Transcript

Please take your Bibles and go to Psalm 133. Let’s finish up what we started last time. This is a Psalm that is just bursting with truth and great application in a prophetic sense because you can’t get what the Psalmist is saying here until you understand grace that saves us and brings us together as the people of God. There is no way that you can take a text like this and just simply say it has only a meaning historically for the Jews of this day. Certainly it did and all Old Testament prophecy has an immediate application but it has a full application in Christ as our Savior and in the people of God and what he produces in us. It’s all about this excellence of unity.

Now contextually, this is a Psalm of ascent. They are coming back into Jerusalem from captivity. They are joying in and rejoicing in the unity they are finding as they’re fellowshiping together, particularly around these sacred feasts and festivals God ordained for Israel because in those feasts and festivals, they were reminded of the great way God had saved them and rescued them and blessed them in generations past. But all of this points to Jesus. Charles Haddon Spurgeon always told the young preachers he was training in his preacher’s school, he said, “Now every road in England leads to London.” He said, “Wherever you land in the Scriptures, that road leads to Christ. Find a road in that Scripture that leads to Christ.” Well, you want to be a little careful with that. We don’t want to see something that’s not there but you can’t help but see the bursting out of the glories of Jesus Christ and the wonders we get to experience because of Jesus Christ that are in this text.

Look at it together again, Psalm 133,

1 Behold, how good and how pleasant it is [not for unity now but] For brothers to dwell together in unity! 2 It is like the precious oil upon the head, Coming down upon the beard, Even Aaron’s beard, Coming down upon the edge of his robes. 3 It is like the dew of Hermon Coming down upon the mountains of Zion; For there the LORD commanded the blessing – life forevermore.

So we’re talking about unity and first of all, we were talking about the provisions of unity and we saw this in verse 2 where the Psalmist speaks of this oil coming down upon the head, coming down upon the beard, even Aaron’s beard, and going all the way down to the edges of his robe. The first thing I asked myself was, “What does that have to do with unity? How does that have any bearing on the people of God knowing unity?” Well, who was Aaron? Aaron was the priest. He was pictured as the human mediator between the individual Jews and the Jewish nation and God. But of course, Aaron had no power or authority to truly bring men to God or bring the nation to God. He was a type. He was a type of Christ as Moses was a type of Christ. As Christ is the prophet, Moses was a prophet. Aaron here is a type of Christ. Aaron was a priest, Christ is the one true high priest. David was a type of Christ. David was a great and mighty king and God even promised David, “Of your seed, one will sit on the throne forever.” That was Christ. David represented Christ as King. It’s all fulfilled in Christ. It’s all typified of Christ.

So here we have Aaron and the oil running down upon him because only what God provides through his high priest, Jesus Christ, can produce the kind of unique unity, now listen, that only truly born-again children of God in a local church experience. Did you hear that? We have something that cannot be bought, bartered for, won, worked for or anything else. God produces through his Son, Jesus Christ, something that enables us to know a unity the world really can’t comprehend but the world should see it and be drawn to it and be in awe of it. We’re going to talk more about that in just a moment.

Now, in review, we talked about how he is, Christ, the provision of this unity. When the oil came down upon Aaron’s head, that’s a picture of Christ in his majesty. They head speaks of majesty. The oil came down upon Aaron’s beard. That speaks of Christ in his manliness. Jesus was fully man while he was fully God. The oil then, the Bible says, ran down upon Aaron’s garments. The garment was the priestly garment and it represented his ministry and that speaks of Christ in his ministry. Then the oil, the Bible says, runs all the way down to the hem of his garment, touches all the way down to the bottom. That speaks of Christ in his mercy. That was the earmark of his ministry. It’s a ministry of mercy. Then finally, the oil from the top of his head to the tip of his toes, the oil covered all of Aaron which I think that pictures the members of Christ. We are all members of Christ’s body. It’s very interesting that we have that mystical union that though he is certainly separate from us and we are not one with him in the sense that we are part of his deity but yet when he saves us, he makes us in union with him and we are one with him and we are so much one with him that we are his body at work in the world. So as Jesus ministered in his physical body on the earth, now he has ascended into heaven, he saves his children, he collects them into local church congregations and now the local churches are his ministry on the earth. He, the head, working through them.

