Our Beliefs : Sermons : Sermon Archive - 2003 : June 29, 2003
The Kind of Church God Wants Us to Be: A Church Built by Word and Sacraments
Pentecost 3
This morning I want to start off with a quiz. I know I didn't warn you in advance, so I won't make it very hard. It's only one question, and it's true/false. Here it is: Jesus is alive. Pretty straight forward; seems maybe too easy. It must be a trick question. But it isn't. True or false -- Jesus is alive. If you answer false, then you're in the right place because you're going to find out something that will change your life. If you answer true, then you're still in the right place, because you've shown why you're here this morning and why you want to come back time after time to hear that same message. The answer is, of course, that Jesus is alive -- True. That means that Jesus is God himself and our Savior. That means that our sins are forgiven. That means that heaven is ours through faith in Jesus. That is the message of the gospel. It's a message that has been proclaimed in essence since Adam and Eve's time, and it is a message that changes hearts and lives even today. That means that as we share that gospel message like Peter did, our little church will grow by leaps and bounds like the early New Testament church, right? Maybe not. Sometimes we don't see our little group of believers growing. We might conclude that the simple message of the gospel has to be spruced up a bit to make it more acceptable to 21st century Americans. But we would be wrong. God, in his infinite wisdom, has decided to make his Church grow in one way only -- not through gimmicks or worldly wisdom or psychological manipulation -- but only through the simple and foolish and, to the world, unattractive message of the cross and resurrection. The Holy Spirit again wants us to see the Kind of Church God Wants Us to Be. This morning he reminds us that he wants us to be a church that is built and sustained by the simple gospel message found in God's Word and the Sacraments.
There are many differences between the early Church and the Church today. We don't often see people cut to the heart today over their sins, craving the gospel. We don't see 3000 people joining the church on a single day. Instead, we see our church worried about being able to stay open, paying the heating bill, seeming to have no impact. We might not be in that situation yet at Living Word because we have a number of other churches helping us out right now. But the time will come when we will be concerned about how the heating bill will be paid. Like other congregations we, too, will be concerned about why it doesn't seem like our church is growing. As a result, we can lose our zeal for the message of Christ crucified and risen ourselves. Before we start down that road, we need to look a little closer at what happened in the early church.
The first thing we notice is that the Word of God worked. That is very clear in our text. It was the Day of Pentecost, 50 days after Jesus rose, the Holy Spirit was poured out on the apostles. The apostles' message was amazing. Peter summarized it in verse 36: "Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ." Now today, we know who the Christ is -- Jesus. At Jesus' time, no one knew it yet, except those who heard Jesus' gospel message and believed it -- only 120 believers in Jerusalem. But Peter had a message for all the Jews and all the world to hear. He showed them from the Old Testament that the Savior had come. But instead of crying out to him as their Messiah and God himself, the Jews had cried out: "Crucify him!" They murdered the Savior, and said, "Let his blood be on us and on our children." It was. They were guilty.
What was the result of that powerful message? "When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, 'Brothers, what shall we do?' " Peter message hit them between the eyes. The law did its work -- as Paul says in Romans 3:20: "Through the law we become conscious of sin." The people were cut to the heart because they realized what they had done. Perhaps some of you can look back to a time in your life when you truly loved someone, but they treated you like you didn't exist or they ended up loving someone else. If that ever happened to you, it feels like they have stabbed you in the heart. That's what these Jews felt as they saw who Jesus was and as they realized what they had done to him. Their agony must have been horrendous.
But then Peter saw that they were ready to hear more. He said, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins." The Word worked. We find that 3000 people believed and God added that number to the other 120 believers.
Does the Word still work today? Often it doesn't seem like it does. Many churches have resorted to gimmicks to get and keep people in the church, whipping the people into an emotional frenzy so they will come up to the altar and make their decision for Christ, or turning worship into some major production that it's like coming to be entertained, while the real message of sin and grace can be lost. Is that what we see here? No. Peter simply told the people the crushing message of the law and then the edifying message of the gospel of Jesus.
