Sermon: Stewarding the Gift of Christ

Good evening, good to see you all. If you would take a Bible in hand and open with me to the Book of Acts, the book of Acts chapter two. This evening we will be a reading and studying hearing from verses 42 through 47.

Uh, as you should know, by now, we are taking a, a month long pause of preaching through books consecutively, um, to to preach on the topic of stewardship and how this topic of stewardship extends to every area of our life. All the things of our lives fall under this, this subject of stewardship. Everything that we have and everything that we are, we are to steward for God. And so tonight, uh, the subject that we will be studying,

the sub subject is the gifts of Christ, the gifts of Christ, the ordinary means of grace. So we'll consider that from Acts chapter two in just a moment before we read God's word and hear it preached, let's ask for God's blessing upon it.

Oh God bless now the reading and preaching of your word that it might become and an effectual means of salvation to save the lost and to sanctify saints that it might bring glory to your name. Oh God, most high. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Acts chapter two verses 42 through 47. Listen carefully for this is God's word. And 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 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 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 are being saved.

Well, I don't need a show of hands and it might be wise if you don't answer this question with a raise of your hand, if it, if you can answer this question in the affirmative. Are there any here who have already gotten tired of the Christmas present that you received at Christmas?

Like bored of it. You're done with it, you've forgotten about it already. After a very busy and exciting few days in our house playing with new toys, playing new toys with cousins and with grandparents, all the excitement began to wear off in our home. And we heard it didn't seem like it took very long, that dreaded declaration. I'm bored Already. It's been like two days. How can you be so bored? Have your new gifts already become old

and uninteresting to you? If not, how long will it take? And maybe here's a good test. How many gifts that you received from Christmas one year ago are you still using today?

We tend to become very disinterested things in this life quite quickly. We tend to become disinterested, even bored rather quickly with what we sometimes receive with great joy and thanksgiving.

Sometimes we quickly move on from those things because we've become bored looking for something new, something else, something exciting that will reinvigorate our interest. Want you to hold that thought?

You know, God is a gift giver. God is a gift giver. Jesus says in Matthew seven, if you who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more does your father in heaven know how to give good gifts to his children? God is a gift giver. He gives gifts. God gives life. God gives strength. God gives provisions. He gives wisdom. God gave us Jesus. God gives the Holy Spirit, he gives salvation. He gives us faith. God gives promises,

spiritual promises to his people. And if you're here this morning, you heard, I hope you heard Pastor Jason reference explicitly another one of God's gifts. Gifts that God gives to his people. Do you know what I'm thinking of? Pastor Jason as he came to institute the Lord's supper by bringing to us God Jesus's words, he said at the end, these are the gifts of God for the people of God. May your faith be encouraged. May your souls be nourished.

These are the gifts of God for the people of God. The sacraments are a gift. The sacraments are one of three gifts that God has purposed, designed, instituted, given one of three gifts that God has purposed to especially strengthen the faith of believers because these gifts communicate God's grace to his people. So the sacraments, the word of God and prayer, the word of God, sacraments and prayer. Three gifts. God has given purpose

to especially strengthen faith in God's people. Now these gifts have a technical title which you may have heard before. Call them the ordinary means of grace. Sometimes you'll hear the pastors or maybe you, he'll, you'll hear the elders describe uh, UR C's philosophy and ministry as an ordinary means ministry, an ordinary means of grace, ministry. And what that means is that we university reform church are committed to these three means of grace.

We're committed to them. We focus on them. We make these things the word of God. Preached, read, sung, prayed, seen in the sacraments.

We make these things the main things in our Sunday gatherings. Do you want to know why our services look the way they do? Why they have what they have as elements of the service and why we don't have other things? It's because these are means of grace. And one of the reasons why we make these things the main things is because of what we see the church doing in the scriptures. And we find one of those examples here in Acts chapter two.

This is what the church does. They hear the word of God and they devote themselves to it.

