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FBC Travelers Rest sermon from August 11, 2024 by Pastor Rhett Burns.
We can turn in your Bibles to Acts chapter 2, Acts chapter 2 verses 40 through 47. We touched on this passage briefly last year when we went through the book of Acts, but we took it in the context of the whole of chapter 2, which is pretty long.
And so I want to revisit it today as part of our series on local church ministry and mission. As I mentioned last week, these sermons this month are just a little bit different than what we normally do.
And so if you're new with us, what we normally do is we just go through books of the Bible. So on any given Sunday, I'll turn the page of that book that we're going through and just preach whatever the next chapter is or whatever the next passage is.
And we'll do that again soon. In September, we'll start going through 1 Timothy. But for August, I'm preaching this series on local church ministry and mission in hopes of it propelling us towards a faithful and thriving future here at First Baptist.
And so what I want to do today before we get into Acts chapter 2, I want to introduce this sermon using ice cream as a metaphor. And so this illustration is brought to you by our chairman of Deacons, Bill Walker, and his dog, Puff, known for their nightly ice cream.
But I want to use ice cream, and I want you to think about vanilla ice cream. Now, on the one hand, vanilla ice cream is kind of boring. It's plain. It's not fancy. It's never going to be the flavor of the month over at the ice cream shop.
I mean, you can go to any given ice cream shop, and you can find some pretty wild stuff. I mean, you can find a triple mousse track, chocolate fudge, rainbow mint swirl at some places. And one of your kids will be like, yes, that's what I must have.
And then the other kid will be like, eh, vanilla, please. Now, personally, I'm a butter pecan or black cherry man myself because I'm an old man at heart. I love those flavors. But vanilla ice cream, done right, is, it can be incredibly rich.
And it really is, if it's done right, it really is the perfect ice cream flavor. It's the standard. Every ice cream shop has it. And sometimes you might get a wild hair and just want to order the cake batter with mangoes and pistachios or some other exotic flavor that you're inevitably going to be disappointed in.
No one's ever really disappointed with a good, solid vanilla ice cream cone. And so what I want to do is make the case today for vanilla church. That is, a church can focus on a lot of different things.
A church can have program after programming after programming that ends up with a quite exotic flavor like cake batter with mango and pistachios. But I would submit to you that focusing on the fundamentals of church life can be incredibly rich.
And so in making the case for vanilla church, I want to encourage us to use our energies and our resources to make the fundamentals of our church life together incredibly rich without the pressure to be super fancy, without the pressure to make a splash.
Now, just like ice cream, it's fun to mix it up from time to time. Put a little topping on it, add a little flavor, and we do that. But I'd say if the extras become the focus, then you end up with some really weird combinations that distract from the main thing, which is the ice cream.
And when applied to the church, you end up distracting from the main fundamentals of the church, and they suffer. And on top of that, you just kind of exhaust everyone. And so today from Acts chapter 2, I want to draw our attention to the fundamentals of church life and encourage us to focus on making them incredibly rich in the life of our church.
And so let me read Acts chapter 2, verses 40 through 47. Acts chapter 2, verses 40 through 47 in the Word of God says,. And with many other words he testified and exhorted them, saying, Be saved from this perverse generation.
Then those who gladly received his word were baptized. And that day about 3 ,000 souls were added to them. And they continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers.
Then fear came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were done through the apostles. Now all who believed were together, and they had all things in common. And they sold their possessions and goods, and divided them among all as anyone had need.
So continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart. Praising God and having favor with all the people.
And the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved. Amen. This passage comes right after Pentecost. Excuse me, on Pentecost, right after Peter preaches at Pentecost. And 3 ,000 people believed the gospel that day.
They were then baptized, and the new covenant church was born. And immediately after, what we're told here in Acts chapter 2, is what the church then gave themselves to. Now before we dive into this, I want to remind us of something that we talked about last week.
And that is that we applied the principle of growth and development to the church. And we saw that the church grows and develops over time as conditions change. And so this is not a call to return and do everything exactly like the church in Acts did.
We live in a different era of redemptive history under different conditions. We can't go back to first century Jerusalem. But we also said last week that we are no more disconnected from our past than the roof is from the foundation.
And so what we find in Acts chapter 2 is the foundation. We might say the fundamentals of church life. And while our expression of the fundamentals, what we do with them, they develop and they shift and they grow over time.
We never get past the fundamentals. If we're going to have good ice cream, you've got to make sure the ingredients are incredibly rich. I don't know if I can switch the metaphor for just a moment. College football season is coming up here shortly.
