Well, thank you Paul and musicians for leading us so beautifully this morning in worship.
Rick mentioned the ministry fair tent outside, and I also want to encourage you after the
service to eventually find your way through that tent.
There are many tables in there with lots of information, there are people around to answer
questions.
You'll be able to find out just about anything you want to know about ministries here at
Grace Church.
And it's not only there for information, it's there so that you can get what you need so
that you can decide how God wants you to become involved in ministry.
And if you're ready to sign up today, there are folks out there ready to help you to know
where to sign on the dotted line, so to speak.
This is a great day for us, it's not only a day of celebration, it's a day of commitment
to ministry.
Commitment to this new year of ministry that God has graciously given to us in His providence.
And so find your way there and be a part of the fair today, as well as the other great
activities outside.
Now would you open your Bibles with me please to the book of Acts in the New Testament.
The book of Acts.
I am not going to be long this morning in preaching, no applause please.
It is a full morning of celebration and last week we had a number of people respond for
baptism and I have devoted some of my preaching time today to their baptism, which will occur
at the end of this service.
And I rejoice in their decisions and what they are doing is actually a sermon in itself
to all of us regarding discipleship and obedience to Jesus Christ.
But what I do have to talk to you about this morning is a very important subject.
We are again today going to examine the heart of the new community of God.
To understand what made this early church so dynamic and so effective in its generation.
We have looked at its beginning, the fact that the new community was bought by Christ's
death based on His ascension, born in His promise, and built on His Gospel.
The new community has given to each of us who has been born from above a heavenly status
and a personal relationship with God.
Therefore this new community that God has established deserves and demands our loyalty.
The relationship that we have been given answers four questions that arise out of the collapse
of our culture.
We talked about these at length a couple of weeks ago.
Those questions are, do I have significance?
How will I survive in a world like this?
Who am I and how do I fit into the world?
And what is truth?
Four crucial questions that arise because of the collapse of the culture around us.
And in the new community of God every one of those questions is answered in a most positive
and beneficial way.
We've also been challenged by the fact that the new community of God is characterized
by obeying.
It is an obeying community.
And obedience begins.
It doesn't end, but it begins with baptism.
Jesus gave us two commands that are to be a part of the new community in every culture,
on every continent, in every part of this age.
And those commands are to be baptized and to remember Him in the Lord's Supper.
Now there are lots of other commands of the New Testament.
But those two commands stand out above all of them and we call them the ordinances of
the church.
Obedience begins there.
Now looking further into the text this morning, we cannot but be impressed with the sense
of belonging that there was in this new community.
There was a togetherness in this community.
Verse 41, So then those who had received His word were baptized.
And there were added that day about three thousand souls and they were continually devoting
themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to
prayer.
And everyone kept feeling a sense of awe and many wonders and signs were taking place through
the apostles.
And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common.
And they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all,
as anyone might have need.
And day by day, continuing with one mind in the temple and breaking bread from house to
house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart, praising
God and having favor with all the people.
And the Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved.
Notice twice here that word together in the text.
And then the Lord was adding to their number.
Notice the sense of belonging that was a part of the heart of this new community.
The new community of God was characterized by an excitement for gathering together.
The fire of Pentecost had created a burning within them to be with other believers.
To be a member of God's community means earnestly desiring to be together with others for teaching
and worship and fellowship.
And it is the Spirit of God Himself who draws us to this.
And so this morning I want you to realize how vital being at the gathering is for you,
for your family.
And I hope that you will go away from here as you begin a fall of your life and a fall
of ministry as a part of Grace Church with a refreshed commitment to being present when
the body gathers.
Because that's what it means to be a part of God's community.
Now there are three perspectives to this that I want us to look at ever so briefly.
The first is an historical perspective.
Because the idea of gathering as God's people did not begin on Pentecost.
It has Old Testament roots.
God provided for it and ordered gatherings in Israel.
There were national observances or heaths which were established to remind the people
of their spiritual roots and to bind them together several times a year as a distinct
group in the midst of a world of paganism.