They are devoted to the fellowship. They are devoted to the breaking of bread to the sacraments and they are devoted to prayer. We're gonna consider that more here in a moment. But if you've heard this title, ordinary Means of Grace, perhaps you've wondered what does that mean? What does it mean that these means of grace are ordinary? That seems like a really odd philosophy of ministry for a church. You serve God the great God of the universe, ordinary

means of ministry, yes, ordinary. Why do we call them ordinary? Well, first, because they are ordained by God. Ordinary means they've been ordained by God, instituted by Christ to be used, gifts to be used. The other reason why we may call them ordinary means of grace is probably more obvious to you the word of God. The sacraments and prayer are rather ordinary. Aren't they hearing words proclaimed eating bread and just tiny little morsels really that's going

to nourish your soul? Not that doesn't even nourish your belly and praying, praying to a God you cannot see.

Yes, these are ordinary means. They are not outwardly extraordinary. But these ordinary means when accompanied by the blessing of the Holy Spirit are extraordinary in their power and effect. These ordinary means when they are blessed by the Holy Spirit are extraordinary in their power and effect. They are meant and they do nourish the souls and encourage the faith of believers.

God's chosen and regular way of blessing his people is through the word of God, read and preached, the sacraments observed and prayers offered publicly and privately. And that's why we focus on these means. That's why we give our attention to them. God uses them. He's commanded that we use them. So we speak of them as means. But you can also think of them as gifts, God's gifts for his people. And as we're thinking about stewardship this month,

if we are to be good stewards of all that God has given to us in all the aspects of our life, then we must also think about stewarding the spiritual gifts that God has given to us, not just physical gifts that God has given to us or or time, maybe not such a physical thing, but a commodity. We must think about stewarding spiritual gifts. And so that's what we wanna do tonight. How do we steward these spiritual gifts that God has instituted to nourish and encourage

and strengthen faith? That's going to be our application at the end. How do we steward these gifts? But first what I want us to do is to look more closely at these four practices here in Acts chapter two, verse 42, these four practices of the early church. And I want us to think about how not just consider the practice, but also how each of these practices is a gift. How each of these practices are a gift. So first, let's look at how the church was devoted

to the apostles teaching. These believers in the early church were committed, you could say to continuing education. They were new converts, recent converts to Christianity. Most if not all of them, they had learned Christ from the apostles. The apostles learned from Christ and then they taught others. These new Christians and these new converts were were those who had recognized in themselves that they had a need for Christ.

They recognized their own personal need for Christ. And what they did is they received the teaching, they believed it and the Holy Spirit caused them to be born again. But like any believer, no matter how old, no matter how mature, these believers still had more to learn. They had more room to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so what did they do? They devoted themselves to the teaching that they committed

to learning more about Jesus. The Apostles teaching. What is that? You might wonder what that is. It's very simple. The apostle's teaching was Jesus. Jesus was their message. They taught what Jesus did. They taught what Jesus taught. They taught how and why Jesus died. They taught how and why Jesus was raised from the dead. And if you want me to prove it, just look up. Just look up and see what Peter preached about in Acts chapter two earlier in

earlier in the chapter, this is what the apostles were committed to teaching. They taught how all of this happened to Jesus according to God's purposes. And in fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies concerning the Messiah, the apostles taught what you have sitting on your lap right now. Their message is the same message that you find right here. Jesus. Jesus was their message.

The Bible, dear friends, is a gift. It's a gift because in this word you come to know God and you come to know his only son, Jesus Christ. There's nowhere else that you can come to know this God. There's nowhere else that you can come to know this Christ. When you hear the word of God read, when you hear it preached, you learn of your need for Christ. I am a sinner. I need to be saved and reconciled to God. And you learn how you may be reconciled,

how you may be saved. It's by faith in Jesus Christ. You don't just learn about your need, but the word of God is actually the means by which we are saved through the word. The Holy Spirit gathers in the lost and grows up the found. That's what one preacher said gathers in the lost and grows up the found. That's what the Holy Spirit does through the word God's word is powerful and effective to accomplish what God intends to save.

