Acts 2:37-47

Acts 2:42 And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.

It is possible that we have so redefined conversion in terms of human decisions and have so removed any necessity of the experience of God’s Spirit, that many people think they are saved when in fact they only have Christian ideas in their head not spiritual power in their heart.

We saw last week Jesus promised to send the Holy Spirit to help us live. It is in this context that at Pentecost and immediately afterwards that the evidence was in their practical life.

How to Receive the Gift of the Holy Spirit

The Word of God Must Be Heard

Peter has preached that in God’s plan Jesus was crucified, raised, and exalted as Lord over all the universe and that forgiveness of sin and spiritual renewal can be had from him. The Word has been heard.

Each Individual Must Receive the Word

Verse 41: “So those who received his word were baptized.” Receiving the Word means that it becomes part of you so that you trust the Christ the Word presents. You trust his provision for your forgiveness, his path for your life, and his power to help you obey. And you trust his promises for your future. And that radical commitment to Christ always involves repentance, a turning away from your own self-wrought provisions and paths and powers and promises. When you really turn to Christ for new paths and new power, you open yourself to the Holy Spirit, because it is by his Spirit that Christ guides and empowers us to live a practical Christian life.

Four Commitments are seen in the first gathering of the early church. The outpouring of the Spirit produced not just momentary enthusiasm but four continuing commitments: to learn, to care, to fellowship and to worship. The apostles’ teaching probably included an account of Jesus’ life and ministry, his ethical and practical teachings, warnings about persecution and false teaching, and the Christocentric Old Testament hermeneutic. But at its center was the gospel message. And so today, to devote oneself to the apostles’ teaching means evangelism as well as edification.

The Apostles’ Teaching

Acts 2:42 And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.

The believers are said to have “devoted themselves” to four practices in their new life together. First was the teaching of the apostles. Just as the apostles had been instructed by Jesus, so they passed along that instruction to the new Christians. In keeping with Jesus’ teaching to them (chap. 1), this would have included such subjects as his resurrection, the Old Testament Scriptures, the Christian witness, and surely their own recollection of Jesus’ earthly ministry and teachings.

The fundamental activity of the first congregation is this firm, continued adherence “to the teaching of the apostles.” They were the called teachers and preachers and they began their work at once, after Pentecost, there being about 300 hearers to each apostle.

At various times in Acts, especially in the early chapters, Luke gives summary reports of how the church is doing. Here we have the first. In it Luke describes what a biblical church really looks like, not only in the first century, but in every century from the Lord’s ascension until his second coming.

A biblical church is marked by teaching. Thousands of new converts needed to understand precisely how Peter linked Old Testament text with the ministry of Jesus. Theologians call it “Messianic Christology”. It became the core of New Testament doctrine.

The Early Church and a Biblical Church is a Learning, Studying Church

The first phrase says that they devoted themselves to “the apostles’ teaching.” Luke stresses that in these early days, in spite of an experience as great as that of Pentecost, which might have caused them to focus on their experiences, the disciples devoted themselves first to teaching.

The community lived out its commitment to the apostles’ teaching by gathering each day in the temple courts to hear instruction. They probably met in Solomon’s colonnade, at the eastern end of the court of the Gentiles (5:12; compare 5:20–21, 42, and Jesus’ practice, Luke 20:1; 21:37). In the temple they also fulfilled their commitment to prayer as they engaged in corporate worship.

It could have been a temptation for the early believers to look back to Pentecost and focus on the past. They might have remembered the way the Holy Spirit came and how he used them to speak so that those in Jerusalem each heard them in his or her own language. They might have longed to experience something like that again. They might have been praying, “Please, Lord, do something miraculous again.”

A Spirit-filled church always studies the apostolic teaching. It is a learning church that grounds its experiences in and tests those experiences by the Word of God.

It is important that the object of their study was the apostolic teaching. The apostles were people specifically chosen by Jesus Christ to remember, teach about, and authentically record the events and meaning of his ministry. The importance of this office is seen in the way the apostles went about choosing a replacement for Judas, who had betrayed Christ and then committed suicide. Many people had witnessed the events of Christ’s ministry, but the Lord did not choose all of them. He chose a certain number. And he chose those to remember and record an official, Spirit-inspired compendium of his teaching. Jesus said in the last discourses, recorded in John’s Gospel, that after he was gone he would send the Spirit to bring to their remembrance all that he had taught.