Think of a good football team. They might run any number of different offensive and defensive sets and formations. But all football comes down to blocking, tackling, running, throwing, catching. If you can't do those, you can't win.
And so it is with the church. We must focus on the fundamentals. What are the fundamentals that we find here in Acts chapter 2? Well, the first that we see there in verse 42, we see the Apostles' Doctrine.
This refers to the teaching of Jesus that the Apostles received as recorded in the Gospels. It also includes the teaching that the disciples received from Jesus in the 40 days after His resurrection. It would also include the Apostles' teaching and interpretation of the Old Testament Scriptures.
The Apostles' Doctrine. The second thing we see is fellowship. This refers to the shared life together of the believers. Especially the sharing of material goods. Then in verses 42 and 46, we see the breaking of bread.
So in verse 42, we'll talk about it in a bit, it specifically refers to the Lord's Supper. But also to the general fellowship meals, house to house, in verse 46. We also see the Acts 2 church focused in continuing in the prayers, verse 42.
Both in the temple, large group, and in homes, smaller groups. They prayed together and they devoted themselves to prayer. Verse 44, they held all things in common. Now this is not mandatory communalism or proto-communism as some have suggested.
Note that no one was under any compulsion to do anything with their property. Some, if you keep reading in Acts, you see that some retained their private property and retained their homes. However, what we see here is that the new community was particularly generous in looking after those among them, who belong to them, those who have material needs.
And this is related to the fellowship, the shared life that we see in verse 42. Verse 46, they continued daily in one accord. The church had unity among themselves. This unity was possible because of the fact that they were devoted to the apostles' doctrine.
People unite around shared doctrine. Doctrine makes unity possible. Notice that these things are together in the same passage. That they are devoting and continuing steadfastly in the doctrine and they had unity.
You don't get one of those without the other. And then, so we see this is one reason why doctrinal teaching is so important. Then also in verse 46, we see that they were in the temple and from house to house, meeting in large groups in small, corporate worship, home hospitality.
They had, verse 46, gladness and simplicity of heart. And in verse 47, they were praising God. This refers to song, especially the song. Or Ron just sang Psalm 72. This is the hymn book of God's people.
And they were praising God with psalms and song. And then verse 47, they were having favor with all the people. What I want us to do is taking this list of things that we see, these fundamentals that we see in Acts chapter 2 of the first church there, I want to apply them to our church and our programming, encouraging us to focus on these fundamentals in the life of First Baptist Traveler's Rest.
So the first thing is Lord's Day worship. We see the first church here, this new community in Christ. We see them worshiping in the temple and from house to house. They are praising God. They are devoting themselves to the apostles' doctrine and teaching.
They are taking the Lord's Supper together. This new community was a worshiping community. And I would say to you that worship is the single most important thing that Christians do. Gathering together with God's people on the Lord's Day is central to your help as a Christian.
It is the most important thing we do. I remember singing a song in kids' choir when I was growing up. We were made to praise the Lord, praise the Lord, praise the Lord. We were made to praise the Lord.
Yes, that's what we were made for.
And it's true.
We were made to worship God. First question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism says it like this,. It begins with this question, What is the chief end of man? What is the goal, the chief purpose of man?
And the answer is, man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. We were made to worship. That's why He made us. To worship and to bring Him glory. Now, of course, we bring God glory and express worship in all sorts of ways in every area of life.
But the central way we do that, the way that shapes every other way, is that we come into God's presence with God's people on the Lord's day. We spiritually ascend to the throne of God when we gather like we are right now.
Into the throne room of God Almighty and worship. And this is God's action to us and our response to Him. So God calls us to worship. He summons us to appear before Him. He assures us of our forgiveness of sin.
He speaks to us through His word read and through His word preached. God makes the gospel visible and edible in the Lord's Supper which we took together last week. He gives us His grace and His blessing.
We come and we receive from God. And then we respond. We respond, we sing, we praise, we pray, we hear. We treasure up His words in our hearts. We apply them to our lives and obey them. We receive the Lord's Supper.
We receive His grace. We receive His blessing. And then we go out with His blessing upon our heads to live out in the world and bring Him glory to win glory for His name. You see, Lord's Day worship is the central act in the life of the Christian and in the life of the church.
And so in the two years that I've been your pastor, I have given more emphasis to Lord's Day worship than anything else. Out of every aspect of church life, I've been more insistent and particular about what we do and how we do Sunday morning worship than anything else.
So when I first started two years ago, I was pretty confident I could get away with one kind of big change at the beginning without causing too many problems. Everybody expects a new pastor to do something different.
