Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Acts 2:42-47, NASB
- Series: Sent for the Sake of the Gospel (2026), no. 9
- Date: Sunday, August 2, 2026 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
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Preparing a Place to Grow
I have a tendency to walk through Atwoods with my children, and it’s my favorite store. It’s the only store I actually want to go into. All the rest of them, I like to order stuff online, but it’s stressful. When I walk through Atwoods and my children see the rabbits, I hear, “Can I get a rabbit? Isn’t he cute? Yeah, I’ll buy him with my own money. I have enough.” Okay, yeah, you’ve got enough money for the rabbit, but can you just buy a rabbit? I mean, I guess you could, but responsibly, can you just buy a rabbit? No. What else do you need money for? You need food and shelter for the rabbit, and that’s where you get into real money.
When we started raising chickens, the chickens were cheap. That was not intended as a pun, but thank you. The chicks were cheap. They were two, three, four dollars apiece, depending on what the special was that day or what the price was that day. But it was the building of the coop. It was the predator-proofing of the coop. It was building the water system. It was building the feeding system. It was buying all the feed. We can’t just bring animals in and not have a place for them.
When somebody finds out they’re expecting a baby, they spend months usually preparing what? A nursery. You need a place to put that baby. I know some people say, “Oh, the baby will sleep in our room.” If you ever want to sleep again, you need a place at all. You still won’t even get a full night’s sleep, but you need a place to put the baby. You need a place to raise the baby. It’s not just animals; it’s people too. We need a place to grow that’s safe and that’s nurturing.
After our detour last week, and I’m thankful to Jonathan for filling in last week, we’re back in our series about being sent for the sake of the gospel. We spent several weeks talking about the call that God has given us to go out and share Christ with others—what that looks like, how it works, and why it’s so important. Then a couple of weeks ago, we sort of diverted into what we need to do and what we need to become so that comes more naturally for us.
Something we’re going to look at today out of Acts chapter 2 is preparing the kind of church that we can bring new Christians into. When I say that, it’s not meant to imply that we’re not. But there’s always preparation that comes for a new baby. If we want to disciple baby Christians, if we want a place to bring them in where they can grow, where they can be nurtured, where they can grow to maturity in Christ, we need to prepare a place for them. And that’s one of the things that we take—well, we take our characteristics for that from Acts chapter 2.
It was the earliest church. My pastor growing up used to call it First Baptist Church of Jerusalem. Make of that what you want. But we look at their example. We see these godly people who had walked with Jesus. The leaders of this church had walked with Jesus for three years. They had heard what they were supposed to do directly from Him, and we get to see them put it into practice. There were some characteristics that this church had that made it not a perfect place. We see later on in the book of Acts some issues, some difficulties and challenges that they had, but we see that they were a good place for new Christians to be discipled.
We’re going to look at verses 42 through 47 this morning of Acts chapter 2. Here’s what Luke records for us about that church:
They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone kept feeling a sense of awe; and many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles. And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common; and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need. Day by day continuing with one mind in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved.
Everything we read here is connected to what happened right before this. Right before this, we see Peter’s sermon at Pentecost, where he stands up in front of the crowd in Jerusalem. Many of these same people were among those who had called for Jesus’ crucifixion. They’d stood there a couple of months before shouting, “Crucify Him.” And now Peter is telling them, “You crucified the Son of God. You thought you were killing Him. It was all part of God’s plan. Jesus was in control of all of this. And the Man you crucified, God raised Him up to prove that He was the Son of God.”
The people began to be pricked in their hearts. Their consciences were pricked, and they began asking, “What must we do to be saved?” Peter explained to them that salvation is found only in Jesus Christ. Then, right there in verse 41, right before we started reading, it says, “Those who had received his word were baptized; and that day there were added about three thousand souls.” So this is a church that people are being brought into. This is a church where brand-new Christians are being brought in for the purpose of discipling them.
