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The Church By Hywel R. Jones

I'll be seeking to answer from this question, what is the Church?
And what the Church should be, if not what it is.
Now God in His wisdom
deemed that it was necessary for the spread of Christianity that the Church should exist.
The Church was not the idea of the early apostles.
It was not that they just sat down and thought,
well we've got these Christians together, what shall we do with them?
In their wisdom, the Church concept, the Church idea was imposed upon them by God.
The Lord, even in the Old Testament, was concerned that those who come into a living experience
of Himself should also be in a living experience of each other, that they should be together.
And the Acts of the Apostles presents us with a picture of the developing early Church,
and it's a fascinating picture.
Particularly, I think, if you compare it with the Church of today.
You see, if you ask someone today, what is the Church?
Then you get all sorts of peculiar and amazing answers to that question.
And the answer will vary depending, I suppose, upon who is being asked.
For some people, the Church is merely a religious social club, it's no more than that.
It's a place where they go on Sunday, somewhere else they go on Saturday,
somewhere else they go on Monday, but Sunday they go to the Church,
and it's merely a religious social club.
To others, it's an extension of the state.
For many years in England, it was common to say that the Church of England
was the conservative party at prayer.
Don't say that now, my new, but that's what they used to say.
So the answers are numerous as to what the Church is, and they vary,
but often they're a million months from the New Testament concept of what the Church is.
And the confusion, I think, arises because we fail to answer another question.
If you can ask the question, what is the Church?
You've got to answer another question first.
And that question is, what is a Christian?
You don't get that sorted, but you'll never understand what a church is.
You see, those two questions, what is a Christian and what is a church,
they hang together, they're like twins.
You can't separate them.
If you don't answer biblically and satisfactorily what is a Christian,
then you're always struggling to find out what is a church.
Because a church will only be what its members are.
I'm not going to waste your time telling you that the church is the people of the building,
you all know that.
But you see, it's the members that constitute what the church is.
If they are enthusiastic believers who take their faith seriously,
who love the Lord Jesus Christ,
then the church will be something as described in the New Testament.
If the members are half-hearted, insipid, pathetic,
then the church will be insipid and pathetic.
The church will only be what the people are.
Now as you look at the church in the Acts,
you see that it consisted of men and women
with a real love and experience of the Lord Jesus Christ.
And if you wanted one word to sum up the life of these early church members,
it would be the word life.
Life.
That was the thing about them.
They had life.
They were alive.
Their churches were alive.
Their Christianity vibrated with life.
There was nothing stale or drab or matter of fact about it.
They weren't being strangled by tradition as so many of our churches are today.
They were alive, pulsating with the very activity of God.
Now there's a difference between life and lively.
You see, a church can be lively in a sense that it's got activities every day of the week.
You know, Monday night is sewing club, and Tuesday night is drama,
and Wednesday is choir, and Thursday is goodness knows what.
And they can have a full list of activities, and they can be lively in that sense
and be completely devoid of any spiritual life.
And noise doesn't mean life either.
Some people say, oh, it's a lively church
because it was swinging on the chandeliers or something.
But noise isn't life.
It isn't life.
I mean, it can be a symptom of life, but not necessarily.
It can be a symptom just of noise.
And very often when you get noisy churches, when you're looking underneath,
it isn't always the life that you find in Acts that is being exhibited there.
So we have to ask this question.
What sort of life does God want to see in this church?
Now a church should be alive.
Now what sort of life is it that God wants to see?
And I think the answer is brought very clearly before us here in Acts 2.
I want to bring you five points from Acts 2 about the life of the early church.
I don't usually use alliteration, but they all comes up with little cons for you tonight,
so you can't forget them.
And the first thing here is it was a confessing life, a confessing life.
You look at verse 4.
All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit,
and they began to speak in tongues as the Spirit enabled them.
All of them, all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.
The life of the church is dependent upon the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit in its members.
They were all filled, not just the leaders, not just the preachers.
