September 21, 2003

Service Theme – "Our God Is Forgiving"

Acts 2:42-47

What Are We as a Church Passionate About? (Communion Service)

  1. Introduction
    1. Illustration – If you look on the front of your bulletin, you’ll see our church’s vision statement. I’ll read it and you can follow along: (NEW SLIDE) The passion of Sodaville Evangelical Church is to reach people for Christ by accepting all people where they’re at and moving them toward Christ-like maturity. (NEW SLIDE) We do this by providing a safe and stable place to share, serve, and grow together into a loving Christian family.
    2. Context – This vision of what God wants to create in us can be condensed into a three-word description: authentic biblical community. We talked last week about God’s passion for hearts that seek after Him, and authentic biblical community is the means God uses to enable us to seek after Him. Let’s read Acts 2:42-47 and see what all this means.
  1. Scripture Passage
    1. Acts 2:42-47 (from the New Living) – (NEW SLIDE) They joined with the other believers and devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, sharing in the Lord’s Supper and in prayer. (NEW SLIDE) 43 A deep sense of awe came over them all, and the apostles performed many miraculous signs and wonders. (NEW SLIDE) 44 And all the believers met together constantly and shared everything they had. 45 They sold their possessions and shared the proceeds with those in need. (NEW SLIDE) 46 They worshiped together at the Temple each day, met in homes for the Lord’s Supper, and shared their meals with great joy and generosity— (NEW SLIDE) 47 all the while praising God and enjoying the goodwill of all the people. And each day the Lord added to their group those who were being saved.
  1. An Intimate Connection
    1. Randy Frazee, pastor and author of The Connecting Church, writes, (NEW SLIDE) "Biblical community is the life of Christ on earth today. When the church is fully functioning, it exudes the presence, power, and purpose of Jesus Christ" (pg. 22). Frazee knows what he’s talking about. He and his staff have planned, organized, and staffed their church in a way that has made authentic biblical community the norm for their church. Pantego Bible Church is passionate about biblical community! And it’s grown them from a church averaging about 250 on Sunday mornings to one that averages over three thousand. They have been used of God to bring hundreds into His Kingdom, and we can all praise God that those hundreds are going to heaven and not hell. But what does that have to do with us?
    2. We are a church full of good people who are trying to make sense of their faith in a world that is tough to live in. We are a church that is very good at doing good things – we have many folks who are good at rolling up their sleeves and doing whatever needs to get done. But at the same time, we are a people who feel locked into every tightening schedules and ever increasing commitments and don’t know that there is more to life than simply doing. Please understand this – I’m not in any way, shape or form saying that doing isn’t good, or that we’re not good people who are striving to follow Jesus. Doing is good, and we are good people who are striving to follow Jesus. But our schedules and our mindsets form barriers between what we do and what we say is important. Again, I’m not knocking us – I’m saying that there is more to life than we’re allowing ourselves to live!
    3. Our vision statement paints a pretty good picture of what authentic biblical community is. Let me read it again: The passion of Sodaville Evangelical Church is to reach people for Christ by accepting all people where they’re at and moving them toward Christ-like maturity. We do this by providing a safe and stable place to share, serve, and grow together into a loving Christian family. Good stuff! But how do we do it? How do we transform what we say we’re passionate about into that which we do on a daily basis? How do we make seeking after God’s heart in the context of authentic biblical community a reality, and not just the desperate yearning of our hearts?
