Why We Go to Church - Part 2

With all the books, seminars, consultants and programs focused on church growth, you'd think that God must need a lot of help in that department. Today on Turning Point, Dr David Jeremiah assures you that's not the case as he returns to the second chapter of Acts and reveals the simple reason for authentic church growth. In his special message, Why We Go to Church, here's David. Today, we're going to finish up what we started yesterday as we're talking about why we go to church, and that's never been more relevant than it is right now as for many folks that have been told not to go to church. Some people have challenged it, some people have worked through it. Here in California, we found a way to go to church.

And we've been talking about that throughout the whole month of October, actually beginning with an interview with Sheila Walsh that will take place on Wednesday, our last broadcast in the month of September. Here in California, we found a way to go to church and not get in violation of anything because we were allowed to have church outdoors. We built an amphitheater in one of our parking lots. And the first weekend that we did that, the place was full. We had some distancing for people to sit as families. But we've had church now.

We haven't missed a week. And I can't imagine what this would have been like without church. Some of you say, well, you had online services, but that's not church. That's a substitute for church when you can't have church. That helps you have the essence of church in your home.

Maybe you're in one of those vulnerable situations where you just can't go or your church isn't open, so we're there for you. But the ultimate goal is to get back to church because church means gathering. It means community. It means coming together. In Acts 2, we are given the blueprint for the New Testament church. And as you study that, you realize how vital it is that the people of God be together. The Bible says we're not to forsake the gathering of ourselves together as the manner of some is. How grateful we are to be going to church, and we hope very soon for all of you, church will be normalized.

We'll be back together as we long to be. Well, let's jump into this. This is Acts chapter 2, and it's part 2 of Why We Go to Church. Not only was there exposition, the teaching of the Word of God, there was evangelism, the winning of the lost to Christ. Even after the day of Pentecost, when there were so many people who became Christians, here's what we read in Acts 2. And with many other words, Stephen testified and exhorted them, saying, be saved from this perverse generation. And that day, 3,000 people were added to them, and the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved. The result of Peter's preaching and Stephen's preaching was that the Holy Spirit was outpoured. Can you imagine going to church one Sunday and having 3,000 people come to Christ in the service? I mean, I can't imagine that, but it happened.

It happened in that early day. And the Bible says their names were added to the number, but it doesn't say it really was their names. It says their souls were added. Did you know that Peter had more converts on that day when he preached than Jesus had in his entire lifetime on this earth? This made the total number of believers in the early church total up to 3,120, because if you go back to the first chapter, you'll find there were 120 disciples. Now 3,000 more people have gotten saved, so now the church has got 3,120 people.

Believe it or not, they counted them, and that's how many they had. So they taught the Word of God, and then they shared the gospel. Now I need to talk to you about that just for a moment, because there's not anything that I know that puts most of us into fear and guilt and grief than somebody coming up to us and saying to us, when was the last time you shared your faith? What do you mean? Share my faith?

We have all these little classes, and we teach people to do all these little things, and we've made this way too hard. Sharing your faith is just telling people what Jesus Christ has done for you. It's not a formula. Oh, you can get some formulas. In fact, I was reminded again that there have been many people who have taken the gospel and put it into little books where you can just take one page at a time and go through the book and tell people how to be saved, and you don't have to be a rocket scientist to do that. Just give them a copy of the book, and you keep the book and go read the book together. You say, you can do that?

Oh, yes, you can do it. And you know how many people have come to Christ by that? Because the power isn't what you say. The power isn't what the book says. The power is in the Holy Spirit, and if you just follow the Holy Spirit and let him lead you, probably one of the greatest evangelistic tools that has been used in my lifetime was Campus Crusade's four spiritual laws. And you can debate the theology of it all you want to. Thousands of people came to Christ, hundreds of thousands, probably millions of people, simply because somebody came up with an idea to make the gospel simple enough that anybody could share it. The Bible just tells us to share our faith.

Tell people how Jesus has blessed your life. And then when they ask you, how did Jesus get into your life, whip out your two little books and say, hey, let's go through this, and I'll show you how this happens. So, there was exposition, and there was evangelism. And then there was expression. When they got together in the church, I think their church service was pretty lively.

Listen to what it says. And fear came upon every soul. Many wonders and signs were done through the apostles. And continuing daily with one accord in the temple, breaking bread from house to house, they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart, praising God and having favor with all men. So, when they went to church, they kind of did what we do. They worshiped. Worship was one of the ways they expressed their faith.

