2024 National Conference: Sinclair Ferguson

48:10 And I am he. Well, it's a treat to be again here in Orlando, a little warmer in May, unfortunately, and allergy season for some of us. But we have important things to do this evening, and we're going to turn in our Bibles to the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles and to the last few verses, Acts chapter 2. I'm going to read from verse 42 to the end of the chapter, and the topic for this evening is the importance of the local church. These are the events that follow the day of Pentecost. They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers, and awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles.

49:15 And all who believed were together and had all things in common, and they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all as any had need, and day Day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number, day by day, those who were being saved. Of the many passages in the New Testament that we might focus on in thinking about the importance of the local church, I thought it might be instructive for us if we focused on the very first local church in the pages of the New Testament, the church in Jerusalem.

50:15 In actual fact, the opening section of the Acts of the Apostles focuses largely on that church and the work of God in that church and the character of the church. And you may have noticed in your reading of the Acts of the Apostles that the author Luke does a very interesting thing. He punctuates these opening chapters with a series of reports, a kind of state of the nation reports except they are state of the church reports. This is the first of them and the longest of them. But there is another in chapter 4 in verses 32 to 36, another in chapter 5 verses 12 through 16, another in chapter 6 verse 7, another in chapter 8 verses 1 to 3, and another in chapter 9 verse 31.

51:14 When you notice one of them, you can't help noticing two. you notice two, you can't help noticing three, and eventually the coin drops and you realize Luke is doing this very deliberately. He is intentionally giving to us a series of snapshots of the condition of the very first local church, a series of progress reports about how God was working through them, about the obstacles with which they were faced and the ways in which by God's grace they overcame. And I think there can be no doubt that this very first picture that He gives to us of this first local church is intended to present to us the foundations on which the Holy Spirit It was building this marvelous new community of believers that so obviously made a tremendous impact on the city of Jerusalem.

52:22 And indeed throughout the ages of church history, I think by and large it is true that Christians have always regarded these verses as a kind of spirit-breathed blueprint for what our churches are called to be. This is the church in its pristine condition, we might say, on the day of Pentecost, which is really not so much about the Spirit as it is about the Lord Jesus Christ. On the day of Pentecost, Christ is presented as exalted, the transaction that has taken place invisibly in heaven when Jesus has gone to the Father and said, You promised on my obedience that You would give me the nations for my inheritance, and this is accomplishable only through the gift of the Holy Spirit.

53:19 Father, You promised, and I promised my disciples that I would go to the Father and I would ask You to send the Holy Spirit. And so the coming of the Holy Spirit is the indication first that Jesus has been exalted at the right hand of the Father, and then second that the Father has given Him His desire, and He is pouring out upon the church the very same Spirit that the Father had poured out first upon Him. The Lord Jesus bore the Spirit throughout the whole of His ministry, and now He bestows the Spirit on the church. And the fruit of that is the day of Pentecost, which is utterly unique, but from another point of view we might say is the true first great awakening.

54:16 The Spirit comes, people are converted, and a church is formed. And in many ways that is the divine paradigm, that is the divine plan. Christ is exalted, the Spirit comes, and what is formed is the local church in Jerusalem. And as I say, it has seemed to Christians throughout the ages that what we find here is a blueprint for the marks of a genuine church. Christian church has always wrestled with the question, what are the marks of the church? We're all familiar with the formulation of the early fathers in the church, the Nicene Council, and their emphasis on the apostolicity and holiness, the Catholicity, and so on of the church.

55:17 And when those marks have seemed to be formal, as in some ways they seem to be to the Reformers as they viewed churches that claimed these marks, the Reformers believed that at the heart of these marks was the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments, and that these would be the hallmarks of a genuine local church. And yet it seems to me in many ways that what the Holy Spirit has given us here through Luke is the best of all possible formulations of what a local church is called to be and therefore why the local church is so central in the purposes of God. And I want in the time we have this evening to draw attention to four dimensions, four dimensions of this new community that God was creating in Jerusalem.

