The Dynamics of Devotion IV, Breaking Bread, Healing Hearts

Yes, you're right. This is the fourth. I heard someone saying four. Where have I been? Well, this is our fifth Sunday, I think, in here. Sixth. Is it nice and warm again? Yes. Let me tell you something, folks. That heat you're feeling is very, very expensive. Just want you to know that we found out we got our first gas bill yesterday. So praise the Lord. Wear your coats next week, all right? Acts 2:41. So those who received his word were baptized. And there were added that day about 3,000 souls. And they devoted themselves to the apostles, teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers. And fear came upon every soul. And many wonders and signs were done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all as any had need. Someday I want to talk about that. I don't want you to think that because we haven't brought that up, that it's insignificant or irrelevant to our culture. But I won't get to it today. I just want you to know that there are some application there that we need to make. Verse 46. And day by day attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes. They partook of food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. The Lord added to their number day by day, those who were being saved. I have a letter in my possession that was written by someone here in the community who probably will not be part of the community in the future. I want to read this small portion of this letter to you to see if somehow it may describe some of the feelings you may have from time to time about life together and relationship with others. There's about three or four pages describing the struggle that this person and their family had gone through and trying to sort out their life. And I must say that they had come an awful long way. The last paragraph says, thanks for your prayers and for your help in fixing. And they described something that I won't elaborate on, but I guess what we really needed was for someone to be a friend to have, someone who wanted to come to our house and sit around the table and have coffee and just talk and be together. Someone that we could really know and who would really know us. Somehow, they say that never happened. And I don't know why. I'm not sharing this, to condemn or complain or judge. I just share it in love. I wonder if you've ever had the experience of being in a crowd of people like this morning and yet feeling really very, very Alone, feeling that you're not even understood at all, that somehow you're the weird monkey in the bunch and all the rest of these people are really happy and rejoicing and you're just kind of here. Have you ever felt that way? Have you ever felt what this person's feeling? That life is going on around you, but somehow you're not part of it and nobody really cares or seems to care anyhow. And I might add, in the case of this person, I don't think it's the whole story. There's lots of things that they could have done and so on and so on. And yet, beloved, it's very evident to me that lots of people are yearning to be heard and understood, looking for someone, excuse me, who can really know them, really understand what they're going through, really identify with their needs in life. It doesn't really happen on Sunday morning. There's not time. It's not really the purpose of our worship gathering to sit and share our victories and our struggles. You know that, don't you? We have prayer circles almost every Sunday just to give you an opportunity to be ministered to. But listen, if you want someone to really know you and identify with you and support you and vice versa, it just doesn't happen in church on Sunday. That's been the downfall of most of American evangelicalism, that we've built our cathedrals to worship but never done the other part of this verse. Which was what? Day by day, meeting in homes and breaking bread together. Without that experience, I want to say this morning, unequivocally, it's easy for us to begin to accumulate a very right sounding packet of doctrines and phrases and to put together all the right stuff to sound just like you're right in tune with what God is doing. And you get the right perfectly timed hallelujahs and amens and you get just the right bumper sticker to not be too obvious. And you do all those things, but yet deep inside you know that no one really knows you and that you're not really reaching out to know anyone else. And there's isolation in that and you begin to increasingly feel alienated. And I know people that put up with that for a while, but after a year or 18 months, two years, you don't see them anymore. What's happened to them? Well, they've allowed themselves to buy into the thought that somehow they could really get along without the rest of the body. There are people here this morning that have been coming to North Way for three and a half years. And really, that's. I'm describing you right now. And you know something? The Enemy just is going to have a field day. I can't remember a time when we've had more calls, more requests for prayer and ministry and intercession and people who are depressed. It can be depressing to not be able to get out of your driveway for two weeks. Right. There's something to this cabin fever problem. But lots of the things we're talking about, Beloved, are a lot deeper