(1 Chronicles 29:6-9; Acts 2:42-47, Acts 4:32-37)

At various places throughout the Acts of the Apostles, Luke scatters brief progress reports on the church.  I included one of them in our reading last week, verses 12-16 of chapter 5.  By my count, there are nine of them, and they get shorter as the book goes along.  They serve to show us how the message and ministry of the gospel of Jesus Christ are spreading across the Roman world.  The first few go beyond that to give us snapshots of the life of the church so that when Luke says in Acts 16:5, just to pick one, that “the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers,” we understand what that really means.  It’s not just that their attendance was up, it’s that they were living boldly in the way that we see here in Acts 2 and Acts 4.

That’s important, because it’s easy to talk about a strong church, or a Spirit-filled church, without having any real idea what that means; and since nature abhors a vacuum, that void of understanding will fill quickly with worldly ideas of strength and goodness.  What’s a strong church?  One that has a lot of members and a lot of money.  What’s a Spirit-filled church?  I don’t know, but those people seem to be nice, moral people, so I guess they must be Spirit-filled.  But this is not what God has in mind.  If you want to know if a person or a church is filled by the Holy Spirit, look at the fruit—how are they living, what are they producing, what qualities characterize their way of life?

What we see in Acts 2 and 4 is a church that has chosen its world, and it isn’t this one.  Everything they have in this world, they’ve placed at the disposal of the world to come.  They had one common goal, and so as Acts 4:32 tells us, “They were one in heart and mind”—or, better, in heart and soul.  This doesn’t mean they never disagreed, or even that they never fought; we know they fought.  Disagreement and conflict are inevitable—and more, they’re often necessary for growth.  Because we’re all limited, we need our different perspectives in order to make good decisions.  Real unity isn’t just superficial agreement, it’s something deeper.Read more→

(2 Kings 6:8-23; Acts 5:12-42)

I imagine all of you know that this Tuesday is Election Day; and I trust that all of you of voting age will go out and vote.  I put that insert in your bulletins because we do need to vote wisely, as a matter of prayer; I also put it in because I found that website to be long on information and short on telling you what to do.  But understand this in light of 1 Corinthians 7:29-31:  “The appointed time has grown very short.  From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it.  For the present form of this world is passing away.”  As John Piper says, “so it is with voting.  We should do it.  But only as if we were not doing it.”

I don’t tell you to go out and vote because your vote matters.  I do believe it matters to you, but on the larger scale, it probably doesn’t.  I’m not telling you to go out and vote because we the people are the real source of authority in this nation.  In human political terms, that’s purely theoretical anymore—the country is too big, power is too centralized, and most people are too far from the centers of power.  We’re ruled, not governed, by an elite, and it’s hard to see how that realistically could be any different.  And in theological terms, Godis the source of all authority; he raises up and brings down whom he will.  We should vote, but not because we think it will do anything important.  As Piper says, and as Paul would have said, we should vote as though we were not voting.

Now, that might seem defeatist, and even pointless.  If my vote won’t change anything, why should I vote?  Well, because that’s what God has given you to do.  Because what matters isn’t what you can make of it or what the human system will make of it, but what God is going to make of it—and that, only he knows.  And because you can vote as though you were not voting, because you don’t have to think it’s crucial, because you know that government isn’t all that and a bag of chips.  Vote without discouragement, because however the election goes, it’s all in God’s plan.  As Piper puts it, “In the short run, Christians lose.  In the long run, we win.”  We’ve seen the back of the book, remember?Read more→

(Daniel 3:13-18; Acts 4:1-31)

Eight years ago, in the summer of 2006, I horrified a group of my colleagues.  We were delegates to General Synod, which is the Reformed Church’s equivalent to the Presbyterian General Assembly.  A number of us were out for a walk one night, and I made the statement—in response to what, I don’t recall—that the job of the pastor is to be crucified for the congregation.  You would have thought I’d set off a bomb.

It wasn’t that they thought I had delusions of grandeur; they knew me well enough to know that I didn’t think of myself (or any of them) as some sort of messiah.  Rather, they reacted to it as a highly uncomfortable view of pastoral ministry.  I didn’t disagree, but I don’t see any way around it if you’re going to be faithful to Scripture.  Jesus says, as we read a few weeks ago, “Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.”  Paul makes clear in 1 Timothy that Christian leadership is about modeling and imitation; the basic principle is one which he states concisely in 1 Corinthians 11:1:  “Follow my pattern of life as I follow the pattern of Christ.”  We can’t learn to live like Christ just by reading about it, even though the book we read was written by God.  We need to see it lived out, which is why God didn’t just give us his word, he also gave us his people.