56:20 Of course, many left because they had come from elsewhere, but this is what God is doing locally in Jerusalem. And the first thing I want to point out is that the very existence of the Jerusalem church is actually the fulfillment of a specific prophecy of the Lord Jesus. I'm thinking, of course, of Jesus' words in Matthew 16, Matthew 16, 18, I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. Now, in many ways, we tend to think of those words as a kind of general prevision of what would happen in the rest of history. But I think it's helpful for us, at least in the first instance, to think of them as a specific prophecy that is fulfilled at least in its inauguration on the day of Pentecost and in this particular congregation, this particular church in Jerusalem.

57:30 It is the fulfillment of a specific prophecy. The day of Pentecost was groundbreaking day for the church in Jerusalem. And not only so, it seems to me to be perfectly clear on the day of Pentecost and thereafter that what our Lord Jesus says to Simon Peter, you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against that church. Not that He was speaking to him as an isolated individual or giving to him the keys of the kingdom as an isolated individual. But here in Acts chapter 2 and later on, of course, in Acts chapter 10, what we notice about Simon Peter is that he is in fact the God-ordained ministerial instrument who takes the keys of the gospel of Jesus Christ out of his pocket on the day of Pentecost, and he preaches the exalted Savior.

58:37 And then in his experience in the household of Cornelius, he takes the keys out of his pocket again as he realizes that the gospel is not merely for the Jewish people but is also for the Gentiles. And so this whole section in the Acts of the Apostles, at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, is a very specific, of course there may be multiple fulfillments of that prophecy, but it's a very specific fulfillment of the prophecy that Jesus had given to Peter and to the other apostles, that through them on this foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, He would begin to build a church that would last throughout all history and rise again for all eternity. And it all begins here.

59:38 And it's because of the way in which those words have a very specific fulfillment on the day of Pentecost and these days that follow afterwards, that if you want to know what your local church should look like, then this is the primary place where you should look. If you are the pastor of a church and you are longing for a vision of what the church should be, then this is the place where you should look. If you are elders seeking to encourage a right understanding of the church, this is the place where you should look. And if you are in neither of these two categories and are in the category to which most of us probably fit, this is what we should be longing for and this is what we should be praying for. And best of all, when Christ is exalted and the Spirit comes, then this is what is produced.

1:00:40 So as I say, first of all, this is the fulfillment of Jesus' specific prophecy. This is how He builds His church. And it is therefore the supreme model for a local church community. And its marks are fairly obvious, aren't they? This church is marked by teaching that is apostolic. And thank God we still have it. You remember how in the upper room Jesus had in fact prepared the apostles to take the illumination He gave them and to give it to the whole church. When the Spirit comes, the Lord said, He will lead you into all the truth. He will remind you of all that I have taught you.

1:01:36 He will show you things to come. There could be no simpler description of the New Testament Scriptures than those three statements of Jesus. So when Luke tells us that these early disciples devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, that's a model and a pattern for every single local Christian church, devotion to the apostles' teaching. Second, fellowship that is marked by humble service. They devote themselves to the fellowship, you notice. And then Luke interestingly goes on to describe what that fellowship looked like. They were together. They had all things in common.

1:02:30 They were even willing to sell their possessions and their belongings if they discovered that there were others who were in special need. They were together. That's actually one of the most important words in the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles as you read through, isn't it? Together, together, together. They were together. They break bread in their homes. They have glad and generous hearts. They praise God. They have favor with the people. It is an amazing picture of what a church fellowship really looks like. You remember how the apostle Paul says in Ephesians chapter 4 that the way in which the body of Christ grows is when each part is doing its work properly, when each part is doing its work properly.