And I think their worship wasn't all that different than what we do. The Bible says, first of all, when they came to worship, they came in a sense of awe because the apostles were still in the afterglow of the presence of Christ on this earth, and they were doing signs and miracles. So, when you went to church, something happened. And they came to church and they watched these things happen. And then the Bible says that they began to lift their worship.

The word praising God is in the text. And it's evident from this passage that there were two kinds of worship in the early church. There was the formal worship, where they experienced temple worship, kind of like what we do in the church services. And then there was informal worship, which they did in their homes. All of their worship had a couple of qualities. I want you to see this in the text. Look at your Bibles. The two qualities that describe their worship are gladness and simplicity.

Do you see that? With gladness and simplicity, they worshiped. Now, the word gladness is the word from which we get the word to rejoice.

Others have translated this word exalt or unaffected joy, total joy. When we get together to worship men and women, we shouldn't all be sad. I mean, we have some somber songs we sing on occasion, but worship is primarily a glad and happy and joyous experience. And if you come to this church and you think, well, their music's too uptempo or it's too upbeat or it's too happy, I don't know how to explain to you that I don't have an answer for you. What do you mean it's too happy?

How happy should you be because your sins have been forgiven and you're on your way to heaven? I mean, you know, is it like this or like this? I mean, but however it is you worship, the Bible says it is with gladness and joy. And then I love this, with simplicity.

I never saw that before. And one of the things you hear about modern worship is, oh, it's so simple. Seven words spoken 11 times in every song.

7-11 worship, have you ever heard that? Worship songs are so simple. They're biblical. They're simple.

That doesn't mean they're meaningless. Watch now what happened. They come together in the church and they teach the Word of God. They come together in the church and they have a desire to see other people become Christians.

So they had some way that they did that. They shared their faith. And I would imagine in the early church there were as many bashful people in that church as there are in this church, but somehow they worked through their bashfulness and they began to tell other people about Jesus.

And man, if you can't do that, you can invite them to church, at least do that. And then they worshiped. They were praising God. And when they gathered in the temple courts, they sang psalms and hymns. Did you know that Christianity is the only singing religion in the world? Did you know that? Others moan and they groan and they mumble, but only Christians sing.

Listen to this. Here's what one pastor said about this. The fact that Christianity is a singing religion bears witness not only to the way we're wired as human beings, but to the kind of God we have, namely, now listen to this, you probably didn't know this, a God who is one day, according to Zephaniah 3.17, going to sing over us. God is going to sing over us. He is going to lead a choir and celebrate the fact that we belong to him. And we're going to join in singing that he is ours because God is so valuable and so beautiful and so multifaceted in his perfections that to leave out the emotional component and not let it spill over into poetry and song would be to leave out one of the most important things you could ever do to express your love for God. God is going to lead us in worship.

He's going to sing over us, and we're going to sing to him. We're going to spend eternity enjoying the worship of our God. One of the ways they expressed their faith was through worship. Another way they expressed their faith was through baptism. Notice what it says in verse 41, and those who gladly received his word were baptized.

Baptism is such a special thing. You know, Don and I started out in the church doing what we do now back in 1969. In 1969, we started the Black Hawk Baptist Church.

It's still there. That's where we started radio and television. We started in baptism.

I had made up my mind. I wasn't going to let baptism become a meaningless ritual where people just walked into the baptistry, and we dunked them, and then they walked out the other side, and people talked about how many people they put under during one service. So we required them to give a testimony.

At first, it was really hard, because people, you want me to talk in front of people? And then a few people did it, and a few people saw it, and others began to realize what a blessing it was. You know, in seminary, they don't teach you to baptize.

Did you know that? There's no class on baptism in seminary. I had never baptized anybody in my whole life. I didn't know how to do it. I knew you kind of put them under.

Here's what happened to me. The first person I ever baptized as a young pastor was a woman named Carol Stonic. Now, I don't know how to say this right. I'm just going to tell you. She was the thinnest woman I have ever met in my life.

I hardly have weighed 80 pounds. She comes into the baptistry, and I'm trying to be real dignified about this. I go to put her under, and when I put her under, that's fine, but I couldn't set her back up, because she didn't have enough body weight to come back up. Her feet kept coming to the top. That was a real frustrating moment. I mean, I didn't know what to do. Ladies and gentlemen, I floated her out of the baptistry.

I did. One of my favorite stories about baptism is a story about Jerry Falwell. I know a lot of stories about Jerry Falwell.

He was a character. And his church in Lynchburg, Virginia, was one of those churches back in the days when there was a bus ministry. They had buses going everywhere.

