Foundations of Faith: Lessons from the Early Church

But what I am going to preach is are the things that Luke writes in this that the church was doing because these are things that all churches can do. The western world has kind of forgot about the putting stuff together, but the rest of these I think hold water. First of all they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching. [00:02:02]

But I think the most important thing is the effort to actually do it the first time. To take and hear the Bible read out loud as we do on Saturday morning at Hollybrook as I try to do here. Hear it out loud and then reimagine it in our world, in our time for what we can do to follow God's way. It is the effort and not the specific that's important. [00:03:06]

But I thought that was an interesting devotion because you open it up for the day and the week and the year and the month and it has a verse and you see it and you pray. That's not the way the apostles read the Bible. That's not the way that I think we need to read the Bible. There's nothing wrong with it but without the other parts of it and when you go from one verse in one book to another verse in the next book the next day there's no continuity. It doesn't help all that much. [00:04:42]

Read it in context. Read it out loud to yourself or come to church and hear someone else do it and then listen for the Spirit to help because that's what John says that the Spirit is here for. Jesus said I sent the Spirit to tell you everything that you need to know. [00:05:17]

And that's part of what we need to know. Second they the people the disciples and the apostles devoted themselves to fellowship. We're good at that. We welcome people. We talk to people. We want people an ongoing everyday product. I don't even know if it's always on Sundays because we don't get that many new people anyway to sit to ask to go out to lunch and all that. I think it's every day that we are out in public or with friends or with family saying hey did you think about that? Did you read that? What do you think of that? [00:05:58]

We go out, and part of our fellowship is to eat together, and that's wonderful, and that's important. That's part of being a family, and that's part of being a family. What church is all about. But it's also more than that. It's more than just breaking of bread among ourselves. It's when we do it in the Lord's Supper or Holy Communion. [00:07:37]

And that's why I make it a 15 to 20-minute thing that we do. It's that important because we only do it 12 times a year, though there were three weeks we did it in a row. But we can be in the Spirit with here, and I think it's one of the few times that Jesus is so close, just around the corner. We can almost feel him when we do communion. So they fellowship together. They ate together. [00:08:03]

Now, we could, and people do argue over whether or not the word does should be there. Over, they devoted themselves to prayers, or devoted themselves to the prayers. The means there are prayers that were already around that they were doing. Pastor Ray and the other pastors in the world don't have to stand up here and go, what do I have to think of today? They're there. They're in the Psalms. They're in the Proverbs. They're in the Lord's Prayer. Other prayers. We used to do in that room with Pastor Frank, sit and read a daily prayer every day. [00:09:09]

Those are the things that these men and women were doing every day. They would sit with themselves as a group. They would sit with themselves as a group. As a community. And do the Lord's Prayer. Now, do you know that there are churches that don't receive, recite the Lord's Prayer? They just don't do it. [00:10:05]

We talked about the future of the church. The future of churches out there. And that's what pastors and ruling elders on sessions all do when we get together. What can I do? What is the silver bullet that I can do to grow my church to have more rear ends in the future? [00:12:39]

That means you get to where you're comfortable and you think it's always going to stay that way. And even worse, when you're declining or when you need to start doing something else, you keep all that line because you just think where you're at is stupid. Okay? Lots of churches are on that red line. They don't even know it, but they're kidding themselves. [00:14:53]

The Holy Spirit's going to do something in this church. We are either going to transit into something else. Probably a Presbyterian church. I don't know. We don't know. We don't know what happens here. There are churches that are starting to do this. Change your thinking a little bit. But we're going to transition and we will be on the other side. Whatever that other side is. [00:21:35]