Keyser, Keith: KRK.9.11.10.BlasdellYouthConf.3

Dancing. So, uh, I wouldn't have had any advantage anyway. Okay, I'm really gonna have a tough time. Sudafed's a cold medicine, okay? Not a steroid. Got it, okay. What's he talking about, Sudafed? I don't know, is it good stuff, dude, you know? Acts chapter two is where we left off. And verse forty two. And they continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine, in fellowship, in the breaking of bread, in prayers. Now, this describes what the early church devoted themselves to, and these are really core activities. Now, it's amazing for what passes for the church today. There are a lot of ideas that have crept in and notions of what the church ought to be doing, but these are four things that we will call fundamental and things that right from their salvation, these believers were involved in. Now, you'll know the theme verse from First Timothy four. It says, neglect not the gift that is within you, and we're going to get to some of the gifts this message and to more in the next, so I haven't forgotten about the gifts, but I want to start with what every believer is to be involved in, what every believer is to be steadfastly devoted to, because gifts are good, and gifts are useful, they're given by the Lord for specific purposes. But if we get so fixated on what our gift may or may not be, and forget the very basic things that we as Christians are to do, uh, then we're in a very problematic state. So we want to remind ourselves just what the church is and why these four activities are so important. You will notice the first of them is that they continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine. And I said before that that word doctrine means teaching. Now, nowadays, to be quite honest about it, how much of the professing evangelical church does things has more in common with a Masters of Business Administration program at the Wharton School of Business, or maybe Harvard Business School or some other business school, than it does with the Apostles' Doctrine. Because the notion in Western churches has gotten to be that church is about people. Church is about meeting people's needs, and church is about getting people in. And the more people you can get in, the more needs you can meet, and you can build up a bigger organization, and you can have a more powerful entity. Now, I'm not against many people coming in to hear the word of God. I'm certainly not against many people getting saved. Here in Acts chapter two, three thousand people got saved at a pop. Now, that's wonderful. I'd love to see that happen more often in our day and time. But the statistics are a bit troubling, that when you find out in the last forty years or so what has been called church growth, as different churches have become numerically larger, much of that has not been actual growth. Much of that has been just people moving from church to church. Why is that? Well, it's like restaurants, you know, used to be, it's hard to believe, but the United States and Canada were very boring places to eat out. I mean, people didn't have the disposable income to eat out anyway, and you'd go out and they might have a diner or something, but there was a time in my grandparents' youth before McDonald's. It's scarcely understandable how they lived, but there it was. There was no McDonald's and no Kentucky Fried Chicken and no Tim Hortons, so it's really getting bad now. And, you know, they'd go out to a diner or someplace to eat, and the options were somewhat limited. Now, I tell you, nowadays, when I take my family on the road, it's terrific. When we're about getting the meal time, we've got this lovely little GPS, and occasionally we'll have the three A tour book with us, and we'll say, okay, what do you feel like tonight? Do you feel like Indian? Do you feel like Thai? Would you like Chinese? Would you like Mexican? Would you like American? Are we going to do fast food? Are we going to do sit down? If we're going to do fast food, what kind of fast food are we going to do? I mean, it's amazing how long the discussions are because we have so many choices. And isn't that so with our TV packages? I mean, nowadays, you know, what did they ever do when they had ten or twenty channels? I mean, you got to have three hundred just to have five interesting things to watch, really, you know, because if, uh, if, uh, you know, Jerry Springer is a rerun or something, I mean, you're going to have to flick on the... Please don't watch that, it's trash. But anyway, you're going to have to flick somewhere else in the five hundred channels you get in the average cable package because people want more, want something different. Well, you know what? The same mindset has been brought to public Christianity in our countries. That if you don't like this church, if it doesn't appeal to you, if it's not your style, if, uh, the piano player's playing in one key and the guitarist is playing in another. Sorry, I'm, I'm non-musical, so I am, I really shouldn't open my mouth. I appreciate what you guys are doing. You're doing a good job. But, you know, for whatever reason, you don't like the wallpaper, there's five more places down the street you can go to, until you find the one that you want. You know, you shop around. You find the one that appeals to you. And church leaders aren't stupid, they've learned that. So they say, well, how are we going to get them in? How are we going to be more