"Bountiful Sowing and Reaping" (Acts 2:42-47)

Transcript:

Well, whenever we are involved in any kind of activity or organization, we're always asking ourselves, I think, two questions. First of all, what kind of input is this going to require of me? What kind of sacrifices am I going to have to make of my time, energy, efforts, my talents, maybe even my treasures? And then second, we are going to ask ourselves, what can I expect from this? What kind of outputs can I expect in exchange as a return for what I am putting into this?

And then we are always asking ourselves whether we are considering maybe a new opportunity, or whether we are evaluating kind of the ongoing experience of involvement in something, or whether we are considering whether to make adjustments to our investments in light of the returns that we are getting. We're always evaluating those questions to know, am I putting too much into this or am I getting more out of this than I could hope or dream? Well, those are always questions that we ask. Maybe you do this formally. Maybe you're one of those very detailed, thorough people that sets down a very thorough pro and con list as you evaluate everything you might do, everything you are doing.

Or maybe you're one of those fly by the seat of your pants, shoot from the hip kind of a people where you're just intuitively asking yourself, is this worth it? Well, yeah, I guess it is. Whether you do it formally or informally, all of us are asking this question, and I think it's fair to say that all of us are asking this question about the Church. What's really required of me in the Church? What do I have to sacrifice and what can I expect to get out of this?

What's my return on investment from the time and the energy and the efforts and the investment of my talents and the offering, the treasures that I'm giving for the sake of the Church. And if what we are doing is only a duty, I have to do this. Really only one of two things can happen. Either we will continue to invest at a very high level that we don't feel is commensurate with the output that we are getting in return for this, and we will become increasingly cynical and bitter about what we are doing, or we will just adjust ourselves and we will say, this really isn't worth all that I'm investing. And so I'm going to start tapering down my involvement, perhaps to the point of walking away from the Church altogether.

Now, as we think about the Church, as we think about our involvement of the Church, the text we have in front of us this morning is a critical text for evaluating that kind of return on investment. That we can expect from the church. We're not expecting crass prosperity gospel promises of living our best life. Now, we're not promising that if you gave $100 in the offering this morning, that you can expect tenfold to come from some source after that. That's not the way that this works.

But as we think about the return on investment of the church, we want to see the very biblical principle that is reflected here, that whoever sows bountifully will reap bountifully. That's our theme for this morning, that in the church, whoever sows bountifully will reap bountifully. Now I want to consider this by trying to think about this return on investment idea. So I'm going to structure the sermon this morning by considering different financial concepts. Now, I'm not a banker or a financial manager.

You don't want me managing your money. But these are some basic principles that we can think of as we evaluate what we are going to see here. So the first section, we are going to see that the church expectations revolve around slow and steady growth. What we can expect to see is slow and steady growth. Second, we are going to talk about the fact that the church cannot engage in gutting for profit.

There is no gutting for profit or for maximizing our gains from eliminating our expenses. And the third thing we see is that there are no get rich quick or no spiritually get rich quick schemes for the church. Now again, those are sort of metaphors, concepts to think through these concepts. But hopefully we'll see them as we work our way through this text. So let's start with what we can expect from the church in terms of slow and steady growth in the first section in verses 42 through 43.

But before we look at those verses, let's remember what happened in the immediate preceding verse in verse 41 where we left off yesterday in our scripture reading. So those who receive his that's Peter's word, the word of the gospel, about Jesus whom God had made, both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom they crucified. So for those who received his word, they were baptized. And there were added that day about 3,000 souls. Now this addition of 3,000 souls was up from where the church began.

We read about that in Acts chapter one, verse 15 of 120 persons. If you do the math, that is a 25 fold increase. It's a tremendous increase, a tremendous infusion of new people into the fellowship of the church. And so what does this fledgling church, what do these new Believers do, we might ask. Well, Luke tells us and gives us a snapshot of their activities in the life of the church.