    4. The passage we read in Acts 2 can give us a bit of a picture of how we can begin the process of making authentic biblical community happen here in Sodaville. Let’s look at verse 42: They joined with the other believers and devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, sharing in the Lord’s Supper and in prayer. The new believers joined into what the current believers were already doing. They devoted themselves to what the believers were modeling. That means that those of us who’ve been Christians for a while and who’ve grown into some form of maturity are going to have to take the lead on this. But what were they doing? Devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching. What were the apostles teaching? Everything they knew about Jesus both from personal experience and from Scripture. (NEW SLIDE) We have the same capability of devoting ourselves to true biblical teaching – from God’s Word and from more spiritually mature believers. We can do it! We often use the argument that those folks spent all day learning, while we have jobs and families. Same thing there, folks. They had jobs and families, but they invested a large portion of their spare time to building this community of believers who would transform their world. Food for thought for us. The believers in Acts 2 devoted themselves to learning more about Jesus and how to be like Him, and it paid huge dividends. Devoting ourselves to spending regular time together in the Word will help us begin to establish authentic biblical community.
    5. What else did the believers devote themselves to? Fellowship. The Greek word is koinonia, and I’ve preached on it before, so I won’t spend a huge amount of time on this. But koinonia means an association, communion, or fellowship, and carries a similar level of intimacy as that of the marriage relationship. (NEW SLIDE) In other words, the believers didn’t just shake hands and engage in small talk. They knew each other on a very personal level and shared the details of what was going on in their hearts and lives. There are a couple of verses that help us understand how they did this. In verse 44 we see that all the believers met constantly and shared everything they had. They didn’t just see or talk to each other once or twice a week – they made it a point to have nearly daily interaction, interaction that was personal enough that they shared everything they had. In verse 46 we see that they met in homes. Why is this important? Because as important as it was for them to meet together as a large group for worship, which they did, it was equally important for them to meet in small groups in homes. There they had brothers and sisters in Christ who they could be accountable to, who they could share who they really were with, who could really know and love them. I want to make a very important point here. These weren’t small groups as we think of them. Small groups in the church culture of our country can mean anything from a Bible study to a prayer group – and these are good things. But we also allow each other to get away with keeping our private selves private, with not holding each other in loving accountable, with not investing our deepest selves in each other. Those things have to happen if we’re going to experience authentic biblical community.
    6. You may be thinking what I tend to think – the cost personally is way too high! People aren’t going to accept me because of the uglier parts of me. The risk of rejection is too great! In spite of all the tools for communication we have, we are the loneliest people who’ve ever lived. Suicide rates are skyrocketing in part because we have no hope of ever overcoming the deep despair of loneliness. Kids act out in schools in ever increasing numbers because they are desperately lonely and will do anything for attention. More and more young ladies are getting pregnant out of wedlock because they are so desperately lonely they will settle for any form of companionship. And the statistics aren’t much different inside the church. I’m not saying this to depress us – I’m saying this to let us know that we’re not alone in our loneliness. We have lots of company, and if we’re going to overcome our loneliness, we’re going to have to risk building trust and sharing ourselves and our lives in the context of authentic biblical community. We long to know and to be known, and this kind of small group of believers will fulfill that need if we’ll just take the chance. It worked for those believers two thousand years ago, and it will work for us today. As (NEW SLIDE) Eugene Peterson writes, Community ... means people who have to learn how to care for each other (as cited on PreachingToday.com). That’s what intimate fellowship is all about.
    7. The believers devoted themselves to the teaching of the Word together, they devoted themselves to fellowship, and they also devoted themselves to sharing in the Lord’s Supper. The Greek reads "the breaking of bread," which is used to describe the sharing of communion and also the sharing of common meals as indicated in verse 46. They celebrated together the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ through celebrating communion. We do that here on a regular basis, and we’re going to once again in a few minutes. They also shared the close fellowship of eating together. (NEW SLIDE) There is something about the dynamic of sharing a meal with others that causes us to open up and share who we are and how we feel. We miss that in our society, and in our church. Yes, we should have potlucks more often, so we can all contribute food and fellowship to each other as a larger body. But we should also eat together in each others’ homes on a regular basis, if not weekly. We miss out on the close fellowship of sharing a meal to grow closer to each other, then moving that intimacy into the context of learning through sharing God’s Word and how He impacts our lives. It’s all part of building authentic biblical community.