appealing? How are we going to be more relevant? Well, of course, we want to present the Lord Jesus Christ eventually to them, but how are we going to get them in? Because if we don't get them in, we can't give them Christ, right? Well, I'll take issue t- with that idea, actually, because the thing about the New Testament church, the thing about these people, is everywhere they went, they took the gospel with them, and they just couldn't stop talking about the Lord who had changed them. They couldn't stop talking about the gospel, how they deserved God's judgment. They were dead at before God in their trespasses and sins. They were held in sin's bondage, and yet the Lord Jesus, by grace, had come and died for them and saved them and rose again to give them a brand new kind of life. And wherever they went, they couldn't stop talking about it. They couldn't stop telling people about it. Now, I have to confess to my shame that many times in my life, that hasn't been the way you could describe me. I've been undercover brother, you know? I- I'm a believer, I have the truth in my heart, but I haven't been so forthcoming about who the Lord is. You notice that the first thing they devoted themselves steadfastly to... Excuse me while I get a drink, was the apostles' teaching. And that's a very important thing, because we have to have an authority source for what we do spiritually. I mean, the idea is that, you know, which has come to us subtly in a hundred different ways in society, that your opinion is what matters the most. What you think about stuff, that's the biggest deal. When, in fact, the gospel says no, there's a bigger opinion than yours, a much bigger one, God's opinion. What God thinks of this world is the key thing. What God thinks about you is the key thing. In fact, repentance literally means having a change of mind. It's having a change of mind about ourselves and about God. We think we're okay, we think we're nice, we think we're just fine, then we hear the gospel, and the gospel says you're sinners, you're out of fellowship with God, you're alienated from the life that is in God, and God is holy and right and just. And maybe we had hard thoughts of God, maybe we thought God was mean and distant. Maybe we asked, why did God let thus and such happen in my life? But then when the gospel comes, and we believe it, we repent, we change our mind and say, no, God is right. He is a just God. He is a fair God. He is a loving God. He is a holy God. And I was wrong. But now, by the grace of God, I've been made right too. I've been justified in the Lord Jesus Christ. I've been brought into this new life. So what's my authority source now? Well, how are you saved? Romans ten says, faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by what? By the word of God. That's exactly right. You know something? The same principle by which God saves you is the same principle by which the Christian life operates, and the Christian church, for that matter. You know, there were these lovely guys from Ohio. Anybody from Ohio here today? All right, a little pride for the Buckeye state. There were these guys, Orville and Wilbur Wright. Anybody here from North Carolina? Okay, we won't have a war today, because those two states fight over the Wright brothers, you know? Because these guys were actually from Ohio. They had a bicycle shop, and they tinkered and invented, and they were really fascinated with the idea of getting men to fly. Uh, but to actually get their invention off the ground, no pun intended, well, slightly intended, they had to go down to North Carolina to do it. So North Carolina puts on their license plates, many of them at least, first in flight, you know, but Ohio says, no, the Wright brothers are ours. You know, those guys, they were amazing. They took a bit of light wood and some canvas or whatever, and some string, and I don't know what else, and they made this contraption that actually flew. Now, it didn't fly for very long. I forget what the first flight was. It was a matter of minutes, okay? It wasn't a great length of time, but it was flight nonetheless. And the same, some of the same basic aero- aeronautical, is that the right word? Aeronautical principles, principles of flight. Do I have that right? Is there an engineer in the house? Okay, thank you. Yes, aeronautical, some of the same basic aeronautical principles that made their plane fly are still in use today on a Boeing seven forty seven, for example. But I tell you, I'd rather fly cross country on a Boeing seven forty seven than on the Wright brothers' plane. There's a lot more to the Boeing seven forty seven, isn't there? But the principle in each is the same. If you're going to get lift, if you're going to get the right amount of speed and velocity and all these things to slip the surly bonds of Earth's gravity, I think Ronald Reagan said, talking about the Challenger astronauts. If you're going to be able to, whoa, we put a hole there, okay. If you're going to be able to do, sorry about that, I usually don't tap dance during my meetings, but if you're going to fly and get off the ground, you've got to adhere to that same basic stuff. And it's the same thing in the Christian life. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. You are saved, born again, by the word of God, which liveth and believeth, which liveth and abideth, rather, forever. That's what you're saved by. And what's more, oh, the beetles have just landed behind me. Crazy. Anyway, people screaming, it's terrible. But what's more, not only are you saved by faith in the Word of God, when you get saved, you find out the Word of God is now your standard of life. It's now your guidebook, your direction book. So they devoted themselves steadfastly to the apostles' teaching. Now, why the apostles' teaching? What's so big about the apostles' teaching? I mean, aren't there other holy books in the world? You've got the Book of Mormon, you've got the Quran, you have the Vedas of the Hindus, you've got all these different books that are out there, all these different religious texts. What makes one superior to another? Well, the thing about the apostles' teaching is it was not original with them. Now let's go in the Word of God to John chapter fourteen first of all. This is the night before the Lord Jesus goes to the cross, and he's in an upper room with his disciples. And in John chapter fourteen, the Lord Jesus tells them that he's going away. But he says, verse twenty five, John fourteen twenty five, these things I've spoken to you while being present with you, but the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you. Go over to chapter sixteen a moment, John sixteen, Verse twelve. John sixteen twelve. I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. However, when he, the Spirit of truth, has come, he will guide you into all truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears, he will speak, and he will tell you things to come. Now, the fascinating thing about the ministry of the Lord Jesus while he was here on earth is that he tells us that the works he did he received from the Father. He says that in John chapter five, among one passage. Then he also says in that same passage that the very word, or rather in John fourteen I should say, he says the words that he speaks are from the Father, that he doesn't speak on his own authority. That's why the Lord Jesus could come and tell us, he that hath seen me hath seen the Father. We are getting the word of God straight from the lips of the Son of God. You are learning what the Father wants you to know. And now that the Son of God has physically gone back to heaven and been replaced on earth by the presence of the Holy Spirit in believers, that Holy Spirit now guides us into truth, but to the apostles in a special way, because, as we read in chapter fourteen, he said he would bring to your remembrance the things concerning me. Now you look at the gospels, for example. Let's take the gospel of John as one instance. And John tells us at the end of his gospel that there were many other signs which Jesus did, but if all the signs that Jesus did were written down, the whole world couldn't contain the books that should be written. But these are written, said he, that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, is what the previous chapter tells us about those signs. You see, the material in the Gospels was specifically selected by God. The Lord himself gave his things to the Spirit and said, convey these things to the apostles. Bring this to their mind. So, why does one gospel have certain stories about the Lord Jesus and another gospel doesn't? Well, the Holy Spirit wanted those things to be written down by one of the writers and not to be written down by the other. And there are things that none of the four tell us about the life of the Lord Jesus. For example, his life between age twelve and about the age of thirty, we know very little indeed. There are only one or two brief statements sort of summarizing that time period and things that we may infer about it. But what we do know, we have the assurance that it wasn't just dependent on Peter. I mean, can you see Peter there sitting down with his pencil? Now, what was it the Lord said there? Oh man, was that the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon on the Plain or the Olivet Discourse? I wish I had had my tape recorder with me, you know? And what was it he said? No, no. The Spirit brought the same words to his mind that he wanted us to know. So Peter says in second Peter one, that, speaking about the Old Testament prophets, but the principle's the same for the New Testament, he says holy men of old were born along by the Spirit of God. The Spirit himself came upon these men and controlled what was being written, because these words, as two Timothy three sixteen will tell us, are inspired of God. They are God-breathed. So the apostles aren't shy about telling us that they've received these things. Now let's go just to see one instance of that. First Corinthians chapter fifteen. 1 Corinthians 15. First Corinthians fifteen, and I'll start at verse one after I get a drink. First Corinthians fifteen verse one. Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. Notice verse three. For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received. Now, when he uses that word delivered there, it's from the same root as the word that you'll find in First Corinthians eleven, when he says, I praise you that you keep the traditions just as I handed them down to you, or keep the ordinances. This is the verbal form now. I delivered these things to you. These were things handed down to you. They were handed down to me, first of all, and then I handed them down to you. He goes on to explain, uh, which he says, which I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures. So Paul, as brilliant as a man as he no doubt was, being a leading rabbi before his conversion, it wasn't left to Paul's intellect to come up with what he was going to write, nor to Peter's, nor to Luke's, nor to Matthew's, nor to anybody else that the Lord used to write his word. The apostles' doctrine was conveyed by the Holy Spirit to them, and they were selected at a unique point in time just for this ministry. Now let's see that, speaking of the gifts, Ephesians chapter four. Ephesians chapter four. You may say, why belabor this? I mean, why emphasize this? What's the big deal? We know the Bible's the word of God. But out there, when you meet people that don't know Christ, they want to know why they should take this book seriously. Why they should listen to the Bible and not listen to the Quran, or why they shouldn't listen to L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics, or why they shouldn't read The Lord of the Rings and make some kooky religion out of that. I mean, there are people that made a religion out of Star Wars, so, you know, you can make a religion out of just about anything. I've heard about Jedi weddings. It's disturbing. But anyway. Because let me tell you, the last thing I want to see is my wife Naomi with a lightsaber. But Ephesians chapter four is very interesting when it comes to talk about gifts, and in particular apostles. He talks about how the gifts were given. Now, first of all, he stresses unity. And it's interesting that whether you read about the gifts in Ephesians four or in First Corinthians twelve, as we will later, or Romans twelve, as we will still later than that, in all three places, he emphasizes unity among the believers, because spiritual gifts are not meant to divide us. Spiritual gifts are meant to unite us, but not to unite us in some kind of, uh, fa la la way that we all light a match and say, I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. I'd like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company. You know, all that rubbish. I mean, that's nonsense. We are the world and all that. And then five minutes later, they're back to warring and blowing one another up. It's not just unity for unity's sake, it's unity in the Lord Jesus Christ. Because Ephesians four twenty two says, is going to begin talking about the fact, such as in verse four, that there is one body and one spirit, just as you were called, and one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above you all and through you all and in you all. So here we have this great unity among believers, being one in Christ Jesus, and the goal of that is to come to be a spiritually mature man. He's thinking in terms of a body, which we'll look at again when we get to First Corinthians twelve. But look at what it says here about the giving of the gifts. Verse seven, but to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ's gift. Now, please notice that. Grace is behind the giving of gifts. In fact, the very word gift is something that is given to you, something you receive freely. No strings attached is the idea behind the Bible gift. So it's grace, therefore, to look at a man or a woman who has a gift which is somehow impressive to us or appealing to us, and to think that that man or woman is something in and of themselves, or worse still, for the gifted person to think that because they have a certain spiritual gift, that somehow they are better than other believers or more special or worthier of more honor or dignity is a totally false notion, because it is given by grace. And when Paul describes his own apostleship in second Timothy chapter one, he's going to talk about, uh, sorry, first Timothy chapter one— how grace was given to him to be an apostle and a t- preacher and a teacher of the Gentiles. He didn't say, oh yeah, God's really lucky to have me on board, because did you see my degree from the University of Jerusalem? I mean, I studied under the vaunted Professor Gamaliel, and I had top honors, summa cum laude, and if they had Rhodes Scholarships in those days, I would have gotten one, and probably a Fulbright too, just for good measure, and, you know, all that kind of thing. I would have come and taught at RIT or someplace, and that's what I would have been. God's really lucky to have me as an apostle. No, Paul says I obtained grace, because you know what I was before? I was an insolent person. I was violent toward others. I was proud and headstrong. I was ignorant of the truth, but I found mercy, and God saved me. So whatever our spiritual gift or gifts may be, you got to remember it doesn't make you special in the sense that you're more important than somebody else. It's what you receive from the Lord, and it's what you are to use unto the Lord and for the edification of his church. We'll speak more about that later. But in Ephesians four— now they're beeping horns at me. Can there be anything worse? Anyway, he says in verse eight, Ephesians four eight, therefore, he says, when he ascended on high, he led captivity captive and gave gifts to men. Now that is absolutely astonishing because it's a quotation from the Old Testament, specifically the sixty-eighth Psalm, and the sixty-eighth Psalm itself is lifting some phrases from the book of Judges, chapter five. Excuse the interlude. In Judges chapter five, Deborah and Barak sing this wonderful song about their victory that the Lord had given them. And it was a wonderful thing. You know, Barak got this force of Israelites up, and they went up to