than that and have a lot more significant roots to them. And the Enemy, if you're isolated, nobody's there, no one's there to hear you and to listen to you. He just begins to build, and you start believing what he has to say. And I've seen it happen over and over again that people who thought they could make it and tried a little bit of fellowship and got their toes stepped on somehow withdrew. And it wasn't long before they became their own filter by which they decided whether or not they were right with God. And it isn't long before the Enemy deceives you perfectly. When you're separated for long from the body of Christ, you begin the process of dying. There was an experiment that was done on some monkeys, little baby monkeys, to see how they would adjust to being isolated from their mother and the brothers and sisters. And the experiment, the purpose of it was to determine how they would adapt to their environment, how much intellectual development they would go through, and so on. And the experiment was a total failure because all the baby monkeys that were isolated, even though they had their food and all their other provisions, died in two months. Because they had to have the touch. They had to have the association with others of their kind. You remember the North Way Christian community love feasts that we used to have occasionally, maybe once or twice, twice a year at Bradley's. And we'd pull everything together and we'd open up. How many of you ever went to one of those on a Friday night? We had, okay, maybe half of the group. It's been a long. It's been since we've had one. But those were a time when we'd open the doors and say to anybody that we knew, come and share a meal with us. Let's be together. Let's enjoy the fellowship, the communion of being together. And I just miss those. I miss the joy of being together doing what the early disciples did, which was breaking bread. Now, when you read the phrase breaking bread there in verse 42, look at it, would you? There's four things that are said. What's the first one, the apostles teaching, the second one, fellowship, the third one, and the fourth one is prayer. Now, I understand doctrine, I understand prayer. And we talk about fellowship the first week. And all those things to me are spiritual. But breaking of bread, Come on, is that really spirit? What is that talking about breaking of bread? You know, that phrase appears 14 times in the New Testament. Fourteen different expressions of breaking of bread together. And so apparently there's something to this practice of breaking of bread. Something that implicitly is taking place in us when we break bread together. And I want to say to you before I just describe a little bit about what that might be, that if all you see North Way as being is your spiritual smorgasbord stopover on Sunday morning, a place where you can just sort of enjoy the music and rejoice a little bit and praise the Lord and hear a teaching and then go on your merry way, you've missed what it means to be a community. Hear me, church. I'm saying that we need to see ourselves as a spiritual family, not a smorgasbord. Turn to someone and say, we're part of a family. What did you do? Go ahead. Right beside you say, I'm part of the family with you. They need to know that. Let me ask you something. When you were growing up, or maybe now in your experience, if at no other time, when was the one time your family was all together? Mealtimes. Doggone, I'm glad to know I'm in good company. It doesn't matter where you were during the day or how hard you worked. At six o' clock you were there, right? Why? I was hungry. Yeah, but that was the time that the family was together. How many fathers made an extra effort to get home just for dinner? Because why? They wanted to be with everyone. They wanted to know what was going on in the lives of the family. It's no different. I believe, beloved, that the disciples were modeling that principle. They wanted to be together, so they broke bread and shared life together. And there was a purpose in this. And we're going to look at it here. The first thing is the disciples were together, breaking bread and sharing. You might want to write these four things down. Sharing. That's one of the purposes of breaking bread together, having a meal together. Now, before we go on, let me just say again, breaking of bread, obviously in verse 46, is talking about what? Eating food, okay? Not talking here about anything spiritual, just talking about eating together. How many of you have discovered that there is something. It sort of just gets a little with it, a little bit more of a flow when you're eating, never have to talk to someone that you didn't really want to see. And you decided to go out to lunch, and it just made it a little easier. How many businessmen here have recognized the wisdom of taking a client out to eat before you nail them with something, Right. Soften them up with a nice meal. Right. It just is something in us that over, if nothing else, you can talk about the food, and then that begins to get things going. And because we all have this common need, you see, there's nobody that says, well, I don't really eat myself. There are some people that try that for a while and become miserable. So we all have that, and there's just something that begins to happen between us. About a month or