SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm reading from the Old Testament found in Deuteronomy 15, 7 through 8 and 10 through 11. Now, if there are some poor persons among you, say one of your fellow Israelites in one of your cities in the land, that the Lord your God is giving you, don't be hard-hearted or tight fisted toward your fellow Israelites. To the contrary, open your hand wide to them. You must generously lend them whatever they need. No, give generously to needy persons. Don't resent giving to them, because it is this very thing that will lead to the Lord your God's blessing you in all you do and work at. Poor persons will never disappear from the earth. That's why I am giving you this command. You must open your hand generously to your fellow Israelites, to the needy among you, and to the poor who live with you in your land. The word of the Lord.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

God performed many wonders and signs through the apostles. All the believers were united and shared everything. They would sell pieces of property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to everyone who needed them. Every day they met together in the temple and ate in their homes. They shared food with gladness and simplicity. They praised God and demonstrated God's goodness to everyone. And the Lord added daily to the community those who were being saved. The word of the Lord.

SPEAKER_02 2:16

If you are able, please stand for the gospel reading found in Luke 22, verses 17 through 20. After taking a cup and giving thanks, he said, Take this and share it among yourselves. I tell you that from now on I won't drink from the fruit of the vine until God's kingdom has come. After taking the bread and giving thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. In the same way he took the cup after the meal and said, This cup is the new covenant by my blood, which is poured out for you. The gospel of the Lord.

SPEAKER_03 3:10

Please remain standing with me as we pray and as we listen to the elementary kids behind us here today. If you hear some noise coming from behind, that's they're having a great time. Jesus, um we so desperately need to hear your voice and sense your presence in our lives. Even in days and weeks like this past time period, as we think about the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and our loved ones and our brothers and sisters in Christ and hold them in our hearts this morning as we think about what has happened in Michigan and in Virginia this past week, and we grieve with those communities and all that they experience is violence in our own midst. And even as we walk through our own hardships and struggles, our own griefs and losses, and we find ourselves so often, like the psalmist earlier, like our soul just pants for you. We need you. And our moments were more aware of our desperation than others, but we do know from the very depths of our souls that we need you. So would you meet with us today? Would you help us? In your name we pray. Good morning, saints. It is good to see you this morning. As I said last week, and I'll share just oftentimes when we use the word saints, we're recognizing that is Paul, the early follower of Jesus' favorite word for you and me. Uh, it's a way of saying that the most important thing about you and the most important thing about me is what Jesus has done in our lives. Um, that he has and he is and he will make us holy. Uh, that he has and he is and he will make us whole. He'll heal us in every way. And so we are grateful for his ongoing work for us. My name is Jason. I'm one of the pastors here. If you're new or visiting, we're grateful that you're here, especially on a very cold, snowy, icy day. Uh, it'll be 89 on Friday. So uh welcome to Colorado in March, I guess. Uh, we know for many of you, we're not able to make it in today. Uh, you know, you grew up in places where this kind of weather is not normal, and so you wisely stayed home. Uh, we bless you. And I know there's like all kinds of flu and junk going around as well. So if you're at home and recovering or caring for members of your family, may Jesus heal you in his name. Uh, but we say hello to everybody who's watching online or who's watching later, maybe because they're volunteering this morning. This is the fourth Sunday in Lent. Uh, our 40-day preparation of uh walking with Jesus to the cross and preparing our hearts to celebrate Easter together. Holy Week will start two weeks from today. So, two weeks from today, we'll be in here waving our palms like we just don't care. Um, starting off into Holy Week. I want to make just a couple of announcements uh about Holy Week. This year, for the first time, we're gonna offer an online Monday Thursday service uh to be able to share the Eucharist together as a community. So Thursday online, we'll celebrate Monday, Thursday together. And then Good Friday, we normally meet here on Good Friday, uh, but District 11 had a scheduling error. Our reservation didn't make it onto the calendar. Somebody else booked uh Palmer for that day. So we will not meet here for Good Friday. Instead, we're gonna be at the pioneering on the hill. So if you uh walk out the doors, you look toward the mountains, you see a big, beautiful building on top of a hill in front of Pikes Peak, we're gonna be there uh on Good Friday for two services because it's a little bit of a smaller venue at 5:30 and 7:30. Uh so just want to start