What believers do (2)
Acts 9: 23 - 43
Rev Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 11 August, 2002
(This is a summary of the sermon, which was preached extemporaneously)

WE SAW a fortnight ago that believers "preach the gospel". Paul - Saul as he was at the time - shows us a pattern. Almost as soon as he became a believer, he began to preach.

Preaching is vital. When there was a problem in the Church about distributing support to the widows, Peter spoke on behalf of the apostles. He said it wasn't appropriate for them to serve tables when they had the work of preaching to do, so the Church appointed the Seven to attend to welfare needs. And even that group wasn't slack in preaching, either!

But preaching is not the whole story with the early Church. And it's not the whole story for us, either. The other thing that believers do, if they are obedient to their Lord, is to minister to the needs of people.

I believe that one of the greatest errors of the modern Church is to think that we have done everything when we have preached. If we haven't preached, we certainly haven’t yet done everything, but, when we have preached, there's still plenty more to do!
You’ve seen how much good the gospel has done in the world. You can see how many great acheivements have come about through the faith and commitment of God’s people.
In the late 1800s, some people were very enthusiastic about what Christians were achieving. Hospitals, asylums, social welfare, nearly all the things we take for granted were the good works of Christian believers.
But do you think that Christians will end all poverty, all sickness, all evil, all war, all oppression? You know the Bible better than that. But around 1890, some Christians even began to believe that the efforts of Christians would be enough to bring endless peace and justice and love to the earth. Maybe Christian effort was the key to transforming the world, with no need for Jesus to return at all.

Of course there was a protest. In the US, some Deep South evangelicals rallied against these movements. People like B.B Warfield and C.I Scofield spoke out against the idea of leaving Jesus out of the formula.

Then there was another force, coming from another side.
There was Azusa Street, the famous Pentecostal mission. It was a congregation of African and European Americans, all held together by the love of Christ and the power of the Spirit. The newspapers were horrified. There were weekly accounts of people speaking in tongues or falling on the floor in a faint. But, worst of all, blacks and whites were in church together.

The pastor, was a remarkable man. He wanted to attend a Bible College, but the law prevented him from going to one for whites. But the College wanted to admit him. So they employed him as a janitor and said, “If you want to sit in the corridor outside a lecture room and listen, you can. You don't have to clean while lectures are going on.”

And that was how he got his education.

He saw the races mixed, he saw people loving one another across cultural and racial and even religious lines, he saw women as well as men preaching the gospel and winning hearts for Jesus. And he knew that God's kingdom was present. This was a glimpse into heaven itself.
And if God's Kingdom was here on earth, then the power of God's kingdom was also here on earth. Jesus is here to heal. Jesus is here to drive out demons. Jesus is here to raise the dead. Maybe not all the time, but enough times so that everybody ought to know who Jesus is, everybody ought to see from his works that he is alive again and working his works of power.

And there was a protest again. Deep South evangelicals like B.B Warfield and C.I Scofield spoke out against the idea that any of Jesus power is in the world today. “These things ended with the Apostles,” they said.

Who would win? Warfield had authority as a theologian. Scofield had a reputation as a Bible teacher. And Bartelmans was a poor man, a son of slaves, a man educated at a tiny Bible College, who had never been properly taught anything.
But the horrors of World War I ended any thought of a world progressing to perfection! Where was God when the whole world was hurting?
So people listened to Scofield and Warfield and all the rest, and they ignored Azusa Street and Christian Social action and everything else on that side.

But let's not take our ideas from mere theological arguments.
The bottom line for the believer is not, “What do the theologians think?” The bottom line for the believer is, “What does the Bible say?”

I’m not knocking theologians. I’m saying what any good theologian would tell you: always check your theories against the Bible.
And there are some teachers, even today, who tell you that all the good things we read about in the Bible were al in the past, and the only thing left for us today is to preach.
My daugher goes to an evangelical Anglican church. They are pretty good. But she attended some seminars led by people who learned their theology out of Warfield's books.
She told me the other day that someone said that Jesus mainly preached, and hardly ever healed or cast out demons.

Do you see where it all heads to? Warfield said healing and casting out demons belonged to the age of the Apostles. Now Warfield's descendants are starting to deny that healing and deliverance ever occurred.

I sent her back to the Bible. She knows that God heals today. She has experienced it personally. But she was beginning to believe the negativity she was hearing.

We've just read about Peter, bringing healing to Aeneas and raising Tabitha from the dead. That's why I read those gospel passages earlier. The story of Jesus healing the paralytic who was let down through the roof on his mat has parallels to the story of Aeneas, and the story of Jesus' healing of Jairus' daughter closely parallels Peter's ministry to Tabitha. Peter was following the pattern that Jesus laid down. He'd been a disciple, someone learning from a trainer or teacher. Whatever the master did, the disciple did. You remember how often Jesus even took Peter, James and John wth him to learn specially from him. So, when he was confronted by a situation which was similar to one he'd experienced with Jesus, he knew exactly what to do.

Luke is making the point very clear, that Christians are called to do what their Master did. If he healed, we heal; if he drove out demons, we drive out demons; if he preached, we preach. It's very simple. We follow the pattern set by our Lord.

What my daughter heard was partly true. Yes, Jesus preached a great deal, maybe even more than he did other ministries. But the point is very clear, that he was concerned for the whole person, and not just for some "spiritual" aspect, apart from the body and the mind.

But there is another aspect to what Luke shows us in this passage, and that is, that our ministries must be concened, not only with the individual, but also with society.

Dorcas was not just an individual who had died, she was also a provider in her society, a practical Christian, whose ministry was vital to community function. When Jesus raised her to life through Peter's ministry, God returned her to her community and her ministry within it. God cares for how our societies function and for the ministries we carry out in them.

So this brief passage introduces us to three things that Believers do. We have already seen that they preach, but this passage shows that Believers maintain and extend Jesus' healing ministry. It also shows that Believers are called to bring recovery of life to the people they are called among. And it shows that we are called to minister in care to the needs of our societies.

There is an important verse, "Go and do thou likewise." We'd better obey, then, hadn't we?