so ago, I was requested by our government to go down and be part of the jury selection process. And, well, I'll tell you what, that's quite a process and very slow. By lunchtime, I was looking forward to getting out, and I went down to one of the little restaurants down near Kauffman's, I guess it was on fifth Avenue or so, and walked into this place and ordered a bowl of cream of oyster soup. Sounds great, doesn't it? Took my little bowl of cream of oyster soup and my sandwich. Went back to a bar stool with a countertop right in front of the window that looked out on the street. And young fellow came up next to me. He had real serious working clothes on. He was obviously pitching boxes around or something. And he sat down on this stool and he had a bowl of this cream of oyster soup. He looked over at me, he said, this is the best soup in the city. So I said, I made a good choice. We just started talking about the soup. Not about Jesus, you know, not about, you know, what are your spiritual gifts? I just said, we started talking about this soup and how good it was. And it wasn't long before we did start talking about what do you do in life? And then we started talking about his struggle with making ends meet and so on. It wasn't long before that became a significant interchange. All because we had cream of oyster soup, the best in the city. Do you ever share meals with other people from the community, other believers, or maybe not even here, but other believers, just because you know that God's called you to love them. I'll tell you what, there is something that happens when you invite someone into your home for a meal. They begin to know you in a unique Way. Notice it says there, would you in verse 46. They broke bread in their homes, not in the deli. Not that there was anything wrong with going out to a restaurant, but there's something unique about being in a home together. You begin to share who you are and what you're about and what's important to you. A couple of years ago we were invited by someone in the community to come to their house and share one of their ethnic style dinners. And they happened to be Greek in descent. Yes, you're right. Eichen Shelley Curiousus so they had our whole family over and each thing that would come out of the oven and there was a whole list of them. Ike would be explaining where this came from and he started telling me how this recipe had come over from the old. All this you started looking at, wow, I didn't know all that could come in a spinach leaf. And just all these strange little things that tasted so good, so unique. And we had a wonderful couple of hours together just talking about heritage and family and what was important to them and the struggle of making the adjustment into open life and community together. And then as things would have it, one of the kids bounced on the trampoline and hit the other one in the head and they had a bloody lip and that was the end of dinner. But we had a great time nonetheless and it really made for an ongoing understanding of that family for us and I just appreciated it. Have you done that with anybody? I mean, so often around here we bump into people who don't have their name tag on and we say, are you new here? They say, no, I've been coming for three years. Oh, well, let me just suggest that when you do that next time and you blunder like that, just say, well, maybe God wants us to get together. How about coming over this week and having a meal with us? I want to challenge you to do that. Share your life with somebody that you don't know. It will bless you. It will bless them. Now the second thing that breaking of bread represents to us, that overhead on a scale of one to ten, is worth about a one and a half, isn't it? We're going to have to do something with the lights here. I'm afraid that's really bad. See, I don't have any problem up front, but when you get back here, it's very difficult. So I apologize for that. Breaking of bread is caring. Not only are we saying, hey, I'd like to get together with you and talk a little bit, but we're saying And I think the disciples recognize this, that I care about your life. I am interested to the point where I am willing to extend myself toward you. You know, beloved, this matter of caring is no small thing to us at North Way. The Holy Spirit said clearly to us in a prophetic word three years ago, almost four now, that he would send us as many people as we would care for. And I mean, care to me has the definition there of giving yourself to a person so that they might be all that God would have them to be. Is that a good definition? Giving yourself to a person so that they might be all that God would have them to be? That's the kind of care that the disciples were looking for when they spent time together. That's the kind of care that was happening as they met day by day in their homes. You want to know what I think the message was at the Christmas banquet? You want to know why so many people were touched by that and impressed and affected? Because it said in a profound way, we care. We care. And that's why the disciples were devoted to it. They didn't just do it incidentally and occasionally. What does that word, devoted mean? To set yourself on course, to affix yourself to. To steadfastly cling to. To me, this means every day they were getting together and sharing