The lost Romans 10 17 faith comes from hearing and hearing by the word of Christ and it's powerful and effective to sanctify the found John 1717 sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth. The Lord himself says in Isaiah 55, my word that goes out from my mouth shall not return to me Empty. God's word is powerful. It is a means of grace. It affects what it intends to bring people to saving faith in Jesus Christ and to sanctify saints.

So the early church was devoted to the apostles teaching and they were devoted to the fellowship. Fellowship can be a sort of superficial term that we just kind of like throw out all the time. Any conversation we have fellowship or something like that. Okay? That's not what that means here. This does not mean that the early church was devoted, devoted some time or a few minutes to spend after the service in the foyer talking with

a friend in the back of church. What this means is that the church was devoted to one another. They were devoted to one another. They were unified by a common faith, a common Lord, a common baptism. And so they committed themselves, devoted themselves to one another.

When you become a Christian, you no longer belong to yourself first and most importantly, you belong to the Lord. He bought you with a price. But then you also belong to all the others whom Christ has bought.

You now have not just a a family, a flesh and blood family that you can point to. You have a spiritual family that you can see in this room, brothers and sisters in the Lord. And you are to look out for one another. You are to care for the needs of one another. And we find that's what these early believers were doing and concerned about caring for one another's needs, caring for one another. They were devoted to the fellowship

because they were unified in Christ. Now, Christian fellowship is not what we would consider to be one of the primary means of grace. It's not one of the, the regular means of grace like the word sacraments and prayer. And I'm not gonna give it as much airtime tonight in the interest of time, but that does not mean that fellowship is unimportant or that it's somehow dispensable fellowship. Christian fellowship is a gift

and I think all of you can attest to it, just spoke with some visitors this morning that were here. How, how Christ will often use the love and the care that we show to one another to be a means of encouragement, a means of of building us up in the faith, causing us to persevere in the faith. And so we see that the early church was devoted to the fellowship and then they were also devoted to the breaking of bread. Some commentators, uh, believe that this

reference here in verse 42 to the breaking of bread is that this practice was actually more of just a regular sort of meal sharing. It was a regular sort of hospitality, having people over into your home breaking bread, meaning they're just sharing meals. And that seems to be a regular practice in the early church. If you look down at verse 46, day by day they were breaking bread in their homes. But I'm convinced here in verse 42,

as are several other commentators, that the breaking of bread in verse 42 is a reference to the Lord's supper. This is not just a regular meal that Christians were sharing together. And the reason I'm convinced of that is because you notice there in the ESV there's a definite article before breaking of bread and there's not. In verse 46, they were devoted to the breaking of bread. It's distinguished. There's a difference between these two

breakings of breads. The breaking of the bread in verse 42 is a reference to the Lord's supper. And if you look later in acts in chapter 20 verse six, you can find a reference again to breaking of bread. On the first day of the week in the Christian gathering, the Christians when they were meeting together on the first day of the week were breaking bread together. They were celebrating the Lord's supper. And so I think what we see in this, this picture of the life

of the early church is the church observing the Lord's supper together. And I think it's interesting. You'll notice where this falls. Okay, it's the third, it's the third practice identified here in verse 42. It devoted themselves to the apostles teaching to the fellowship and to the breaking of bread. This sacrament, this sacrament of the Lord's supper, breaking of bread is meant to strengthen both of these devotions.

The Lord's Supper first helps the church to hold fast to the apostles teaching because the Lord's supper is the message of Christ crucified. The very same message that the apostles were teaching and the Lord's Supper is often called communion. We commune not only with God, but we commune with one another. We share fellowship as God's people. And so as they were, they were practicing the breaking of bread, practicing, observing the Lord's supper.

