The Church: A Spiritual Community Guided by God

from the book of Acts, if you'd like to find that in your Bibles. Acts chapter 1 is where I want to begin reading. For the last several, for the last two weeks, we've been talking about what the Bible teaches about the nature of the church. What is the church? And what is God's role or plan in the church for us? We start off by talking about how a person gets in the church. The church is comprised of people who said to God, I give you my life. I surrender my will to your will. I will do in the future whatever you tell me you want me to do without resistance. You are the Lord of my life. That surrender of a person's life to Christ allows them entrance into the church or the kingdom of God. For God must have control over every person for them to enter the kingdom of God. Whatever it is, God, I will do it. It doesn't matter. Then when each person does that, the church is comprised of a group of people, all who have said to God, you are in charge of my life. Then when God gets the group together, they jointly decide what it is the will of God has for them. God doesn't send one person out there to figure all this out. He has groups of people. I know a lot of people do think committees are cumbersome, but they're one of the ways by which God helps us to find a direction that he has for us. All of us listening together to the voice of God, here's what the head says, and then each of us as members learn how to participate in doing it. That is the church, its makeup. Well, this group of people start on this job that they've never done before. How do they manage to be able to do it? The Bible tells us that whenever you make this surrender to God, he places inside of us his Holy Spirit, the very spirit of God that created all the things that exist in the world, the very spirit of God that resided in Jesus. And when he wanted to know what to say, he asked the father and the father told him what to say. When he wanted to know what to do, he asked the father and the father told him through the spirit what he was to do. Everything Jesus said and did was the result of the spirit in him guiding him. That's what the church is, a group of people who are looking to God in the power of the spirit to know what he wants them to do. Now, you would think if you take a pagan person or a person that's so far from God and they surrender their life to God, begin to do what he tells them to do, then they're filled with the spirit of God that God would have accomplished his purpose. And right there he would just take them to heaven without any question. But he's left us here. There has to be a reason for that. Why is it that God left all of us here on this earth? Well, because he has something greater and more important than simply our individual surrender to him and our individual dependence upon him. He looks at the whole world and he's concerned about everyone in the world. What God wants to do is to take this world where people live according to their material or physical desires that guide their lives and guide their choices and guide their directions and change that. All of the people in the world growing up, you start from a baby being focused on yourself. What do I want? I want something to eat. I want something to drink. I want my diaper changed. All those things are self-focused for a person. And we all grow up doing that. And when we get to be adults, sometimes we become big babies where we want our way all the time. We want what happens to us to be everybody else say, okay, you can do whatever you want. We'll let you do it. That's a part of our human nature. What God wanted to do in the middle of this world where people live like that was create an environment or a society or a group of people who were controlled by the spiritual dimensions of their life. Most people live this life in this world without any awareness that there is a spiritual dimension inside of them. It lies dormant. It lies dormant because it's not connected to God. So when a person says, I give my life to you and God places the spirit in them, there is inside of every person, that ability to connect with the spirit of God. You can hear the spirit of God talk to you through your spiritual nature. He interfaces with our spirit and his spirit. So we're connected like computers would be connected to a network. So God wants to build in this world, a group of people who are not only living material lives and physical lives, but living this spiritual life that God called them to live. He wants to create an environment in which there is a spiritual community. So every person who surrenders their life to God is brought together in a community of people, a community of people who have focused themselves on listening to God, living in obedience to him and allowing God to direct their every choice in life. And so when we ask God, what do you want me to do? He communicates that to us. What do you want me to say? He communicates that to us. What is it that I'm doing wrong? He tells us about that. All of this happens in our minds as God is beginning to build in us a community of believers. Everywhere you see the Bible in operation, God always has a community of people who are under his authority. It's a part of his plan. I want you to be aware that not only are you accountable to me, you're accountable also to other people who are around you to discover my will and to live it out. This group of people, though, have more of a job than simply being a spiritual group in the world. God has a purpose for what they do. When Jesus came into the world, he could have done everything he did by himself without any disciples around him. But the very first thing he did was to call people around him who were ready to engage in a spiritual community. They were all different kinds of people, people who had been living material lives, focused on themselves, what they wanted to do. But all of a sudden now they became aware that Jesus was there and they had a hunger inside of themselves for something more than what they'd experienced. And Jesus came to them and said, would you follow me? He asked them to leave their family and their homes and their jobs and everything that they were doing and come and watch him. Jesus was filled with the spirit of God. They could listen to him talk and hear the words of God in his words. They could watch what he did and see the power of God and what he had to do. They were watching God live inside of a person that the Holy Spirit had control of. They were watching all of this and learning for themselves. They made mistakes in what they did. Jesus had to correct them over and over and over again. He was teaching them.