And so any given congregation can absorb a major change with a new pastor without too many hiccups. I knew I probably had one. And so we changed the order of the service to do things in a specific order with specific purposes for each element.
And we tweak some of those as we've gone along. But the reason we've done that is because how we worship God matters. And what we do when we come together as God's people matters. You see, there's categories in the Bible of proper and improper worship.
And so you think about some of your Bible stories. You remember Uzzah? He died because he did not obey God's instructions on how to handle sacred things. He touched the Ark of the Covenant and he fell dead.
Or Aaron's sons, Nadab and Abihu. They offered strange, that is, unauthorized fire before the Lord, and they were consumed by it. Saul made an unlawful sacrifice without Samuel being there, and the kingdom was then stripped from him.
Improper worship, and he lost the kingdom. Cain's heart was not right before God, and God did not accept his offering. You see, it matters how we worship the Lord. And our worship shapes us as Christians.
We meet with God and we're changed.
We're shaped, molded.
What Romans 8 says, we're conformed into the image of the Son, Jesus. Therefore, I believe how we worship has a direct influence on how we live. So is the fear of God presence in our worship? If yes, then we'll live with the fear of God, which will lead to obedience to His commands, to the blessing that comes from obedience, and to wisdom of which the fear of the Lord is the beginning.
If we don't have the fear of the Lord, we'll do what's right in our own eyes, for there is no fear of God. Are we reverent or flippant in our worship? Is God's Word central? Is the focus on God or is it on ourselves?
Is the focus on God's preferences or our preferences? Are the preferences somebody else who might come in on any given Sunday? Are we more concerned with pleasing God or pleasing man? The answers to all of these types of questions about Sunday will find their corollaries in our lives Monday through Saturday.
Therefore, we must be diligent to make our worship rich. How can you do that? Well, you can come with hearts prepared. Come with hearts prepared to worship. Fix your eyes on Jesus. Feast on His Word. Let us sing songs rich in Scripture and doctrine.
Let us participate with hearty amens and thanks be to God with our attention, with our prayers. And I'll also say that we don't skip out on worship. Now, I know there are times when providence prevents us from attending worship.
You get sick. A child gets sick. A car breaks down. There's all sorts of legitimate reasons. But for Christians to just skip out on worship for reasons, to go to the lake, travel ball because it's raining, because you're on vacation, insert whatever reason here, it demonstrates misplaced priorities where God is not preeminent in all things.
So I want to encourage you. Come before God each week and worship richly. Now, I know when people look at church programming, corporate worship is kind of assumed. It's the baseline. And then they look at all the extras that a church may have.
It's niche ministries to various demographic groups within the church. It's various discipleship strategies and opportunities.
And those things are fine.
But I want us to see this gathering, the Lord's Day gathering of the church, as the central discipleship strategy and opportunity of our church. It's the chief ministry of the church. Not as the assumed baseline, bare minimum, but as the center of the wheel with spokes going out to everything else and is connected to everything else that we do in life.
And so let's give ourselves to rich worship. Second thing is the Lord's Supper. We see this in verse 42, mention of the breaking of bread context. There's the Lord's Supper. Church leaders are often always looking for the next big thing to spice up their ministry and make a splash.
It's like somebody stood up in a staff meeting and said, okay, hear me out, mangoes and pistachios. Meanwhile, God has given perfectly good vanilla ice cream that just nobody remembers. It's the Lord's Supper.
Not that the Lord's Supper is ice cream, but in the metaphor. We forget that Jesus instituted the Lord's Supper. That when Jesus himself was establishing the church, what he decided to give the church to nourish their souls and to strengthen them was not a marketing scheme, it was not a study course, it was not an outreach strategy, it was not a big event.
He gave them bread and wine, and he said, do this in remembrance of me. Now I can't prove what I'm about to say, and so I want to give a disclaimer for this next statement. This is my sanctified hypothesis.
This isn't God's word here, so I just want to be clear. But I believe that there is a correlation between a church's practice of the Lord's Supper and their ministry potency. There's a correlation between a church's practice of the Lord's Supper and their vibrancy as Christians.
That is, a weak or improper practice of the Supper will yield weak or improper Christians. And so, what is the proper practice of the Lord's Supper? Well, it includes the actual Supper. That is, that we actually do it.
And so I believe the testimony of Scripture and of church history is the frequent practice of the Supper. That we ought to take the Lord's Supper regularly, and we ought to take it often. Now, I've been in a number of churches, and I've often heard people say, well, the more you do it, the less special it gets.