What we see here is a group of people who, as a body, are being shaped by Christ to follow Christ and to shape others to be able to follow Christ. So we look at this for some of the characteristics of what it looks like to become a church that is worth inviting people into, worth bringing people in. I was a little hesitant about that phrasing, inviting people in, because I don’t want us to get mistaken and think that evangelism, the Great Commission, these things that we’ve been talking about—the goal is to invite people to church. There’s nothing wrong with inviting people to church. There are times that may be all the seed we have an opportunity to plant. “Hey, we’d love to see you at our church.” If that’s the case, by all means do it.
But at the same time, don’t let that be a substitute for sharing the gospel as you have the opportunity. We can do both. If somebody trusts Christ, they need a place to grow, and that’s exactly what the church is here for—not just for new believers to grow in Christ, but for us as established believers to continue to grow until we reach maturity. By the way, when do we reach that? I’m still waiting. We don’t reach full maturity until we’re reunited with Him. So until then, we need each other, and we need this fellowship to continue growing toward what we’re supposed to become.
Grounded in God’s Truth
If we want to be a church that’s worth doing that, there are some things here that we want to emulate. You might say, “Well, is there really such a thing as a church not worth inviting people into?” Absolutely. And I’m not here to name names this morning. But I’ve told you some stories about the first church I ever pastored. That’s the one where we had an issue with somebody taking a swing at somebody else over who got the mail. That was a little ridiculous. I cringed at the thought of inviting a new Christian in there.
I told you there were the Northern Baptists and the Southern Baptists. It had nothing to do with denominations. It was which side of the room they sat on and who they talked to. A new person would come in, and immediately—I saw this happen more times than I care to count—somebody would go over to them and start trying to tell them about the other side. That is not a good environment to bring a baby Christian or a lost person into. We want to avoid those things. We want to focus on what it is that Christ calls us to become.
A church that is being shaped by Christ is going to show some definite characteristics. I think each of these is present in our church. I don’t want you to take any of this as, “We’re not doing these things; this is what we need to fix.” I think all of these characteristics are present in our church, but again, until we reach full maturity in the presence of Jesus, there’s always room to grow. Also, by the way, these are not things that are in our human nature, and so these are things that we have to do deliberately. We can’t just say, “Well, we’ve done that,” and move on. These are things that we need to focus on.
When Christ shapes the life of a church, it becomes, first of all, grounded in God’s truth. Look with me again at verse 42: “They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching.” When it says they were devoted to the apostles’ teaching, that doesn’t just mean whatever the apostles thought and whatever their opinions happened to be. When we read about the apostles’ teaching or the apostles’ doctrine in the New Testament, we’re talking about the things that were learned and passed on by men who had themselves sat at the feet of Jesus for three years.
It’s not just, “Oh, this is Peter’s opinion on whatever.” This phrase means something. It means the things that Jesus told them and they turned around and passed on. Until the Scriptures were finished, this is what they had to understand the Word of God. They had the Old Testament, and they were in the process of writing down the New Testament under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. So they took the Old Testament, and the apostles did with those they were training what Jesus had done with them.
Specifically, it says in Luke 24 that after the resurrection, Jesus went through the Law and the Prophets and began to explain how all of those things referred to Him. The apostles’ teaching was taking the Scriptures that they had and taking the words that Jesus had imparted to them and instructing those who had not walked with Jesus in what it meant to walk with Jesus. Those lessons are recorded for us in the pages of this book here in the New Testament. So when we see the apostles’ teaching, don’t just take that as, “Oh, it’s just the things they had to say.” We’re talking about the Word of God; they just didn’t have it all written down at that point. It was what was faithfully handed down through the apostles.
It’s important to note that it was the apostles—plural—here. Someone might wonder whether one apostle could have changed or distorted what Jesus taught. But this was the teaching of the apostles—plural. The other apostles were present to confirm what Jesus had taught and to correct anyone who departed from it. This was the united testimony of multiple eyewitnesses in the church at Jerusalem, faithfully passing down the things Jesus taught.