They were monotheists who worshiped the God Yahweh, the true God, the Creator God.
And these feasts were there to remind them time after time as they gathered about who
they were and their uniqueness in the world.
Later the national worship of Israel was centered in Jerusalem and it focused on the temple
that Solomon constructed there.
When the city and the temple were destroyed by Babylon, there was a new gathering for
God's people that apparently developed which were called eventually synagogues.
The word synagogue comes from a Greek origin and it means to bring together.
You can understand the dilemma that the Jewish people were in.
Until 586 their minds were focused on Jerusalem and the temple and from that year on they
had no Jerusalem or temple for decades.
Many of them had been carried away exile into Babylon.
And so during this exile what were they to do?
They began to gather together in groups that were called eventually synagogues.
These groups may have, the groups to the synagogue may have its origin in the elders of Israel
who came to the prophet Ezekiel for his teaching during the early part of the Babylonian captivity.
But it is evident by the time of Ezra when he returned to Jerusalem in the middle of
the fourth century that synagogues were present among the people.
And even in Jesus' day, although Herod the Great had rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem
in that day, and sacrifices were again offered in Jerusalem, even so there were synagogues
throughout Israel and Jesus taught in many of them.
The gathering of the church from Pentecost and Esther seems to have arisen out of this
historical pattern among the Jews, together together wherever they were.
At first the new community of God gathered in the temple area because that's where the
Holy Spirit came and that's what we see in the early part of Acts in chapter 3.
But they also were meeting from house to house from the earliest times.
A new paradigm was developing at this point.
It was not long before the Jewishness of the church began diminishing as Gentiles were
saved and added to it.
Within a few decades after Acts chapter 2, the temple was again destroyed, this time
by Rome.
Jerusalem was burned by the armies of Rome.
The material temple was replaced in this new paradigm by a revelation from God that had
come in the meantime from Pentecost until when that occurred.
That revelation came primarily through Paul.
That is that there is no longer a physical temple where God is worshiped.
There is a spiritual temple where God is to be worshiped.
He says that we are the stones that make up that temple, that spiritual temple.
The earthly Jerusalem, which had early on been the thinking of people, the focus of
people, was replaced by another concept, the heavenly Jerusalem.
The writer of Hebrews picks up this theme strongly when he says we have not come to
physical Mount Sinai representing the law.
But he says we have come rather to another mountain that he calls Mount Zion.
Now he's not talking there about Mount Zion that part of Jerusalem.
He's talking about Mount Zion in the spiritual sense.
And he goes on to say to the heavenly Jerusalem.
So you see in this age there is a new paradigm.
We're not focused upon a city in Israel.
We're not looking toward a temple in Jerusalem.
But God has created a new gathering for us, born out of historical roots that began in
the Babylonian captivity of the Jews.
But it is a gathering together of the spiritual temple of God wherever the people are located
around the world.
The community began to understand itself as an assembly of temporary sojourners in this
world.
That's what we are.
That's how we need to see ourselves.
That we are a temporary assembly in this world that we're looking for the heavenly city and
home whose builder and maker is God.
The early church like we today met together in clusters wherever the citizens of God's
community were located.
And as they met together they organized themselves in certain ways with elders and deacons so
that they became functioning churches, functioning gatherings of God's people.
That's the historical perspective, the biblical perspective.
Let's think about that.
The Apostle Paul typically, whenever he went in his missionary journey through the Roman
Empire, the Apostle Paul typically sought out synagogues of the Jews where he began
preaching the Gospel.
There was a natural connection for him.
He himself was a Jew of course, had been a Pharisee of the Jews.
He knew the Old Testament backwards and forwards and so whenever he went to a new city he would
find a gathering of the Jews in a synagogue and there he would begin to preach Christ
to them.
We see this for example in the book of Acts.
Turn with me to Acts chapter 19.
This is actually the third missionary journey of Paul but it lays it out very clearly for
us.