So he, Jesus Christ, is the provision for unity. You might go into churches that are troubled and it seems like there’s an awful lot of that going on and squabbles and divisions and infighting. As a matter of fact, just to be honest, Baptists in the last few generations are falling into a pattern of governing themselves that’s more or less mob rule. They have business meetings and if you can get a big enough mob together to vote on your viewpoint, then you get to rule the day. We don’t have that here, by the way and God has given us many years of sweet and blessed unity. So really, Psalm 133 for Grace Life Church is just a glorious explanation of what you and I have been enjoying. Not in perfection but we enjoy this here and it’s far too rare but we enjoy it and it is a wonderful thing. No wonder he says “how good and how pleasant it is.” You may be new around here and I want you to know that when God saves you and you walk in the door, we don’t have charter members here, you’re one of us but we just don’t make fusses and get in squabbles about things that just don’t matter. I have said 100 times from the pulpit here that if you find something that clearly violates Scripture, if you’ll show the elders, I promise you we will humble ourselves and try to fix it. But your subjective opinion is not any more important than the other thousand subjective opinions. Amen? That’s why we have elders and that’s why we have the word of God. I mean, you might say, “Well, I wanted the carpet to be gold or I wanted the carpet to be mauve and I want the carpet to be blue or whatever.” Well, that’s just a subjective opinion so we just decide what Jane Bishop wants the carpet to be and that’s the color it is. It’s just real simple. You do stuff like that and it just solves everything. You say, “Well, why can’t I decide?” Well, I don’t know. She’s just always decided so that’s the way it works. My point is: there are a million and one subjective viewpoints and folks used to say every Baptist could have his say but every Baptist can’t have his way. Well, that’s foolishness. If we waited for everybody to have their say, we’d have chaos all the time. Alright?

Now, the provision of unity. What brings a group of people to the point where they are mature and humble and do not have squabbles and divisions over stuff that doesn’t matter? Christ. He’s the provision. He changes us by his power. Now, let’s go to the second point I want to bring out and that’s the protection of unity. I don’t think I’m amplifying this too much. We see in verse 1 the idea that he says, “how good and a how pleasant it is,” not just to have unity, that’s what the liberals in the world would say, the goal is just all of us embrace everybody’s values and everybody’s morality or immorality and let’s all just be in unity. That’s not what it says. It says, “For brothers to dwell together in unity.” In other words, we all have something that unites us. Jesus taught in the New Testament the thing that unites us in Christ is even stronger than family bonds. He very clearly says that it’s possible, thankfully, it’s not probable, it doesn’t happen all that often, but it’s possible that you could come to Christ and your spouse not come to Christ but you’re not to leave Christ even if your spouse says, “If you keep following Jesus, I’m leaving you.” So it’s not just unity, it’s brothers who are all together in Christ and it has the concept that this is something that we fight for. Brothers in arms. When you hear that phrase, when you hear the phrase “a band of brothers,” immediately you think, “We fight for each other. We stand for each other.”

It’s interesting when you’ve heard these commanders on the battlefield. I remember before Operation Desert Storm they interviewed some of the men who had been in some combat before and they said, “You know, in all honesty, when you’re going out there and the bullets are flying and our lives are on the line, you’re fighting not for country, not for the homeland, not for the great principles of America as much as we believe in those and stand for those and would die for those, we’re fighting for each other. We’re fighting for our brothers in arms.” That’s the idea here. We would fight to protect this. There is a protection principle here. The Bible says in the New Testament that every Christian in every local church is to be diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit. Once again, not unity but a unique and special unity that only we know, the unity of the Spirit. You could amplify that and say that unique unity that is produced by, enabled by, the Holy Spirit of God.