a place called Mount Tabor, which if you ever get to Israel, I encourage you to visit. You'll have the wildest taxi ride of your life, because there are these Palestinian taxi drivers that each vie to get closer to the edge, and there's no guide rail, and here you are flying up these windy roads up this Israeli mountain to get to the top of Mount Tabor. And when you get up there, you realize, hey, there weren't any paved roads in the days of the judges, and this would be a pretty comfy spot to hang out. I can just see old Barak there with his army up on top of the mountain, and oh look, down there are the Canaanites, and look at all their chariots getting stuck in the mud. Poor guys, they're caught in traffic and all that kind of thing. You know, as long as we stay up here, we're safe. What? We should go down there? You must be kidding, right? I mean, as long as we're up here, we're invulnerable to harm. We have the high ground, and they can't easily scale where we are. But what they did was, in the battle, they descended, and through the power of the Lord, they defeated a much stronger foe. So they sang about leading their captivity captive. And the psalmist takes that up in Psalm sixty eight and he says, yes, you lead your captivity captive and receive gifts from men. Now, that's how it used to be in warfare in the good old days. Ah yes, those were the days when you could go out and crush your army on the battlefield, your enemy, you know, you could go out and crush them, and then you could go home to their houses and despoil whatever they had. If you like their stereo system, you could take it for yourself. If you like their flat screen TV, it's yours. If you like their BMW chariot, well, go ahead and take the keys and the horse with it. You can have it all. Why? Because you beat them in battle. You get the spoil. That's where the old phrase to the victors go the spoils come from. But here in the New Testament, you'll notice that the Holy Spirit changes the quotation. He brings it into the New Testament and says, he led captivity captive, and where we would expect to read, and received gifts from men, it says he gave gifts to men. I tell you, that's just like the Lord Jesus. There's an old hymn about him that says he giveth and giveth and giveth again. You know something? I hope you get serious at a young age about the Lord. I hope you're serious now. If you're not, I hope you get serious. I hope you love the Lord so much that you say, Lord, I want my whole life to count for you. I want you to take my life and use it. I want to be what Christians are called to be, according to Romans twelve one, a living sacrifice. I want to be wholly devoted to you. And if you give your life to the Lord, as some people I've been privileged to know have, the Lord may take that life and do some dramatic things with it. I think of a man that I knew in my teen years by the name of T. Ernest Wilson. Now, some of you know Terry Wilson, who's at Camp Playlillai. This was his grandfather. And T. Ernest Wilson, when he was sixteen years old, was converted, and he went into Harland Wolf Shipyards to do an apprenticeship as a journeyman shipwright. This was the shipyard where they had built the Titanic and its sister ship, the Olympic. Now, that was a little before he got on the scene, but just within memory, it was like eight or ten years later that he started working there. And many of the men he worked with had worked on the, on building the Titanic. And there were a lot of Christians, some from his own home assembly, that worked in the shipyard with him. So he said at lunch break, what they used to do is they'd sit around and they'd have what they call a Bible reading, which meant that they would go through a predetermined passage of scripture. Let's say it's John chapter one, and everybody knew they were in John chapter one. so you'd read it on your own and think about it and maybe look up some of the key words. You'd study it a bit, and then you'd come together, and at lunchtime they'd sit around and talk about John chapter one. and usually one of the older, more experienced guys who had a handle on the word would sort of lead the discussion, and he said that was his Bible school. And very soon he got to love the Lord who had saved him and the word of God so much that he got the reputation as somebody who had swallowed the Bible. And what they meant by that was that wherever he went, he was quoting scripture and preaching out on the streets and giving out tracts to people and talking to others about the Lord. And it wasn't too long before he started to think about the mission field. The Lord put that on his heart. And at the age of twenty one, he went out to Portugal to learn Portuguese because he needed that language to get into Angola, which was a colony of Portugal in those days. And he went into Angola, and over the course of more than thirty years service in Angola, he learned three different African languages, Chokwe, Songo, and Umbundo. As if that wasn't enough, having Portuguese, Chokwe, Songo, and Umbundo, I would have stopped there. But, um, yeah. Anyway, as if that wasn't enough having those, he taught himself New Testament Greek so he could study the Bible better. And he went into places where the Africans had never seen a European man before, and went with the gospel of Christ, and many times went in danger of his life, not only in danger from lions and from snakes and from disease. He got so ill