soft and tender heart to love as you love and to be filled with your spirit, Lord, as we receive this communion, as we receive you into us, God, I pray that there's no room for anything else inside of us but you.
[00:27:32] We are filled with your body. We are filled with your spirit. We're filled with your love.
[00:27:38] In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
[00:27:42] Today some of us are going to come around and distribute these elements. We're going to pass them around. If you are a person who has received Jesus Christ as your Savior, that you are a follower of Christ, a committed follower of Christ, we encourage you to participate with us. But if for any reason you don't feel comfortable doing that, it's fine, just let it pass. It's not a big deal either way.
[00:28:02] This is for you as a commitment of your fellowship with Christ.