Now, let’s talk about a definition of true unity here for just a moment as far as what the Scriptures would call unity. Now, don’t misunderstand me, we have to work in a fallen world and there is a type of unity that we work for in the office place or in the factory or in the club at school. There are all kinds of types of unity but they’re not the true and ultimate unity that we know as Christians in the church. Are you with me? The kind of camaraderie and team spirit and whatever kind of amplifiers you want to put on what you have together as a oneness in worldly settings, that’s fine, we live in the world and we’ll have some of that even with people that don’t know Christ but nevertheless, it’s not to be compared with what we know as unity in the church because our unity is a spiritual oneness that we have as a group of individual Christians walking in the Spirit and wholly surrendered to Christ and his word. It’s just a beautiful oneness we have as Spirit-filled Christians that is walking in the Spirit and wholly surrendered to Christ and his word. It’s what I call a Gospel humility that God brings in a church. It was very obvious to me when we started, when it started being more prevalent and more consistently who we are, when there was a thorough Gospel humility where truly we walked in a spirit of considering our brothers and sisters more important than ourselves, truly willing to yield, even rights that we had. Even sometimes when we were right and a brother or sister were wrong, we were able if it didn’t matter, if it didn’t dishonor God or denigrate the Gospel or something, we were able to give those things up and love and give and support each other. It’s a sweet Gospel unity.

You see, the only place that true unity can exist is in Christ’s church. Our unity is first a unity that’s spiritual. The Bible says the Lord, in Acts chapter 2 as the church age began, “The Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved.” They didn’t add themselves. They didn’t consider the claims of the Gospel and just intellectually buy in. God added them through the power of the Spirit regenerating their individual hearts and as they were reborn of the Spirit, they were one immediately and it’s so amazing that you can be born again and really be quite ignorant and quite naïve about true doctrine and you can even have a very weak, if you will, if not erroneous, understanding of the Gospel. But if you’ve been truly born-again, you still sense a oneness with brothers and sisters who do know Christ well and know doctrine very well. Amen? We’re one spiritually first. Again, that’s something that’s quite mystical. You can’t put your finger on it They asked an old country preacher one time, he was black man and said, “What does it mean, how do you know when you’re preaching under the unction, the spirit of God is using you?” He said, “I don’t know when it is but I know when it’s not.” Well, that’s something like being born-again of the Spirit of God. I remember when the second, number 2 George Bush was running maybe for his second term and he was asked about his spiritual or his views on being a Christian and I think they may have asked him, “What does that mean to you? What does it mean to become a Christian?” He basically said, “If you haven’t experienced it, I can’t explain it.” Of any politician, that’s one of the best answers I’ve ever heard because he was saying, “I have experienced something that you’ve got to experience to know what it is.” We are first one spiritually, then we are one mentally. After you’re born of the Spirit, you study the word of God and you sit under the preaching of the word of God and intellectually you’re illumined by the Spirit to begin to grasp, hold to, treasure and glory in all the great truths of God and our salvation. Then we get more tight in our unity.

Thirdly, we become one physically. That is, we begin to live the truths we’re learning and in our lifestyles, we agree and we complement each other and we challenge each other and we encourage each other.

Then of course, then we’re one emotionally. There is something about the crowning of the joy that comes after all of this and this Psalm sort of brings that out about the pleasantness of this change that’s happened in individual Christians that brings about a corporate unity.

Now, that leads me to a couple of thoughts on things that rob a church of unity. Two key things. 1. Unsaved church members; having an unregenerate membership. It was probably close to 30 years ago, I don’t know where I was. I wrote a little thing or something and it was published in a journal or something and I talked about how our goal at this church is just to have a regenerate membership. That’s almost like saying a gas station purposes to have gasoline for sale. You know, it should be the most obvious, absolute, fundamental thing. A church should strive for truly regenerate membership because if you’re not saved, you’re not a part of the church. But if you have a portion, if not a prominent percentage of your membership that are not truly saved, there can be no unity because it’s a unity of the Spirit and they don’t have the Spirit. They may be 1,001 things, maybe good Baptists but many of them may still be lost church members and there can be no unity in that kind of setting.

