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Copyright © 1991 by Mike McMillan. Not to be reproduced for profit without the permission of the author.
J.B. Phillips, when he was translating the New Testament, chose to call his version of the Book of Acts 'The Young Church In Action.' If 'in action' describes the church then, why, many people wonder, does 'inaction' describe it today?
Phillips himself, in his introduction to the book just mentioned, ascribes the difference to the fact that the individuals who made up the church were filled with the Holy Spirit - empowered and guided by him. He is, of course, quite right; but even now, many churches are full of 'Spirit-filled' people and yet are not having an impact on the New Testament scale. Perhaps the problem is not our wine, but our wineskins. We have limited our concept of the church and its function in a way which, in turn, limits the work of the Holy Spirit. This is not to say that everything they did in Acts is right, or even a model for us when it was. But some of what they did can be useful for us to reflect on and see if we've forgotten anything in our church life today.
So what did the church do right at the beginning - just after Pentecost? 'They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and 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 favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.' (Acts 2:42-47)
The apostles' teaching would have been in several important areas.
They would have passed on the teaching Jesus had given them - the material later incorporated in the gospels. They would have interpreted the Old Testament in the light of his opening of these Scriptures to them after his resurrection (Luke 24:45). They would have brought new inspired teaching as the situation required - the process that gave us the epistles.
And they preached evangelistically. The Jewish leaders were greatly disturbed because the apostles were 'teaching the people and proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection of the dead.' (Acts 4:2.)
The apostles' teaching was the Word of God. It was the basis for everything else that happened in the church. And they taught it fully - the angel who let them out of jail told them, "Go, stand in the temple courts and tell the people the full message of this new life." (Acts 5:20.)
Where do we find the whole message? In the whole Bible. How do we know what is in the whole Bible? We read the whole Bible.
Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God (Matt 4:4). All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work (2 Tim 3:16-17).
Notice the purpose of Scripture. It is not there to inform us. If it were, we would know a lot more about Jesus' life than we do. It has been estimated that if his biography had been written covering every day with the thoroughness with which the Gospels cover that which included the last supper and the burial, we would have one hundred and eighty books the size of the Bible to deal with (Vincent's Word Studies in the NT, Vol 1, p 433). This falls short of John's estimate that if everything Jesus had done were written down, there would not be room in the world for all the books (Jn 21:25); but as he explains at the end of his previous chapter, those which were selected to be recorded 'are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.'
The Bible is not given to inform us, but to transform us. Jesus commissioned the apostles to teach disciples to obey all that he commanded, not just to know it.
When the whole Bible is preached with this goal of transforming the listeners, we begin to approach the church as God would have it. But Acts also conveniently details for us some of the elements of obedience to the Word which go towards making us the spotless Bride of Christ.
'Fellowship' has become a much-used, and hence much abused, word in the modern church. In many cases it has fallen to the level of the breaking of biscuits and dipping them in cups of tea while discussing the weather and/or the football.
In the New Testament church, fellowship was koinonia - sharing (another abused term). John writes, 'We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.' (1 Jn.1:3.)
Fellowship is always twofold, with God and with one another - a subject treated more fully in my article 'One in Christ'. If 'the breaking of bread' here means the Lord's Supper, as seems likely, it symbolises both aspects of this - and is rightly called 'communion'. Paul reminds the Corinthians that the one loaf, which is the Body of Christ, shared among the church, reflects the fact that it too is the Body of Christ- one body (1 Co 10:17).
Accordingly, all the believers were together and had everything in common. 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 (Acts 2:44, 46). All the believers were one in heart and mind. No-one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had (Acts 4:32).
They had a practical community with two aspects: commonality and unity. They were visibly one. They didn't just meet for two hours a week, but were constantly together, eating together in one another's homes - a system later known as the agape (love) meal, and apparently much like a modern pot-luck. They weren't just members of the same church, but members of one another (Ro 12:5).
Nor can we omit fellowship with God. What we glibly talk about as 'a personal relationship with God' was a daily reality in the experience of these people. Both John and Paul reveal in their writings an 'inner life' of communion with their Lord and Lover as rich as any of the 'mystics' who have lived since, yet they were practical, active men, living very much in the world. Here is a goal for each of us to strive for. It can be reached in only one way.