meals together and church. I want you to know, I don't think caring happens automatically. I think it's very possible for us just to go through the motions of being religious and not really care. And, you know, the people that care the most, they're the ones who, at some point in their life were so wiped out by circumstance or some sort of incident in their life that they had to have someone to care for them. And they discovered what it meant to be cared for. And now because they're back on their feet, they. They're able to give care. Has that ever happened to you when you were so sick in the hospital that you couldn't even pray for yourself? And someone came and prayed day by day, and you realized that's what the body of Christ is for. And that person, now, that's the person that I want to come visit in the hospital, the person who knows what it's like to be cared for. Now there's another kind of person that I think cares, and that's the one who's just so full of the Holy Spirit that they're just walking around looking for something to spill over into what it boils down to kind of hypertension. Just give me somebody to love here. Bouncing into something and they want to give so desperately. There's a few people like that, but most of us are not either of those extremes. We're right in the middle, and we don't want to care. We're afraid to care. Because it costs so much, you know, that it costs to give up an evening and say to someone, let's come have a meal together. What does it cost? Well, it costs the time that you could be watching tv. It costs the money to prepare the meal. It costs the laying aside of other things. It costs the possibility that they'll find out something about you. And you know something? Fear chokes life. Fear creates inertia. Let me say that again. Fear creates inertia. Fear is what keeps us from moving at all. What is it that kept the other 11 disciples in the boat and Peter taking a step out? Fear. Peter took the step because he believed more than he was afraid. And then he got out there, then he became afraid and was frozen in his tracks. But church, if we don't take a step of caring, if we let fear rob us, then we won't be able to do what the Lord said in Isaiah 58, this is the fast that I've chosen to loose the bonds of wickedness and free those who are oppressed. To give bread to the poor and to feed the hungry. That's what the Lord says. Third thing about breaking of bread, it's communing, communing together. Now, no doubt some of you are asking the question, well, on some of these 14 occasions of this, wasn't it talking about having Holy Communion or the Eucharist together? The answer is, yes, it was. Communion together is clearly part of what the New Testament teaches. You know that in First Corinthians 11, in fact, Paul writes and says, hey, some of you people are getting together and carousing before you have your agape feast and your communion. He said, that just shouldn't be the way it is. And so he corrects them in that. And so we know that the early church had times when they'd have a meal and communion together. And let me say to you, there is nothing at all inappropriate about having just that experience. Have a family over and conclude your evening by having communion together. And the beautiful thing is, in our denomination, you're allowed to do that. You can have communion as often as you are led of the Spirit to do it. Isn't that great? No elder will knock on your door, no pastor will call. You can have communion as God leads you to do it. But listen, that's not really the important part here as far as I'm concerned. The important part is that Jesus Christ is in that breaking of bread experience, just eating hamburgers together. That's what I think the essence of communion is in breaking of bread isn't just having the elements there. It's the fact that he is present, that he is with us, that he becomes the central presence in that meeting. How many of you have been to a place and had some dinner and just talked about the weather and the economy and sports and it's been so boring and dull you just couldn't wait to get done? I said in the first service we had to outlaw wedding receptions, right? I mean, some of the most inane conversation happens when you sit down in a group of eight people around a table. They don't know each other and the only safe topic is either your local sports team or some politician that's lost it in the last six months. That's not what I mean by communing together. I mean I'm talking about the experience of being together where you're imparting life just in the focus of your conversation. Now I'm not saying you're talking about Jesus this and Jesus that. I'm saying that your heart is so intent on caring that positive, meaningful things are taking place. I just don't you remember meals like that? Think about some time that you were with someone at a meal and because of what was said, your life was changed. Fred and Krista and Carol and I met in California five years ago, our way back from a trip. And we were able to get a meal together with Jack Hayford of the church on the way to talk about our struggles in defining a vision for our lives. I just remember that so clearly. We went to a restaurant and I was so looking forward to that. I knew that there would be an impartation together. And I. We sat down and talked and