Even out of the state of Virginia, they had buses going everywhere. And these kids would get on the bus and come to Sunday school, and some of those kids were rowdy. Some of them would come to church, and then after Sunday school, they'd slip off the campus instead of going to junior church, and they'd go downtown and mess around downtown Lynchburg. And the word got out, and the church was pretty upset, because they're paying all this money to fuel these buses, bring these kids to campus, and they're supposed to stay for both services, but some of them were coming to Sunday school and then flaking out, and they figured out how long they had before the bus left after the service, and they'd sneak back on campus and get on the bus and go home like everything the deacons found out about it, and the deacons were furious. So the deacons decided that the way to handle that was to get the biggest, meanest-looking deacons they had in their team, and they put them around the perimeter of the church. Every few feet, there was a deacon, and if somebody looked like they were sneaking out, those deacons grabbed them by the naff of the neck and took them into the main service and put them in the front row of the adult service.

That was their punishment for trying to sneak out. They had to come and hear the adult service pastor. One Sunday, two deacons come down the front row with a kid on each arm. They plop them in the front row.

They have a great service. Fall gets up, and he preaches the paint off the walls, and they hear the gospel, and these guys get saved. And so they practiced what we call immediate baptism.

As soon as you get them saved, get them baptized before they wear out, before they cool off, get them baptized. So they would wait, and after the service, they would baptize all their converts. So these kids got saved, and they baptized them, and after the baptism, one of the deacons came and said, we're gonna have to figure out a way to get you home because obviously your buses have already left because you stayed for the baptismal service.

Kids said, we don't know anything about that. We were walking by this church this morning, and some two guys grabbed us and brought us in here, put us in the service. And I made the comment back then that Falwell got more people saved and baptized by accident than most people do on purpose. Baptism. Men and women, we practice baptism because it's a great blessing, isn't it? Just like the early church did. The Bible says they baptized those who believed.

So this is a good time for me to say to you, if you're not baptized, you're missing out on one of the things we do at church, one of the things the church is all about, being baptized is coming out and saying, I'm not ashamed that I'm a Christian and that I'm on my way to heaven and I've been a Christian now and I'm gonna be baptized. And then they had the Lord's Supper. They worshiped, they had baptism in the Lord's Supper. It says in verse 42, they continued steadfastly in the breaking of bread from house to house. And this is kind of a technical term in the Scripture for communion.

Let me tell you one thing that's really interesting. I say that the Lord's Supper is an evidence of expression. Do you know what the Bible says about the Lord's Supper?

It says, as long as you eat this bread and drink this cup, listen to me, you proclaim the Lord's death till he comes. And the word proclaim is the same word that is used for preaching. The Bible says when we take the bread and the cup, we preach, we proclaim the gospel. In the early church, they worshiped, they baptized, and they preached. They preached through communion the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is pretty interesting because as we follow the directions of the early church, we find that God blesses our church. And then they got involved with one another. So far we've looked at exposition and evangelism and expression.

What is engagement? How did they engage? Through partnerships, it says, and they continued steadfastly in fellowship. Did you know that the word fellowship is the same word that is translated by the word partnership? Do you know when we come to the church, we're in partnership.

We have become partners with each other. They also engaged through prayers, the Scripture says, and the prayers were special prayers that they prayed in the early church. This wasn't just normal praying, but prayer was a big part of the church. In fact, if you go back and study the early documents of the church, many of the prayers were printed out, they were carefully crafted, and the people joined in the prayers. Well, there you have it, the curriculum. The curriculum for the early church.

Notice what it says. It says that when they had these things happening in their church, the church grew. I hear so much about church growth these days, and I want to just tell you that my take on church growth is real simple. If the church is God's church and it's connected with him as the head of the church, the church will grow. The only thing we ever do to make the church grow is get the barriers out of the way. Church growth isn't giving a hyperdemic needle to the church.

It's saying grow. The church is going to grow. All we need to do is get the stuff out of the way that keeps them from growing, and God's church will just keep growing.

That's what happened in this church. It doesn't say here that they had church growth meetings in the early church. They just did the church the way the church was supposed to be done, and the result was that it grew. Church growth isn't a product.

It's a byproduct. Church growth isn't a goal. It's a result of doing what you should do in the church. And if you look through the New Testament, what you will find is over and over, this church, this early church that we read about in Acts chapter 2, it was growing.

I'm not going to give you the numbers, but I'm going to give you the adjectives that are in the Bible, and you just listen to how this is described. The church was adding to their number day by day. Multitudes of men and women were being saved. The number of the disciples increased greatly. Many believed a large number, a great multitude, a great number of Greeks, and a number of leading women were saved.