The first job of those of us called to be elders and deacons for the church—including pastors, as we are called teaching elders—is to be models of the life of Jesus.  Yes, we’re all most imperfect models, but we need to be committed to that purpose; and part of our calling is to model the right way to respond when we do sin and fall short of the measure of Christ.  We are humble sinners saved only by grace who need grace from the Lord and from his church, just as much as anyone is, and we need to show by our lives what it means to live openly and honestly in that way.  Beyond that, if we want to lead the church to be faithful to Jesus’ call to take up the cross and follow him, we need to do that ourselves.  To lead the church on the road to the cross, we have to walk that road in our own lives, on our own two feet.Read more→

(Isaiah 66:18-22; Acts 3)

There is a story about an encounter between Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval theologian, and the pope.  I don’t know if it actually happened, but it does fit with the time in which he lived.  As the story has it, after making some display of the church’s wealth to Aquinas, the pope said, “Thomas, you can see the church no longer has to say ‘Silver and gold have I none.’”  Aquinas responded, “True, holy father; but neither can she now say to the lame man, ‘Rise up and walk!’”

Now, as I said, I don’t know for sure that this conversation happened, or that it happened in just that way.  I do know this:  it’s believable because both statements are true.  For all the wars fought by the popes, the Roman hierarchy was wealthy, and its wealth was growing.  We have a rich heritage of great artworks and beautiful buildings that were paid for by the blood, toil, tears and sweat of the peasants of Europe.  But for all the church’s silver and gold, it lacked spiritual power.

That should have been a sign that something was badly wrong; but it took the explosion of the Reformation a few centuries later to get the point across.  As we see in Acts, when God builds the church, he does it by the power of his Holy Spirit, not by the power of the sword or the purse; and as we began to see last week, when this happens, the results look very different from anything the world expects.Read more→

(Joel 2:28-29; Acts 2:1-42)

We’ve been spending the last number of weeks talking about revival.  We’ve seen that it’s God’s work, not ours, and that we’re utterly dependent on him—that only God can bring the dead to life, and that’s exactly what he’s on about doing.  We took some time to read the end of the story so that we know where it’s going, which is the total renewal of creation:  all things (including us) will be made entirely new.  We’ve been reminded that everything we have is God’s, and he calls us to spend all of it—our time, our money, our talents and skills—in his service.  Where we might use our lives to pile up temporary treasure in this world which is passing away, he gives us the opportunity to use them instead to store up treasure in the next, which is eternal.

With all of that said, we need more—we need to go beyond the limits of our own experience and see what revival looks like.  That’s why we’re going to spend the next several weeks in the first part of the book of Acts, which records the first mass movement of the Spirit of God in human history.  When the Holy Spirit goes to work on a large scale in the full power of God, what happens?Read more→

(Exodus 16:13-20; 2 Corinthians 8:1-15)

Kaleb’s experience illustrates a couple aspects of the reality Paul’s talking about in 2 Corinthians 8.  First, he reminds us that God provides for his children, and in fact that everything we have is God’s provision.  Yes, none of the extra money they received simply appeared miraculously out of nowhere; it could all be tracked to where it came from and why.  But God was in command of all those events; he set each in its proper place and time to meet Kaleb and Ashlea’s needs at that point.

The fact is, God most often works through other people to accomplish his purposes, even when they’re completely unaware of it.  As we see in Paul, he provides for our needs through other people, and provides for the needs of others through us.  This is simply how he chooses to operate.  I don’t know all his reasons for working this way, but at least in part, it’s a matter of taking us seriously and treating us with respect.

When God uses us to take care of other people, it makes our actions and our lives meaningful.  He could easily do everything directly, all by himself—but then what would we have to do?  What would we matter?  He makes us instruments of his blessing so that we can see that our lives are important.  He does it in ways that are completely apart from our own plans—like that woman who ended up blessing Kaleb by accident—to help us see that everything we do, even the smallest thing, has consequences which ripple out far beyond and outside anything we could ever predict, or even understand.Read more→

(Deuteronomy 30:11-20, Psalm 49:7-20; Mark 8:34-38)

Or as Jedi Master Yoda said, “Do.  Or do not.  There is no ‘try’.”  For anything important, anything that really matters, anything that’s truly a challenge, either you abandon yourself to it and you give it all you have, or you’d best walk away and go somewhere else.  Otherwise, “squish like grape.”  There’s no three ways about it.