It says in verse 8, and he, Paul, entered the synagogue and continued speaking out boldly
for three months, reasoning and persuading them about the kingdom of God.
But when some were becoming hardened and disobedient, speaking evil of the way before the multitude,
he withdrew from them and took away the disciples, those who had believed, reasoning daily in
the school of Tyrena.
That was a facility that he rented where the believers began to meet.
And this one on it says, for the face of a couple of years.
And it goes on to say that there in the city of Ephesus they began to meet on the first
day of the week.
That began to be their new pattern, not meeting on the Sabbath, but rather meeting on the
first day of the week as an assembly of a new community that was being called out from
that city.
In Acts chapter 20, in verse 6 it says, and we failed from Philippi after the days of
unleavened bread, and says came to them at Troas within five days and there we stayed
seven days.
Notice the we here by the way.
Luke, who's writing this epistle, is with Paul at this point.
And he says, on the first day of the week when we were gathered together to break bread,
Paul began talking to them.
And so a little more time has passed.
You can see this pattern developing that as the believers began to meet, they changed
their day of meeting to the first day of the week.
This is one of the most significant cultural changes that take place in this whole age.
As a brand new day of worship was born for the church.
And it symbolizes the resurrection of course, because Jesus was raised on the first day
of the week.
This change of worship signifies the change from the law to grace, from the Sabbath to
the first day of the week.
And so now as we many centuries later gather on the first day of the week, our gathering
biblically foreshadows the final gathering that is to come in glory.
We heard this morning the stirring words of the midnight cry.
Jesus said, watch, be on the alert, for you do not know the day when your Lord will come.
Apostle Paul reminds us in Thessalonians that the Lord will come with the shout of an archangel,
the trumpet sound of God.
And he says the dead in Christ will be raised.
All of those who died in this whole age since the new community began will be raised.
The dead will be raised.
And we who are alive in that generation will be changed, he says, will not die.
Our bodies will be instantly changed to be like his body of glory.
And then it says that we will be called up together to meet the Lord in the air.
There is the final gathering.
When the church of this age will be called up and together, we will see Jesus face to
face.
And then with him we'll journey through that heavenly city that he is preparing for us,
even now.
And that's why I say our gathering now is but a temporary gathering.
In far-flung places of the earth, but one day there is a final glorious gathering of
God's people.
Oh, what a day that will be when we see Jesus face to face.
And with the face of this age, we are glorified with him and in his presence forever.
The biblical perspective.
But finally, think with me about a cultural perspective.
We talk about worshiping on the first day of the week.
And that is the norm for this age.
But as we think about a cultural perspective of this, we need to realize that while the
first day of the week is the norm, it doesn't invalidate the possibility of worshiping on
other days either.
You see, worshiping on Sunday is not a law.
It is an appropriate custom.
It has deep roots in the New Testament, has theological significance.
But there is not a law that I'm aware of about Sunday as there was in the Old Testament Mosaic
law regarding the Sabbath.
And so there are churches which choose to meet, for example, for a Saturday night service
as well as a Sunday service.
And there are those who use Sunday as a means of outreach.
But their worship, the gathering of the body for believers, is on a Wednesday night or
a Thursday night.
So that's unusual.
But let's not condemn them as though they were breaking some commandment of the New
Testament.
The norm is to worship on Sunday.
But there are those who, for legitimate reasons, have chosen to do otherwise.
And I think of those churches that gather in secret in Muslim countries.
Muslims worship on Friday.
They work on Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
So when is the church together?
Well many of them choose together on that day that they also have off from work on Friday
because that's the culture in which they find themselves.
But there's another cultural perspective I want to bring to this.
And it really goes back into the New Testament, the gathering of the community, which began
as a universal practice that no one would miss.
Within a few years became dispensable and irrelevant and extraneous to some.
How do you know that?
Because in Hebrew it says, let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good
deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together as the habit of some is.
You understand what I'm saying?
I'm saying that within 40 years of when the believers could not wait to get together,
there was another pattern that began to erode the first.