    8. There’s one more piece to this puzzle that we’re going to focus on this morning: prayer. The believers devoted themselves to prayer. We witnessed the power of a few of us gathering together nightly for ten days to pray for Harvest Fest. Imagine the greater power of regular prayer together with those we share the Word, fellowship, and meals with. You know who the people I’m closest to in this church are? They are people that I pray with regularly. They are folks that show up for corporate prayer times and accountability and discipleship groups. (NEW SLIDE) Prayer draws us closer to each other. I don’t love them any more than anybody else in this church, because I love all of you with a deep love that God has given me. But prayer brings unity and focus and purpose, and we share an awful lot of ourselves when we pray. I want us to dream! I want us to begin to imagine our own personal loneliness beginning to melt away as we find ourselves loving and loved by a small group of like-minded people who we share the Word, intimate fellowship, meals, and prayer with. And don’t let that dream die!
    9. God has written a dream on our hearts – a dream of being part of a loving Christian family that we can be ourselves in and be loved anyway. A dream of a transforming group of believers. A dream of leaving loneliness behind and being reshaped into the likeness of Jesus, of reaching out and loving because we’re loved, of ministering to those who need Jesus’ love so badly. It’s not a pipe dream. There are things we can do to get started. There are good programs we can adapt and use to help us in this progress, like Rick Warren’s Forty Days of Purpose based on his Purpose Driven Life book, like Randy Frazee’s The Connecting Church program, like Leadership Network’s The Equipping Church program. And maybe we should take some of each one and use them. The point isn’t what we use – the point is that we use and do whatever we can to be the people we’ve been created to be through the power of authentic biblical community.
    10. Illustration - John Ortberg, in his book Everybody's Normal 'Till You Get to Know Them writes: In the movement associated with John Wesley, people met together in little communities to help hold each other accountable for their deepest values and most important decisions. Wesley had a beautiful phrase for this: he called it watching over one another in love. Before someone entered into this community, they would be asked a series of questions to see if they were serious about living in mutual accountability. Sometimes when I speak on community I'll read these to church leaders, and ask them to imagine these questions being posed to attenders at their churches: · Does any sin, inward or outward, have dominion over you? · Do you desire to be told of your faults? · Do you desire to be told of all your faults—and that plain and clear? (By this point, church leaders are inevitably laughing at even the idea of people putting up with such pointed questions.) · Consider! Do you desire that we should tell you whatsoever we think, whatsoever we fear, whatsoever we hear concerning you? · Do you desire that in doing this we should come as close as possible, that we should cut to the quick, and search your heart to the bottom? · Is it your desire and design to be on this and all other occasions entirely open, so as to speak everything that is in your heart, without exception, without disguise, and without reserve? (as cited on PreachingToday.com).
    11. I like that phrase Wesley used, "watching over one another in love." If I would have been involved in authentic biblical community, I know that I wouldn’t have done a lot of the stupid stuff I did. I know I wouldn’t have had to wait to love and be truly loved by a small group of other believers. I’m telling you today that I’m done waiting. And we as a church have to make that commitment that we’re done waiting. We’re good at doing so let’s do whatever it takes to become a church that lives authentic biblical community and shares the blessings it brings with the world around us. Let’s brutally slash our schedules and spend time being the people of God instead of being just like the people of the world. Let’s become believers who live in authentic biblical community!
  1. Communion
    1. (NEW SLIDE) Bill Hybels wrote, The mark of community--true biblical unity--is not the absence of conflict but the presence of a reconciling spirit (as cited on PreachingToday.com). And this morning we’re going to spend some time reconciling with God. We’re going to spend some time asking Him how our lives look from His perspective. We’re going to spend some time allowing Him to share with each of us what He wants us to do about establishing authentic biblical community here at Sodaville.
    2. (NEW SLIDE) Spend whatever time you need praying and reconciling these things with the Lord, then come forward, take the bread and the juice, kneel at the altars and partake whenever you’re ready. Celebrate what He is going to do in your heart and life as He begins to make these changes in you. And commit yourself into His hands. Let’s pray now.
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