making you aware of that. Then we'll be back here on Easter Sunday for two services on that day, 9 and 11. Uh, 9 and 11 on Easter Sunday. So, all right, if you have a Bible, please turn with me to Acts chapter two, or you can follow along on the screens, as Stephanie said a second ago. Uh, we're in a series through the book of Acts called Kingdom Movement. And over the last couple of weeks, we've been looking at the birth of the church on Pentecost and the beginning of the church's witness with Peter's first sermon, and then that kind of rapid, immediate expansion of the church as 3,000 people are cut to the heart that day and they repent and are baptized and they join the Jesus movement. And now the next passage is one of the most well-known and often cited passages in the book of Acts. It begins this way it says, the believers, so those who've just come to faith in Jesus, devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to the community, to the shared meals, and to their prayers. This is the opening line of one of several summary statements that the writer Luke provides in Acts, where he gives us a little bit of a glimpse into the life of the early church. Now, a couple things to point out. First of them is this Will Wilhelmond notes this in his commentary that this summary is surprisingly absent of one really particular thing. And it's surprisingly absent of the names of any of its leaders. That nowhere here is mentioned Peter, James, John, Paul, or Ringo. Like none of them are named in the middle of this. Though we'll see throughout the book of Acts that leaders are going to play a key part, particularly Paul in the second half of the book. But what Luke wants us to do at this moment is he wants to draw our attention not to particular individuals, but to a community. He wants to draw our attention to the church as a whole, as a way of recognizing for us that the epicenter of God's work throughout the book of Acts, and the epicenter of God's work throughout history, from this moment on is going to be the local church. That it's a local church in cities and communities all around the world and across time that has been the epicenter of what it is that God is doing to advance his kingdom in the world. And so he wants to highlight the everyday lives and the faithful witness of Christians just among their neighbors, of those who are living their lives as followers of Jesus in the place that God has placed them. And so we have these new believers, those who have received the gospel and been baptized, begin to, their story continues. This was the moment of Pentecost and hearing Peter's sermon and responding and maybe coming to an altar sort of moment was not sort of the end of their story with faith. Instead, it was just the beginning. It was not the end of their responsiveness. It was their first movement or first moment of responsiveness. But instead, they responded to the gospel. And then it says they devoted themselves to the king and to his kingdom. They faithfully and persistently did four things. These have often been called the four pillars or the four marks of the church. And so the idea here is that the first church didn't just do these things for a week or for a moment or for a month or for a season, but they devoted themselves to these four activities. The implication is that this is now what they concerned their lives with. That these things became their priorities and their practices for the rest of their days. And they didn't do just one of these things. They all four belong together. If you remove one, then the others start to distort in some way. And they didn't do these things alone. This was not just about their quiet time with Jesus. This was about what they were doing as a community together, that they devoted themselves to these four principles, these four pillars, these four marks, these four practices, whatever words that we want to use. And the first one is this is that they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching. Now we know from the Gospel of Luke and from the other gospels that Jesus is a teacher, that this is Jesus' sort of primary role oftentimes in the Gospels, is that he's teaching and teaching and teaching all about the kingdom of God. And then he's following up with that teaching with demonstrations of the kingdom with miracles and other things. But Jesus is primarily a teacher who is teaching his disciples. These are the ones who learn directly from Jesus how to live in God's kingdom. And one of Jesus' final instructions to them is to go and do the same thing for others, to take everything that they've learned from Jesus and pass it on to continue to teach others. He says in the Great Commission to go all to go into all the world and to make more disciples. And one of the things it says is teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. So when we hear the phrase apostles teaching, we're not leaving Jesus behind. This is the thing that they learned from Jesus. Jesus passed it on to the apostles. The apostles are now passing it on to others. So the apostles' teaching really is Jesus' teaching. It's a teaching that's been passed down and then eventually written down in books and letters and the Bible, which becomes kind of our canon of faith or in rules of faith that became creeds. This is the idea that we are a community devoted to a common faith, a faith that has been handed and passed down to us through generations and centuries and millennia. So