NewLife Fellowship, April 30, 2000

Last week, we celebrated the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and we are now in the 50-day period in the church's calendar between the resurrection and Pentecost. Today, let's look at what happened in the church during these 50 days. There is a lesson here for us -- at least there is for me.

Let's begin in the Gospel of John. Chapter 20 describes the discovery of the empty tomb. Mary Magdalene discovered that the tomb was empty, and Peter and John had a little footrace and also saw the empty tomb. Jesus appeared to Mary, and then later that same day he appeared to the other disciples. Let's pick up the story in verse 19:

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you!"

20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

So the first thing that Jesus did was to convince the disciples that he was really alive. Well, actually, there was no question that this man standing in front of them was really alive. The question was, Was it really Jesus? And Jesus says, Hey, guys! It's me -- it's really me. See my hands and my side.

And he convinced them of who he was, and they were really happy about it -- astonished, no doubt, but really happy as well. A day ago, they were devastated, disappointed, dejected, discouraged, and really sad, because Jesus was dead. Their whole world had fallen apart — and now suddenly, Jesus was standing there in their midst -- it was even better than it was before, so they were overjoyed.

OK, now that that was taken care of, Jesus had some instructions for the disciples.

21 Again Jesus said, "Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you."

So he had a job for them, some work for them to do. He was going to send them, just as the Father had sent Jesus into the world on a mission. The disciples were to have a mission of their own.

But just as Jesus did not perform his work with his own strength, neither could the disciples do their work on their own strength. They needed help, and they needed it desperately. They were going to face years of hard work and persecution. They were going to turn the world upside down, they were going to preach a new interpretation of the Scriptures, and they were going to write some Scriptures of their own.

They didn't know it yet, but they had a lot of work to do, and they needed wisdom and power for the job. They needed the Holy Spirit. They needed God himself living in them, motivating them, changing them. They needed the same power that Jesus had.

A few days ago, they had run away. Peter had denied Christ three times. That was not going to happen again, because the disciples were going to be changed. They were going to be different. They were going to perform their mission not in their own strength, but with the strength of God.

Just as the Father did not send Jesus on his own strength, Jesus did not send his disciples to work on their own strength. They didn't even have enough strength to get started, much less to continue through years and years of persecution. So Jesus gave them a job, and he gave them the help they were going to need. Verse 22:

And with that he breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven."

Now, this account doesn't say exactly when they received the Holy Spirit. The point is simply that the disciples needed the Holy Spirit in order to do the job Jesus was giving them.

We can also notice here that the work that Jesus was giving had something to do with forgiveness. "If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven." Jesus' work and ministry is, at its basic level, about forgiveness. The message is called good news is because it's about forgiveness. This is what Jesus is sending his disciples to do — to preach a message of good news.

Now, the news may be good, but it's not easy to preach. There will be persecution, and problems, and pain. In order to keep at the job, we need the Holy Spirit. And to forgive people, to forgive the people who cause us pain, that also takes the Holy Spirit in order to do it.

In John 20, we are looking at the original disciples, the original apostles. But they weren't all there. Judas was of course not there, but for some reason Thomas wasn't, either. Verse 24:

Now Thomas (called Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord!" But Thomas said to them, "Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it."

And so Thomas has the nickname ever since of Doubting Thomas. But Thomas did not doubt for very long. Verse 26:

A week later [another Sunday evening] his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you!" 27 Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe." 28 Thomas said to him, "My Lord and my God!"

So Doubting Thomas became Believing Thomas — and perhaps he was the first disciple to call Jesus God.

Doubt is not the unpardonable sin - it is the normal human reaction of anybody who has the brains to realize that dead people don't normally come back to life. Thomas simply needed some evidence, and he got it. There's nothing wrong with that. We shouldn't just believe anything and everything we are told. We need to see some evidence — and that's OK. We can't get the physical, touchable evidence that Thomas got, but we can get reasonable historical evidence anyway, and that is what Jesus talks about next: Verse 29:

Then Jesus told him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

Who was Jesus talking about? People like us. People who hear about it — people who think, "I've never seen anybody come back from the dead, and I'm not going to believe any stories about people coming back from the dead." But the historical circumstances around Jesus don't have any other reasonable explanations. This doesn't sound like a fraud and it doesn't sound like a mass hallucination. Nothing else makes sense. So we say, "Maybe Jesus is an exception to the general rule."