Secondly would be carnal-acting Christians; Christians who are just not walking in the Spirit as they ought to be walking. That’s why we have the preaching of the word. That’s why you have a quiet time. That’s why you have Bible study together so that the word of God can constantly be calling us out, bringing those reproofs and rebukes that we need to get ourselves back in line with the word of God and that brings back the unity. You know, we need to remind ourselves sometimes that Jesus was the most divisive person in history. Jesus was the most divisive person in history. As we’ve gone through Luke, everywhere he goes, trouble follows. Now, people might argue, “Well, we had a decent unity before he showed up,” but you see, what they had was some sort of a fellowship based on error which was not true unity. Unity starts with truth. Christ would bring the truth to bear on the compromise and error of the day and it would just burst everything wide open and then after he, if you will, demolished or destroyed the falseness, the false unity, then he could begin to build a true unity on the truth. Psalm 51:6 says, “You desire truth in the innermost being,” that is, truly born-again, changed from the heart.

You know, any type of fellowship or camaraderie or membership that does not begin with the spirit of man is not true unity in the sense of what we would define from a Christian perspective as true unity. Why is that? It’s because the spirit is the most important part of man. Let’s say you have a basketball team and 2 of the starters on your team are supposed to be Christians but they are not walking with Christ. Then you have one member on the basketball team who’s a Mormon and one person on the basketball team who’s an atheist and then one person on the basketball team, a starter, who’s a committed Christian. You don’t have unity. Now, you may have camaraderie and you may have cooperation. They might be a pretty good basketball team, you can ask my daughter about that. You can have a pretty good team and not have a oneness with the people you’re there playing with. But they don’t have true unity because the spirits in all of them are in different places. The spirit in the community of the Christian is different from the spirit in the Mormon and the spirit in the atheist.

So we define unity as a spiritual oneness that is manifested, if you will, when Christians in one local church are walking with the Lord and are wholly committed to Christ and to his word. Now, the defending of unity. Not only the definition under protecting it but the defending of unity. I think that’s an aspect of what we are always about as brothers in Christ. Now, how are we going to defend unity? Here’s the main way we defend unity: by making obedience to truth the chief goal of the church. Again, we don’t go out looking for unity, we go out looking for truth. We don’t go out striving toward unity, we go out striving toward truth and all individual Christians committed to the same truth find themselves as a byproduct in unity. Unity is not the goal but the result of the goal. We have churches and religious organizations all over the place who have no unity because they make unity their goal, not truth their goal.

We had a mess in the Southern Baptist Convention for all those years when we were trying to take our institutions back from liberalism and we kept hearing these calls to stop what we were doing and let’s just all be in unity. I thought, “You’ve got out-and-out theological liberals teaching in our graduate schools of theology training preacher boys and these out-and-out classical liberals would tell us the Bible is not the authoritative word of God.” They didn’t believe the Gospel. They didn’t believe in evangelism. I spoke at Southeastern Seminary years ago to a class on evangelism and shared with them something about our outreach program and how we purpose to share the Gospel. The second day, most of the class boycotted my lecture because I was talking about telling people they were sinners and leading them to Christ. Here’s my point: you can’t unify with that. There is nothing left to be unified over. There’s got to be enough truth. Now look, we can disagree on 1,001 secondary issues, okay? Amen? Have toleration on things that are not clear in the Bible. It may even trouble you some what some brothers and sisters are doing but if the Scriptures aren’t clear on it, we have charity and grace in those areas. But brothers, when it comes down to what the Scriptures are, when it comes down to the person of Jesus Christ, another view of classic liberalism in theological circles is that Christ isn’t fully divine. Well, if he’s not fully divine, he can’t atone for our sins and on and on we could go.

Another point about classic theological liberalism is that the miracles of the Bible didn’t really happen. Well, if the miracles really didn’t happen, how do I know the miracle of Christ’s resurrection happened? They would say, “Well, when the Bible talks theologically it’s accurate but when the Bible speaks of history, it can be inaccurate. It can have error.” Well, was not Jesus’ birth an historical event? Was not his life an historical fact? Was not his death an historical record? Was not his burial an historical fact? If you say the Bible can’t be trusted in its history, you lose the Gospel.