Starting in verse 42, we read and they devoted themselves. This is a description of what they did, what they offered as continuous deliberate investments of their time, of their energy, of their efforts. In addition, we're going to see of their talents and their treasures that they're going to pour into the church. They devoted themselves to certain things. And notice that Luke gives us four individual things to the apostles teaching and the fellowship, to the the breaking of bread and to the prayers.

Now, we see four items there, but I want you to notice that there are two uses of the Word and in this passage. Notice. To the apostles teaching and the fellowship. And then there's a second section to the breaking of bread and the prayers that's very faithful to what the Greek text has. There's two uses of ands, which suggests, I think, that that what Luke is giving us is not just four individual unrelated items.

He's really giving us two pairs of items. And each of those pairs are connected. The items in those pairs are connected in a way that helps us to understand more fully what he is getting at. So let's look at these both as individual items and in the two sets of pairs that we have. So the first item we have is to the apostles teaching.

Now, the apostles teach. Teaching comes from what the apostles were teaching them. And what. What were the apostles teaching them? Well, we know back in Acts chapter one, verse two, that in the 40 days between the time of Jesus's resurrection from the dead and ending in the time of Jesus ascension into heaven, there were 40 days where Jesus was instructing his disciples, his apostles, in the Holy Spirit.

What Jesus was doing was. There was this period of preparation for the apostles for what they were going to be doing. We talked about that in that sermon that just as Jesus had 40 days of preparation in the wilderness where he was tempted and tested and tried, so these apostles had 40 days of their own equipping, their own preparation for the public ministry that they would be engaged in. And so here they are teaching, presumably what Jesus taught them during those times. They are teaching what Jesus taught them.

Well, where do we find this teaching of the apostles today? Well before Jesus apostles died out, they committed their teaching to the Scriptures of the New Testament, which built upon the Scriptures of the Old Testament so that we have the whole counsel of God set down for us in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. And what does the New Testament emphasize? We can get A flavor or a sense of what they taught by studying the New Testament. And we see that the New Testament is really given to two particular emphases.

The first is what man is to believe concerning God. And the second is what duty God requires of man. To use the language from Westminster Shorter Catechism. Question number three of what the Scriptures principally teach in the New Testament. We know that God wants us to believe the Gospel, a particular message about who Jesus is, namely, that God has made him both Lord and Christ.

This Jesus who was crucified, who died, who was buried, and then on the third day rose from the dead. And then 40 days after, he ascended into heaven, where he is seated on the throne of David at the right hand of the Father, where he is reigning and ruling, putting his enemies under his feet, until the day when he comes again to complete his mission in this world, to bring his children home and to renew the heavens and the earth to be a place where we will dwell with him forever, while the wicked will be cast into hell for all of eternity. That day is coming, and we must perpetually keep it before us. But the second thing that we see in the teaching of the New Testament is that that teaching is not just a set of facts. This is not just something for gurus to instruct us in as though we were Gnostics, where it's all just about sort of populating our minds with the right mental furniture, the right mental thoughts.

This teaching is always flowing out into a practical effect. The New Testament is always giving emphasis to the various responsibilities that we have to one another in our various relationships to one another in the church, in the families and relationships of husbands to wives and relationships of children to parents and parents to children, and our relationships as brothers and sisters in Christ, in the church, and relationship of the church to the rest of the world. There's all of these responsibilities that we are given that are lived out and instructed us as an outflow of the apostles teaching of who Jesus is. And this is something of what we get in this second term. It's not in the apostles teaching, but it's also the fellowship.

Now, fellowship is a broad word. It can refer to everything in the church, from picnics to prayer meetings. We had one yesterday, we're going to have another today. And all of this is contained in the social relationships in life and the responsibilities that we have to one another. And the idea of connecting these is very clear.

That the teaching we have, the apostles teaching, is telling us something important theologically about who God is, about what Jesus Christ has done for us. But that theology is eminently practical. It tells us about who we are in relationship to one another in the church. And so in this first section, we really see how the teaching flows into the fellowship. But what about the second prayer?