And so millions of Christians have started off with doubt. Some people think it's too good to be true, some people think it's too gross to be true. We all have our different kinds of questions, but we eventually come to believe, and Jesus pronounces a special blessing on us: "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

Now, when Jesus spoke this, probably no one was in the category of believing without seeing. Probably everyone who believed had also seen Jesus. But by the time that John wrote this Gospel, it was probably almost the entire church. They were all second or third-generation Christians. They had believed because somebody else had told them.

And that is part of the mission Jesus gave his disciples. That is part of the work he commissioned them to do — to tell others about himself, to go into all the world and preach the gospel in his name, and make disciples and baptize them in his name, and to teach them what he had taught, and to be his witnesses in Jerusalem, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

And that is why John wrote the book. Verse 30:

Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. 31 But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

John wrote his book so that we would believe.

And it is likely that John wrote this book near the end of his life. He had done all the preaching that he could. He had told as many as he could, convinced as many as he could. Now he put it in writing to help the church to continue the job he had begun. Just as he had told them the stories of Jesus, so also he was enabling them to continue telling the stories of Jesus through the book that he had written.

Just as Jesus had given him a job to do, a work to do, so also he was giving the church a job to continue. They had work to do — the work of Jesus. The work had grown from one man, to twelve disciples, to thousands of believers who were turning the world upside down through their faith in Jesus, through their faith that this dead man who had come back to life was actually God in the flesh who died for their sins.

With a message like that, you need the Holy Spirit — and friends, today, we have the Holy Spirit, and we have a message like that. That is the work set before us. We have work to do.

Now, the work is not just going out and preaching the gospel. It is also about living the gospel in our day-to-day lives, in our marriages and on our jobs. It is about forgiving the people we live with, and sometimes that's not easy -- we need to Holy Spirit working in us in order for us to do it.

We have three basic kinds of work: upward, inward and outward, and we need all three. Some of us are better at one, and some are better at another, but we need all three. We need an upward relationship with God, so that we are responsive to the Holy Spirit, if we are going to preach the gospel. We need prayer, and we need study. We need faith, we need an awareness of our own inabilities, and we need to rely on the strength of God in order to do the work.

And we need a work within the church, too, if our outward work is to be effective. Our church needs to be a community in which the gospel is lived, in which people love one another, in which everyone seeks to serve others. We need to be a community that works together. That could be a sermon all in itself, but I think it belongs here, too, because it is part of the work that Jesus has given us to do. Our sense of mission needs to include the upward, the inward, and the outward. We need all three.

We need to pray not just to preach the gospel, but we also need to pray for ourselves, because God is doing a work in each of us.

We need to think about each other, not just as more manpower for the "real" work of going to the world, but because real work is being done in each of us -- and in us together, as a church community. Our love for one another is part of the work that we need to build and grow. We need to work at improving relationships within the church, and networks within the church. That is certainly an area that I need to work at.

But our work should include the outward dimension, too. Prayer is not a substitute for evangelism -- it should lead us into evangelism. Our church community is not a substitute for mission, either -- it should be something that helps us reach out to others. It serves the outward mission, but it is also important in its own sake, because this is an area in which the gospel is working in our lives.

Well, let's get back to the Gospel of John. If we keep reading, we will find a lesson about work. Chapter 21, starting in verse 1:

Afterward Jesus appeared again to his disciples, by the Sea of Tiberias. It happened this way: 2 Simon Peter, Thomas (called Didymus), Nathanael from Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two other disciples were together. 3 "I'm going out to fish," Simon Peter told them

So the disciples had gone back to the region of Galilee, and I'm not really sure what was in their minds. Maybe they were trying to raise money for their worldwide mission. No, I don't really think so.

Well, they did need to eat, and they did need to do something to earn a little money, and it seems like they were just going back to work. I suspect that they had momentarily forgotten about the mission Jesus had given, and had simply gone back to their old jobs. And so Peter says, I'm going fishing. I've got work to do.