1:03:28 And that's what's expressed here. The universals that are used, all those who believed, every soul, the generosity that was displayed, it is a phenomenon. And the wonderful thing is, apparently until later on, it didn't need to be organized. They didn't need to go to the presbytery about this. It was because of what God was doing in their hearts that this was created. And actually one of the wonderful things about this is the way in which it illustrates what Paul says later, you remember, in 1 Corinthians 12 when he uses the picture of the church as a body. He was not the first person in history to use the imagery of a body to describe how a group of people function.

1:04:24 And those of you who, like me, sat in high school and chanted Latin is a language as dead as dead can be. It killed the ancient Romans and now it's killing me. May remember, may remember there is a value in studying the Latin language, and you may remember the story that the historian Livy tells about the consul and the senators who were concerned about a rebellion among the plebs, the ordinary people, the under people, and how Agrippa Menonius went out to address the plebs and said, look, friends, our society is like a body, and we've all got our parts, and some of us are the stomachs, and some of you are feeding the stomachs, and that's how it is in a body. So get back to feeding us.

1:05:19 You are the underlings, and that's your place in the body, so stay there." And it's fascinating to see how the Apostle Paul shows how the gospel radically transforms that picture when he says this, what happens in the body is not that. What happens in the body is that we give very special attention to the basest parts. And that's part of the revolution of the gospel, isn't it? That's Jesus' style of thinking, inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of these, my brethren, you have done it to me. It's that radical transformation that takes place when the Holy Spirit comes on a community and makes them Jesus-like in their service, willing to wash the dirty feet of others.

1:06:19 And it's all here in Acts chapter 2. Devotion to apostolic teaching, fellowship that was marked by humble and loving service, and yes, worship that was marked by awe. I think we shouldn't miss out that word that he uses, should we? That because of their meeting together, verse 43, awe came upon every soul. I think I would have to say if there is something more than most things lacking in the evangelical church subculture to which most of us belong, it is a sense of awe as we gather together in the presence of God under the Word of God and find ourselves both humbled and exalted so that when the service ends, we do not want to move.

1:07:24 We want to linger. We want to continue that sense that God has been among us. And you remember how Paul speaks about this too to the Corinthians. This is what we long for as we gather together, not the excitement of you speaking in tongues, but the power of the word of prophecy that makes even unbelievers bow down and say, surely God is in the midst of you. And the fascinating thing in the Acts of the Apostles is that it's the awe, that's A-W-E, it's the awe that comes upon the church that has a powerful evangelistic impact on the world. So a few chapters later on we are told there was such awe came upon the people that nobody dared join them.

1:08:23 That's the kind of church we want, the kind of church where there is so much awe in the presence of God that nobody will join us. And then we read in the next words that people were crowding into the church as they were drawn by the sense of the majesty and glory of God among His people, and it was here right from the very beginning. That sense of awe was here. And I sometimes wonder if we are indifferent to this because we've never really experienced it. But friends and Christian family, when you taste this, you can never be content until you taste it again and again and again and again. And you can see then how Luke is holding this out to us. And it is interesting to me that in these verses I think you can probably trace the four basic pictures that the New Testament gives to us of the church.

1:09:32 It's clearly a body in the way it functions. The members are caring for each other and serving each other. It's a temple because there is such a sense of the presence of God that awe has come upon the people, we are told here. I don't think it's stretching it too far to say it's also a bride because of the way in which Luke says, you know, the thing that marked this church out was devotion, the devotion of a lover. And it is also, isn't it wonderfully, a family fellowship where they care for each other. I think those four pictures of the church are interesting from this point of view, body, temple, bride, family.

1:10:27 They provide an interesting analytical tool to enable us to ask the question, well, which is our church? Would we say it functions like a body, well organized, well structured, there are good ministries in it? Or would we say our church feels like a temple? That's the great thing about our gathering together is this sense that God has come among us and is dwelling among us and we have this sense of awe. Or would we say we are a bit bride-like? There's a lot of devotion in our church and that's the dominant theme? Or would we say our church is most like a family? Well, we're to be all of these, aren't we? But that's a pretty good diagnostic tool that may indicate to us the weaknesses and the frailties of our own local church.

