Resurrected Body Life

Scripture Reading

The Scripture reading today is from Acts 2: 41-47. If the miracle of Pentecost and the preaching of Peter might be seen as God’s act by which He gave birth to the church, through the repentance of about 3,000 persons that heard that sermon – then we have here the earliest description of the church. If we remember that the apostles spoke of the church as of Christ’s body after His bodily ascension into heaven, and that the same Spirit who rose Jesus from the dead dwells in our mortal bodies (that is, the mortal bodies of believers), then it is fair to call the church the resurrected body life of Jesus Christ. So our text today takes up at the end of Peter’s sermon.

With that in mind, let us pray.

God whose Holy Spirit dwelt in the church of old, dwell in us. Draw us together into unity, bring us to the place where our flesh is crucified and we can say with Paul, “It is not I that live, but Christ who lives in me.” Help us to abide in the apostle’s doctrine, and in fellowship, and in the breaking of bread, and of prayer. In Christ’s Name, Amen.

Acts 2: 41-47

“Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”

This concludes the reading of Holy Scripture. May God add His blessing to the Word.

Introduction

Many of you reported to me how much you enjoyed having Peter Marshall come to Bemidji and speak over last weekend. I think most of us could agree that some of the anointing of his father, Dr. Peter Marshall, has rubbed off onto the son, the Rev. Peter Marshall. Peter is six feet four inches tall, and has a deep bass voice which doesn’t hurt any. The sermons he preaches on these renewal weekends are all from the same cloth. Many of us heard some of the same quotations given two or three times during the weekend. He knows these sermons well, and the illustrations and quotations that elaborate them.

Now I make no claim to preach as brilliantly as Peter preaches. But I want to point out to you that the thrust of his messages is no different than what I have preached to you. He had two main thrusts to his message. First, if we are to renew America, we must discover America’s Christian heritage – through the Pilgrims, the Puritans, and the Founders of our Great Republic. Much of his teaching series is an attempt to go back and recapture the original vision of the people who came to and ulitmately founded America. If we don’t know our past, neither can we understand our present or work toward a better future.

His second thrust came from II Chronicles 7:14. This is an Old Testament Scripture – but it applies today to the people of God – the Christians – even as it applied to Israel of old. It calls for God’s people (those called by God’s name) to humble themselves, that is, to recognize that we are nothing without God and we can accomplish nothing of value without God doing it through us). Secondly, we are to pray and seek God’s face – that is, pray with the end of discovering God’s presence and will for our lives. Thirdly, we are to repent; that is, turn from our wicked ways. Peter said that our wicked ways are simply the ways of self – the ways of individualism, complacency, fear, anxiety, living for self rather than living in obedience to Christ. Now in this passage this kind of repentance has occurred. A few verses before in vs. 37 it says that the people were cut to the heart. There is a turning from self to God. Now many of us have learned that repentance happens when a person converts to Christianity – that we repent and believe the Good News, but Peter points out there is nothing one time about it, because the ways of self are what we do naturally out of our fallen human nature. Repentance must be a life-long process that is daily, as God’s Holy Spirit changes us daily from our old ways of thinking and acting to the new creation he is working in us. Nothing is more fundamental to faith than this daily turning from self to God.

Without personal repentance the next miracle would be impossible, and that is the coming together of transformed people to make up the church. The text reads, “Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer.”

Now they are baptized, that is, immersed or inducted, into the life of union with Christ and one another. Clearly in the text this means something much more than the Institutional membership of many of our modern churches. The only comparable thing we have to compare it with is the covenant of marriage. They are inducted into the covenant. We’ve talked a lot about covenant, but a covenant is a permanent, life-long relationship based on God’s Word and the vows and promises of those entering the covenant. It is not something easily broken. When thus baptized, it says that they devoted themselves to four things – the apostle’s doctrine, to koininea or fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer. The definite impression is that these people loved to be together, because in being together they experienced God in their midst.

The Four Devotions

Do you personally love to be together with the people of God as much as the early church did? Each of us should ask ourselves that question, because upon it hinges whether or not we have stayed in daily repentance.

When Christian people are together, they are sustained by four devotions. The first is the apostle’s teaching, and that teaching is the same as our Lord Jesus’ teaching, and it ultimately became enshrined in the Holy Scriptures, the Word of God. On Monday, the day that Peter left, Arlo Feiock called me during my lunch hour (I was subbing at the High School) and had me turn on the Public Radio to listen to a retired American Episcopal Bishop pontificate. His name is John Shelby Spong. It was shocking to hear this Episcopal Bishop in the name of the church tell so many lies to so many people with such great assurance. But I will review briefly what he said, because we can know the apostle’s doctrine as the opposite of what Mr. Spong says.

