Live Free with Josh Howerton - The Shared Life | Ep. 459 | Thursday, November 7, 2024

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

The last few verses of Acts 2 give us a glimpse of the early church. These new believers devoted themselves to fellowship with each other. They lived vulnerable lives in rich relationships with one another. Living like Christ in the power of the Spirit enables us to live sacrificially, humbly, and generously. May we live counterculturally like the early church so others are drawn to the God who saves.    For more information, visit lakepointe.church/dailydrive

Thanks for tuning in to today's Daily Drive with Lake Point Church, a daily dose of God's word for your morning drive. When the word, not the world, becomes the majority of your week, your life will start to change. For that reason, our prayer is that God will speak to you through today's devotional. For more digital content to feed your faith, visit lakepoint.combe.com slash daily drive. And now let's dive in to today's devotional. What is up, everybody? Thanks for joining us on the daily drive of the day. My name is Bro, and I'm honored and grateful to spend a few minutes with you just diving into God's Word.

We are currently in Acts chapter 2 looking at not only some of the practices the early church did, but the character traits that those practices flowed out of. Yesterday, we talked about how they were teachable, how they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching. They wanted to know everything about Jesus. They were hungry to learn more about God, and that posture of humble teachability. It's crucial for our growth. When you start to think you've arrived, you never will. So stay humble, hungry, and teachable.

There's a second trait that jumps out to me as I read Acts chapter 2. Not only were they teachable, they were vulnerable. They opened up and got into real community. It says that they were devoted to fellowship. Now, fellowship, the Greek word for that is koinania. You may have heard that word before, but it literally means the shared life. One of the things that captivates me about this first church is their incredible level of devotion to and vulnerability with each other. They share joys and pain, gladness and sorrow, promotion and loss, victories and failures with each other.

It really was the shared life. Somehow I missed this understanding of fellowship in the church I grew up in. I thought fellowship was like having an all-church potluck dinner where everybody ate gluttonous amounts of food. That's what I thought fellowship was. I got a good pastor friend of mine who was telling me about a time that an AA group wanted to start meeting in the basement of their church in a room known as the Fellowship Hall. Well, he gave him permission, and he said that he started praying that what happened upstairs in the sanctuary would trickle down to the basement. And then he went to a meeting and saw the real and raw unvarnished vulnerability, all the sharing, the friendship, the healing. and he said he started praying for what was happening in the basement to make its way upstairs to the sanctuary to the rest of the people.

In an Acts 2 kind of community, people don't only sit in rows. They also get in circles, face to face with each other. They take their mask off and say, here's what's really going on in my life. Here's what I'm scared about. Here's what God's asking me to do, but I don't have the guts to do it. Here's the image I'm projecting, but here's the truth about who I really am. That's the kind of rich relationships we were created by God for. It's what our souls yearn for.

And that kind of community is available around fire pits and coffee shops. All kinds of local churches have men's groups and women's groups and Bible study groups and recovery groups and student groups and kids groups and moms groups and young adult groups and senior adult groups and neighborhood groups. Just be vulnerable and take a risk and get connected into this new community in the shared life. And did you notice how you? generous they were. They literally shared. They opened their homes, opened their tables, shared their stuff. I mean, meeting other people's knees just flowed out of them. You see, they had learned that

Jesus had said, it's so much better to give than receive. And that spirit of generosity and compassion is so much better than the spirit of entitlement. It's so much better than stockpiling stuff for yourself. So like Jesus, they just began to live a generous, other-centered life. A couple of chapters over, we see the fire is spreading. It says this in chapter 4, verse 32. All the believers were united and heart and mind, and they felt that what they owned was not their own, so they shared everything they had. This really was coinania. This really was the shared life.

Not some weird, cultish commune, but it was countercultural, just a bunch of real people who had been touched by the love of Jesus Christ and wanted to live like him. And you know what? They did. The most common things said about the early church was this. These people love everybody. I mean, you can't find any kind of religious or other kind of movement before the Church of Jesus Christ that actually sought to include every single human being, regardless of skin color, nationality, how much money you made, your gender, your age, your health, the down and out,

the up and out, all were together in this shared life. Not only were people in ancient Rome and Greece separated by class, but the rich, the educated, the beautiful, the noble were prized and taken care of, while the weak, the poor, the sick, and the marginalized had no worth whatsoever. Children, they weren't valued at all. And if they showed signs of being weak or having any kind of disability, they were often abandoned, neglected, or even disposed of. But there was this weird little movement going on.

These followers of Jesus, who remembered that he said things like, let the little children come to me, for such is the kingdom of heaven, and that all children were made in the image of God. And so they actually began to take in abandoned kids, children that were not their own, and eventually orphanages began to spring up. Started by, you guessed it, the Jesus followers. Widows were taxed, fined by the Roman Empire. It was considered bad form to outlive your husband. They were seen as an economic drag on the empire, so they would find them, cheat them, take advantage of them in every way. for this weird little movement of Jesus followers,

who saw how he treated everyone. And they remember how one day he noticed a poor widow give her two small coins in the temple offering and how he stopped the value her and her gift above all the rest. And so they began to take care of widows, to clothe them, feed them, take them in. Again, this was unheard of in that culture. Many people in that time that suffered from illness were outcasts, shut out of their towns, quarantined, left to die.

But these followers of Jesus, began to take in those sick people and care for them, treat them, nurse them, because they knew and had seen how Jesus would take care of the sick and how he would reach out and touch lepers. And as these Jesus followers began to follow his example, the first hospitals sprang up in the fourth century. When we speak of organizations like the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, Compassion International, the fight against sex trafficking, when you visit hospitals with names like St. Jude, St. Mark, St. Peter, Central Baptist, Good Samaritan, You're speaking of the movement of Jesus. You see, whether you believe in Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior or not,

we have all been impacted by people who just live the shared life. It's the Church of Jesus Christ, and it's vulnerable and generous best, being the light of the world. So today, why not participate in the shared life? Find a place to be real and vulnerable, and then share with those who have been left vulnerable by this world. Let's go shine today. And I'll see you back tomorrow.

Thanks for tuning in today. For more biblical teaching and worship, join us for our church online live weekend services on Saturdays and Sundays. For more information about all the digital ministries of Lake Point, visit lakepoint.church slash daily drive. Also, if this podcast was helpful to you, would you be sure to rate, review, and share this podcast to help get the word out.