This is truest when it comes to following God.  That’s why God is very clear—we see it in Moses, and we see it in Jesus—that either you’re striving to follow him with your whole heart and soul and mind and strength, or else you’re not following him at all.  Granted, even at our best, the execution is never entirely there; but the intent and the desire and the commitment have to be.  Obedience that wants to make an exception at any point isn’t obedience at all.Read more→

(Malachi 3:6-12; 2 Corinthians 9:6-15)

Martin Rinkart was a Lutheran pastor in Eilenberg, Germany in 1637.  He was also the only pastor in Eilenberg, Germany in 1637.  I don’t know what happened to the rest of them, but I have my suspicions.  You see, this was during the Thirty Years’ War, and in 1637 Eilenberg was attacked three different times.  When the armies left, they were replaced by desperate refugees.  Disease was common, food wasn’t, and Rinkart’s journal tells us that in 1637, he conducted over 4500 funerals, sometimes as many as 50 in a day.  Death and chaos ruled, and each day seemed to bring some fresh disaster.  But out of that terrible time, Martin Rinkart wrote these words:

Now thank we all our God with hearts and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things has done, in whom his world rejoices;
Who, from our mother’s arms, hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.

During Napoleon’s reign in France,a man named Charnet offended the emperor—unintentionally—and was thrown in jail to rot.  As time passed, Charnet became bitter and lost faith in God, finally scratching on the wall of his cell, “All things come by chance.”

But there was a little space for sunlight to enter his cell, and for a little while each day a sunbeam cast a small pool of light on the floor; and one morning, to his amazement, in that small patch of ground he saw a tiny green blade poking out of the packed dirt floor, fighting its way into that precious sunlight.  Suddenly, he had a companion, even if only a plant, and his heart lifted; he shared his tiny water ration with the little plant and did everything he could to encourage it to grow.  Under his devoted care, it did grow, until one day it put out a beautiful little purple-and-white flower.  Once again, Charnet found himself thinking about God, but thinking very different thoughts; he saw that however much we may pound down this earth, the glory and beauty of God still breaks through, and so he scratched out his previous words and wrote instead, “He who made all things is God.”Read more→

(Jeremiah 32:36-41, Ezekiel 36:22-28; Romans 12:1-2)

In October, we’re going to be participating in an initiative called Pray31.  The men who’ve launched this are hoping to get one million Christians in this country to pray together methodically for the US every day in October.  They aren’t asking for a major time commitment; the guide for this initiative is what they’ve called the “US Prayer Atlas,” which gives two simple prayer requests per day.  These requests are laid out through the month to get all of us praying for every US state and territory, for our national system and institutions, for the church in this country, and for revival in the land.  I’ve ordered copies of the Prayer Atlas for everyone, and I hope everyone in the church will use theirs daily next month as we pray together for our nation.

Now, I think this is an admirable project, and I’m glad to have our church join with churches across America in prayer for this country, but I do have one criticism:  I think the vision of the men doing this is too small.  Their materials seem primarily concerned with public moral standards and whether the US is being governed according to biblical principles, and I suspect that if suddenly this nation looked a lot more like it did in the ’50s, they’d figure their prayers had been answered.  Certainly, back then there were many more people in church, the mainline denominations were still planting lots of churches, and there was public respect for Christian faith which is now going if not gone.  On the other hand, I had a colleague in Colorado who pastored one of those 1950s church plants; I remember her saying that when she got there, the church knew nothing about Jesus, because their previous pastors had never talked about him.

Donald Grey Barnhouse, who was then the pastor of Tenth Presbyterian in Philadelphia, read the signs of the times clearly.  As Michael Horton of Westminster Seminary California tells the story,

Barnhouse speculated that if Satan took over Philadelphia, all of the bars would be closed, pornography banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other.  There would be no swearing.  The children would say, “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” and the churches would be full every Sunday . . . where Christ is not preached.

I think he was right.  The Devil would as soon damn people through religion as debauchery, through morality as immorality; after all, people who are immoral and debauched are just likely to hit bottom and realize they need God.  Moral, upstanding citizens are likely to think they already have him, whether they have any actual relationship with him or not.Read more→