They would be strengthened to hold fast to the apostle's teaching and to strengthen the the fellowship that they shared. Now the sacraments are a gift. I've already said that Pastor Jason said it this morning because in the sacraments, God communicates the gospel to us in a very tangible form, in a way that we can see and touch and taste.

And because through the sacraments, Christ makes us a partaker of him and all his benefits, he makes us a partaker of him. Sacraments have been called the visible word. The the word of God preached is especially fitted for the ear. While The sacraments are fitted for the senses of sight and taste and touch, the grace that God communicates to you in the sacraments of baptism in the Lord's supper is not a different grace.

It is not a superior grace to the grace that God declares and communicates through the word of God, read and preached. It's the same grace, but, but God is gracious and he knows that you are weak. He knows that your faith is weak. And so he institutes sacraments, sacraments that declare the same grace, communicate the same grace but tangibly to you and the benefits in a different way so that you can partake of his grace to you.

What are those benefits that you receive in Christ that are, that are displayed visibly in the sacraments? Well, you've got union with Christ, regeneration, justification, adoption, sanctification, the benefits of assurance of God's love, peace of conscience, joy in the Holy Spirit. These are all displayed in signs to you in the sacraments. But not only signs,

God's sacraments are means of grace. They are seals of his grace to us. God works through them. These ordinary signs to nourish your faith, to strengthen your faith, to sanctify your faith. They are means of grace, not just symbols of grace. And so the sacraments are a gift. And then finally the prayers. The church was devoted to the prayers. Verses 46 and 47 tell us that when believers gathered together for public worship,

they prayed corporately. When they gathered together privately in homes, they prayed together. When you read the book of Acts, next time you do this, read through the book of Acts. It is impossible not to notice how the church grows in amazing ways. Their church is growing, growing, growing.

And it's impossible not to notice how the word of God is said to increase and multiply and spread. There's no coincidence that the church grows as the word increases. They go hand in hand together. But it's also as the church prays, also as the church prays to together, and that's what they were committed to in the early church in verse 42, that they were committed to praying together and prayer too, like these other practices are a gift for you people of God.

Prayer is is one of the most distinct privileges that you have as a child of God, as sons and daughters. You have access to the Father who is in heaven. You are welcome there. Hebrews 10 describes prayer as, as entering the Holy of Holies.

The holy of Holies was off limits to any normal person. But you as sons and daughters may go in to the holy of Holies and commune with God through prayer. He speaks to you in his word and we speak to him through prayer. Prayer is the means that God uses to deepen our communion with him and sweeten our communion with him.

God uses our prayers even more than that. Furthermore, to accomplish his purposes. God does great things through prayer and he does great things in you through prayer. Through prayer. God is sanctifying you as he is conforming your will to God's will we pray. In Jesus' name, we pray according to God's will. And as we do so, God is strengthening our faith, sanctifying our faith, sanctifying our desires so that they look more like His.

God uses prayer to accomplish his purposes in his church and in his people. These are gifts of God. So these practices, reading and hearing the word of God, observing the sacraments, praying in public and private worship, these are the normative means that God uses to convert sinners and to build up believers in the faith.

And that's not just in the early church, that's today. These are gifts that don't grow old. These are gifts that don't wear out. These are gifts that stay fresh, that are to be used over and over and over again generation through generation. So what I want us to do with the remaining time that we have is to think about how we can and should steward these spiritual gifts that God has given to us. Two ways, two ways that we steward the means of grace.

First, we use them, we use them. These are gifts to be used. Unlike those Christmas gifts that you might've received and have already lost interest in, find boring. These are gifts to keep using. God uses these gifts to communicate his grace to you and to grow you in grace and deepen your faith. If I ask you, do you want to grow in your faith, I would expect nearly everybody in this room would say, yes, I can easily answer yes.

I want to grow in my faith. You don't need a flashy program. There is no updating to the approach that God has for, for deepening your faith, growing you in your faith.