with malaria that it turned into what they called in those days black water fever, because your urine turned the color of coffee, okay? And this was shortly after he got married, and the doctor who, uh, was attending to him said to his new wife, you've married that man only to bury him. Well, he didn't die, he survived, and he stayed in Africa until he was forced out because there was a revolution in the country, and the government was fighting an insurgency, and they forced all the missionaries out, and he had to come back to the United States, where his wife was from. Landed up in the ancestor assembly of my current home assembly, much to my father's annoyance, because, not that he was annoying, but he wouldn't be at the meeting, his wife would be at the meeting, and when my dad would preach, his wife would come up after the meeting and tell my dad everything that her husband taught on that passage. So, uh, that was a little unnerving for a young guy, but she meant it well. She was trying to encourage my dad. He got to appreciate that in later years. But when he came back to the States, he did just the same thing that he had been doing in Africa. He kept preaching the word of God. He kept talking to people about the Lord. He kept traveling among churches of Christians, teaching the word. Why? Because he had devoted himself to the Lord Jesus Christ, and he lived into his nineties. and he preached until he physically couldn't preach anymore. And I remember visiting him when all he could do was sit in a chair, and he was legally blind, and his hearing was going. He still had his faculties, and I would sit there and talk to him, and all he would talk about was the Lord. You know, he got saved at sixteen and served the Lord for all of those years into his nineties. Almost eighty years of service, of him giving up nearly everything in this life for the Lord Jesus. And you know what? That is still nothing compared to what the Lord Jesus gave for him. Still nothing compared to what the Lord Jesus gives for you. Whatever you give up for the Lord, whether it's being asked to leave this country to go somewhere else and serve people that are going to hate you and maybe even kill you, whether it's being asked to give up the comforts of being married and having a family that you might devote yourself to the Lord, whether it's being asked to take a job which isn't going to be as prestigious and make less money, but you're going to have the time to serve the Lord. You're not going to be well regarded in this life, perhaps, but whatever it is you give to the Lord, you're not going to outgive him, because when he ascended up on high, he gave gifts to men. Specifically, he gave first, it says, some apostles, and these apostles gave to us the word of God. Not Peter's teaching and views on the matter, not Paul's teachings on the matter, not John's teachings on the matter, the Lord's teachings through John, through Peter, through Paul, through these different men. He gave some apostles, it says, and then he gave some prophets, because as Ephesians chapter two will tell us, the church is built upon the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, Jesus Christ himself, the chief cornerstone. Now, prophets were people that could speak for the Lord in a given situation, particularly about the future. We see different instances of this gift operating in the book of Acts with a fellow named Agabus, who had a great ministry of bad news. Whenever Agabus showed up, I'm sure the brethren groaned, because, you know, one time he shows up and says, there's going to be a great famine in Judea, thus says the Lord, and he goes on his way. Another time he shows up and he takes a hold of Paul by the belt, and he says, the man who wears this belt is going to be taken in chains to Jerusalem. Oh, okay, great. Thanks for the good word there, Agabus. I mean, not what you call a cotton candy preacher. A guy who brought a word from the Lord, but what would sometimes seem as negative, perhaps. Well, negative or positive, before the word of God was complete, they needed prophets to fill in the blanks of what hadn't been revealed yet. And when we talk about the apostles' doctrine today, we're talking about the New Testament, essentially, because all of the New Testament writings were either written down by the apostles or by their co-workers. So when it says they steadfastly devoted themselves to the apostles' doctrine, it's something coming straight from the Lord and written down for us in the New Testament. It is our guide and our authority for what we do. Now we have to hang on to that because our world today says, no, question authority. You're your own authority. You decide what's good for you. You decide what you need. Yeah, you can try that, but you'll be like the other six billion cases of heartache in our world that ends in destruction. You try to do it your own way, you try to be your own authority, then you're setting yourself up for a fall. It's a foolish thing to do. We need to devote ourselves to the scriptures. So it brings me to the question, how much time did you spend in the word last week? Now that's a good question, isn't it? You know, you live in a time when you have more Bible translations in your language. I trust all of you speak English. If not, this has been an exceedingly boring day for you. But assuming English is your first language, especially, or or one you're very able at, there are more translations