1:11:29 But there's another question I think I'd like to ask, body, temple, bride, family. Which of these four pictures of the church in the New Testament would we say is most fundamental, is most important? Well, I'll maybe come back to answer that question. But, you know, if all four are not present, there's surely something lacking. And there is something lacking in our contemporary church life, isn't there? I think we would all recognize that. One of the most fundamental things that has been lacking for many years now is the way in which with really good intentions people have said, we're building a new building, So what we must do is build it as near as we can to the crossroads of two major highways so that people can come from, let's say, thirty miles away.

1:12:31 And the motivation has been good, but the law of unintended consequences is that in such a church it's scarcely possible for all these marks to be fulfilled, is it? You're not embedded, you're not really a local church, not embedded in the community. And because we are moderns, it never crosses our minds that our forefathers all the way through church history embedded their congregational life in specific localities in order that these marks of the church might be fulfilled and might be fulfilled organically and naturally. And that's a real challenge to us, as it's also a challenge to us that we have almost done neuroticism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century to build as big as we possibly can without thinking, what are we supposed to be as local churches?

1:13:39 Not what do we plan to accomplish as a church, but what do we plan to be embedded in our local community so that our church by God's grace may make some of the impact that this first local church made in Jerusalem. So, as we look at these words, I think it's true that we see that they are a fulfillment of Jesus' prophecy, that they are a model for every local church community. And then the third thing I think it's important for us to notice, that this community becomes an object of profound hostility, an object of profound hostility. And as the rest of these opening chapters underlines for us, that also is a fulfillment of Jesus' prophecy, isn't it?

1:14:37 I'll build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. Now, I wouldn't want to be absolutely dogmatic about this, but I think the language of the gates of Hades is significant. Hades, of course, is a picture of death. It's the language of death, but the gates of anywhere, what are the gates signifying in the language of the Bible? They signify the place of strategy, authority, and rule. You remember how Boaz, wanting to marry Ruth, where does he go? Today he would go online. Then He goes to the city gates. Why go to the city gates and not City Hall? Because City Hall was at the city gates.

1:15:32 That's where the decisions were made. That's where the strategy was organized. And I think that's what's implied in Jesus' words here. He is thinking about the powers of darkness and their organized strategy to destroy the church that Jesus Christ is building. But this is part of the story that begins in Genesis 3.15. There will be conflict between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. There will be great conflict between the seed of the woman and the serpent itself. And you remember how the book of Revelation says that even when the serpent grown into a dragon is not able to destroy the Christ, what does he do? He goes off in persecuting pursuit of those who belong to Jesus Christ. Friends, it's a great lesson for us that being an object of deep hostility is not eccentric for the church, but Jesus prophesied it would be normal for the church.

1:16:42 Not all was at the same level. Do you remember how Paul says in 2 Timothy 3 verse 1, in the last days in which we are all living, there will be particular times of stress. The only other place in the New Testament where that language is used is in connection with the Gadarene demoniacs who are uncontrollable. There will be times when the opposition to the church of Jesus Christ will seem to be so uncontrollable. Sometimes we feel that today. In many ways the church has had control in society. The Christian ethic has had control in society. But now it sometimes seems that the powers of darkness have the control. We're living in times of difficulty, and some of us fear persecution. And many of us know, brothers and sisters, many parts of the world who either physically or mentally or morally are under persecution.

1:17:37 That is not a strange thing, says Peter, if you are a follower of the persecuted Jesus. But the thing I want to underline for us is that insofar as this church is a model for our church, it is interesting to see how the powers of darkness seek to destroy it. Because I think if this is a paradigm for our churches, what happens to this church is also a paradigm of what may happen to ours. And there are three strategies that appear in the early chapters of Acts. The first is intimidation. And in this instance, it was partly physical. It need not be physical. Intimidation. That's the preaching of the gospel.