They were devoted. They weren’t just interested. They didn’t just give it a passing glance. They were devoted to the apostles’ teaching. That’s our goal here as well: to be devoted to the apostles’ teaching—not my teaching, not whatever random idea I happen to come up with, but what God’s Word says. We follow in their footsteps of being grounded in God’s truth and being committed to the apostles’ teaching.
When we are committed to the text of Scripture—what does it say, what does it mean—this is our guide. When a question arises, this is the first thing we turn to. What does God say about it? When we’re committed to the text of Scripture, when we are careful to understand it in its context—and that’s key, because Scripture can easily be twisted to say something it doesn’t really say—and when we’re faithful to apply it to our lives in light of Christ, then we are grounded in God’s truth.
James tells us that we don’t need to be merely hearers of the Word, but also doers. It’s not enough to read His Word. We need to read it with the goal of understanding it so that we can apply it, so we can obey it and do what it says. Does that mean we take every law that’s taught in the Old Testament and apply that? We’re going to have a stoning here later. No. We apply it in light of Christ and what He taught. He taught that He fulfilled the law for us.
Folks, every church is going to be grounded in something. Every church has something that it turns to. Every body of people has something that it turns to as the final authority. Unfortunately, it’s easy to get into a circumstance where that final authority is not the Bible. We dare not get to a place where the final authority is just what we think or feel. We dare not get to a place where we think the final authority is what Jared said. Jared can be wrong. Ask Charla; it happens. Don’t ask Charla. You’ll be here all day. We are going to be grounded in something. It has to be God’s truth; otherwise it’s just our opinions.
Sharing Life Together
We see also in verse 42 that this church, shaped by Christ, had become committed to sharing life together. He says they were continually devoting themselves to fellowship. Now, when we hear fellowship, we think of what? Food. Are we committed to that? Absolutely, yes. If we have a get-together and you walk away hungry, it’s probably your own fault. But they were continually devoting themselves to fellowship, and we know that fellowship has more to it than just food.
I think the food component is there because that’s something we sit down and do together. That’s where we learn about each other. That’s where we share things with one another. That’s why it’s so important to have meals with your family. That’s why we tell the kids at least once a day, “You have to sit and eat with us whether you like it or not,” because that’s how we grow closer together. So food is not separated from fellowship, but there’s so much more to it than that.
Fellowship for them was not just being friendly before and after the service. Fellowship for them was not just sitting down periodically at a potluck. For them, they were sharing their lives with each other. Elsewhere in the book of Acts, it talks about them going from house to house. That’s not talking about them knocking doors. That’s talking about them being a part of each other’s lives on a daily basis.
Now, in a group even this size—and we’re not an enormous church—it can be mathematically improbable that you’re going to have everybody in your house and that you’re going to be equally close to everybody. But there should be somebody, or some bodies, within this church that you’re connected with outside of just saying hi to each other as you come in and go out. Within this body, there ought to be people who know what’s going on with you, what your needs are, what your challenges are, what your joys and celebrations are.
There ought to be those people that you could call if you’re stuck on the side of the road at 2:00 a.m. These people were there for one another, and it wasn’t just for the sake of being social, but because we are not made to do this alone. One of the first things that God said in the garden after creating Adam was that it was not good for the man to be what? Alone. And so He created Eve. I maintain that that’s true outside of just the marriage relationship. It is not good for us to be isolated for extended periods of time.
Especially as Christians, this world is hostile toward Jesus, and it’s hostile toward what we believe. It can be a challenge to continue to walk with Him faithfully and do all that we’re supposed to do if we don’t have the fellowship of our Christian brothers and sisters encouraging and strengthening us. That’s part of why we gather on Sunday and at times throughout the week. It’s not because God takes attendance. Sometimes we have that idea. I think I had that idea as a child—that God was sitting up there on Sunday taking attendance, and maybe He’d like me just a little bit more if I was always there. No. We gather because we need to be strengthened by one another.