I would say there's a couple of problems with that. I've heard it many, many times. One is, nowhere in the Bible does it say that the Lord's Supper ought to make you feel special. And so if that's the standard, that's not a biblical standard.
But the second thing is, we don't apply that standard to anything else in life, do we? It's just more special if my wife gives me a smooch four times a year. Like, I don't know about you, I like a smooch every day.
I can say that, can't I, Shannon?
Just to embarrass her.
No, we don't apply that to anything else in life. I will tell you that the assumption of the Bible is that when the church gathers, they do this in remembrance of Jesus. And so I believe we ought to have regular, frequent observance of the Supper.
That's the first thing. Second thing, in addition to just actually having the Supper, is right doctrine. A right understanding of the doctrine of the Supper. That is, a right understanding of the Gospel, first and foremost.
The Gospel that the Supper makes visible. That's what the Supper is. The Gospel made visible. It's the Gospel made edible, tasteable. And so we have to have a right understanding of that Gospel, that Jesus Christ is Lord, that Jesus Christ lived a perfect life, died in our place, was raised in our place, so that we, being united by faith to Him, by repenting of our sins and trusting in Him, placing our loyalty in Him, that we too could be raised up to new life.
That's the Gospel. We need to have that right understanding. We also need to have the right understanding of what the Supper is. And so we reject the Roman Catholic view that says that Christ is physically present in the physical elements of the Supper.
We also reject the view that Christ is nowhere present in the Supper.
At all.
And we embrace a view of the real presence of Jesus in the Supper. That we believe that the Supper is a memorial, but it's not merely a memorial or only a memorial, but rather it is a God-ordained, Jesus-ordained means of grace.
Not saving grace, but grace that strengthens and nourishes our souls that fuels our obedience and our Christian walks. To have right doctrine, right understanding of the Supper. Then we need to have right elements.
And so, here at First Baptist, we use real bread for communion. We don't use stale crackers or those kind of paper-ish wafers. We use real bread. We use the fruit of the vine, that is from grapes. So, just any liquid won't do for communion.
I remember during COVID, seeing some churches, they would do Zoom communion. And they would encourage people to take whatever you had at the house, toast and orange juice and take communion with it. And I'm not going to go off on that too long.
There's a lot wrong with that, including the use of different elements and just taking in isolation, which is meant to express unity. But you'll notice that's the fruit of the vine there. That's a Bible term.
It comes from Matthew's account of the establishment of the Lord's Supper. And I think using that broad term gives us leeway in our use of grape juice. When Jesus gave wine, we used grape juice. So, I think it gives us some leeway there with Matthew using that fruit of the vine because grape juice is a fruit of the vine.
I'm not proposing changing that or doing anything different. But I do think we need to be honest about the fact that Jesus gave wine. And it's just not true that the wine in Jesus' day was actually Welch's or else it would have been really silly for Paul to say, don't get drunk on Welch's or Solomon to say grape juice is a brawler.
That wouldn't make much sense. But here's the reason I bring it up. Not because I'm announcing we're going to do it different next time. The reason I bring it up is because I believe Jesus chose wine on purpose.
I at least think we need to realize that when we're thinking about the supper. That wine has rich, significant theological import and symbolism in the Bible. It represents the wrath of God that Jesus took.
It represents joy, rest, power, and even the gospel itself. For just as Jesus' body was crushed, buried in a tomb, and resurrected as a new heavenly body, to make wine, grapes must be crushed. They must be stored in darkness for a period of time and then they're resurrected as a powerful drink given to gladden the heart of man.
Psalm 104 verse 15. We've got to have right elements.
We need a right heart.
That's why we examine our consciences before partaking of the supper so we don't do it in an unworthy manner. We confess and repent of sin before taking the Lord's Supper. We must have living faith in Jesus Christ.
We must have a right heart. And then also a right fencing of the table. That is, not everyone who comes into a church service ought to come and take of the Lord's Supper. The supper is for the household of God.
That is, for baptized believers in good standing and membership with the local church. And for a Baptist church like ours, that would mean properly baptized as a believer. Also, someone not under church discipline.
Someone not walking in high-handed, unrepentant sin. And so it is good and right to say no to some people taking the supper. In the same way, if you go back to the Old Testament and the temple, not everybody was allowed into the holy place or the most holy place.
So it's not unloving, it is protecting that and handling sacred things the way God tells us to. So we have all these properties of the Lord's Supper. You remove one or more of them, I believe the church loses some of its potency.