The second prayer? If the first prayer or the first section had fellowship in mind, the apostles teaching flowing into fellowship, how to live our lives in relationships, the second pair has in view the worship of the church. Notice Luke talks about the breaking of. Literally, it's the bread, the breaking of the bread. Most people would agree that although there are some differences, that this is a reference to the broken bread of the Lord's Supper, the celebration of the Lord's Supper at worship, and also to the prayers.

Now, in prayers, we can be talking about a prayer meeting like we're going to have in the perch on the third floor at 11 o'. Clock. In case you missed the announcements, please come. Are we praying together then? That could refer to those kinds of prayers.

But when we're gathered for worship, we're primarily praying. We're hearing God's word and then we're praying back in response to Him. Now, sometimes the pastor is the one praying and we're praying silently in our hearts, talking to God and to ourselves, in our hearts uttering amen to what someone else is praying. Sometimes we pray together, as for example, when we pray together the Lord's Prayer. Other times we are praying through the very songs that we sing.

The songs that we sing are prayers that we are offering to God. That's the way we lift up our voices together to sing to God. And so our worship service, you might call an hour of prayer a time of prayer. Even though we do different things in the midst of this. And one of the evidences of this use of the word prayer is just a little bit later.

If you look down the page at chapter three, verse one, we read. Now, Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, which was the ninth hour. What happened at the ninth hour? Well, that was the time for a public worship service. That was the time when the morning sacrifice was offered.

That was the time when there was scripture read, when there was singing, the choirs that would be singing, when there was prayers that were offered on behalf of the sacrifices that were offered. That hour of prayer was not just a small prayer meeting up in a perch somewhere. It was the worship of the gathered people of God. And we see the early church devoting themselves not only to the apostles teaching and how that informs the fellowship and relationships they have with one another, but also to the gathered public, corporate worship of the church. Now, it's very important to recognize that what these people in the early church devoted themselves to was internal.

Do you see that they're focused on learning from the apostles teaching. They're focused on the fellowship that they have with one another as fellow believers in Christ. They're focusing on the breaking of the bread, the Lord's Supper, which is shared only by the church, and the prayers that they are offering when they are gathered together as a corporate church. The first thing that the church must shore up in every age is our internal life, what we do when we gather together. But that does not mean that we ever take our eyes off of the outside world.

And the next thing that Luke tells us is that in the midst of this, as the church was busy doing these things together, focusing on their apostles, teaching informed fellowship, and focusing on their public worship, is that awe came upon every soul. The word awe there means fear. Fear came upon every soul. And it's almost certain that Luke has in mind the outside world, not every soul in the church, but every soul outside of the church. And the reason that's clear is if you look at the next verse, he shifts and he says, and different subject.

All who believed did these sorts of things. So awe, fear fell upon every soul in one instance, but a different group, all who believed did something else. So there was fear falling upon every soul. And this is something that we see throughout the Bible, particularly Old Testament. In the Old Testament, we regularly see fear falling upon the surrounding peoples and nations to protect and prevent the outside nations from hindering what God was doing in the midst of his people.

As the patriarchs were moving as sojourners through the land, fear fell upon them, so they didn't harass them. As God brought his people out of Egypt, fear fell upon the surrounding nations. As God brought his people into the land of Canaan by parting the river, the Jordan river, stopping it up so that they could cross over on dry ground once again, fear fell upon all the nations. In fact, we are told that this fear often serves an evangelistic purpose. Rahab, she converts, she defects to Israel.

Why? Because she says that when her nation heard about what God had done for Israel, fear fell upon them and their hearts melted and became like water. And so, in desperation, she cries out. Rather than defiantly resisting them, she cries out, save me and my household. So what we are seeing here is that what the church is doing together has an effect on the outside world.

Fear came upon every soul, and many Wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. Now it's important for those signs and wonders to continue to be done. That was important for verifying the truthfulness of this gospel they were preaching. But notice that this is outside of the list of the things that they were devoting themselves to. Now, I think if we had an apostle here today, that's all we'd be asking for, right?

Like sh. Show us another one of your signs and wonders. Yeah, yeah, the Bible, it's fine. And prayers, those are fine. But my goodness, show us something you can do.

And of course, Jesus rebuked people who chase after him seeking after signs and wonders. If an apostle were here and that's all we were after, he'd be rebuking us, too. What we are seeing here is the church did the right thing by devoting themselves not to signs and wonders, as important as those were, but to very ordinary, very slow and steady methods of what they were giving themselves to in the church. In God's vision for his church, he wants to see his people hunger for his word, not so that they could just think the right thoughts, as important as good theology is, but so that we can put it into practice in our relationships, our fellowship with one another, and in our gathered worship together as the people of God. If this were a financial plan, if you were thinking about this in the methods of a financial planner, you know, financial planners are constantly trying to give you the right ways to leverage this particular product and the tax laws over here and trying to produce something that's very complex, that takes advantage of every possible loophole and advantage you could find.

But this is so simple. This is like paying a lot of money to come to a financial planner. And the financial planner says, here's what you're going to do. You're going to put money in your savings account, and you're going to keep putting money in your savings account, and there's going to be compounding interest. All right, I'll collect my fee.

Now, that's the vision that we're giving here. It's very slow and steady and ordinary, but little by little, the church is growing. Now, if that's the vision for what the church is to be doing, I think there are a couple of temptations that we might be drawn aside from. And the first one is that in the life of the church, there are always temptations to cut corners, particularly by saying, you know, we could go so much faster, we could do so much more as a church, if we weren't always hampered by the many Needs that consume so many of our resources. Things that seem to require a high input and seem to give very little in return.

And so this brings us to the second section, where we see there's no gutting for profit. That is, there is no reduction of input in order to increase our return on a smaller investment. But look at what we have here in verses 44 and verse 45. There were needs in this church, and the church took care of those needs. Verse 44.

All who believed were together and had all things in common, and they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all as any had need. There's a very clear principle. As any had need, the church would arise to meet that need. Again, a very simple principle. But this is a passage that has become so distorted by various economic development debates.

Some look at this passage and they say, well, there you go. We see communism or socialism in the Bible where everyone gave up their claims to private property. But we're missing the point of what's being taught here if we take that line of interpretation, because Even in verse 44, it says they had all things in common. So you say, okay, well, in what sense? Well, in verse 45, it says they were selling their possessions and belongings.

They were selling what belonged to them, their private property, and they were distributing the proceeds to all as any had need. When needs arose, they would use their private property to benefit those in need. Later on, in Acts chapter five, we have the story of Ananias and Sapphira who sold some land and they gave much, but not all of the money to the church, saying, this is what we received in exchange for selling the land here. The church can have it. They wanted the recognition of people who had given everything from the sale of this land to the church, but they did not want to give all of the money to the church.

Now, the problem was not that they didn't give everything. The problem was that they lied about it. And so Peter says to Ananias, while this property remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal?

The issue that we are seeing here, come to the front. Is that the body took care of other needs in the body. You know, sometimes you hear about surgical procedures where people have to have some kind of reconstruction work or something has to be repaired, and to do that surgery, they will. Something is so damaged or lost or something like that, where they need tissue grafts from some other part of the body to sort of make up for what is lost or what's being reconstructed. Now, if you're someone in dire need of this surgery, and you know, maybe it's on one part of your body and they have to take a graft of tissue from another part of your body, you're going to be absolutely ready to make that exchange.

I have excess tissue in one place. Let's use it for whatever I need in the other part of the surgery. What you don't do is today, go home, take a scalpel and start finding all the excess tissue in your body, cutting it off and setting it on a shelf somewhere just so you do this. When you have a need, when one part of the body has a lack, you're willing to use what is excess to meet that lack. But you don't do it in advance.

And that's what we're seeing here. As needs arose, the body arose to take care of those needs. But the question whenever the. Whenever we consider the body of Christ, is that now we're not talking about my needs, one part of my physical body to benefit another part of my physical body, we're talking about other members. Now, the scriptures tell us in that apostles teaching that we are so connected to one another that we are members of the same body of Christ, when one suffers, all of us suffer.

When one has a need, the excess of others is supposed to meet that need. But the question arises, if I give that up to meet that need, what am I going to get out of that? What's my return on investment? Now, I had a phone call this summer with a man. That was a phone call I wanted to have for a long time.

It just sort of came out of the blue. He called me. He didn't really know who I was, but he called me to ask for some help with something. He's a ruling elder in the pca and he called me, and I've known his name for a long time. And so I said, I'd love to help you with this.

Tell me, do you know the man by your same name? I'd seen his name a lot. And so I wondered, are you related to the man by the same name at Faith Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where I went to seminary? He said, well, yeah, that was my father. And I said, your father died a few years ago, didn't he?

And he said. He said, yes, he did. I said, let me tell you a story about your dad. Your dad and your mother. When my wife and I were very first married, when we had absolutely nothing, we were as poor as we could possibly be.

Your parents saw that and we didn't ask for anything. They just one day showed up and said, hey, we have an excess couch and a loveseat. Can we give it to you? Now? We were sitting on.

We were sitting on the floor, floor in our living room and we were sitting on some dining room chairs that we had scraped together from I don't know where. But these dear saints brought us this. It's just a generosity. They blessed us that day with that gift. I've never forgotten it because it was something we desperately needed at that time.

It was such a blessing to me to receive on that day. But as I was telling him and realizing this is a story about his deceased father, that he did not know that I was actually able to give him something, not because of what I had given, just because I happened to be there as the recipient of the generosity of his father. And let me tell you, as much of a blessing as it was to receive that gift, it was a far greater blessing to give the gift of this memory of his deceased father that he did not know about. As Jesus is quoted in Acts, chapter 20, verse 35, it is far more blessed to give than to receive. What do you get out of this?

You have no idea until you are the giver of a blessed gift. Well, it's always tempting to cut those losses, to try to avoid maybe unnecessary expenses, but we can't do that. But there's another part of this in the third section where it might not be that we're trying to cut losses, but we're trying to get as quick of a return on investment as possible. We want to chase after the get spiritually rich quick schemes. Maybe we read a book and this is the secret that you're missing, that if you could just implement it, your life would be transformed immediately.

We'd love for that to be true, wouldn't we? We want to put a coin into the vending machine that we call God and we want to get back a reward from him immediately. But that's not the way this works. What God calls us to in his church is bountiful sowing that one day, eventually, slowly and steadily for sure, but will one day lead to bountiful reaping. And so in the third section, we have no get rich quick schemes.

In verses 46 through 47. The word there in 46 for attending and day by day attending. This is actually the same word that appeared earlier. For they were devoted to. It's the same word.

They were devoted to what? Well, they were devoted to worship and they were Attending the temple or devoted to the temple. And the word there for together is a word that means with one mind. They were together in the sense of having one mind, one impulse. In other words, their impulse that they shared together was that they needed to be in the temple.

That is, they needed to be worshipping publicly, but also they need to be engaged in fellowship. They were attending the temple together and breaking bread in their home. Earlier the phrase was breaking the bread. And again I argued, that's probably the Lord's supper. This is just breaking bread.

It refers to just ordinary meals shared together in the life of the church. And here they were, they were dedicated, they were of the same mind, the same impulse to worship together and to fellowship together. Those are the same things that we saw earlier, worship and fellowship. And they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And you ask, what is the return on all of this?

And the Lord added to their number day by day, those who were being saved. The Lord gave steady growth day by day to his church. Now, the application that I want to draw from this is this invest goes bountifully in worship and fellowship. I want to think about these two aspects that we saw both in the first section and the second section being devoted to both worship and fellowship. So for worship, you're here this morning.