teaching has always taken a prominent place in the church from its very beginning. We are learning together. What's interesting here is that there's such an emphasis in the scriptures that there's a sense that learning here is not simply about learning facts or ideas and verse numbers and all of those kinds of things, but to actually learn to have the mind of Christ, to learn how to think about our lives and the world the way that Jesus thought about them. One of the core aspects of our formation, what it means to be formed in the image of Jesus, is to have our minds changed. Romans 12, Paul puts it this way: he says, Don't be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed, be changed. How? He says, by the renewing of your minds. Why? Why does that matter so much? So that you can figure out, so that you can discern what God's will is, how it is that God really wants the world and our lives to look like, and specifically what is good and pleasing and true or mature, depending upon the conversation or the translation. So according to Paul, our minds have already been formed. Our minds have been formed by the prevailing culture around us. So long before we came to Jesus, we were being formed in some way. And even if you grew up in church, you probably were being formed in some ways by the family and community that you were part of. And there's other ways that we're constantly being formed or invited to be formed by the prevailing worlds around us. We're being invited or trained to think according to the patterns and philosophies and ideologies of our world. And so what Paul is saying is that for us to think Christianly is that our minds have to continually be reformed. We have to learn continually what it means for our minds or our thinking to be repatterned after the kingdom. And so this isn't just about learning how to think the right things about God, though that is part of it. But in the early church, what we see is this is learning how to think godly about everything, about every aspect of our days and our lives and our resources and our relationships. So it's not just one thing, it's everything. So the early church devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, so that the apostles' teaching, i.e. Jesus' teaching, would become the dominant voice, the dominant guide, the dominant pattern upon which they were learning to think about everything. We stop here for just a moment. There's an invitation then to at least ask, what is it that shapes the way that we think? If we were going to think about maybe our normal weeks of a Monday through Sunday week or a Sunday to Sunday week, what is it that fills our brains? What is how are we being trained to think? What are we being sort of formed into? When we think about the voices that maybe are the dominant voices in the day for each of us, what are those voices? And can we say that as listening to them and studying those and reading them or watching those things, are we finding that our mind is being repatterned toward the kingdom? Or is our mind being repatterned according to something else? The early church said, no, we want to have the mind of Jesus. So they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching. The second thing they devoted themselves to is the community. That word koinania that we talked about in January, they devoted themselves to this idea of fellowship, of participation, of sharing in the field of anthropology, so the academic field, not the store. The idea here is an idea of fictive kinship, that they formed amongst themselves family-like social ties. They were not based on blood or by marriage, but on this unity that they now found as followers of Jesus, that they had a genuine connection with one another, that they cultivated and fostered and developed, that there was in the early church a belonging to and identifying with this new family of God. In the New Testament, this was not a casual or occasional sort of relationship of kind of like, yeah, I kind of am connected in some way. No, and for them, it was a deep commitment, a commitment that included a responsibility to and a reciprocity from, that there was a mutuality that was referred to oftentimes using the word membership. When various writers or thinkers or pastors or practitioners sort of talk about what are the greatest obstacles to discipleship in our day? What are the greatest challenges facing the church as we think about that long and slow and sometimes messy growth into Christ-likeness over the course of our days? Some will say that the greatest obstacle to discipleship is indifference. That the church today, unlike the church of the past, just lacks desire. We sort of lack a devotion to commit ourselves to the things of God. Others will point to and say, no, it's not so much indifference as it is distraction. And we now live in a world where the impact of the digital age is just distracting us over and over and over again, and it is now difficult for us to even sit in silence for a moment to try to listen to the voice of God. Some will point elsewhere and they'll they'll point to consumerism and the tendency that we have in our culture to commodify everything, to look at everything through the lens of an economic sort of uh worldview, to think of things as transactional, to evaluate our lives on a cost-to-benefit analysis. And connected to that is that idea of entertainment that we now have become the culture that's the answer to nirvana's prayer. Here