And the other guys said, Good idea! Verse 3:

and they said, "We'll go with you." So they went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.

Now, it's true that fishermen sometimes don't catch anything, but in this case it seems to have been by divine arrangement. God did not want these men to think that they were supposed to catch fish. They would not be a success at that. God had something else in mind for them. They were no longer fishermen — they were apostles — men who were sent, men who had a mission, men who had a message, men who had spiritual work to do. Verse 4:

Early in the morning, Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus. [Perhaps it was a bit foggy, perhaps it was just a bit too far away to recognize anyone]

05 Jesus called out to them, "Friends, don't have you any fish?" "No," they answered. 6 He said, "Throw your net on the right side of the boat and you will find some." When they did, they were unable to haul the net in because of the large number of fish.

Now, this no doubt was reminiscent of something that had happened earlier in Jesus' ministry. The disciples had been fishing all night and caught nothing, and Jesus told them to throw the net in again, and they did, and they caught so much that the nets began to break (that's in Luke 5).

So when all this happened again, John 21, verse 7,

Then the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, "It is the Lord!" As soon as Simon Peter heard him say, "It is the Lord," he wrapped his outer garment around him (for he had taken it off) and jumped into the water.

Peter wanted to be first, so he jumped into the cold water with all his clothes on, and he raced toward the shore. I do not know what he did when he got there, the book just doesn't tell us. All it says is that he was in a really big hurry to get to Jesus. Verse 8:

The other disciples followed in the boat, towing the net full of fish, for they were not far from shore, about a hundred yards. 9When they landed, they saw a fire of burning coals there with fish on it, and some bread.

So Jesus has built a little campfire, and was cooking some breakfast for them. I don't know where Jesus got the fish and bread, but he had them. And verse 10, Jesus said to them,

"Bring some of the fish you have just caught."

Now, Jesus didn't need any fish. He already had some on the fire. But for some reason he wanted the disciples to pay attention to the fish.

Simon Peter climbed aboard and dragged the net ashore. It was full of large fish, 153, but even with so many the net was not torn.

And here we come to one of the most famous mysteries in all of biblical studies. Just what is the significance of 153? And the answer is that nobody knows. Various suggestions have been given, but none of them seem very convincing. Here's my theory: It's just a hint that there are many things about Jesus that we don't know. We are not supposed to think that we have everything figured out.

Verse 12:

12 Jesus said to them, "Come and have breakfast." None of the disciples dared ask him, "Who are you?" They knew it was the Lord.

Before, that was the question: Who are you? Are you really Jesus, the man we saw killed on a cross? Now, there is no question. It really is Jesus, risen from the dead.

13 Jesus came, took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. 14 This was now the third time Jesus appeared to his disciples after he was raised from the dead.

And after this is the story of how Jesus asked Peter three times, Do you love me? And Peter says, of course I do, and Jesus tells Peter to take care of the sheep, to feed the lambs. He is being recommissioned, from being a fisherman, to being a shepherd. He is supposed to take care of Jesus' sheep, the church, that is. He has work to do. Just as Jesus had taken care of the little flock of his disciples, Peter was supposed to take care of the flock after this. Peter was continuing the job that Jesus had begun.

So here we see a different side of the work that Jesus commissioned his followers to do. There is the work of being sent out, of going into all the world, and there is also the work of taking care of the lambs, taking care of the flock. We have that kind of work, too.

At the end of verse 19, Jesus says to Peter, "Follow me!" What I have done, you are now supposed to do. The example I have set, you are supposed to follow. The things you have seen and heard in me, these you also ought to do. As I have loved you, you ought to love one another. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.

This is the message given to Peter as the leader of the church, and it is the message that is given to all the church. We, as the body of Christ, are to do the work of Christ. As the Father sent Jesus, so Jesus sends us. We have work to do.

And Peter said, verse 21, Lord, but what about John?

And Jesus replied, That's my business, not yours. Your job is to follow me.