These people, these early believers, were a genuine family. They had to be, because they faced what so many of us don’t face. They were going to be ostracized by their families if they trusted Christ. This is reality in many parts of the world still, that if you trust Christ, you are cut off from your family. You’re cut off from your community, from everybody you’ve ever known. They want nothing to do with you anymore. So the church had to be that family and that community.
We may not be in the same boat. For most of us, there may not be a sense that our family says, “I’m done with them because they follow Jesus.” It may create distance in some relationships, but most of us are not facing what the early church faced or what people face in other parts of the world today. But the reality is still there that God put us together because we need that encouragement and that strengthening from fellow Christians. It makes a difference.
I can think as recently as the ice storm that we had last winter, when we canceled services—I think for two Wednesdays and a Sunday in between—because we didn’t want anybody getting hurt on the sheets of ice out here. The longer that went on and the longer I was separated from the rest of the body, I just got kind of cranky. And not because we all got cranky being cooped up together. It was more to it than that. We need each other, and a church that’s shaped like Christ is going to be committed to sharing life together.
Devoted to Sincere Worship
A church that is shaped by Christ is going to be devoted to sincere worship. We see this in a few places scattered throughout this passage. He says that they were continually devoting themselves to the breaking of bread and prayer there in verse 42. Breaking of bread can, at times in the New Testament, deal with the idea of fellowship, sitting down and eating together, but he’s already talked about fellowship in that same verse. So that is the point of the Lord’s Supper when we come together: to remember what Jesus did for us and the significance of it.
When we pray, part of that is acknowledging the greatness of God. We’re not praying to Him because He’s less than us and He owes us and we expect Him to do things for us. We pray to Him because He’s greater than us, and we are appealing to Him in His greatness and also recognizing what He does for us even now. So for them to be so focused on prayer and the Lord’s Supper, this is worship.
Verse 43 says, “Everyone kept feeling a sense of awe.” Now, worship is not just about our feelings. It can’t be just about our feelings. There has to be a conscious recognition of the greatness of God. But feelings play a role in that. It’s not by accident that God gave us emotions. People were in awe because of what they saw God doing in front of them. When we see what God does, and we respond in awe, and we give Him glory for it, that is worship.
As a result, verse 47 says they were praising God. That idea of worship, of recognizing the goodness of God and the greatness of God, is woven all through this description of the church to the point that we see it’s part of who they are. I think this phrase gets overused, but for a reason. It’s part of the DNA of this church to worship God.
That’s our goal when we come together. It should be something that we do every day, individually, maybe together in fellowship. But absolutely, when we gather together on Sundays, part of our goal is to worship God. As a matter of fact, I submit to you that we could consider everything we do part of our worship for God. Worship is not just the song service, although that’s part of it—singing praises to God.
As we come together and we study His Word and we look at it and say, “God, what do You want to tell me today? What am I supposed to do to please You and glorify You this week? What do I need to understand?”—that is an act of worship because we are coming with our hearts prepared before Him to do what He calls us to do. As we pray, that is worship. As we try to encourage one another in our walk with Him, that’s worship. All of it could be considered worship, but it was part of their fabric.
Our goal when we come together is that God would be glorified in all that we say and do. Not that Central would be glorified, not that I would be glorified, not that you would be glorified, not that we put on a really great show, but that God would be glorified in all we say and do. If we keep that our focus, it permeates everything else and makes this a good place for new believers to come and be discipled.
Ready to Care for Those in Need
We see in verses 44 and 45 that a church that is shaped by Christ is ready to care for those in need. He says, “All those who had believed were together and had all things in common,” talking about their possessions, “and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need.”
We can get more into the details of this tonight at 6:00 when we meet back. But there are things elsewhere in the New Testament that clarify this. There were guidelines on using discernment in how they did these things. I also want to say that this was not communism. Communism is evil and against Scripture. This was the idea of people voluntarily giving what they had so that others’ needs could be met.