They were all filled with the Holy Spirit.
And the confessing, witnessing, and proclaiming of their faith was not left to the pulpit.
They all confessed.
They were all filled, and we read here that they all began to speak in other tongues,
and they all confessed to the Lord Jesus Christ,
and bore witness to the grace of God in the Lord Jesus Christ.
It wasn't just the function of the pulpit to do that.
They were all involved in it.
The whole church was exhibiting this confessing life.
When a church, you see, gets to the point that it thinks that if the preaching is okay,
then everything else is okay, then it's failing to be a New Testament church.
And that's probably one of the main troubles with Reformed churches.
They think if the pulpit is okay, we've got a good man in the pulpit, he's preaching the truth,
and if he's preaching with a little liveliness and a little action, then the whole church is okay.
And it's not necessarily so.
In fact, it's definitely not so.
You see, the tendency with such thinking is to enjoy the sermons and do little else,
and just come to church on Sunday and enjoy the sermon and go away,
and that's it for the rest of the week, and do nothing.
Whereas in New Testament, all the church members were involved in spreading this gospel.
They were all involved in it.
You look at verse 4.
Now, I don't want to bother you with the actual manner of the confession.
That was the speaking in tongues.
The content is more important than the manner.
But notice this.
It was the Holy Spirit who enabled them to speak.
He enabled Peter to speak.
He enabled little Mr. X over there, and looking this Y over there, and old Grandpa G over here.
He enabled them all to speak.
The Spirit came upon them, and they were all confessing the Lord Jesus Christ.
No Holy Spirit means no power.
No power means no life, and no life means no confession in the life of the church.
And how we need this power of the Holy Spirit today in our lives as individual Christians.
Now, what do they speak of this confessing life?
What were they talking about?
Well, we're told in verse 11, they were talking about the wonders of God.
They were talking about the wonders of God.
Let me ask you a question now.
I didn't quite count how many numbers churches were representing here,
but it's a dozen or more, I think.
What's the main subject of conversation in your church
five minutes after the sermon tomorrow morning?
What's the main subject of conversation?
Are you talking about the wonders of God,
or are you talking about yesterday's football result,
or the weather, or this, that, and the other?
What's the main subject of conversation when we come together as Christians?
You've been sat around here all day.
What's been the main subject of conversation?
The main subject?
I'm not talking of exclusively because you had several hours,
but the main subject of conversation.
Has it been Christ?
Has it been God?
Have we been sharing with each other?
We're in conference.
Have we been sharing with each other the wonders of God?
Have we been sharing with each other how God has enriched our lives,
and what God has shown us from Scripture,
and what God taught us this morning?
You see, the answer to that will tell us whether or not
we know anything of the filling of the Spirit.
What we talk about with each other.
Many Christians say to me,
Pastor, I find it so difficult to witness.
I find it so difficult to talk to unbelievers about the Lord Jesus Christ.
And you know, the answer there is this.
If we don't talk to each other about the Lord,
we're never going to talk to unbelievers about the Lord.
And the fact is, is that we find it embarrassing
to talk to each other about the Lord.
Are we never going to confess to the world
the glories and the riches of Christ
until we can enjoy just sharing with each other
the beauties of the Lord Jesus Christ?
They talked of the wonders of the Lord.
It was a confessing life.
It was a convicting life.
You look at verses 7 and 12 here in chapter 2.
As the people said this, they say,
are not all these which speak Galileans?
And then they ask in verse 20, 12,
amazed and perplexed, they said,
what does this mean?
What does it mean?
What they said out of effect upon the people
who were listening to them.
You see, such was the reality of Christ.
Such was the reality of the Holy Spirit
in the lives of these Christians.
The unbelievers were startled and amazed.
What's going on, they said?
What's happening in man goes wrong?
Who are these folks?
They saw a difference.
They saw a difference.
And you know, when people truly see Christ in a life,
they began to ask questions.
They said, are not these which speak Galileans?
What they were saying was,
aren't these ordinary people?