in your language than have ever been in any language in the history of the world. There are more Bible study tools, whether you want to talk about computer or printed form, whatever, more than have ever been available to people around the world right now are available to you. Many of them at your fingertips, a keystroke away on the internet for free. Many that are able to be purchased very cheaply indeed. Doesn't take a lot of money to start a basic library for reading and studying God's word. How much time do we spend in it? You know, our generation has produced the one-minute Bible. Now, you know, it's interesting, but I don't want to get, step on anybody's toes if you own the one-minute Bible or something like that, but isn't it interesting that something like that is marketed under the assumption that we only have one minute a day to read the Word of God? Has anybody ever seen the one-minute hockey game or the one-minute baseball game? Well, I suppose you could watch the, the highlights on ESPN or whatever, you know? But, but most people have time to do something other than sleeping, eating, going to work, or going to school. You have time to do something in your day that you want to do. And you know, the truth is, we find time for what we want to do. You might have a commute to school or to work, whether that's on a bus, a train, or however you do it, even if you drive, there are great resources because you can get the Bible in recorded form now, pick your technology. If you have an old car with a tape player, you can get the Bible on tape. You can get it on CD, you can get it in MP three. you can get it in whatever they're coming out with next, let me assure you. You can listen to the Bible as you go to where you're going. You go jogging, you got your iPod or your other similar um MP three player, whatever, you can listen to the word of God. You can take the word of God with you. I remember hearing a preacher say about his father, who had a job as a delivery man, that he would write verses of scripture on a three by five card, and at each place he delivered, he'd pull the three by five card out and read the verse, and by the end of the day, he knew that verse by heart, and plus he was thinking about what the verse said, meditating on scripture. Another guy I heard about used to ride the subway into work in New York City every day. He'd take a volume of F. W. Grant's Numerical Bible. Now, that's an old set of books, but what it is is a translation of the Bible with commentary in little print below it. So he would read the scripture and think about it, and then after he got some thoughts of his own, he'd check out the commentary. I mean, you see what I mean. There are times in all of our days when we can listen to the word of God somehow, whether it's reading it, listening to it, however we do it. There are means of doing that. And these people that were saved in the first century didn't have the time-saving devices we have. In fact, reading the epistles, you find out many of them were slaves. Now, do you think slaves were hanging around? Oh, what do you want to do this weekend? Do you want to go to the beach? Oh, sure, let's go to the beach. Surfing, why not? Yes. Oh, let's go have a barbecue in a park or something. Give me a break. Their master would say, you get up, you serve me. That's what you are, you're a slave. But when they got any time, they'd get together with the believers, and they'd want to hear the word of God. And they probably didn't even have, most of them, their own copy. There might be a Bible per church in those days, or a few of them, and they would read the word. That's why Paul says to Timothy, give attendance to reading. So they would read it, and they would remember it, and they would think about it, and they would repeat it to one another. They would devote themselves to the apostles' doctrine. But then he goes on to say, and I'm almost out of time, he goes on to say, also they devoted themselves to fellowship. And that's something that's so vitally important because we're living in an age where people are losing relationships one with another. I mean, there are people out there that their avatar in their virtual world is more important to them than their everyday life. When they have more contact with somebody on the computer than they do actual people in their neighborhood. And many people, I don't want to poll anybody, but many of us could say we don't really know our neighbors anymore. That's a trend in society. But I tell you, when it comes to the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ, the word fellowship has the idea of having a common share in something. In fact, it's used of business partners in the Gospels, partners of Peter and Andrew in the fishing business. There are certain corporations that if I hear on the news, Microsoft, for example, if I hear that Microsoft stock is up ten points or down ten points, I could care less. I change the channel. Why? Because I have nothing invested in Microsoft, other than the fact that my four-year-old laptop runs XP, you know? I don't own any shares in the company. So whether they do well or do poorly, it doesn't affect me one bit. I have no share in that company. But not so the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. You, if you were a believer, have a share in it. You have a common part in it. You are to be invested in the lives of the other people in your local assembly, and