And we might ask a similar thing today: Lord, what about the Baptists, and what about the Presbyterians? And Jesus says, Don't worry about it. Just do the job as best you can, and I'll worry about the other guys. Your job is to follow me, and that is your job no matter what the Baptists and Presbyterians are doing. Just do your job. Follow me. Be like me. Follow my example. Do what I have done. "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you."

Next page, Acts, chapter 1, verse 1:

In my former book, Theophilus, — that's the book we know as the Gospel of Luke — I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach 2 until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen.

3 After his suffering, he showed himself to these men and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.

4 On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: "Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. 5 For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit."

So apparently this was near the end of the 40 days, and the disciples had come back to Jerusalem, and Jesus appeared to them, ate with them for the last time, and told them to stay in Jerusalem until they were baptized with the Holy Spirit.

We don't all experience it the same way, and we don't all respond to the Spirit in the same way, but we have been given the same Spirit. We have different spiritual gifts, but it's the same Spirit. God may work in other people's lives in different ways than he works in us — that's OK. Our job is simply to do what he tells us to do. We aren't supposed to get distracted by what other people are doing.

Let's get back to Acts chapter 1, and there we will see more about why the Holy Spirit is given. Why did Jesus tell his disciples to wait in Jerusalem until they had this special experience of the Holy Spirit? Because they had work to do.

Verse 6: When they met together, they asked him, "Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?"

This is what the disciples were hoping for, this is what they were working for. They wanted the restoration of the kingdom to Israel. The disciples were not yet thinking of a kingdom that would extend to all nations.

They were thinking of a physical kingdom, forgetting what Jesus had said about the kingdom of God being already present in his ministry and his miracles. So they had some misunderstandings about the kingdom, and what they were all about. And so they asked, and that's OK.

And Jesus said to them, verse 7,

"It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority.

In other words, What's that to you? That's not your business. That's not your job. Don't worry about it; let God take care of it. You don't have to know everything — not even everything that's important. The date of Jesus' return is very important, but it's not very important for us to know when it is. God isn't asking us to know when or to calculate when — he has a different job for us to do. Verse 8:

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."

So that's the job. That's what Jesus is sending his disciples to do, to be his witnesses, to tell other people about Jesus, to tell them the message of good news and forgiveness, to continue the work that he began. And he promised them the power they would need to do it. The Holy Spirit would give them the supernatural power they would need to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every people.

And as we know, the disciples did not finish the job. They passed it on to the next generation, and the next, and the next. The work is still set before us. It is still waiting, and we today are part of that work. We have inherited the job. But no longer do we have to wait for the Holy Spirit. We have already been given the Holy Spirit. We are already enabled and empowered to preach the gospel. We as the church of Jesus Christ, as the body of Jesus Christ, as the temple of the Holy Spirit, have the work of sharing the good news. We do that as a community, and we do it as individuals, and the Holy Spirit enables us to do it.

As we look forward to the day of Pentecost, we are reminded of our mission, and we are reminded of the supernatural power that is needed for our mission, and we are reminded that we already have that supernatural power living within us. There's no need to wait — we have work to do.

Now, the NewLife Fellowship of the Worldwide Church of God in Pasadena is facing a certain problem in the summer of 2000. We can meet in this building only until July 9, and we don't know where we will be meeting after that. Our pastor was working with Dennis Pelley and Raul Ramos to see if we could combine our resources and rent or buy a building together. But that doesn't seem to be working out. All the buildings large enough for the Saturday morning congregation also seem to be about three times as expensive as we can afford.

So Mr. Pelley decided this week that he will begin looking for a church building to rent on Saturday morning, and he suggested that we look for our own building as well, because the facility he rents will most likely already be in use on Sunday mornings. So we will need to look for a place of our own, perhaps a place we can share with the Spanish church, perhaps one just for us. Perhaps something permanent, perhaps only a temporary arrangement.

So we need to look for a place to meet. Well, that was what developed this week, and I think pastor Bermie would tell you about it if he were here, so I am sharing it with you this morning, and I think we all need to pray about it.