These aren't special people
who've been to some Bible college.
Aren't they just ordinary country pumpkins
from upstate, you know?
They're the little people from the sticks.
They're from the bush.
They're Galileans.
Who are they?
They're nothing special about them.
They're just the same as us.
And yet they are different.
Listen to them speaking about God.
And they said, what does this mean?
What does this mean?
They were saying, there has to be an explanation
for these people we want to know.
Tell us, tell us what's the explanation
of these people.
Not just what they're saying,
but about these people themselves.
Why are they like this?
Now is that the sort of reaction
we get from unbelievers today?
Do they look at us and say,
now there's something about this world.
There's something different about them.
Not the sort of super pious boys, you know,
who are polishing their daily every Sunday morning
at 10 o'clock before they go to chapel.
But what sort of people are they?
They're talking about God.
Their conversation is different.
Their attitude is different.
Their desires, their ambitions,
they're all different.
You know, we can do what we want
and say what we want,
but until the world begins to see in us a difference,
to see us as different,
different because we feel about the presence
and the love of the Lord Jesus,
then we can preach the truth
and it won't touch people
until they see that truth active
and living in our lives.
So often over the last few years
the Church has been going out of its way
to show the world there's no difference
between the world and the Church.
There is a difference.
There's got to be.
If there's no difference,
then pack the Church up.
There is a difference.
And the difference is Christ.
The difference is the loveliness
of the person of the Lord Jesus Christ,
dwelling and living and reigning
in the hearts of his people.
That's the difference.
And the world needs to see that difference.
You see, the world is convicted,
not when you see that we're just like them
and we swig beer like them
and we tell dirty stories like them
and we laugh at their smutty jokes like them,
but the world needs to see there are people
who've got a different standard
and that standard is Christ.
And that's evangelism.
You know, we can talk all day
about techniques of evangelism
and methods of evangelism.
And I've been doing conferences on evangelism
over the last few months.
I've got to do one in Sydney next week.
But you know, it's about time
we started to think,
well, listen, what is evangelism?
It isn't technique.
It isn't how do I witness in open air?
How do I witness in work?
How do I preach or how do I do that?
Evangelism is exhibiting the beauty
of the Lord Jesus Christ
in everyday matters,
in everyday effects,
so that people can see
the reality of Christ in us.
And when they can see that, they say,
what is this?
Give us an explanation of this.
You see, you might never be able to get up
and give a testimony or anything.
You might never be able to get up and sing
You might find it extremely difficult
to tell someone about the grace of God.
But your life should be exhibiting
the reality of Jesus
every single moment of every day.
That's evangelism.
About this time last year,
our next Book One neighbors were converted.
We'd been praying for them for some time
and witnessing to them.
And on Easter Monday,
the husband bought me back a book
that he had borrowed from me,
and he wasn't really returning the book.
He wanted to talk.
You could see that God
had been dealing with this man.
And we sat in the study of an hour or so
on Easter Monday,
and by the grace of God,
he was converted there and then.
Then a couple of months later,
his wife was converted,
but just early in the summer last year,
our summer year, winter,
she was converted.
And then later on in the summer last year,
she was in our house,
both of them were in the house one day,
and she said to me,
Peter, she said,
I didn't come to church to hear you preach.
Nice of you to talk like that to you, you know.
Puts you back in your place to think.
I didn't come to hear you preach, she said.
I said, why did you come there?
Oh, it's because of Lorna, she said,
because of my wife.
And Lorna looked at her.
I actually didn't know what she was
talking about, you know.
But she said,
when you had that operation,
two years ago,
I had a quadruple bypass heart operation.
And she said,
when you had that operation,
I asked Lorna when you were in hospital,
how is Peter?
And she just said,
well, you know, he's coming on well,
but the Lord is with us, she said,
and the Lord is taking us through this.
And she said,
the moment she said that to me,
I realized,
if it was my husband
going through that operation,
I could never have spoken like that,
and I could never have reacted like that.