Many believed, almost all of Asia believed, many thousands believed. This was a church that was on fire. They weren't having classes on how to grow the church. They were just doing the church, and when you do the church right, the church will grow. Isn't that true?

It's true. And if we keep doing that, men and women, if we don't get lost, if we don't get off on a sidetrack and get caught up in something else beside what we're supposed to do, God will honor the church because there is a hunger in the culture today for church as it was meant to be. Let me finish with this. Rodney Stark is an expert in the rise of Christianity, and he estimates that by the year 350, 52% of the Roman Empire worshipped Jesus Christ as Lord. The church was so vibrant and so powerful. And Pastor Kevin DeYoung has challenged us all with these words.

I hope you will listen carefully. If we truly love the church, we will bear with her in her failings, endure her struggles, believe her to be the beloved bride of Christ, and hope for her final glorification. He said, I still believe the church is the hope of the world, not because she gets it all right, but because she is a body with Christ for her head. Don't give up on the church.

The New Testament knows nothing of churchless Christianity. The church is for you. The church is for me.

So I guess this is my advice he wrote. Find a good local church and get involved. Become a member. Stay there for the long haul. Go to church this Sunday. Worship there in spirit and in truth. Be patient with your leaders. Rejoice when the gospel is proclaimed.

Bear with those who hurt you and give people the benefit of the doubt. While you're there, sing like you mean it. Say hi to the teenager no one else notices.

Welcome the blue hairs and the nose-ringed volunteer for the nursery once in a while. And yes, bring your fried chicken to the potluck like everybody else. Invite a friend to church. Take the new couple out for coffee. Give to the Christmas offering.

Be thankful someone vacuumed the carpet. Enjoy the Sundays that click for you. Pray extra hard on the Sundays that don't.

And do not despise the day of small things. You know, we're not a consumer-driven organization. If your attitude is, well, I'm looking for a church that meets my needs, God bless you.

You're in the wrong place. Because that's not what we're about. We want to do what God called us to do. And you know what?

When we do that, it'll meet your needs. But we're not here to satisfy every whim and desire of everybody who comes. You know what's interesting to me? That I meet some people periodically, not very many, who come here, and they give the impression that we are on trial. They're trying us out, and we're on trial.

We're not on trial. We are who we are by the grace of God. We could be a whole lot better, and we're led by flawed people, including the pastor most of all. But this is God's church, and I've given my life to it, and I hope I have a lot more years to give to it, and I hope you do too. And this year, let's make this the church that God wants us to have. Amen.

Amen. Back to church, everybody. Back to church.

You know, someone has said that you don't know how much you appreciate something until it's withheld from you. And I have a feeling many of you are going to love church more than you ever did before, because, you know, the church has been a part of my life. I don't remember any time not going to church every weekend, and I haven't missed any even through the coronavirus.

And yet, it's been different, hasn't it? It's been hard, and we long for the services to be back to normal. I have a bit of a challenge with that, because as you know, our church services are recorded, and then they're reproduced, and they're on television, and so on television now are the church services that were being held before we couldn't go to church. And so every time I watch that, it almost brings me to tears thinking about how much I miss being in church as it was meant to be for us as members of Shadow Mountain.

I'm sure many of you feel the same way. We thank God for what he's done. We thank God for what he's doing.

We know what he's going to do, and we're grateful for the privilege we have of being the church, the Church of Jesus Christ. So tomorrow, we're going to talk about Forward. We're going to listen to an interview that I had with Sheila Walsh as she helps us introduce the new series that begins tomorrow and occupies the month of October. One last time now, if you haven't ordered your calendar for 2021, this is it.

I'm not going to mention it again. You can get this calendar for a gift of any size during the month of September, and September's almost over. So make sure you sit down today, send your gift, and when you do, ask for the 2021 calendar, Colors of Creation. Today's message originated from Shadow Mountain Community Church and Senior Pastor, Dr David Jeremiah.

We'd love to hear how Turning Point is impacting your life. Write and tell us at Turning Point, Post Office Box 3838, San Diego, California 92163, or visit our website at davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio. Ask for your copy of our 14-month 2021 calendar, Colors of Creation, highlighting God's breathtaking handiwork.

It's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the English Standard and New International versions and in Standard or Large Print in the New King James with notes from over 40 years of study by Dr Jeremiah. Visit davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio for details. I'm Gary Hoogfleet. Join us tomorrow as Sheila Walsh and Dr Jeremiah discuss his new book and series, Forward. Here on Turning Point.