And so we want to cultivate a rich practice of the Lord's Supper here at First Baptist. It's one of the fundamentals. We currently have a study group that is working on evaluating our current practice in light of the scriptures in order to make some recommendations for future development of that practice.
But we want our practice to be rich there. Third thing, Apostles' Doctrine. So the Acts 2 church continued steadfastly in the Apostles' Doctrine. And we too should be devoted to doctrine. Now sometimes doctrine gets a bad rap.
People don't want to take doctrine too seriously. They just want to get the high points and everything will be okay. Everything else. But God has revealed to us His Word. And a minister is called to rightly divide it.
Doctrine matters.
It matters what we believe. It matters what we practice. And there's a connection between the two. Now here's the thing. We don't want to be unnecessarily schismatic. But we do value theological precision.
Because those things are connected. Because what you believe in your heart always comes out in your life. Doctrine always comes out of your fingertips. It always comes out of your mouth. And if what we believe is out of alignment with God's Word, then our life will show it.
Therefore, one of the primary ministries of our church will always be our teaching ministry. Some of that is preaching. But it also includes our Sunday school classes, our Wednesday night program, any other opportunities, teaching opportunities that we have.
And so in our church programming, we want to cultivate a love for rich doctrine and a taste for sound teaching. This is more vital to our spiritual health than any events that we could think of. Now there's three more here for time's sake.
I want to go through these fairly quickly. Fourth, you have a shared life. The biblical word here is fellowship, koinonia. Shared life of the believers. And so they broke bread together, held things in common.
Again, the principle here is generosity. They're generous with their resources. They sold their possessions and gave them away when somebody had need. They're also generous with themselves, with their time, sharing meals together.
We've talked about this recently, particularly during family feast week. But I'll just note this. Fellowship, hospitality, and shared life is a huge emphasis of our church. Because we want to be together so that we can do the one another commandments of the New Testament, love one another, forgive one another, bear with one another, the burdens of one another, all of those things.
And if we're going to do that, we have to have a shared life. We want that and we need that. And it's creating that kind of culture. It's good for us, but it also creates a centripetal force where it is evangelistic.
Because we've created a culture in which people want to join that rich, vibrant community. Fifth thing, prayer. The Acts 2 church was devoted to prayer that continues steadfastly in it. I've heard it said that you never do anything greater than prayer until you pray.
And so we must give ourselves to prayer. For unless the Lord builds the house, we labor in vain. Because it is God who gives the growth. So I would ask, how is our prayer life as a church? How is your prayer life individually?
But also how are we together as a church? We have a once a month corporate prayer meeting.
Do you attend that? Could you attend that?
We come together usually first Sunday of every month and we pray together. Also we have midweek family fellowship starting back on August the 21st. Our regular Wednesday night program, we'll be back, regular schedule on that on August 21st down in the fellowship hall.
Part of that this fall is going to be praying together. Common prayer is going to be a part of our Wednesday night. A rich church community is one where the people continue steadfastly in prayer. And in gladness.
You see this early church, they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart. You see it's hard to beat joyful Christians. The gospel should make us glad. For you see our sins are forgiven. The Lord is our God and we are his people.
Jesus defeated Satan's sin and death. We have a home in heaven. We should be filled with joy. And then that joy should overflow. And particularly in a cynical gloomy world in which we live, Christian joy and gladness is a powerful apologetic for faith in Jesus Christ.
And so let us do everything with gladness and simplicity of heart. So the things we talked about today, worship, Lord's Supper, right doctrine, shared life, prayer, gladness. You see these are not revolutionary ideas.
This is not the cutting edge of church innovation. This isn't triple fudge cake batter with mango and pistachios ice cream. It's that old standard vanilla. But it's incredibly rich. And so let's cultivate the simple things.
The foundational things. The fundamental things as we move forward in ministry and mission here in Traveler's Rest. And may God be pleased and our neighbors be blessed. Let's pray together. Our Father in heaven, help us to faithfully practice the fundamentals of church life.
Help us to give ourselves to worship. Help us to give ourselves to the Lord's Supper and to right doctrine. The apostles teaching your word, the scriptures. Help us to give ourselves to one another in shared life.
Help us to give ourselves to prayer. And help us to be glad. Help us to faithfully practice these fundamentals of church life in a way that is rich. In a way that pleases you. In a way that nourishes our souls and spurs us on to love and good deeds.
Conforms us into the image of your son Jesus. That helps us grow in our knowledge of you and our love for you and our obedience to you. And in a way that blesses our fellow church members and makes the name of Jesus known to our neighbors.
And we ask all of this in the name of Christ.
Amen.