We live in a different age, of course. We live thousands of years after this teaching. Peter is not with us. James was martyred. John has died. So have all the others. Even Paul, who came along later, has gone. How is it possible for us to focus on the apostolic teaching? These men gave us the New Testament.

This is the deposit of their teaching.

A Spirit-filled church is always going to be a Bible-studying church. What is true of the church is true for individuals also. If you are Spirit-filled, then you will be drawn to this Book.

They Fellowshipped Together

Acts2:42: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship …”

Here the believers fulfilled the words the Lord gave his disciples just before the crucifixion:

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:34–35).

We have a lot of images that come to our minds when we think of fellowship. Most of them are pretty tame. We think of simple togetherness, and that is certainly part of it. But Luke seems to focus on another more radical meaning of fellowship. The word “fellowship” (koinonia) is built on the root meaning: common, having in common, sharing.

This text is threatening to many of us who own a lot of things and believe that the right of private property is assumed in the command, “Thou shalt not steal.” And so when we read this story, we are very quick to defend ourselves and point out that there is no coercion here. The selling of property is all voluntary.

We must be very careful here. How easy it is to justify our lifestyles and our attachment to things by writing off threatening texts. There is no doubt that Luke recorded this fellowship because it was praiseworthy. Luke admired this sacrificial love for the sake of the needy. He was giving the well-to-do Theophilus (and to the materialism of Americans) a lesson in the way Christians who stand in awe of God handle their possessions.

This radical fellowship was an antidote for the suicide of materialism committed by the man who built bigger and bigger barns and lost his soul.

In a moment Luke is going to talk about times of eating and praying together, what we usually call fellowship. But that is not his first illustration of fellowship. His first illustration is that the believers were so bonded that if one was in need, the others did not feel they had the right to live on in prosperity without giving up something to meet the needs of others. They would sell possessions and use the money to meet the needs of the poor in the church.

What a standard for today’s church, or better yet, an indictment. What we do or do not do with our material possessions is an indicator of the Spirit’s presence or absence.

The apostles’ fellowship and breaking of bread was a sharing of possessions to meet needs and of lives in common meals (2:44–46). What an inviting way of life for our day, when “loneliness drives people into one place, but that does not mean that they are together, really”

verse 46: “And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook of food with glad and generous hearts.” “Breaking bread” might refer to the Lord’s Supper, or it might simply refer to simple table fellowship. But “partaking of food with glad and generous hearts” shows that togetherness was a precious thing to the believers in the early church. They loved to be together at meals.

They Gathered and Prayed

Jesus. When they got in touch with each other, they got in touch with God. They prayed.

How It All Hangs Together

What’s the driving force that made those believers free from their possessions, and eager to meet needs, and full of gladness and generosity and praise and prayer when they ate together day after day?

Could it be the key is found in verse 43 in the phrase, “fear came upon every soul”—a joyful, trembling sense of awe that you don’t trifle with the God of the apostles. That is not our experience. Today for most people, including most professing Christians, God is an idea to talk about, or an inference from an argument, or a family tradition to be preserved. But for very few people is God a stark, fearsome, stunning, awesome, shocking present REALITY. For to many, even Christians, He is tame, distant, and silent.

Where are the churches of whom Luke could say today, “Fear—awe, wonder, trembling—is upon every soul”? Are you and I people who make up a church that could be described that way?

The absence of this fear has a direct effect on the way we accumulate possessions for ourselves, the way we ignore the needy, the way we trivialize fellowship, and the way we play more than we pray.

Churches are dying today because they are not doing anything which the world should look at and say: “There is evidence that God is real and that he is glorious.” Many churches have forgotten why they exist: namely, to do good deeds in the name of Jesus so that people will be moved to give God glory (Matthew 5:16).

When the church forgets that it exists for others and for God, it becomes in-grown and self-satisfied and can go on year after year like a social club with a religious veneer. But its life is ebbing away, and people are no longer saying: “Look at all their good deeds and the humble spirit of love in which they are done; their God must be a glorious God of encouragement.”

The Result of Practical Lives Lived out by the Power of the Holy Spirit

Every day the Lord Jesus by his Spirit saved some, incorporating them into their number. God’s plan is for churches to grow. The challenge for us is,

“Will we meet the Scriptural conditions for growth: a dedication to be a learning, caring, fellowshipping, worshipping church?” Will we meet the essential conditions?

Will you and out live that out in our practical lives?