Satanic Opposition to a Spirit-Filled Church, Part 2
Acts 13:2b-13
As we begin our study of this critical 13 chapters we told you last week Chapter 13 is the beginning of the new portion of the book of Acts. The church as it goes to the world, the ministry of Paul, as opposed to the Jewish church and the ministry of Peter in the first 12 chapters.
Now as we have continued to study the book of Acts we have been exposed to the blueprint of the church. Our Lord designed the church. It is our Lord's church. He is the one that builds it and He has some very precise plans for its building and its operation. And I hope that several things are happening as we're studying the book of Acts. One of those is I hope that it's iconoclastic in a sense. That is I hope that it smashes some idols about the church, because I think that for many years through the filtering in and out of church history and culture and so forth the church has very often substituted its form for its real life. It has substituted its ritual for its reality. It has become an institution instead of life. It has become a business instead of a body. It has become a kind of professional pulpitism sponsored by lay spectators rather than a ministering organism and I hope that somehow as we study the book of Acts, even as we did when we studied the book of Ephesians, we are smashing some old idols about the church and that we can kind of get down to the basis of what the New Testament church is to be.
Now we know there are not verses and texts in Scripture that give us all the forms of the church, how we ought to do this, and what time we ought to meet, and what day, and such and such, and whether we ought to have a ladies' aid society and a men's fellowship and how we ought to do this and that and the other. Those little form details are not there, but at the same time there are details that are basic in terms of the philosophy and the ministry of the church.
Time changes, but they are timeless principles. The church today obviously is not going to have the form that it had its early years, but it still has to have the same kind of life. It has to be the same basic organism, energized by the same power, and committed to the same priorities. And the church today, and I used word church in a very broad and general sense really misses the boat in this area. And I'll tell you I would rather than be a critic of the church, be a reformer. There are plenty of critics. What the church needs is reformers not people who sit outside and condemn, but people who get inside and change. And I think that's really the commission of any man of God is to make into the organized church what God intends the organism to be. And you know, as you look at the church today around the world there's so many things that you could criticize and rightly so. There are two extremes of the church that I see. There is the religious machine type church, which is big business. The church becomes an end in itself. It just exists to exist. It is not a means to anything. It is just an end. It doesn't have as its primary goal, at least in a working sense, teaching and winning and discipling and reproducing. It's success is measured by the number of people that are there, the number of bodies that are briefed, baptized, blessed, and given tithing envelopes, and that's about it. And if you have more bodies in your building than the guy down the street you're successful and he's not.
And so you have the big business idea of the church, which, of course, is totally foreign to the concept of an organism and a body that operates in simplicity through the gifts of the Spirit and the responsibilities of fellowship.
On the other hand, you have the other extreme, which is the social reform view of the church. That the church isn't really to preach the word of God, the church is to preach economics, politics, it is involved in civil and social and environmental struggles and truly the pastors and leaders are as lost as the heathen, only they are more damned the Bible says, because they sin willfully against light and their false prophets. Their concern is a preoccupation with civil issues. If there is no reality to their theology, if they can't believe the word of God, if they can't really nail down who Jesus is and they can't be firm on fact on who God is, the only thing left to do is fool around with man. And so that's what happens.
In U. S. and News and World Report recently did some surveys of young pastors and young ministers and these men says the article, "Are calling on our churches to save the individual." Sounds good. It goes on, "By saving or reforming society dealing with the ills of urbanization technology and discrimination." Only that approach they feel will make religion relevant.
Beloved, that approach will make religion obsolete. That is not what we're to do. Oh ultimately we are to minister to the total man in every way, but the church preoccupied with social ills is a church that is had the gospel vacuumed and sucked right out of it. And I reject the idea that the church is a reformed institution for the world. I think the church is a reformed institution for one man at a time on the basis of the gospel of Jesus Christ and change individuals will change the world. You'll never change society any other way than to change men through the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Now I don't reject the church. I'm not going to throw the baby away with the dirty bath water just because there are some things wrong. That doesn't mean we eliminate the whole thing, right? There's two reasons I don't want to fight the church. I want to be a reformer, not a critic. The reason is Jesus said, "I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it." Two reasons I don't want to fight the church: one I don't want to be on the team that's fighting it, the gates of hell, two, you can't win because Jesus will build His church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. So you might as well realize you can't fight the church, but you can sure get inside and do everything you can to teach the word of God and make it be what it ought to be. And it all boils down to just working with people, doesn't it 'cause people are the church. And people bother me who sit outside and make great sweeping criticisms of the church.
We must strive, I think, to see the church become what God wanted it to be. And as we look at the book of Acts, I'm just flooded, and I don't even give, what I give you is the tip of the iceberg believe me. I am flooded with principles that I hope I'm beginning to filter through my ministry here and make operational in this church, principles that I have seen in the first 12 chapters of Acts that really make a church what God wanted it to be. The idea of fellowship, and sharing, and ministry, and teaching the word, and prayer, and all of these ingredients that made that early church so dynamic. The idea of boldness, the idea of waiting on the Holy Spirit instead of running ahead with your own ideas and your own programs and your own inventions and this and that and the other thing, and just waiting on the Spirit of God.
I talked to a fellow this week who said you know this pastor so and so has got a terrible problem. He says he just spends all his time inventing programs and none of them work. Now that's a frustrating thing. If you read the New Testament you don't find them doing that, as we shall see again this morning.
But as we go through the book of Acts principle after principle after principle comes out of the text. Now when you study the word of God, you don't study it just for the history of it. You don't just read through well they went over there and they did that and then they went to Antioch and they did that. Hm that's nice and then they went over there and did that.
There's more to it than that. What you want to do, and this is what I think good teaching is, for you who would like to teach this is the thing to remind yourself of, you take what is there and you turn it into spiritual principles that are practical for life now. Right? One historian said, "We learn one great lesson from history, that men learn nothing from history." We go over the same mistakes again and again and again and again and we learn nothing. Well let me tell you something, there's no sense in just studying history in the Scriptures. What you need to do is principlize it and then make it practical in your life.
So when I'm going to talk to you about the church in Antioch, I'm not just going to say there was a church and they did this and they went there and now we'll go on. I'm going to say what are the principles that come out of that text that I can apply to my life and to my church today in 1973. Right? That's God's word to me because the principles are timeless.
So let's look at some principles even though we're talking historically in the 13th Chapter of Acts, we're going to see some principles. Now in part one last week we saw that the church in Antioch, the first Gentile church established in this pagan city, and a very large and famous city, this first Gentile congregation had some fantastic ingredients. In fact, they had the features that really make a church effective, t