'They devoted themselves . . . to prayer.' It is made no more specific. Prayer for what? Mostly, judging by the rest of the New Testament, for those ministering among them and for one another. Paul often exhorts the recipients of his letters to pray for him, and asserts that he constantly prays for them and for their maturity in the faith.
Prayer is primarily for people; even when asking for prayer for the success of his ministry, Paul says 'Brothers, pray for us that the message of the Lord may spread rapidly and be honoured.' (2 Thess 3:1.)
Few things are as exciting as prayer, especially when it is answered, yet anyone who has ever tried to promote a prayer meeting even among committed Christians will know that it is not widely popular. Why? Partly because we have made it religious, and religion is boring.
The religiousness of our praying, especially in church, was graphically demonstrated to me one day when, at the end of a bracket of songs, I failed to catch the song-leader's words, 'Let's pray.' I was treated to the spectacle of several hundred heads snapping forward in unison, eyes closing as the congregation assumed the traditional religious posture for prayer.
(The traditional Anglo-Saxon posture, that is. In both Old and New Testaments, the usual position was with eyes open, looking up to heaven, and hands outstretched, and this is seen in art for a number of centuries after New Testament times. Not that the position matters particularly, but body language conveys an attitude; our modern one seems ashamed at approaching God, while the ancient one reaches out to embrace him.)
Then again, we don't know how to pray. We haven't listened to Jesus' reply when his disciples asked him, 'Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.' (Luke 11:1.)
The reply in Luke contains 38 Greek words, none of which means 'just' or 'really'. God is addressed by name once, at the beginning. By the time we have said, 'Oh Lord, Father, I just really pray that, Lord, you'll just really bless us here tonight, Father, and Lord, we just really want to come before you here, Lord, and just really ask, Father, that, Lord, you'll just . . .' Jesus has finished his prayer. We haven't started ours, not having asked anything that God could visibly answer.
I used to wonder why we addressed God so unnecessarily often by name in our prayers, until I heard the song 'Lida Rose' from the show The Music Man. It proceeds in a similar way - virtually every second line both opens and closes with the girl's name - and the reason is that the speaker, having been away from town for a long time, is trying to pick up the relationship where he left off and is very, very nervous.
We don't need to be nervous; we can approach the throne of grace with confidence (Heb 4:16). And we can do so concisely and clearly and still see God work. The prophets of Baal had spent hours crying out and cutting themselves and making a song and dance (literally) when Elijah stepped forward and with thirty-three well-chosen Hebrew words brought the fire of God down from heaven (1 Kings 18).
Which brings us to 'signs and wonders'. (See also 'For the Sake of Compassion'.)
Healings in the New Testament were not primarily used to get a hearing for the gospel; they were done basically out of compassion, like Jesus' miracles. But if they created an opportunity for evangelism (like the healing of the crippled man at the temple, which Peter described as 'an act of kindness', Acts 4:9), it was seized like any other opportunity. In this case they were often described as 'signs and wonders', though this is also used as a term for the miracles of God's redemption from Egypt and should not be confined to healings or necessarily applied to all of them.
Although our text depicts only the apostles ministering in this way, Paul writes to the Corinthians about these kinds of gifts in a way that may imply their presence among non-apostles in Corinth. Certainly James exhorts us to call the elders of the church to pray for us if we are sick and seems confident that the prayers will be answered. His link with forgiveness, though, may suggest that it is the psychosomatic illnesses which a tortured soul can produce which are in the mind of the great church leader. This is one for further study; I am no longer so sure as I once was about dramatic contemporary healings being normal and biblically promised. Yet prayer for healing is, I think, though not, by itself, the 'full gospel', scripturally a part of it. So is the next feature we will consider.
'There should be no poor among you' (Deut.15:4) and sure enough, Luke records that 'there were no needy persons among them' (Acts 4:34). Considering that the Jerusalem church later needed famine relief, perhaps asset-stripping was not the ideal way to achieve this. But the famine relief itself came in the same spirit of unity and solidarity, from the Gentile churches whose members had mostly never met those they helped.