they in yours. Now, that may happen imperfectly. You may say, nobody's really taken an interest in me. Nobody's come and talked to me about things. Okay, fine. Here's a thought. Why don't you be the instigator? Why don't you be the initiator? I'm not talking about big stuff here, just at the obligatory New Testament pattern coffee break, uh, go up. That's a joke. Anyway, go up, uh, haven't found the coffee break verse yet, but go up to somebody and say, how are you today? And when they give you the inevitably perfunctory, oh, I'm fine, how are you? Try and ask a question that probes deeper. What happened to you this week? Anything interesting? Or have you seen anything from the word this week? You ask an older brother or sister that question, they just might fall over from shock. And when they get over their shock, they just might start sharing things with you that'll really help your spiritual life. Now, I talk a lot, as is evident. And in the course of a year, most years I preach over two hundred times, okay? Don't know how many exactly, but I'm well practiced. I remember, though, as a young man of, say, eleven or twelve, and just getting started in the local assembly there. Wasn't long saved, I got saved at seven, and starting to understand things a little better and understand what the Lord's Supper was all about, and we're going to talk about that in the next session. But I remember thinking, man, I could never say anything, because what if I said something wrong? And I started, you know, well, I want to worship the Lord, though. I want to participate. I know that's what the Lord would have me do as a priest. And so I would start thinking about different hymns, and I would sit there in the meeting, and I'm um twelve years old, I would pick out a hymn, and I'd show my father, and I'd kind of just hold the hymn book over to him, and I'd wait for him to give me the nod if he thought that hymn was okay or not, because I had a horror of doing anything wrong. So I started doing that. Well, as a little time went by, I got a little bolder, and I decided I was actually going to get up and pray. By now, I'm probably about thirteen or so. I'm going to get up and pray in the Lord's Supper. And I'd get up and I'd pray, and it would be something very simple. Lord, I love you. Thank you for saving me, something like that. I'd sit down, and all of a sudden my mind would start going. You said something stupid, I bet. You said something wrong. You know, there was a little old lady in our assembly, about ninety years old, no exaggeration. She was stooped over a bit. She had a mole on her face that had little hairs coming out of it, okay? As attractiveness goes in this world's eyes, not a tremendously attractive person. But to me, she was absolutely gorgeous, because whatever I would do publicly in the local church, and especially at the Lord's Supper, if I sneezed and it sounded like a contribution, she'd come up to me after the meeting and say, praise the Lord, I appreciated what you said this morning. And that's what kept me going. There was another guy in the assembly also, at the time, high up in his eighties, and his first language wasn't even English, it was Pennsylvania German, which is, uh, kind of a dialect of German. So when he spoke English, he had this kind of bizarre accent, and he would say, brother, that was wonderful, wonderful. And I didn't care that he couldn't say the word wonderful, you know? To me, him saying that at that time was better than somebody handing me a hundred dollars, because it said to me, praise the Lord. The Lord can actually use me to stand up and say something. Now, at that time, I had no thought of ever preaching God's word, no thought of ever teaching it to people, no thought of ever doing this, certainly with all of my time. But that's what got me involved just in publicly expressing my priesthood. And so, as you get involved in the fellowship, and as you get to know people in your local fellowship, they can minister to you in ways, and you can minister to them in ways that right now you might not be able to imagine. So I encourage you, emulate these early believers, imitate their example. Start getting involved in your fellowship, start talking to people. That might be hard for some of you, you might be shy, but pray about it and say, Lord, guide me to somebody you want me to talk to who maybe has something to tell me that I need to hear, or maybe I can encourage them just by talking with them. And just look for the Lord to give you open opportunities. Father, we're thankful for the giver of all good and perfect gifts, thou thyself. We're thankful for thy son, who in the moment of his great triumph, coming down to earth and becoming vulnerable, dying on the cross, and yet then ascending high, leading captivity captive. What does he do? He gives gifts to men. And Father, if we had ten thousand thousand lives, as the hymn writer says, it wouldn't compare to what we've been given in the Lord Jesus Christ. The gift of gifts, all other gifts in one. Blessed be God our God. Father, just grip us with a sense of thy grace, that we would want to use our lips, our feet, our hands, our whole person for your honor and glory. That we would want to be your channels of blessing to one another and to this lost world that so desperately needs the Lord Jesus Christ. Help us to really lay hold of these things in our everyday lives, we ask in the Lord Jesus Christ's holy name. Amen.