And that went straight to her heart, you see.
Lorna wasn't conscious
that she was evangelizing in that sense,
but that's what convicted this woman
that she needed Christ,
because she saw she couldn't have coped
in that situation in the same way
my wife was coping.
That's what brought her to church,
and when she came to church,
she heard the gospel and she was saved.
But that's evangelism, isn't it?
That's the convicting life.
What convicted that woman
was not the books I'd given her,
or the tracts I'd given her,
but a life which was centered in Christ,
and a life which was knowing the peace
and the reality of Christ.
That's the convicting life
that the church needs.
It was a convicting life.
It was a converting life.
It was a confessing life,
a convicting life,
and a converting life.
You read in verse 37
that these people,
when they heard the gospel,
they were cut to their heart.
They were cut to their heart.
They didn't have to be amused,
these people.
They weren't laughing and joking.
They were cut to their heart.
That's a pretty strong phrase.
They were deeply, deeply affected
by what they heard.
They were cut to their heart,
and they said,
what shall we do?
And we read later on
that three thousand of them
came to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
You see, the result of this
Holy Spirit activity
in the lives of these Christians
was, first of all,
that a huge crowd of people
were prepared to listen to Peter preach.
That was the first thing.
When they saw this phenomena
of these people speaking
of the wonders of God,
they were now willing to hear Peter,
just one voice,
speak to them.
And in the space of one sermon,
one sermon,
a church membership of one hundred and twenty
was increased by three thousand.
That's church code for you.
It was increased by three thousand.
And I wonder if we believe
that sort of thing can happen today.
If we're honest,
I think most of us would say,
no, we don't even expect one conversion,
let alone three thousand conversion.
We don't even look for one conversion,
let alone three thousand conversion.
Now, why is this?
Why is there so little expectancy
among us so often as Christians?
I think it's because very often
we trivialize things,
and we major on things
which should have no consequence whatsoever.
No consequence whatsoever.
I remember saying to our folk in St. Vincent
just about eighteen months ago,
I said, if I preach next Sunday
with my tie off,
that's equivalent in ways
to denying the resurrection,
if I preach next Sunday
with my tie off,
you'll be speaking about it for months.
But if I speak without a conversion,
nobody bats an eye.
And that's true, you know.
We major on silly things.
What does it matter
whether a man has got his tie on or off
when he's preaching?
But it does matter
if a man preaches the gospel
and nobody's sinned.
That ought to bother us.
It really ought to bother us.
It ought to concern us.
And if you are preachers,
then it ought to concern you.
That if you preach the gospel
and you're preaching for conversions
and you're looking for the power of God to come
and something of that measure
of the power of God comes
and nobody's saved,
then it ought to bother us.
Why is it that we don't expect?
Well, is it not, again,
this lack of the Holy Spirit in our minds?
You see, I'm getting more and more convinced.
I've been 31 years in the ministry
and I'm more and more convinced than ever
that the problem is not out there in the world.
The problem is in our chapels,
in our churches,
in our membership,
in our hearts.
And that's always been the problem, you see.
You go back to the Old Testament.
The problem was never the Amalekites
or the Amalekites or the Philistines.
God could deal with those in five minutes.
The problem was always the Israelites.
They were the fellows, God,
to get sorted out.
When they were sorted out,
well, the Amalekites and the Philistines
were no problem at all.
They could bring up an army of Goliaths
and an army of little Davids
could have flattened them.
The problem was always God's people.
And it's still the problem.
It's us, you see.
And the lack of expectancy
and the lack of vision
and the lack of conviction.
And there is no substitute in Christians
for being filled with the Holy Spirit.
No substitute.
Not being filled with the Holy Spirit.
I don't think we all go around jabbering in tongues.
I mean what Paul means in Ephesians 5.
We need to be filled with the Holy Spirit
in order to be better husbands
and better wives
and better children
and better parents
and better workers
and better employees.
That's the context of the faith.
