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Sermon, Sunday August 25, 2019 – The Healthy Church Part 1

Acts 2:41-47

What is a healthy church? 1 Corinthians 12 describes the church as a body, with each part functioning well so that the whole body is healthy. But we are all broken and hurting people, how can we function together as a healthy body?

In Acts 2, we have a model of a healthy church. One hundred and twenty followers of Jesus, waiting in the upper room, were filled with the Holy Spirit and they went into the streets proclaiming the Gospel message. Three Thousand people were added to the church that day and this same church has influenced every church for the past two thousand years. But what was their secret?

The past three months have been filled with mission trips and praying for those going out to share the message of the Gospel, focusing on the lost in our city and across the nations.

This is all good, but a church that only looks at missions without caring about the discipleship of the members is not healthy. Just like a church that focuses only inward is not healthy.

There needs to be a balance of equipping (discipleship) and mission (going out).

Athletic trainers will tell you that a strong core is vital for all the body to function well, and spend hours strengthening the core. If the core is weak, the whole body is weak and cannot operate at its best. The same applies to the analogy of the church as a body. If the core of the church is weak, the whole body does not function well.

The early church was more than a gathering of like-minded believers who came together once a week for a time of fellowship and worship. It was a body of fully committed people, committed to the lordship of Jesus Christ personally, and committed to each other in fellowship and unity. This church was the healthiest and most effective the church has ever been.

Acts 2:42 begins with the phrase, “And they devoted themselves to the Apostles’ teaching…”

Devotion means a regular observance. Individual committed devotion is a sign of genuine salvation. Someone who does not desire to spend time daily in God’s word is probably not filled with the Holy Spirit and probably not saved. Saying that you do not desire to read God’s Word regularly is like saying that you are alive, but don’t need to drink water. The foundational mark of a true believer is someone who abides in Christ, who feeds on God’s word (see John 8:31).

So, what were they teaching? The Apostles had sat under the greatest teacher of all time for three years. In the upper room at Pentecost, they were filled with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth and now they were teaching the new believers who in turn taught others. This is the pattern of the early church and sadly something that we have lost in the church. We have developed this understanding that only the pastor or person who has a master’s degree in theology can teach. We all need to carefully study doctrine, know what we believe, why we believe it and then be able to teach it. This message is intended to come to us and then flow through us (2 Timothy 2:2).

In the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20), Jesus commands all of us to make disciples, to win converts and disciple them. This is not only a command to go to the ends of the earth, but also to the person sitting next to you, or the young person who is desperate for a mentor, a role model to help them walk out the Christian life in the twenty-first century.

The Dead sea is the lowest body of water on the planet and lies between Israel and Jordan. The river Jordan flows into it from the sea of Galilee but does not flow out of it. As a result, the Dead sea has ten times the concentration of salt than the oceans and is unable to sustain any life. This is a picture of many individuals and even churches who pride themselves on their theological knowledge, amassing more and more teaching, but never applying the word.

Such people and churches are deep, salty and dead!

A healthy body of water allows the life-giving resource to flow in and then out again, feeding another pond or stream. Are you stagnating on the word? Or are you allowing the word to flow through you to others?

The early church focused on the resurrection of Jesus and the Gospel message, they preached John 14:6. The Gospel is the good news that Jesus is the eternal Son of God, who spoke all of creation into being. He came to earth in the form of a baby, his mother Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit. Jesus lived a perfect life, he was crucified and buried, but he rose again on the third day, overcoming death and paying the price of the judgment of God for our sins. This Jesus ascended into heaven, where he is seated at the right hand of the Father and where he is preparing praying for us and preparing a place for us to be with him. This same Jesus is coming again to restore all things and judge the earth.

This Gospel message is the message that saves us, but it is also the message that sustains us and keeps us growing in our own personal walk with the Lord. John Piper said, “Therefore, the gospel is the power that gives us victory over temptation to despair and to pride and to greed and to lust. The gospel alone can triumph over every obstacle and bring us to eternal joy.”

