In this follow-up to “One Body” we explore the biblical evidence in support for church organization – on a local level as well as global. A brief recount of early Adventist struggles for church organization is also provided.

<p>In this follow-up to “One Body” we explore the biblical evidence in support for church organization – on a local level as well as global. A brief recount of early Adventist struggles for church organization is also provided.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Dalton SDA Church

We Believe

Chester Clark

Secrets of Ancient Scrolls, Part 1

Secrets of Ancient Scrolls, Part 2

We Believe - Who is God? Part 1

We Believe - Who is God? Part 2

We Believe - The Burden Bearer, Part 1

We Believe - The Burden Bearer, Part 2

We Believe – One Body

We Believe – Church Organization

We Believe – Buried Alive!

We Believe – The Gift (Part 1)

We Believe – The Gift (Part 2)

Voices from Beyond the Grave

This morning we talked about the church as the body of Christ, right?

And as the body of Christ, he calls us to love 1 another as he has loved us.

We're going to see this afternoon be looking at another aspect of his counsel or his will for the church, and that is for it to be organized, for it to have a particular way and objective to operate.

We're going to look at the New Testament church.

We're going to have a brief overview of history.

For those of you who like history, we'll take about a 2, 000 year journey in about a minute and a half, and we'll come down to the present day and examine the message, work, and organization for God's people today.

Thank you for joining us, and let's just bow our heads for a word of prayer.

Father in heaven, thank you for giving us your word.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity now, living in 2013, to reflect back upon the history recorded in the Bible and the ways in which you have guided and led your people.

We want to pray that you'd bless us now, and we thank you in Jesus' name.

So, we begin with the New Testament church.

And so I'm going to share with you some passages here.

If you have your Bibles, We can look them up together.

But we're just going to recall here, first of all, the commission that God, Jesus, gave His disciples as He was ascending, as He left.

In Matthew 28, in verse 18, He gave this small group of people.

There was just 12 disciples and 70, maybe 120 that were gathered in that room later, but there weren't a lot of people there as he was leaving, just with family, perhaps a few hundred, but compared to the size of the task that he gave them it wasn't a very large group.

He says in Matthew 28 in verse 18, Jesus came and spake unto them saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and on earth.

Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.

Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." Now, if you were a disciple, if I were a disciple living in that day, in 31 AD, I think that we would have probably looked at Jesus and said, the whole world.

I mean, you recognize the disciples at that time didn't have any church buildings.

They were, well, they were still seeking to bring the Jewish nation along with them in the proclamation of the gospel.

Once the Jews rejected Christ and began killing his followers, Stephen, a few years later, they had even less to count on.

They weren't often allowed to preach in the synagogues.

They didn't have any type of communication networks besides sending a message, writing a letter, and having somebody take it.

They didn't even have, not only did they not have satellite TV, they didn't even have the USPS, you know, the postal service.

So if you wanted to send a letter, you had to send it by, Not snail mail, just snail, right?

You just had to have someone take it there.

Maybe they use some of those too, I don't know.

But the reality is This was a ginormous task, if that's a word, right?

This was a huge undertaking to take the whole gospel to the world, teaching all nations and telling them about the things that Jesus had taught.

Now if we go on, we start looking at how the early church did this.

What we're looking for this afternoon is clues as to how they were organized, right?

Because it would have been easy for some people to say, well, I know Jesus.

I mean, Peter could have said, I know Jesus.

I think he taught me to do this and to work this way.

And John could have said, well, I knew Jesus too, and I think Jesus would do this.

And, you know, Mattathias, the 1 who replaced Judas, could have said, well, I was there, you know, I wasn't 1 of the 12, but I was a part of, I saw the ascension and so forth, and I think we should do this.

It would have been very easy, don't you think, knowing the human nature of these 12 individuals, we call the 12 disciples or apostles, it would have been very easy, don't you imagine, for the church to have just fragmented in at least 12 different directions?

In fact, that's why the church was blessed on Pentecost is because they were all in 1 accord, right?

They were all praying together in that room.

It wasn't as though Thomas, who would go as the missionary to the Far East, in fact, Thomas made it all the way, landed on Goa and the western shores of India.

He would make it all the way across to Madras, the Chennai, what we call it today Chennai, on the eastern coast of India, where he would be martyred as a missionary for Jesus.

He could have said, well, you know, I'm going all the way the other side of the world.

We'll just, I mean, we're all just individuals saved by Jesus, and oh, maybe we can have local churches.

But what we see happening in the New Testament church is we see a network developing that amounts to a link between not only individual members in a church, but churches in the world mission field.

And this is an exciting thing to discover in the book of Acts.

Let's look in the first chapter of Acts, verses 23 to 26.

Acts chapter 1, 23 to 26, and we see here the organization as they began to replace Judas.

It says, they appointed to Joseph called Barsabbas, who was surnamed Justice, and Matthias.

And they prayed and said, thou Lord, which knows the hearts of all men, show whether of these 2 you have chosen, that he may take part of this ministry and apostleship, from which Judas by transgression fell, that he might go to his own place.

And they gave forth their lots, and the lot fell upon Matthias, and he was numbered with the 11 apostles." Now, you see what is happening here?

Why would it be important to replace Judas?

To attain to the number 12 again that Jesus appointed.

Okay, to attain to the number 12 that Jesus appointed.

But, I mean, they were gonna baptize 2, 3000 in a day pretty soon.

Okay, these men were gonna be the leadership in the church.

So, they needed to replace Judas, who had been called by Christ and mentored by Christ and given a particular, you might say, influence by that time that he spent with Christ, and they were going to be replacing Judas with Matthias.

Oh, because of the Matthew 28 commission.

In other words, You're saying the mission of the church drove them to want to make sure they had an organization that would be capable, full, all the blessings to be able to reach the world.

The fact is, it's not just about people hearing about Jesus and having a personal relationship with Him.

We discover already this early in the book of Acts, it's also about having an, if you want to call it an organization, they at least apparently had some semblance of an understanding that these offices mattered, right?

These offices of the apostles, even though Jesus hadn't called Matthias, Matthias hadn't been 1 of the disciples, He was to be chosen now by Christ to take the place of Judas.

There's many things we could look at in Acts.

We just have a few minutes here this afternoon, so we're going to move quickly through the book of Acts.

And this is a story about when the number of the disciples were multiplying.

Don't you wish churches would multiply today?

I mean, adding members is not good enough, not according to the book of Acts.

These members were multiplying, and that happens when everyone is sharing Jesus, and each 1 wins 1.

So in those days, when the number of disciples were multiplied, there arose a murmuring among the Grecians against the Hebrews because their widows were neglected in the daily ministration.

It's the 11 disciples plus Mathias, right?

So obviously these 12 have a function that is different from the rest of the church members.

Is this pretty plain in the book of Acts so far?

Series

We Believe

We Believe – Church Organization

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

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Sound Doctrine