Does that message still work today? Of course. God doesn't change. His Word never changes. It is still the power of God for the salvation for everyone who believes. Has the Word cut you to the heart recently? Maybe it hasn't. Maybe you just come to church because you're supposed to or because that's just what you do on a Sunday morning. Maybe you are wondering how effective the Word of God really is. You haven't seen an unbeliever cut to the heart recently, so you might wonder if it is still as effective as it was on Pentecost. But remember Peter's message. If you haven't been cut to the heart recently, think of how you put Jesus to death on the cross. How your selfish thoughts and unkind words and actions to others have fastened Jesus to that wooden instrument of torture more surely than any nails could hold him there. But then remember what he did for you there -- paid for those sins, every one of them, and opened heaven to you simply through faith. That's what God's Word tells us, and if we are to be the kind of church God wants us to be, we have to realize that God still works through his Word. It's still the gospel in the Word that changes hearts. Paul said it: (Romans 10:17) "Faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ." Isaiah also talked about the effectiveness of the Word: (Isaiah 55:11) "My word...will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it."
When we start to get discouraged by a lack of results of people streaming through the doors on Sunday morning, remember the gospel in God's Word that you know, and remember those passages. When we are faithful to proclaiming the gospel in the Word, it will change hearts and that message will make the church grow -- both in numbers and in faith. That's how Jesus builds his Church.
But there's another way or means through which Jesus builds the Church also -- through the gospel in the Sacraments. On Pentecost us we see two means through which God built his church and made it grow -- through the Word Peter and the other apostles proclaimed, and also through baptism.
Peter replied, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off-for all whom the Lord our God will call."
In the case of adults, the message is heard and understood first. When that message cuts to the heart and creates faith, those believers will want to be baptized. But God chose to use baptism itself also to create faith in those who can't comprehend the message -- like infants. No one can enter the kingdom of heaven unless they are born again of water and the Spirit, Jesus said (John 3:5) -- a reference to baptism. And later Peter said that the water of the flood which saved Noah and his family was a picture of baptism which saves you (1 Peter 3:21) because it gives the forgiveness of sins, just as Peter said at Pentecost.
Now that ought to astound us. When we look at a baptism, it never fails to amaze me that when an infant is baptized, that infant isn't just having water poured on him and a few words spoken over him, but God is working through his gospel connected to that plain, ordinary water to wash away that baby's sins and take him from the grasp of Satan and turn him through the faith created in his heart into a child of God and heir of heaven. God didn't have to use baptism to do that. He could have simply used the gospel in the Word. But he came down to our level, he used something we could all understand to change hearts. When you come into the house from working in the garden, your hands are filthy with dirt, you put them under the faucet and wash them with water. God uses that picture to show how the gospel in baptism washes our sinful hearts from every stain. We can't see it happening, and it doesn't even make sense to us, but we believe it because that's what God says is happening. So every time you think about your baptism -- even every time you wash your hands in water, you can remember what God did for you in your baptism.
In the words before us we see the other means God uses to build his church -- holy Communion. "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer." This breaking of bread here was more than just eating at a fellow believer's home. Everything in the context is speaking of spiritual things. So we see that the believers were following Jesus' command on the night before he died to celebrate the Lord's Supper to remember what his death meant for them. Jesus himself said that his very own body and blood were given in the sacrament even as they could still see and touch and taste bread and wine. He said that what they received through that body and blood was their forgiveness because, amazingly enough, it was the same body and blood that would be given and shed on the cross the next day (Matthew 26:28). Today also, when we partake of the Lord's Supper, we too are, amazingly enough, receiving the very body and blood Jesus gave and shed on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins. Can we understand it? No. But we believe it simply because Jesus tells us that that's what's happening. Again, God didn't have to give us the Lord's Supper for our forgiveness just as he didn't have to give us baptism for our forgiveness. But he came down to our level and allowed us to actually taste and touch and smell and see our forgiveness. Only God could have done such a thing through simple water and through simple bread and wine, things that we use almost every day. Only God could have used such means to build his church -- the gospel message found in his Word and the Sacraments.
We are members of a small church, just like the small group of believers before Pentecost. As a small church, we will always be tempted to dwell on the numbers. But there's only one number we need to be concerned with -- the number 1. We have one Savior who died to forgive us. You are one person that God has made his own through the gospel in Word and Sacrament. Now you can think of one person who needs to be cut to the heart by the knowledge of their sins and healed through the message of the gospel. God simply tells us to use his gospel in the Word and the Sacraments. We are to be faithful to these means of grace. When we are, will we see our membership grow by the thousands like on Pentecost? Perhaps. That's in God's hands. But today it's more likely by ones and twos, as each of us is connected to Jesus through the gospel in Word and Sacraments, and as we use those same means to bring more into God's family of believers and build his Church. Amen.