we are now, entertain us is sort of our default posture in life. Others will point to the thing that you've heard me talk about so many times over the last several weeks, this idea of radical individualism, a hyper focus on self that does not really consider our connectivity to one another. Others will point to the idea of transience, that all of these things sort of sort of take root in our culture and lead to a sense of transience where we now find ourselves as deeply unrooted people. That we're not rooted in our focus or in our time or in our attention. We lack a kind of centeredness, but we're also not rooted in place or in people or relationships. We're more connected than ever online and more lonely and unknown in our everyday lives than ever before. That idea of transience maybe think about a little bit of the rise of the monastic movement. So in the fourth century, kind of as Christianity was spreading rapidly around the Roman Empire post-Constantine and his conversion and the legalization of Christianity, and eventually the uh Christianity becoming the official religion of the empire, you began to see people sort of cloister away in monastic sort of movements and monasteries to in order to be faithful to one another. But that rise of monasteries also was accompanied by the rise of a group of people that in the monastic writings are referred to as gyroves, which is a great band name if anybody is just like going, like, yeah, we're the gyrovegs. Thanks for coming out tonight. Um, you just have to be really careful. Um But this group was a group of wandering monks. These were people who just moved from monastery to monastery to monastery to monastery. They would stay for a little while, and then they would find a reason to leave and go on to the next one. And what you find in the writings of the early monastics is that typically they were moving from one community to the other to avoid authority, to avoid accountability, to avoid commitment. They wanted to try to get out of the hard work involved with being a contributing member of the order. One person says is that they consumed little, but they contributed even less. They didn't like the limits or the demands that came with being in true community with one another. And so Saint Benedict comes around and he adds to the monastic vows of his community, a vow of stability. They were making a vow to be a part of one community for the rest of their lives. Because they had this deep belief that we can only grow where we're planted. And if we're never really rooted, becomes really hard to grow. Wendell Berry, one of my favorite authors, and who we might say that was the modern patron saint of membership, he says this in one of his writings. He says, I believe that the community, in the fullest sense of place and all its creatures, is the smallest unit of health. And to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms. Oh, okay, Wendell. When we think about that, our lives can be just so transient, so unmoored, so unrooted. And there's an invitation we hear that the early church devoted themselves to a shared life, a shared fellowship, a shared participation over a long period of time. And we have to ask ourselves, what is it that keeps us from being rooted? Have our minds been so sort of transformed by the patterns of the world and individualism and consumerism and transience and all of those things that it is now difficult for us to be rooted in Jesus and in his people? What are the things that are keeping us from going deeper? The third thing that they devoted themselves to is the breaking of bread. This may be a reference to shared meals in general. Sometimes the translations will suggest that they just devoted themselves to eating, which I'm a big fan of. I'm glad that they did that. I don't think we can underestimate the importance of eating together. We see that most communities do have practices of feasting together in some way. Our meal groups from the very beginning, our small groups here, have been centered around tables and recognizing that there is something about eating a meal together that connects us even in our humanity. But there's also, I think, something else happening here in this text. There's this presence of the definite article in the original language. It's the breaking of the bread, is how it really woodenly reads. So it's more likely not just a reference to eating together, but it's likely a reference to the Eucharist, to the Lord's Supper, to holy communion. We see that same phrase breaking the bread in Luke 19 and on the road to Emmaus and Luke 24. Jesus is breaking bed and instituting the Eucharist among his people. So we see that this group has been initiated into the church via baptism, like our birth into this world. They were birthed into the kingdom, into the people of God through baptism. It's a one-time event that's continually celebrated. And remember, just like our birthday, we don't repeat it, but we celebrate it all of the time. But then the life of the community is sustained by that other sacrament, by the Eucharist, which was repeated and continually eaten in First Corinthians, which is one of the earliest New Testament letters. It's written probably in the early 50s, about 20 years uh before Luke Acts. And we see that this meal is already being ritualized. It already has kind of liturgies springing up around it. 1 Corinthians chapter 11, verse 23 23 says, I received a tradition from the Lord, which I handed down