1:18:32 And if that fails, Satan has a second strategy that appears in Acts chapter 5 in the story of Ananias and Sapphira. First of all, intimidation, and then the false pursuit of ambition. And that happens all the way across the board, and discerning people are able to recognize it. The driving ambition of an individual or individuals to get their way, to get honor in the church without reflecting on the fact that the church is supposed to seek the Lord Jesus' way, and In the Lord Jesus' way, the way to get honor is by humbling yourself and being willing to wash the dirty feet of your brothers and sisters in Christ.

1:19:31 And when that fails, strategy number three immediately occurs in Acts chapter 6 in the squabbling between the Greek speakers and the Hebrew speakers over the distribution of mercy ministry. What's the danger there? It's that something relatively trivial should produce division. And over and over again in the history of the church and in the history of local churches, these have been the strategies. usually from without, but sometimes from within. The false pursuit of ambition instead of the desire for lowly service. And then this insidious division and the glorious thing about this first local church is that the gates of hell were not able to prevail against it.

1:20:35 It's interesting, isn't it, that the Apostle Paul says, we are not ignorant of his strategies when he writes to the Corinthians. We are not ignorant of his strategies. And you can't help wondering when that letter was read out if there were some of the elders in the church who were sitting there thinking, well, you may not be ignorant of them, but I'm afraid we have been very ignorant of them. And it's true, isn't it? It's true when things go wrong in our churches, when there is squabbling, when there is false ambition, we almost always tend to think and to speak horizontally. And we fail to ask the question that the gospel encourages us to ask, is it possible that an enemy has done this.

1:21:34 And of course, it's always possible. Indeed, it's more than always possible. This is what he is always seeking to do. And we need to learn that. We need to learn that when Jesus builds His church, He builds it on enemy-occupied territory, And the enemy will be desperate to win that territory back. And this brings us back to one of the reasons why there was such awe in the early church. It was because they sought the face of God and realized they were not wrestling against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against spiritual wickedness in the heavenly places. And beloved, so are we. Our local churches are built on enemy-occupied territory, and we need to be aware of the enemy's deep hostility.

1:22:36 Now that brings me to the fourth point I want to make. The Jerusalem church is the first fulfillment of a specific prophecy. It's in its own way a model for every local church community. It inevitably becomes an object of deep hostility. And then, as this passage and many other passages indicate to us so wonderfully, the Jerusalem church makes a profound impact on the city. And you know, sometimes I think we naively say God isn't interested in numbers in our but he was kind of interested in numbers apparently in the church in Jerusalem, and at least Luke was as he reports how this church grew spiritually and also grew and progressed numerically. And the question is, by what means did this take place?

1:23:39 Some of you who are old timers, my generation, remember E.M. Bowne's book, Power Through Prayer, He was a chaplain, I think, in the Civil War, or the War of Northern Aggression, or whatever you happen to call it in the state from which you come. And in the opening words of his little book, he says that men are always looking for better methods, but God is always looking for better men because men are God's methods. And I think that we could transpose that into our thinking about the church. Men are always looking for bigger or bigger even yet churches, but what God is looking for is better churches because better churches are God's methods. Or we might even say men are looking for better methods.

1:24:38 God is looking for better churches because churches are God's methods. There are people who despise that kind of statement, that if only the church would be the church, then it would make impact on the society, in this case the city in which it had been placed. But isn't it interesting here that there is no description here of the evangelism classes that were held? There are no description here of the questions that you should start asking people if you want to have a discussion about the Lord Jesus. Why should that be the case? Why is it that that has been such a big tool in our evangelism toolkit, ask them questions, And what you find in the New Testament is the very reverse.

1:25:38 As Peter says in 1 Peter 3.15, what you need to be prepared for is to give an answer to those who ask you questions. So the question for us as local churches is what is it that creates the difference? And what created the difference here was the character of these people, the fact that they were a local church filled with the Spirit, that they tasted the power of the preached Word of God, that they tasted awe in worship, that they tasted this lovely unity of the the fellowship of God's people. I said a moment ago that there seemed to be four pictures of the church that dominated in the New Testament, and they all seem to be here, body, temple, bride, family.

