sunday sermon snippet 01 february
“Everyone was filled with awe…” — Acts 2:43
This week’s posting of the Sunday Sermon Snippet comes from this past Sunday’s sermon which is an outflow of a special series of sermons we’ve had at Grace Church.
Our focus in the Sunday Gathering this week? What exactly are the simple practices of the gathered people of God that bring us closer to Jesus, fill us with awe, and radiantly attract those around us into the Kingdom of the Beloved Son? Luke, in his story of the early church, makes it abundantly obvious to the most casual observer…
And if you’d like to check out the whole sermon, just click here.
Something Extraordinary
Look closely what Nathan just read: “Everyone was filled with awe.” Or you could translate that: “Great awe fell on everyone.”
Everyone who? It was the 3,000 people who were added to the community that day. New believers in Jesus. Those transported from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the Beloved Son, into the kingdom of light. One step of belief, and just like that, part of a new community, and new family. And awe fell on them.
And notice something else — they couldn’t stop hanging out with each other. Over and over, Luke tells us what he heard as he spoke with person after person, gathering testimony, writing the story for us: “Yeah, Luke, we were together, together, together…studying, praying, taking communion, worshiping, eating and drinking and laughing…all of it saturated with this deep and pervasive and ever-present feeling of wonder, Luke. It’s hard to put into words, but do you know what it’s like when you feel that you’re in the presence of something vast, something beyond your understanding, something beautiful and meaningful, and it makes you feel small, but not in a bad way, but in a good way? Like standing before a mountain range, or looking at a newborn baby, or a sunrise or sunset over a vast plain? You know, that sense of transcendence, we’re brushing up against something bigger than ourselves. Like that, Luke. When we’re together, it’s like that. Awe falls on us. Wonder.”
Brothers and sisters, just like the 3,000 that came to know Jesus that day, we have been given a gift to be a part of something extraordinary. We’ve been given the opportunity to join a gathering of people that is unlike any other gathering of people. There simply isn’t anything else like it in this world. It is a unique creation of the God of the universe, among the rest of all that he has created. We’ve been given the gift to be part of a special community, a one-of-a-kind family — the church. A place meant to be filled with awe. Where everyone is filled with awe. Where great awe falls on everyone.
What makes something like that possible? What is the most important thing you can know about the church? It’s there in verse 38, after repentance, after baptism, after sins being forgiven, “you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” In other words, the most important and central thing you need to know about the church is that it is a gathering of people where God is present, it is a together-ing where God dwells. And ever since the garden — when fellowship between humanity and God was broken, where dwelling was fractured — God has come in the fire of the Spirit to dwell among his gathered people.
The journey back to that began with Moses, God present as fire on a bush burning, but not consumed. And then in a pillar of fire, God guiding and leading his people to safety and fellowship with him. And then on the top of a mountain, God descending in fire to deliver the instructions for how his people might live in purity and dwell with him. And then, getting closer, God falling as fire on the tabernacle, and then temple, so that he might live among his people. And now here, in Acts, God descending once again, “then tongues, seemingly made of fire, appeared to them, moving apart and coming to rest on each one of them. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit…what you see and hear is the result of the fact that he is pouring out the holy spirit…you will receive the gift of the holy spirit.” And now here we are, little mobile temples, containing the presence of God in each of us and among us, consumed by his presence, but just like the bush before Moses, not destroyed.
Friends, I think that’s what it means that awe fell upon them! And when we really contemplate this, when we see the history of God coming as a fire among his people, when we let that sink in, shouldn’t that fill us with wonder? I mean, isn’t that extraordinary? That’s what I think is possible, for us, the same kind of wonder they had, the same kind of experience they had when, after hearing the Good News proclaimed by Peter, they said, “What shall we do!?” (v37)
Yes, what shall we do? I mean, as Billy Joel sang, “We didn’t start the fire, it was always burning, since the world’s been turning.” So we can’t start the fire of what God is and what he’s doing, but I do believe we can fan that flame, I do believe we can have this extraordinary experience that those new believers had, that they told Luke all about.
And here’s the thing, friends. There is a beautiful and radiant simplicity to it. There are just a few things we need, a few things we must be devoted to…..
If you’d like to check out the whole sermon, just click here.