We have the blessing of the eternal Word of God and a healthy church loves to devote themselves to the Word of God (2 Timothy 3:16-17 and Hebrews 4:12).

The church and individual that studies and meditates on the Word of God will be healthy.

Jonathan Edwards, the 18th century theologian defined 5 metrics for determining a genuine move of the Holy Spirit in a church.

  1. A growing esteem for Jesus Christ.
  2. A discernible spirit of repentance.
  3. A dogged devotion to the Word of God.
  4. An interest in theology and doctrine.
  5. An evident love for God and neighbor.

Are you healthy?

Pray that God the Holy Spirit gives you a passion for the Word of God, and it will bring you life (Proverbs 4:20-22).

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Sermon Sunday August 11, 2019 The Word of God – The Bread of Life

The Power of the Word

We have just returned from our third Grace Point mission trip to the city of Cincinnati. It was a smaller team, but we were so blessed to have a team of passionate followers of Jesus who love the Gospel.

The trip was a combination of door-to-door evangelism and running a VBS at the 1st Baptist Church in Reading Ohio.

As we knocked on doors and met people in the community, we were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of need in the area, so many people in desperate situations who were just trying to get through another day. Sadly, as we offered to pray with people, the common response was, “no thanks, I am good.”

The same response is common even in our churches as people have a form of religion, where they pray to God, hoping He hears, but honestly, they don’t have a relationship with Him. A relationship comes from the starting point of submitting ourselves to the Lordship of Jesus and walking as we are led by the spirit.

In Revelation 10, we read about the angel who holds a scroll in his hand and instructs John to eat the scroll, and then to go and prophesy to the nations about the contents of the scroll.

In Ezekiel 3:3, we read a similar account of the Lord instructing Ezekiel to eat of the scroll and to go and speak the Word to the house of Israel.

These two men were called to prophesy by eating the scroll which represented the Word of God given to them. This is similar language to what Jesus used in John 6:25-36 as he instructs his followers that he is the bread of life given from heaven.

We read in John 1:14 that Jesus is the Word made flesh, and later in John chapter 6 Jesus explained the Lords supper to those who were questioning him and who clearly didn’t understand what he was talking about when he said, “eat my flesh and drink my blood” (John 6:54).

In the crowd following Jesus were some scribes who knew the prophecy of Jeremiah and would have understood the concept of receiving God’s Word into one’s heart.

“For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33).

Jesus, when he was tempted by Satan to turn stones into bread responded in Matthew 4:4 by quoting Deuteronomy 8:3, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every WORD that comes from the mouth of God”

In his letters, the apostle Paul frequently writes about being “in Christ”, and one of the crucial characteristics of being in Christ is to be filled with the Word, feeding on the Word of God as it sustains us. The Word of God is the bread of life that fuels our daily walk as followers of Jesus.

We live in what is called the post-modern culture, and we are all driven by hunger, desires and wants. Daily we seek comfort, joy, happiness, fulfilment, love and so many other pleasures, but only one thing can satisfy the hunger in man and that is the Bread of life that we feed on as people submitted to the Lordship of Jesus and filled with the Holy Spirit.

The adults we that we spoke to in Cincinnati were all struggling, they had spent a life feeding on other things and nothing has brought them satisfaction. But during the last night of our VBS, one of the young girls who became a follower of Jesus, really got it. As we were praying with her, we could see the joy of the Lord filling her life. This young 5th grade child was fully satisfied in Jesus and she didn’t want or need anything else. She was alive with the joy of the Lord and I know she is going to feed on the Word. Our prayer for her as she begins her Christian walk, was that she remains steadfast and true to the path that the Lord has for her as He reveals Himself to her in the Bible.

As followers of Jesus, as the Body of Christ in the 21st century, we must be people of the Word.

The secular humanistic society is constantly looking for meaning and purpose, but deny that objective truth exists, we know that the only truth that can satisfy is the glorious Gospel message.

As the church we are to know the word by feeding on the word, so that we can be the prophetic voice that God has called us to be. We cannot begin to address the problems around us, unless we are feeding on the Word.

Do you love God’s Word?