Be filled with the Spirit.
And then he goes on to tell us
in terms of relationships
and how it affects relationships.
And this becakes the Church
a life which is a converting life,
touching the community.
Touching the community.
Oh, I don't know what
Tamworth Reformed Church does here
or you what Church does,
but I know in Wales my Church
doesn't touch the community.
People don't know we're there.
We've got a massive building on the main road,
seats six, seven hundred people
and people flood passing into town
and come back on their buses and their cars
and we don't know whether a Catholic Church
or Evangelical Church
or a Mormon business.
They don't know.
We don't count for anything any longer.
But this early Church counted.
They touched the lives of people.
And the life of the Church
was a converting life.
Oh, to God that we might see
the life of the Church like that again.
That we might be touching the lives
of this community.
That you might be touching the lives
of your next-door neighbors.
That you might be touching the lives
of the people you're working with.
Touching them for God.
Touching them with the grace of God.
Touching them with the love of God.
Touching them in such a way
that they've known they've been
in the presence of a child of God.
And that's evangelism.
And that's what this sort of life
the early Church had.
It was a converting life.
People were saved
and they were brought to faith in Christ.
And it was a consistent life.
We see in 42
that they devoted themselves
to the Apostles' doctrine.
We see in 46
every day they continued
to meet together in temple courts.
There was a consistency
about these Christians.
I'm sure that's something
perhaps lacking in many of us today
is this consistency.
These were no flash-in-the-pan conversions.
These were no hot and cold Christians
enthusiastic one day
and bored the next.
These were no pick-out-meeting,
pick-out-preacher Christians.
There was a consistency about them.
They continued.
They devoted themselves.
That's a pretty strong word too.
They devoted themselves.
They didn't just drift and say,
oh preaching tonight, oh not that again.
When's he going to finish?
They devoted themselves.
There was something about
what they were being taught
and what they were experiencing in the Church
that they loved and they laughed up
and they wanted more and more and more.
Every day they continued like this.
There was a consistency
about these Christians
that shone out
and their consistency at a broad base.
It was based on doctrine,
on fellowship, and on sacrament.
That was the consistency of their life
and the strength you see
of a broad base is this,
that it stands.
If you're based standing on one leg,
anybody can push you over, can't they?
There are so many Christians
who stand on one leg,
a doctrinal leg or an experience leg
or a chorus leg or this leg or that leg
and they like the wind
and the wind can top them over,
a child could top them over,
but there was a breadth to their base
of their consistency,
doctrine, fellowship, sacrament.
And that's why these people
were not just good starters
but they were good finishes.
They were consistent
and they weren't super saints, you know.
But they were very ordinary believers,
very ordinary.
They weren't perfect
but they were consistent
and the life they lived
was consistent with the doctrine they believed.
Their fellowship was consistent
every day they met.
And this is only possible, you see,
because there was a deep bond of love
between them.
Surely real Christianity
will always reveal itself
in a consistent Christian life.
And if the church of the,
if the individual members are consistent,
then the church will be consistent.
Consistent in its devotion to God
and its ongoing work.
Let me, let me talk for a moment
about the fellowship of the church.
Our churches, you see,
can be no more spiritual than we are
and we should not expect them to be so.
You a church will not be any more prayerful than you are
and you have got no right to expect your church
to be more spiritual and more prayerful than you are.
There's an old jingle which says this,
if every member was just like me,
what kind of church would my church be?
That's a good test, you see.
You just ask yourself that now.
Next time you sit down and moan about your church
and we're all good mourners, aren't we?
Ask yourself this now.
If every member of your church
gave as much time to prayer as you gave,
would it be a better or a worse church?
If every member of your church
gave as much time to evangelism as you gave,
would it be a better or a worse church?
If every member was just like me,
what kind of church would my church be?
You see, there's something we need to remember
about the church too, I think.
The church consists of sinners.
Truly, they're sinners saved by grace,
but they're still sinners.
And they're anything but perfect.
Anything but perfect.
And one of the major problems so often in local churches
is because we forget this.
We forget that those folk
are in the same fellowship group as ours,
or there's people who come to the same communion table,
or those fellows who sit at the other end of the row
over here, they're sinners.
And sometimes we set too low a standard for ourselves
and too high a standard for others.
And we expect more from them
than we prepare to give ourselves.
And that's one of the root causes
of many problems in the church.
You know what happens only if someone
doesn't speak to you in church for a couple of weeks,
or when you're sick and they don't visit you,
you get the hump.
But what happens with the sick?
A little lady came to me several years ago.
She said, pastor, I'm very upset with the church effect.
I was ill for two weeks
and nobody from the church came to see me.
So I didn't defend the church.
That shouldn't have happened.
But I just said to her, I said, so-and-so, you know,
in the church, you know them, yes.
They've been ill for three weeks.
You've been to see them?
Not a word, not a word.
We expect people to do to us
what we are not prepared to do to others.
And that causes all sorts of problems
in a local church, inconsistent.
You see, none of us are perfect in our attitudes
or our behavior.
So that's exercise a little tolerance
with other Christians.
Now that's not to excuse sin,
but it will help us to be more loving
and more tolerant of each other.
Fellowship has got to be worked at.
I'll tell you the test of fellowship, shall I?
It's not that a Calvinist does fellowship
with a Calvinist.
It's that a Calvinist can have fellowship
with an Athenian.
That's a test of fellowship.
If you can have fellowship with everybody
who agrees with you, well, what good is that?
The world does that.
But if you can have fellowship with a Christian
who doesn't see things as you see them,
but is still the Lord's,
that's the test of real fellowship.
That's the test of love.
Well, we can, we can not sweep the things
under the carpet,
but really get on with each other
and have fellowship with each other
and know the differences
and talk about the differences,
but not get all angry about it
and talk to each other about it
because of it, because we disagree.
But the Lord's people, they're in Christ,
they are dwelt by the same Spirit,
they've been saved by the same blood.
God loves them.
Why can't I love them?
That's the test of fellowship, you see.
You see, unquestionably,
the most difficult church in New Testament
was Corinth.
Corinth was one of those churches, you know.
If you went to Corinth on your two-week
summer holiday,
you came back, you wouldn't be,
you wouldn't call it in Corinth,
you know, been to Corinth for two weeks.
Ooh, the singing in Corinth,
and the miracles in Corinth,
and the healings in Corinth,
and the tongues in Corinth.
Poor old Thomas is drawn to Corinth here.
But if you've been in Corinth for two months,
you'd be glad to get back to Corinth,
because Corinth was riddled with problems
on the surface.
It was bundling the spiritual activity,
but underneath there were problems galore.
And you want to go read the first
epilogue to see that.
And Paul was seeking to deal
with one of the most contentious of problems,
and that was the use of the gift of tongues.
And it was causing great problems in Corinth,
and in chapter 12,
and in chapter 14 of Corinth,
he's dealing with this very contentious problem.
And between 12 and 14,
when he's dealing with that contentious issue
in the church,
that was splitting the church,
and dividing the church,
and sending one Christian against another Christian,
he sandwiches in that remarkable 13th chapter on that.
Why does that come there?
Why does 13 come between 12 and 14?
Well, because 12, 13, that's where it goes.
You know, it isn't like that at all, is it?
It's because there was a meaning there.
Paul was wanting to show these folks,
listen, you can be jabbering away with tongues,
you can be healing people,
you can be prophesying,
you can be doing all these things,
but if you haven't got love, you're nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Listen to what he said.
Love never fails.
What a statement that is.
Love is patient.
Love is kind.
It doesn't envy.
It doesn't boss.
It is not proud.
It is not rude.
It is not self-seeking.
It is not easily angered.
And this one, I think, is the most peddling of them all.
It keeps no record of wrongs.
It keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil,
but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes,
always perseveres.
That's love.