Christ’s Blueprint for His Church: The Church of Christ Shares with Others

Christ’s Blueprint for His Church
Studies in the Book of Acts
“The Church Shares with Others”
Acts 4:32-37

INTRODUCTION:
Cambodia. It is a nation in the southeast of Asia, beside Vietnam. Its capital is Phnom Penh and they have about 16 million people in the country. That’s nearly twice the size of Michigan. But its size is not nearly as large as Michigan. Cambodia covers about 70,000 mi2 while Michigan covers almost 97,000 mi2. The Mekong River flows through Cambodia. Cambodia is also the home to a beautiful temple complex known as Angkor Wat, one of 1,000 Buddhist temples built in Cambodia. 97% of the country are Buddhists.

You did not come to worship this morning expecting to hear about Cambodia, did you?

Well, let me tell you about Partners in Progress. Partners in Progress is a mission effort started by a missionary named Bill McDonough. Brother Bill McDonough as a long history of mission work with churches of Christ in Germany and France. After his first wife passed away, brother McDonough married a French woman with the very French name Marie Claire. Anyway, brother McDonough saw an important need in Cambodia and, certainly along with a host of others, started a medical mission effort on a ship called the Ship of Life.

Within the last ten years, 75 churches of Christ have been established in Cambodia. That is one aspect of the church’s work in Cambodia. The other aspect of the work is the Ship of Life. The ship travels up and down the Mekong River, providing simple medical services, dental services, teaching English to the nationals, and, of course, providing Bible studies. They share used eyeglasses with the Cambodians. If someone needs surgery or further health care that cannot be provided on the Ship of Life, the medical doctors will write a referral to send someone into one of the larger cities around Cambodia and provide food and transportation so the individual can get better medical care.

Every week or two, the city moves up to 30 miles, to serve different people who live along the banks of the Mekong River. Cambodia is under a dictatorship but the Ship of Life operates in areas where health care is not easy to have so the Ship of Life operates with the permission of the Ministry of Health. They see about 130 patients a day, 70-80 of those are medical; the rest are dental. Half of the patients are illiterate. Medications are provided free of charge.

One optometrist and her team treated 1,100 patients in five days. During that particular effort, 70 people also had eye surgery with several of them receiving cataract surgery at $50 a surgery. One man in the video said that he felt like he had been “born again.” The people along the river earn about $100 / year. 85% of their health problems are traced back to the contaminated water they drink. So, the Ship of Life, financed by churches of Christ, is going to build some water filtration systems to provide pure water.

You can watch a 14-minute video on the Ship of Life on the vimeo.com website. Just go to the website and type in “Ship of Life.”

I am not trying to promote Swartz Creek getting involved in the Ship of Life or you, personally donating to the cause. You can if you want to. So why have I discussed it so much? Let me answer that question in a just a minute.

Let me first tell you about a national effort to help people among churches of Christ, called Churches of Christ Disaster Relief Effort. When my dad preached in Bayou La Batre, AL in 1979 and Hurricane Frederick hit the Gulf of Mexico, two large 24’ U-Haul trucks from the Madison church of Christ in Nashville, TN brought needed food and supplies to the people hit by that hurricane in the gulf. Since then, the Effort has become a better organized response to any major disaster in the US. They work through local congregations of churches of Christ and the Effort brings their truck loads to the local church of Christ to distribute to those in need, in the name of Christ. In fact, during the height of the water crisis in Flint, one of the representatives of the Effort called me to ask what they might do. I suggested they call North Central or Carpenter Road since we were not as impacted here in Swartz Creek.

The Disaster Relief Effort provides emergency food, personal hygiene products, infant care, water, cleaning supplies, by the pallet. The Disaster Relief Effort employs 15 people full-time but hundreds of volunteers work from the home office in Nashville and the local area, the local congregation to provide supplies in time of need.

Again, I’m not necessarily promoting the Churches of Christ Disaster Relief Effort as a work I want Swartz Creek to support or you personally. But why am I discussing the Ship of Life and the Disaster Relief Effort? Because that is part of the pattern for the church of Christ that Jesus left us in the book of Acts.

A Roman Emperor, by the name of Julian the Apostate (because at one time, he had been a “Christian”) who ruled from A. D. 331-363 saw that pagans were going to have to learn some compassion from Christians and change their behavior if they were going to stem the tide of pagans becoming Christians! Julian wrote in a letter to a pagan priest in Galatia in 362 that Christianity was growing because of their “moral character, even if pretended” and through their “benevolence toward strangers and care for the graves of the dead.” In a separate letter to another priest, Julian wrote: “I think that when the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the priests, the impious Galileans [by which he means Christians, p.h.] observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence.” In a third source, he wrote: “The impious Galileans support not only their poor, but ours as well, everyone can see that our people lack aid from us” (quoted by Stark, The Rise of Christianity, pg. 83-84).

The enemies of Christianity today in the US largely are on the left side of the political spectrum. They think the US can get along fine without Christianity and they believe that the government should provide everything the citizen needs, from the cradle to the grave. I fundamentally disagree with that. The government cannot do hardly anything better than private citizens can do it. The government can give a young mother formula for her baby but the government cannot provide a support network for that young mother. The government might pay for someone’s college but the government cannot help that student learn spiritual and moral life-skills that will help him be successful. The government might pay for someone’s end of life medical needs but the government cannot provide the love and support someone needs at the end of their life. Only individuals can do these things and Christians are uniquely equipped to provide that love, support, and care.