And that was to take the gathering rather casually and to forsake it.
The word means to leave it in a lurch.
It's to turn your back on it.
And the writer of Hebrew says don't do that.
And why does he say that?
He says encourage one another in what?
In being together.
And all the more as you see the day approaching, what is that day?
The day of our Lord's return.
As we see that day approaching, all the more we ought to be encouraging one another.
Be at the gathering.
Don't miss coming together to worship with God's people.
I'll see you when we gather.
You see the pattern of the new community is gathering.
And that gathering doesn't come out of a sense of legalism, thou shall keep the Sabbath.
That gathering comes out of a sense of obedience and a new heart that is filled with the Holy
Spirit.
We don't look at Sunday attendance in a legalistic way.
Jesus said even when the Sabbath was commanded that if your ox is in the dip on the Sabbath,
you better do what?
You better get your ox out of the dip.
Bill Graham has an interesting statement about that.
He says Jesus spoke about the ox in the dip on the Sabbath, but if your ox gets in the
dip every Sabbath, you should either get a new ox or fill up the dip.
Amen.
And yet we have, don't we, such a casual, nonchalant, noncommittal attitude about the
gathering of God's people.
The writer of Hebrews says Christ shall appear a second time for salvation to those who eagerly
await for him.
And when we eagerly wait for him, it will do nothing more than drive us to be together
as the people of God.
And so I call upon you as part of God's new community not to fall into the sinful and
cultural practice of neglecting the gathering, but determine that weekly gathering with the
new community will be your priority, the priority of your family, the priority in your schedule,
and make it the Lord's Day by giving him first place.
Someone has said our great-grandfathers called it Holy Sabbath.
Our grandfathers called it Sabbath.
Our fathers called it Sunday, and we call it the weekend.
But the first day of the week, biblically speaking, is the Lord's Day, and it's an
important day.
William Gladstone, the British statesman who was a member of Parliament, if you can believe
this, for more than 60 years, was also a devoted follower of Jesus Christ.
He died 98 years ago.
And listen to what he said.
Tell me what the young men of England, he said, are doing on Sunday, and I will tell
you about the future of England.
That is insightful, isn't it?
Tell me what the young men of England are doing on Sunday, and I will tell you about
the future of England.
We parents need to set an example in this.
It was a practice of Thomas Edison to work on Sunday because of his invention, and many
of them required immediate attention.
But he suspended that practice from the motive that it wouldn't do him any credit as a father
not to go to church.
It is said that an interesting conversation took place in his laboratory one Sunday morning.
And by the way, to my knowledge, Edison was not a Christian in the sense of our use of
that term.
But his habit was to go to church eventually in life.
He and Mrs. Edison and little Theodore were on their way to the Baptist church in New
Orleans, New Jersey.
And Theodore turned aside and went into the building where they did their experiment.
And Thomas Edison said, you mustn't work on Sunday, Teddy.
But you work on Sunday, was the boy's response.
And it was that that caused him to get into the regular habit of setting an example for
his family of being in church on Sunday.
Moms and dads, I call upon you to set an example that will show your children the priority
of the Lord's day and not to allow other things to get in the way of the gathering as the
habit of some admittedly is, but tell your children and tell the Lord that his day has
priority in your life.
And I tell you if you will do that, the blessing of God will be upon you and your family.
It will make a difference in your life.
It will make a difference in your personal Christian growth.
It will make a difference in the way your family is raised and how obedient they become
and how respectful they are of Christ in the church.
It will make a difference.
And so I call upon all of us on this day of grace fest as we celebrate the grace of God
to give ourselves a fresh to the gathering.
For the heart of the new community, the gathering together, let's pray.
Father write this upon our hearts, I pray.
Write it upon our hearts and may we see it not as some legalistic thing that we must
do in order to perform.
May we see it as a wonderful opportunity that you've given us together in anticipation
of that great day and the final gathering.
In Jesus' name, Amen.
I'd like for us to stand right now and to sing.