Reading the Bible, hearing the Bible, preached, praying the Bible, observing the sacraments is God's way of building up Christians. It's tempting. It is tempting. I know it. These are ordinary means. It is tempting to go find something more flashy, more exciting, less boring perhaps than the word of God. Prayer and the sacraments. You might think there has to be a better way, a quicker way of growing me in the faith of helping my children

to grow in the faith, helping my friends to grow in the faith. There is no better way to build up Christians in the faith then these ordinary means of grace because God himself has ordained them to be used for this purpose. So stick to his way. Make these practices a regular part of your life. Use them as maybe a a crass way of putting this. There might be a better term here in verse 42. Devote yourself to these means.

It's a strong word of commitment. That word has a a sense of continued or continual devotion. When your interest fades or your desire fades in, in picking up the Bible and reading it or coming on Sundays to to hear the word of God preached. Observe the sacraments, stick to it. Remain steadfast, hold fast to God's plan. The church was devoted to these means. And so we steward God's gifts by devoting ourselves to them, holding fast to them.

That's the first way that we are good stewards of these gifts. The second way is that we are to receive the grace which God communicates through these means by attending to them with faith. Attend to these these means. Use these means with faith. With faith. The ordinary means of grace do not work on their own first and most importantly, God must bless these means of grace in order for them to become means of grace in your life.

God must bless them. They do not work on their own. But secondly, we must receive them with faith. Without faith, the good news of the gospel is not good news. With faith, the good news of the gospel falls on deaf ears and on hard hearts. Jesus describes this very thing in Matthew 13, when he says hearing, they do not hear. You can hear the word of God preached but not really hear because you don't have faith without faith in Christ,

one eats and drinks judgment to himself through the Lord's supper.

It does not work without faith. We receive God's grace by faith. We receive Christ by faith and we receive God's means of grace by faith. Verse 44 describes the ones who devoted themselves to the teaching fellowship, breaking of bread and prayers as those who believed. Those who believed, received the word with faith, observed the sacraments with faith. Pray with faith.

But I wanna say maybe just one more thing about this faith. It is not the strength of your faith that makes these means of grace work. It is not the strength of your faith that makes these means of grace works. It is necessary, but it is not the sufficient cause.

If you think that you have great faith, take care. Take care. Lest you think that you somehow earned God's grace through your faith,

God owed this to me because my faith is so great. You can never earn grace.

Grace is god's to give freely and the only one who gets glory for grace, the only one who gets glory for your faith is God himself.

But if I had to guess, there's probably more of you who in this room think that you have weak faith, small faith. And I say to you, don't be discouraged. Don't be concerned that these means of grace won't work in building you up in the faith, in growing you. In the faith. It might take years and years and years of devoting yourself to these means of grace for you to see progress in your life.

It is not the strength of your faith that makes the means of grace. Work. I said it earlier, say it again. God knows you and he knows that your faith is small and weak. And that is precisely why God ordained the means of grace.

He knows that your faith is weak and small. He knows that it needs strengthening. He knows it needs encouraging. And so God ordained these means of grace to be the very means to encourage you and strengthen your faith. So attend to them, attend to them. Use them with the faith that you have and attend to them in order that God would strengthen your faith. God has given his church wonderful gifts, wonderful gifts in the word sacraments

and prayer, gifts that allow us to hear from him, gifts that allow us to speak to him, gifts that will nourish and strengthen our faith. These are gifts to be used with faith. Let us pray. Let's ask that God would use them for that for our very selves.

Oh Lord, we thank you for the word, for the sacraments for prayer. We thank you as well for the fellowship of the Saints. We humbly ask, oh Lord, that you would use these means that you have ordained and given to your people, that they would be powerful, powerful in the effect in our lives and in this church, nourishing our faith and sustaining our faith all the way till the end for your glory and for our good. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen.