The Ideal Church
- Mark Lauterbach
- Jan 22, 2008
- Series: Home page
Most Christians thirst for some kind of church life that is profound, powerful, and intimate. In Acts 2:42-27 they find their model. There we have everything – fellowship, bible study, unity, sacrificial love, signs and wonders, and fruitful evangelism. “That is what a church should look like,” they conclude. It becomes an ideal for aspiration, or maybe an ideal which is the basis for cynicism after repeated failures to attain this standard.
But Luke is not writing about an ideal church. He is not even writing about a model for us to pursue and work to develop. There are no commands in the passage. No, Luke is writing to describe the fruit of the pouring out of the Spirit of God in the church. The Holy Spirit comes and 3000 are added to the church (that’s an advance of the Gospel into the world). The Holy Spirit comes, and he builds those 3000 into this kind of fellowship. It is God at work, not us.
Luke is giving vital signs. He is telling us that when the Spirit of God is at work, these things will be present: hunger for God, fellowship, worship, the active presence of God, the fruit of new conversions. He is not saying that there is no sin or weakness in the church – he will make that clear in the rest of Acts. He is saying that these are the marks of spiritual health.
We think that we are to take this picture of health and use it to measure the working of God’s Spirit among us. We do not think we are to use this passage as a foundation for a moral lecture. We think this passage helps us see where God is at work and where God is not at work. And when we see our deficiencies, we are drawn to seek out what may be quenching or grieving the Spirit. And then we run back to the Savior, for the fresh outpouring of his Spirit in our life, and ask him to revitalize what may be weak. We know in Him is all sufficiency and he is not reluctant to bless.
Here at Grace Church in