That's wonderful. I call you to make public worship a priority, not to miss unless you are seriously providentially hindered. You know, there are people that I've talked to, especially some of those who are shut in, who have learned the value of gathering with the church particularly poignantly because they can no longer come because they are providentially hindered by their health and unable to come. For those of us with the freedom and the ability to come, is coming here something we take for granted? Is it one of those obligations that are on our calendar that I guess it's time again?

Or is this something that we are devoted to with one mind? We want to be here worshiping. I was glad when they said, let us go to the house of the Lord. And I want us to think about this especially. There's an additional fringe benefit of having no technology.

We have no live stream here. This morning you are getting something that no one else is even able to what witness this morning, unless you were here. So that's an added bonus. So there was a good reason that the Lord had for removing power and Internet and things like that. Come here.

It's the only place we can get this. I want to also put evening worship before you. Again, I'm a zealot about evening worship. What a pleasure if, if we're called to devote ourselves to public worship. You know, the apostles went in Acts, chapter three, verse one, to the morning sacrifices, the ninth hour.

Well, there were also evening sacrifices, the third hour of the day. Coincidentally, that was the same hour of the day that Jesus our Lord gave up his life. The time of the evening sacrifice, that wasn't coincidental. That was planned in the providence of God. But there's a pattern throughout Scripture, Old Testament and New Testament of worshiping morning and evening, morning and evening.

This is a time when we can get more apostles teaching together from more scripture readings from another sermon, drawing us deeply into the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. This is a time when we can engage more in the prayers, we have more singing, and we even in the evening have a corporate prayer time, which is just wonderful to share prayer needs and pray for those together and to see over time the way the Lord answers those prayers. We are called to devote ourselves to these things. And I want to encourage you, if that's not been an aspect of what you were devoted yourself to, and you're asking, what do I really get as a return on evening worship? This passage really shows us that this is built into the life of the church.

Take advantage of what you have.

The next aspect is fellowship. I want to plug a little bit the fellowship task force. They are a gem in this church. I got to sit in their task force meeting a few weeks ago, and they brag that they have the most fun task force meeting because they just get to throw parties. And that's really true.

Yesterday they threw a great party, a tremendous picnic. And I hope that this passage helps us to frame that fellowship in light of what's going on there. It wasn't about the food. It wasn't about the baby races. It wasn't about the egg tosses or.

Or even cornhole. As fierce as the competition was there, it was an opportunity to devote ourselves to fellowship in the church. So what do we get out of things like that? What do we get out of all the different fellowship events that our. Our party planning committee is putting on?

Do we put a coin of investment into that fellowship and get some specific trinket in return? Well, maybe you won a prize yesterday, but that's not what I'm talking about. When we sow bountifully in time, energy, effort, relationships, talents, treasures in the church, we'll read bountifully. Let me give you A very simple application to sort of put this into focus. You're here.

Check that off. Good job. You're here for the worship part. Let's talk about the fellowship. Want to encourage you that after this worship service, stay for the after party.

There is a wonderful time of pop, cookies and coffee downstairs. And you might be asking yourself, what do you get out of this? Well, it's impossible to quantify the return on investment of a single hour. Especially because the first few times you do anything like that, it's always awkward. I don't know what to say to these people.

I don't want kind of don't know what kind of conversations I'm supposed to have, but I want you to think about what's the return on investment of hundreds of hours across hundreds of Sundays, with the relationships with the people who are here in this room today and whom God increasingly day by day, adds to our number as time goes on. If you sow bountifully, the promise is that you'll reap bountifully. And when a church has vibrant fellowship, it becomes such a natural place to draw outsiders in. I will tell you, one of the main selling points for our own children was do you remember that church where they had cookies and pop after the service sold? It's a wonderful time to draw people in.

Well, may the Lord bless us in our worship and our fellowship. Come to the fellowship time. Come to the prayers in the perch. Come to worship tonight. May the Lord bless us so that the Lord might regularly add to the number of those who are being saved, even day by day, if that should be his will.

As the Lord continues to build his church until the day when our Lord Jesus returns. Let's pray.