1:26:39 One of these is the odd one out. Remember those intelligence tests you did at school, which is the odd one out? And you could argue for each of them being the odd one out, but actually biblically there's one that's the odd one out. Body, bride, temple are pictures. Family is not a picture. Family is what we are. Family is what we are. And what these early Christians had grasped, and it's all over the New Testament when you begin to see it, was that what God had done was to bring them together as a family, and that what the people who watched them saw was, if I can put it this way, it was like seeing what life was really created to be in the beginning before it became so distorted.

1:27:43 They were quite a big church. The size makes very little difference whatsoever. And the big thing was, yes, you could picture them as a body because of the way they functioned. You could see them as a bride because of their devotion. You could contemplate the way in which they became a temple and the awe of the presence of God was upon them. But all the time, what they were were the sons and daughters of the living God in Jesus Christ, children of God, joint heirs with Christ, and they put on display, as these verses express so beautifully, what it means to be family. And friends, it seems to me, indeed, I call you not friends but family. That's better, isn't it?

1:28:37 Brothers and sisters in Christ. This perhaps more than anything else, more than all our strategies, however important they may be, over all the ways in which we are organized, this in our time may be the most significant thing about the power, the evangelistic power of our church as family and our church as family of families. Because nothing is clearer in our times than family disintegration and men in their arrogance who seek to destroy family. But no matter how much they may say they hate the Christian gospel, there is one thing they cannot deny, nor can they reproduce. And that is what it means genuinely to be the family of Jesus Christ in a particular locality, and not least to be a family of families that are so different that the neighbors eventually begin to say, what is the secret of your family life?

1:29:49 And the answer is, we belong to this greater family, and we fold ourselves into this greater family, and this family embraces us, and we find in this family and in its activity together and in its worship what life was originally designed to be and what eventually life will be in the new heavens and the new earth. And it's such a beautiful thing. I've never forgotten sitting at the back of the church I served in Glasgow in Scotland When a lady came in whom I knew well, whom I tried to help pastorally, she was a wonderful lady. She had married badly as a teenager to a man who was an alcoholic, a drunk, and she had been faithful to him. She had been converted.

1:30:41 And she walked down the aisle in the downstairs of the church, and I knew there was only one seat left downstairs in the church beside the only man in the church who had been knighted by Her Late Majesty, Queen Elizabeth. And she plonked herself down beside him, turned to him, put her arms around him, and plonked a great big juicy kiss on his cheeks. And I thought to myself, that's why I love the church of Jesus Christ, where that kind of thing can happen because it cannot happen anywhere else in the world. And it makes you want to take your unbelieving friend and say, where else will you see this? Only Jesus Christ can accomplish this, and He will do this in the local church.

1:31:43 I have a friend who had been a very distinguished lawyer. He was involved in an international law commission involving what would happen to the very first message that comes to the planet from outer space, and I used to pull his leg about it. And he told me how he walked down the stairs at this conference, and a man came over to him. This was an international conference of lawyers. A man came over to him and said, do you belong to such and such a church? He said, I do. How did you know? Do you know what he said? Don't ask me to explain. He said, I knew by the way you walked down the stairs. Wouldn't it be wonderful if in our local churches there was this about us that made people around us say, are you a member of that church?

1:33:00 I'd like to come and see what happens there. So may God make us such church families in the churches to which we will soon return. Let's pray. Our Heavenly Father, we thank You for the church that our Savior loved and died for. We pray that like Him we may be willing to love the church, our own church, and to give our lives for that church. And as we think of the places to which we severally belong, we pray that something of the breath of the Holy Spirit upon us may produce such fruit among us, and that we may truly be brothers and sisters in the family of Jesus Christ. We ask it in His name. Amen. Thank you.