to you. And then he gives the liturgy that surrounds the table. And he ends this way, and he says, Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you broadcast, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes. In other words, the sacrament of breaking bread together is in Paul's thinking, not simply a shared meal, but it's a kingdom act. It's an act that proclaims God's victory and anticipates his return. In her really compelling book on Christian hospitality, Christine Pohl wrote this. She says, in that sacrament, in the Eucharist and Holy Communion and the Lord's Supper, we are nourished on our journeys toward God's banquet table. Even as we experience the present joy and welcome and welcome associated with sharing in that table now. And then I love this line. She says, a shared meal is the activity most closely tied to the reality of God's kingdom. This shared meal of coming and receiving this meal together is most closely tied to the reality of God's kingdom among us, just as it is the most basic expression of hospitality. The simple yet profound and mysterious act of breaking bread and sharing a cup becomes the primary symbol of God's kingdom presence among us. So they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to a shared life, to the sacraments. And the fourth and final thing is they devoted themselves to the prayers. Prayer along with Bible reading is probably the most talked about and least practiced of Christian activities. We just talk about it a lot and yet we find it very difficult to do. Some of that challenge, I think, is actually rooted in the misunderstanding of what makes prayer good, or what makes prayer genuine, or what makes prayer work, or what makes prayer pleasing to God. Sometimes we live in these kind of situations where we think, okay, in order for prayer to be good or pleasing or right or effective, whatever it is, it has to be lyrical and lengthy. Right? We just sort of think like, oh, my prayers need to sound like a Dylan song. Or for those in like new, like a Noah Khan song, if I if I can just get everything to rhyme, and I can have some repeating patterns in the middle of it, and if it can sound beautiful, and if I can go for a really long time, if I can do all of that, and sort of like prayer becomes a performance art in some way, oh then then, and so then when we find ourselves struggling for words or bored or falling asleep, or just like not knowing what to pray or stumbling over things, or going like, I'm really concerned about what's going on here, but I don't know what to say. When we have this idea that this is what prayer is supposed to look like, then we run into the difficulty of prayer, we typically just give up. They're like, oh, I'm sure somebody else is praying. At least I hope so. What's interesting though is that Jesus actually warned us about praying that way. He says this in Matthew chapter 6. He says, When you pray, don't pour out a flood of empty words. Not that Dylan said empty words, but you know what I'm saying. He says, but don't just get consumed with that. That's what the Gentiles do. Those who are not part of God's family. They think that by saying many words they'll be heard. Don't be like that. Instead, because you're praying like your father knows what you need even before you ask. Pray in the trusting relationship of parents and child. And then it gives us this simple repeated prayer to pray. Our father, who aren't heavy. It's likely when the early church is devoting themselves to prayer, the language actually says the prayers. So it's likely that they are either talking about that they devoted themselves to regular fixed times of prayer. In some traditions, three times a day, morning, midday, and evening, some traditions eight times a day. Kind of these fixed moments, like we're just gonna pray together at these moments during the day, oftentimes for very brief moments in time. Or they're talking about the repetition of specific prayers, either stopping in various moments during the day to pray the Lord's Prayer or to pray a psalm. Not the kind of spontaneous things that we think makes a prayer good. But instead, what makes a prayer beautiful and good is the fact that God's listening to his kids and he just loves us and cares about us. And so he's always listening and waiting for us to turn our attention to him. So we have these specific times or specific prayers that the early church probably gave themselves to. So if you're like me or others and you find prayer to be difficult at times or you're just struggling with it, my encouragement to you would be don't overcomplicate it. Start small, start simple, start in patterned, repeated ways, pray the Lord's Prayer a few times a day, pray a psalm, and just begin to see what happens as you commit yourself to praying like that. Or, like the early church, they probably didn't pray those things all alone. They probably prayed with whoever was around them, prayed in fixed times, kind of like we're doing on Sundays right now, or on Wednesdays right now, gathering online and spending a few minutes praying a psalm together. When I reflect on these four marks of the church, what really strikes me is not just the absence of like mentions of leaders in the middle of this, but what really strikes me as I read that line, as they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. As I look at them like, that's just so ordinary. There's like nothing entirely innovative in the middle of that at all. There's no breakthrough technology, there's no gimmick, there's no like um, it just seems so predictable. And honestly, in many ways, you look at it as like, oh, that sounds really boring. To just devote yourself to those four things over and over and over and over and over and over and over again for the rest of your lives. And we might look at it and be like, you know what that is? That's just an ordinary church. Like, there's some groups over here, they're doing some extraordinary things, but that just sounds so ordinary. But really, the the thing that's extraordinary here is not what they're doing, it's their devotion to it. They have this extraordinary devotion to the basic practices of the faith. An extraordinary devotion to Jesus' words, to one another, to the sacraments, and to prayer. They devote themselves to those. And then here's what happens: Acts chapter 2, verse 43. And as they're doing this day in and day out, over and over and over and over again together, what happens is a sense of awe came over everyone. And then God performed wonders and signs through the apostles, and all the believers were united and they shared everything. And get this they would sell pieces of property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to everyone who had need. And every day they would just keep meeting together in the temple and they would eat in their homes, and they shared food of gladness and simplicity. They praised God, they demonstrated God's goodness to everyone, and then the Lord added daily those who were being saved. The church devoted themselves to four simple, ordinary, everyday acts. It was an ordinary church trusting in an extraordinary God. And then the extraordinary started to happen. The extraordinary thing started to happen among them. All of a sudden, they found that their awe and wonder was enlarged. They saw signs and wonders of the kingdom in their midst as people were healed and set free, and not just physically, but spiritually and relationally and economically, that they saw things start to change in people's lives and the divisions between them began to dissipate. They began to have this great growing sense of a willingness to share, to voluntarily give in astonishing ways as they're selling their second or third homes or cars or whatever, and giving the proceeds they're living open-handedly. And somehow that teaching from Deuteronomy is happening in their midst. The needs of their community, one another were being met, and they kept meeting together in public places like this and in private places in homes. They ate together. They weren't eating these lavish meals, but they ate with extravagant delight. They cultivated joy in all of the simplicity. They lived their lives in grateful praise for all of God's gifts. They did it good to everyone that was around them. In other words, they lived in the land and they farmed faithfulness. They trusted God and they did good. And what happened was that people were saved. They joined the kingdom movements. What does that mean? Well, it meant they repented, they were baptized, and then they too devoted themselves to these ordinary things. They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to the fellowship, to the sacraments, and to prayer. And you know what? It wasn't perfect. We can read this and be like, look at that! That's all amazing, as if this was happening every single day. This was happening over decades together. As they continued to spend time in Jesus' words with one another in the sacraments in prayer. This is what took root and happened among them. And it wasn't perfect. We're gonna read in the next several chapters that there was suffering, there was death, there was conflict, there was controversy, there were things that they had to work through together. It was not easy, it was not perfect, it was just ordinary, ordinary practices and ordinary conflicts and challenges because it was a bunch of people who aren't perfect yet, who are being perfected in community. And all of a sudden, you start to see how God could show up and use their ordinary lives in extraordinary ways. So as we come to the table this morning, as Sarah comes and the band comes, because I've been reading this all week. My prayer uh has been over and over and over again. It's like, Jesus, would you make us an ordinary church? Would we be the kind of people that devote ourselves to Jesus? That devote ourselves to each other, that devote ourselves to the sacraments, that devote ourselves to the prayers, and then trusts and waits and sees how God shows up. Waits and sees how our wonder and awe is enlarged, how signs and wonders of healing and freedom take root in our midst, that we learn how to live together as one family, that all of our needs are met both communally and individually, and we're able to do more good in our city, that we just keep on meeting together on Sundays in each other's homes, that we've learned to cultivate joy in the midst of simplicity. We'd share meals together, we'd praise God, we would do good, and we find, oh, wait, look what has happened in our city over the course of a long period of time. Over a long obedience in the same direction, over a long faithfulness. All of a sudden, God shows up, and what he does is he forms us, and then in informing us, he transforms our worlds. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. For as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. World without end. Amen.