The first Sunday of each month, we are examining the historical book in the NT, the book of Acts, and seeing what it is that Jesus wants His disciples to do in His church. In other words, what is His pattern for His church that He expects all people, in all countries, everywhere to do? That’s our focus in our annual series for 2019.

In January, we saw that we need to go back to Jerusalem, to the original Gospel message to get the pattern inspired by the Holy Spirit for the church of Christ. In February, we saw that in order to be the church of Christ, we need to teach the Gospel of Christ. Today, I want us to see that we need to be the hands of Christ to a needy world.

We begin, as always, with Jesus Himself…

JESUS DID GOOD:
When the apostle Peter first preached the gospel to Cornelius, the first non-Jew to become a Christian, Peter told Cornelius that Jesus “went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him” (Acts 10:38).

As you know, a large part of each of the gospel accounts deals with the good works that Jesus performed during His lifetime. The first miracle Mark records in 1:21ff is Jesus casting a demon out of a man. Jesus did good. The second miracle Mark records in 1:29ff is Jesus healing Peter’s wife’s mother of a fever. Jesus did good. When the news spread that Jesus could heal, people began bringing all types of sick people to Jesus, Mark records in 1:32-34 and Jesus healed them all. Every single one. Jesus did good.

The church of Christ is to share with others because Jesus shared with others. He fed people. He raised their dead. He loved their children. We all know that people listened to Jesus because He showed His love for them.

And that’s how Jesus wants us to live our lives, as a church and as individual Christians. To be the church of Christ, we need to be the hands of Christ to the needy.

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST IS TO SHARE:
You might not realize just how prominent the pattern is in the book of Acts that Christians shared with others. Let me show you…

Acts 2:43-45 - Just after Christianity was established, we read how Christians were having yard sales, selling their possessions, to give to those who were in need.

Acts 4:32-37 - Barnabas is highlighted in this text because he was wealthy, sold a piece of land, and gave the money to the apostles to distribute.

As they say, “Benevolence starts at home” and Acts 6:1-3 illustrates how the church of Christ in Jerusalem was sharing food with their own widows.

The heart of the book of Acts is about sharing the message of salvation in Jesus Christ. The next example of “sharing with others” I wish to highlight is in Acts 11:27-30. Clearly, Jesus wants Christians to share with others.

In Acts 14:17, when Paul was preaching to a bunch of pagans, who had been worshipping Zeus and Mercury, Paul told them about the nature of God. This might be one of the points of discussion we try with our family and friends who do not believe in Christianity: What is the origin of “good”? Who defines what is “good”? You see, when you deal with someone who doesn’t believe in the uniqueness of the Bible or the uniqueness of Jesus, or the uniqueness of the God of the Bible, you have to start at some fundamental point of agreement: Why should we do “good”?

When Paul spoke to the elders of Ephesus, in Acts 20:35, he told them that Jesus told all of us that we need to “help the weak” and to give to others. That is Jesus’ pattern for the church.

When Paul was arrested in Jerusalem because the Jews hated the gospel he was preaching, he stayed under arrest for a long time. He ended up being brought before the Roman governor Felix and in Paul’s defense, he told the governor, “after several years, I came to bring alms to my nation…” (Acts 24:17). Paul was in Jerusalem in order to share with others. He had collected money from Gentile churches in order to share with the Jewish church in Jerusalem to help people in need.

THE NT LETTERS REQUIRE US TO SHARE WITH OTHERS:
When Paul wrote the letter of Romans, he told those Christians: 15:25-27. Jesus wants us to share with others.

We are familiar with Paul’s command in 1 Cor 16:1-2 that when Christians come together to worship, we are to take up a collection. While that collection is designed to care for all of the church’s financial needs, one of the uses of that collection is to help those in need, to do something collectively that we could not do well individually.

In 2 Cor 8:7, Paul challenged the church in Corinth to “abound” in the gracious work of sharing with others.

We could, probably, go through every single letter of the NT and see where the NT writers, the apostles, command Christians to share with others. But, I want to point out three passages before we conclude our study:

Gal 2:10 - Paul went to Jerusalem not long after he became a Christian, to make sure that he was teaching the same doctrine that the apostles were teaching and he comments that one thing they encouraged him to do was to “remember the poor,” which Paul said he was “eager to do.”

In that same letter, Paul writes that Christians ought to be ready to do good to all men, but especially to fellow Christians (6:10).

Finally, just to show that it was not just Paul that requires this sharing with others, I direct your attention to James, the brother of Jesus, who said that pure religion, undefiled before the Father, is defined as “visiting the fatherless [orphans] and widows” and keep ourselves unspotted by the world (James 1:27).

Christ’s blueprint for the church is outlined in the book of Acts. If we want to be the church of Christ, then we will follow Christ and His pattern. Certainly, the Swartz Creek congregation has the monthly food bank. It has a fairly large dollar amount in our annual budget because we serve a whole lot of people. It is a work in which practically anyone in our congregation can do. This past Saturday when the food bank was opened, we had people helping from every age group from little boys to pre-teen and teenage girls all the way up to, older Christians.

But, of course, we need to also share with others as individual Christians and individual families. It is the personal touch that can really make an impact on our neighbors and friends. And that pleases Christ very much.

Take home message: As Christians, let us share our time and our financial resources, individually and collectively. Christ will be glorified.