Bishop Spong attacks the notion that there can or could be a Personal God, denying the very first assertion of the Apostle’s Creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty.” Theism is the very heart of the Christian faith. Since he does not accept theism, he also rejects the incarnation, calling the Christology of the ages bankrupt. Obviously, he says, if we take the Virgin Birth literally, then Christ would be some kind of monster – half human, half divine, so he rejects the Virgin Birth. The story of Eden and the Fall – a perfect world, fallen through sin, he opines, is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian non-sense. And of course the miracle stories in Scripture can no longer be understood as the supernatural events performed by an incarnate God.

The idea of Christ dying on the Cross for the sins of the whole world – the Atonement – Spong calls a barbaric idea based on primitive ideas. And likewise, the Resurrection cannot in any sense have been physical – but rather Jesus was resurrected into the meaning of God, whatever that means. As one can see already, Spong consistently and repeatedly attacks the Bible as in any way authoritative. His views on the relativity of all truth renders all words subjective – and incapable of expressing objective truth. He sees science – especially evolution – as true knowledge over against the so-called “truths” of Scripture. And he pontificates that guilt is bad and therefore the hope of eternal life must be separated from all attempts at behavior modification. He accepts homosexuality as a natural, healthy, life-affirming form of sexuality and performs same-sex marriages.

All of this would scarcely be shocking if it came out of the mouth of a pagan – but he says all of this in the name of what he calls his new Christianity. In contrast, the church lives by the very beliefs he denies – the apostles’ teaching: that is, we believe in a Creator God, who made us in His image, so that every human life is precious. History is not circular but progressive – and at the end of it we must face this God and give account for our lives.

Although God created our world good, we live in a fallen world, inheriting from our first parents a fallen corrupt human nature. Our natural ways are sinful, and our world is characterized by corruption, sin, and death. We believe that God has revealed Himself through Holy Scripture – beginning with the Law (Ten Commandments) and then ultimately through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, born of a Virgin, who on earth performed many miraculous healings, signs, and wonders, and at last came to die on the Cross for our sins and for the sins of the whole world.

God raised up Jesus from the dead to demonstrate that the debt to sin was paid and to give those who trust in Him hope of eternal life. We trust the Word of God because we have come to trust in God’s love and we believe that the moral prescriptions of Scripture are for our good. It is not enough that we simply hear these truths and give intellectual consent to them, but that we devote ourselves to them – let them form our character.

The second part of being united as Christ’s resurrected body has to do with fellowship. The word koininea means far more than simply spending an hour or two together on Sunday morning. It means more than going to a pot-luck supper together. Fellowship has to do with body life – all the commandments of Jesus that flesh out his command for us to love one another. It is an intimate involvement in each others’ lives. In that first early church people shared their good with each other so that there was no one in need. This wasn’t a state-imposed communism – it was a voluntary loving fellowship of people who cared for one another – who didn’t leave their wounded on the battlefield.

Christian fellowship has to do with praising God with one another, with praying for one another, with expecting God to heal and perform miracles for the sick. It has to do with letting the Word of God dwell in us richly admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, making melody in our hearts to the Lord. As Peter pointed out on Sunday night, it has to do with confessing our sins to one another – sharing our spiritual struggles and enlisting one another in prayer, so that we can grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ. It has to do with forgiving one another when we fail – and restoring one another into right fellowship. In this sense a church is like a large extended family – with brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins, where we hold onto each other while at the same time we are being held onto by God.

In contrast, fallen human beings tend to socialize only when they are lonely or when they want something from one another, then to withdraw when something is expected from them.

Thirdly, it says they broke bread together. Some commentators think this refers to the sacrament. This may be true but only in the same sense that devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching meant listening to a sermon. Indeed, they met daily in the temple courts, but then it says, “They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people.” The earliest church met in people’s homes – and they shared food with one another. Some cynic once said, “When did these people go to work. They obviously did. Even the earliest church did not spend 24/7 together. But something so marvelous had happened in their midst that it transformed their lives, and they would never be the same again.

The fourth and final thing is prayer. When we pray, we address God, but we pray for one another as well as for the circumstances and neighbors around us. Have you noticed that in each of these activities, it is not just a fellowship between and among people but God is always involved. We cannot break bread without remembering how Christ broke bread, and said, “Take, eat, this is my body.” We cannot pray without addressing the God whose everlasting arms sustain us. We cannot engage in fellowship without recognizing that we are members of one body, whose head is Christ. And we cannot study the Word without remembering that Christ Himself is the Incarnate Word.

This passage ends with a wonderful promise that Peter mentioned on Sunday night right before we had communion. We have thought a lot about and prayed and planned for evangelism – bringing people in. Yet here is this wonderful promise. As the people loved one another and devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and of prayers, it says, “The Lord added daily such as were being saved.” Not annually, not monthly, but daily. Because of the extraordinary presence and power of God in their midst.

Let us pray: Let Christ so abide in us as we come together, that the awe of God once more will fall, and we will be devoted to those things that constitute the body life of the Risen Christ, Amen.

This Sermon was published on 05/31/2007 and filed in