just hung on the words because I believed that God was going to speak through that man into our lives together. It doesn't have to be that glorious necessarily. Do you know what I'm saying? The presence of the Lord is the focal point. That's what I'm saying. And every meal can be that where Jesus is present and that's what he wants it to be. Do you remember the story in Luke 24 when Jesus was walking with the disciples on the road to Emmaus? Remember that? They were walking along saying I can't believe what happened. And then this figure comes up beside them and says, well, tell me about It. And they said, are you the only stranger around here who didn't know what's taking place? And then Jesus, the Bible says, explained the Scriptures to them. And near the end of the journey, they asked him to sit down with him and have meal. The Bible says that he consented to do that, sat down with them. And it says this. In the breaking of bread, he was revealed to them. Remember that. It was when they. Now, in your mind, what is it he's taking? Listen. Is he taking? When you read that passage, do you see him taking the loaf and saying, this is my body breath broken for you? Is that what that means? I don't think so. I think it's something that happened when they sat down together and just across that table they realized who he was. He was revealed in the communion of his presence around that table together. That's what God wants us to do when we gather, break bread. Finally, breaking of bread is pleasing. It's pleasing to one another, but mainly church, it's pleasing to the world. Do you know that? I believe what the world really is looking for is a group of people that's described. Look with me down in verse 46. A group of people that would break bread in homes partaking of food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. The world isn't looking for a bunch of gloom and doomers. It's looking for people that are glad to be together. Generous, the Greek word there means sincere and authentic. It's looking for people who enjoy spending time together in a vital and genuine way. People are drawn to that. They're attracted to it. And you know something? The only substitutes that the world has or the local clubs and bars and maybe bowling leagues. And I want you to know there are people that are fiercely committed to their bowling night. Maybe you're one of them. But I know people who would not miss bowling night. Listen, when they get on the radio and say there's a storm coming, they don't call up the bowling night. They're we're canceling tonight. They'll shovel their driveways and they'll be there because they want that communion together around a bowling ball. Listen, they want that pursuit. They want to be known. Something happens there. And when the church grabbed a hold of that glad and generous heart, it's such a beautiful picture. Look what happens in conclusion verse 47. They were praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day, those who were being saved. Why? Why? Because the church was Devoted to life together. The prayer, apostles, teaching, fellowship and breaking of bread. Let me leave you with three specific concrete applications. Number one, I want to challenge every home group leader to have your group meet for an agape feast, a love feast together, sharing a meal, common meal, having communion, inviting others to come and be with you. I want to see every home group doing that. I believe that would be just some already do do it. And that's a wonderful. The reports of that are fantastic. I want every group to do that. I think that would be a blessing. Number two, that each of us would ask the Lord once a month to give us a time together over a meal with someone else. And I don't mean someone that's our in laws or someone that we've known for 13 years. I'm talking about the person that you bump into that you think has been visiting, has been here longer than you have. Reach out, turn around and see someone that you don't know and say, hey, Jay just gave us an excuse to go eat. Let's do it. And finally, I want to ask those of you who have a gift of hospitality, is there a way you can creatively use your gift to open the door to include others in the fellowship, the communion of the saints? I believe there is. I believe we haven't begun to really use that gift of hospitality. I would like to see it so arranged that there is a common meal after every service that someone has their home open to invite over those who might be new or visiting to share together a meal after our service, especially our second service. But even our first service could be a brunch. And those with the gift of hospitality, that's no problem for you. You thrive on someone saying, boy, is that good. Bring me some. I'd be happy to tell you. And it's so important that we see that those of you with that gift, that's why God's put you here to release communion together. You want to be the kind of church that's devoted to breaking of bread? I do. And I want to be part of a company that's having favor with all the people and seeing God add day by day to our number, those who are being saved. Let's close up our Bibles and let's just prepare our hearts for communion. As Ken Hobbs comes to sing and to minister a song that speaks of the significance of the bread and of the cup and of the love that it stands for.