"Don't mention social justice - you'll frighten the evangelicals." Too true, unfortunately, in some quarters of the church. We have let the liberals make social justice so much their own that the topic, if raised, raises suspicions about your orthodoxy. But quite apart from the massive biblical basis for it, if the Bible-believing church as a whole began to move into this area it would be a major blow to theological liberalism. It has nothing spiritual to offer, its intellectual basis is false, and if evangelicals are demonstrating biblical love and social concern and being more effective than liberals labouring in their own strength, the church and the world will perhaps realise that Christianity is more than dogmas on the one hand and more than social action on the other; it is a living, personal relationship and a revelation of truth, out of which attitudes and actions must both result.
This is not universally understood. A very highly respected Scottish minister, the Rev. William Still, after emphasising in an article entitled 'What of the future?' that the way forward for the church is through 'the study of the whole Word . . . combined with prayer, corporate prayer', warns against 'the dangerous aberration of embarking on schemes of evangelically-inspired social service - for it would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the Word of God to serve tables, however urgently they were needed.' (Evangel, Vol 5, No 3, Autumn 1987, pp 7-8.)
This demonstrates the dreadful plight of conservative evangelicalism. He has just called for systematic preaching of the whole Bible, as I did earlier in this article, yet he is prepared to reject one of its major themes - justice for the poor. He justifies this by using a verse out of context in a way he would never condone in a cultist - or a charismatic, whose approach he rejects with a veiled and dismissive reference to shallowness and emotionalism.
The first thing that the apostles did after making the statement which he alludes to about waiting on tables was to have the church appoint their best men, 'men who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom', to do exactly that! If we are not preaching justice for the poor and oppressed, we are not declaring the whole counsel of God; if we are not acting to oppose those things which create poverty and oppression, we are disobedient.
We cannot preach Isaiah 53 and not Isaiah 58, any more than we can preach Isaiah 58 and not Isaiah 53, and pretend to be biblical. We cannot fast as we do today and expect our voice to be heard on high (Isa 58:4). On the other hand, when I remarked something like this to a prominent neo-orthodox clergyman of my acquaintance, he asked "What's Isaiah 53?" His concern with social justice had led him to neglect the great chapter of redemption until he needed to be reminded what it was.
Why has 'liberation theology' arisen in South America, preaching a false gospel of justice through the gun? Because the church has not preached the true gospel of justice through the Son. When the Christian voice which the media hear is mocked as head-in-the-sand conservatism, we need to realize that Christianity is not conservative - it is the most radical thing ever to hit this planet.
What else did these radicals do? They worshipped God. That's one of the things they did in the temple courts each day, as well as in their homes (Acts 5:42; Luke 24:52-53). (These were also the two venues, public and private, for the apostles' teaching, a pattern also followed by Paul in Ephesus, according to Acts 5:42; 20:20.)
British worship leader and songwriter Graham Kendrick, in his book Worship (Kingsway, 1984), reminds us how radical this activity is. 'To genuinely worship Jesus as Lord of all is immediately to challenge all false gods, and to pose a threat to their dark and dingy domains. Bearing in mind that the gods of this world are intricately bound into the godless political and social systems that surround us, it is absolutely true to say that worship is a political act.' (p 35).
Worship is a celebration, like the first two chapters of Ephesians, of him who freed us from this present evil age and from domination by our 'flesh' and its desires, and reconciled us to God and to one another. It is a response to the teaching, an expression of the fellowship, an intense form of prayer, a celebration of the signs and wonders and the social and economic healing miracles that have gone on. In short, it proclaims the wonders of God, as the visitors to Jerusalem heard the tongues-speakers doing at Pentecost. And what was the result?
'And the Lord added daily to their number those who were being saved.' How did they get this kind of growth? What was their programme?
They didn't have one. They just let God have his. They did the six things I have mentioned with the intention of pleasing God, but with the added result that they enjoyed the favour of all the people. God was then free to add to their number those who were being saved.
Of course they proclaimed the Gospel. A walk without talk wins few converts, even if it is of the level of the early church. But the same is true of talk without a walk. Evangelistic programmes are not 'wrong' - God uses them - but is is my suspicion that they should not be needed so much if our church life was more like that of the first congregation in Jerusalem.
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29 November 1997.