We'd like to have enough space for a hundred people to meet, space for a band to play, space for children to have classes, space for us to have potluck lunches. We'd like to have space for parking, and we want to be accessible to a community of people around us, an address that's easy for people to find, a building that's easy to locate, a place where we can put up a sign advertising our presence so we can serve the community a little better than we can here. So we want a facility that's even better than what we have here.

And while we are at it, we want a place for SonLight Club, too, a place where children can play, where they can have classes and devotionals, where children from the community can be invited to learn about Jesus. We want a place where we can have a vacation Bible school this summer, to invite more kids in to have fun and to hear the good news about what Jesus does for us.

And we'd like it for a small price.

Is that too much to ask? No. Philippians tells us to let all our requests be made known to God, so we can ask God about all of our desires, no matter how large, no matter how many. And God is certainly able to supply all our needs, and all our wants. Whether he will do exactly what we ask is another question — but our job is to ask.

But there is work to do right now, even though we might be tempted to think, Let's wait until we receive a building from on high. Let's wait until we see our setup, and then we can work. Well, that is of course not what Jesus had in mind. In order to preach the gospel, the disciples needed the Holy Spirit, not a building. It so happens that they had a building in Jerusalem already, but as we read through the book of Acts, we do not find that the building was needed for the work at all. The message went forth just fine without a building, thank you, and sometimes it went better without a building than with it.

So the work does not wait for a building. We will do the work whether we have a building or not. The NewLife congregation has been good about that. We have taken the message to the streets of Pasadena, we have preached in the park, we can work one way or another. We are already making plans for a vacation Bible school this summer, no matter what our building situation is.

When we have the Holy Spirit, we do not need to wait for a building. After all, the people of God are together the temple of the Holy Spirit; we are the building that God is most interested in. The work is done not by bricks and lumber, but by the Holy Spirit working in his people — and since we have what we need to do the work, we will work.

But we still pray for our building needs, too, because a building can help us in the work. But we need to make it clear that the work has priority. We need a building only if we are working. The building is to serve the work, not vice versa. So we pray not just for a building to suit our own desires, but a building to help us do the work that God is giving us, the work that the Holy Spirit is leading us to do and empowering us to do.

And so we need to pray for a building, but we need to pray even more for the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit, that we are hearing his lead, that we as a congregation and as individuals are responding to his direction, that we are doing his work, that we are relying on his strength and not our own. We have work to do, but the work is done by the Holy Spirit working in us and through us.

Let's get back to the text of Acts chapter 1.

Verse 9 After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. 10 They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. 11 "Men of Galilee," they said, "why do you stand here looking into the sky?

I know why they were staring into the sky. Maybe the angels had seen stuff like that before, but these guys hadn't. I think I would have been staring into the sky, too! I would have been watching to see if he came back down, or if anything else was going to happen. I would have been stunned speechless, wondering, perhaps, Are we ever going to see Jesus again?

And the angels broke the disciples out of their trance, and said,

This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven."

Apparently the angels said a bit more than this, too. Apparently they said that Jesus was not coming back right away, but some time later. The angels were saying, There's no need to stand here; Jesus will come back; you don't need to worry about that. There's no need to stand here — you have work to do, in preparation for his return. There is work to do. He told you what kind of work: preach the gospel, be his witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. There is a lot of work to do; there is no need to stand around staring at the sky.

So verse 12, the disciples "returned to Jerusalem from the hill called the Mount of Olives, a Sabbath day's walk from the city. 13 When they arrived in Jerusalem, they went upstairs to the room where they were staying. And verse 14, They all joined together constantly in prayer,

So that was the first order of business, joining together in prayer. And that is what we need to do, too. There are two items here: joining together, and praying. We need both.

Let's take a few minutes today to pray, not as individuals, but as a community, as groups of people. Let us pray for the Holy Spirit to lead us, to guide us in the work he wants us to do. Let us pray for us as a church, so that we are the community of people God can use to do his work. Let us pray for the work of the gospel, the work that God has already given us, and the work that he may give us this summer. And let us pray for a building that will serve those needs, so that God's work may be done.

We have about five minutes, so let's gather in small groups of three or four, to pray as the Spirit lead us for God's work to be done in us as his people....

There is work to do.