By the way, our church has a really good track record of that. This is likely the most generous group of people I’ve ever been around. But their idea was that because we love each other, because we’re a family, there should not be someone starving in our midst while others have an abundance. So they would voluntarily give so that others could be taken care of. Later on in the book of Acts, we see that they were supporting the livelihood of widows and orphans.
As we become shaped by Christ, we become more outward-focused. It’s no longer about me and what I want and what my desires are. It’s about how can I serve other people for the glory of God. Sometimes that service costs them. If you’re new here, you may be thinking, “Well, there we go. They’re talking about money.” I very rarely talk about money. I don’t talk about money unless the text talks about money. Yes, they were giving their money so that others’ needs could be met, but this goes beyond money.
As part of their fellowship, they were there together. Sometimes giving our time to meet somebody else’s need is even harder than giving our money. But this church was ready to do that. That made it a good place for people to come in and be discipled, because life can be messy. That’s especially true when you’ve got new believers who are just coming out of Judaism or paganism or whatever it was in their day. It became the role of the church to meet the genuine needs and to care for people and not let them fall by the wayside.
Reflecting the Goodness of Christ
Then we see in verses 46 and 47 this morning that a church that is shaped by Him became reflective of the goodness of Christ. It says, “Day by day they were continuing with one mind in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house. They were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people.”
It’s a really interesting statement that they had favor with all the people, because they were also being persecuted. What it tells me is that the world around them objected to what they believed, but could not object to the love and the joy and the unity and sincerity that they showed. Folks, if we stay as a church grounded in God’s Word, we cannot help that the world is going to find some of what we believe and teach objectionable. That’s just part of it. It’s the cost of following Jesus Christ.
We can’t get around that, but we absolutely can grow to be shaped like Christ to the point where people would look at Central Baptist Church and say, “Look at how they love. Look at the joy among those people. Look at the unity in that place.” There was something different about this fellowship of people, and it pointed people to Jesus. Because they looked at this body of people—even with this gospel that they didn’t like and didn’t understand—they saw the goodness of Christ.
For some of them, it softened them up to the gospel. For some of them, it earned a hearing because they saw people who really had been changed and transformed by Jesus. What I’ve shared with you from this passage this morning is an example given to us from Scripture of an imperfect church that was on the right track. I say imperfect because there’s no such thing as a perfect church. We’ll be a perfect church when we’re all gathered with Him in eternity. But this was a church that was on the right track. This was a church that was growing in all the right ways spiritually.
A Church Worth Bringing People Into
It set the stage for their numerical growth. We have been focused through this summer on the importance of inviting people to trust Christ—really, of making disciples, inviting lost people to trust Christ and helping believers follow Christ. That’s our job. That’s the Great Commission that has been given not only to this church, but to every church where Jesus Christ is honored.
But if we’re inviting people to trust Christ, and our goal is to help them follow Christ as a result, they need a body of believers that is going to help them grow and mature. I share these things with you again this morning not because we’re doing the opposite of these. As I said at the outset, I see every one of these characteristics in this body, but there’s always room for us to grow.
We want to be shaped by Christ so that when we lead people to Him, we have that nursery prepared, that this church can be a nursery to bring in people who’ve never trusted Christ before. But they finally trusted Him as their Savior, and they’re able to find a place here to grow and to mature and to be more like Him, to the point that they’re then going and finding people and inviting them to Christ as well.
The result of everything going on—and it was the work of the Holy Spirit, but He enlisted His people to do it—was what we see in verse 47: “The Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved.” Folks, this is not about Central trying to become a megachurch. That sounds exhausting. This is about Central being faithful. How can we best carry out the Great Commission? It involves us doing everything we can to prepare ourselves to disciple those that we lead to Christ and to be a church that’s shaped by Him so that He can be glorified in how He works through us here.