So here’s my point: you can’t just throw at me, “Well, let’s all be unified for the sake of Christianity and for the sake of the Gospel.” We don’t agree on what the Gospel is. John MacArthur, one of the most respected theologian pastors in the world today wrote the MacArthur Study Bible and most of you have his commentaries. He had a popular message just a few years ago about: how can we do missions together when we don’t even agree on what the Gospel is? And he was talking to mainline Christians and evangelicals. I’m not the only guy that thinks a lot of people lost their way. The point is: you have to have at least the body of cardinal or central doctrine united together on that before there can be unity to do anything.

So, there has to be a defending of unity by a fighting for and a standing on truth. Now look, in most churches, I know because I counsel pastors every week in this fight, in most churches good pastors find themselves dealing with people who don’t love the truth and who don’t stand on the truth and the pastor’s considered a troublemaker because until he came in to begin to preach the truth, they all felt pretty good about themselves. I mean, it gets tough for a while and when I say a while, I don’t mean 6 months, I mean 6 years or 16 years sometimes. But what I keep telling them, “Look, hang in there. On the other side of the bell curve of reforming that church are some sweet, pleasant days of love and unity. You’ve just got to get the majority of people anchored in truth.” I like that phrase, anchored in truth, and then the unity follows that.

Well, thirdly, the production of unity. Something is produced. Something comes out of this body of believers when they are walking in this true spiritual unity that only the church can know. First of all, there’s a pleasantness that comes out of it. You could even say a blessedness. It’s just beyond human vocabulary to describe the sweet wonderfulness, if you will, of real, true, Christian Fellowship. I know because I experience that here and it blesses me beyond words. It really does. The Bible says here in verse 1 that the picture was of the oil coming down upon the head of Aaron and then it went all the way down to the end of his garment. Does that not remind us of how the oil of God’s saving, cleansing power reaches all the way down to those in the gutters of life? But it also reaches up to those who might be, as far as man’s viewpoint, in the heights of virtue. Some people maybe in their lostness never fell into the muck and the mire of vile and wicked strongholds of sin. Now, they’re just as sinful, they just may not have some of the strongholds others have fallen into but I want to tell you, the person who has the lowest, vilest, life of deepest degradation, when they are genuinely saved and the person that is genuinely born again from a protected and secured wholesome lifestyle, when God saves both of them, they dwell together as one. You see, that’s the power of the church. We come from so many backgrounds, from so many viewpoints, with so many personalities, so much different stuff but when God saves us, how pleasant it is. How sweet it is when God puts us together as one. Grace, you see, makes us all equal and in the historical context, these Jews were coming from all over the world to Jerusalem to share in the joy and the beauty and the pleasantness of these annual feast events and so the writing is, look how pleasant it is for all the brethren to come from all these places with all these different cultures and influences but when they come here, they are united as one together. A picture of what happens in God’s church through the grace and the power of Jesus Christ.

Let’s go to the last thing and that is not only the pleasantness is a production here, but a presentation is produced. A presentation, that is something is stated out in the world. He says here “it is good.” It is good this unity that we have together. Goodness in the sense that there is an enriching, and empowering of what we’re all about as God’s church. If you will, there’s fresh fuel. There is fresh ammunition for what God has called us to do when we walk in this kind of true spiritual unity.

Well, what has God called us to do? Well, we’re to glorify the Son, Jesus Christ. How do we glorified the Son? We glorify the Son by winning lost souls and winning lost souls and if they are not in this area, helping them either get in sound churches or plant sound biblical churches and then those churches grow up and mature and then they help send out more evangelists and more preaching of the Gospel. Well, what’s the ammunition to do that? The great ammunition, now there other things we could put into this mixture, if you will, but the great ammunition for the power of the Gospel is the unity of the saints of God, the sweet, spiritual unity of the saints of God. Jesus said, “All men will know that you are my disciples by the love you have one for another.” Now, we love all men but there is a special bond in love for my brethren in my church because God has given us something for each other that he hasn’t given anybody else and he says, “The world is watching you and when the world sees the way you are dedicated to care for, love, serve and just love each other in the body, the world says, they have something we don’t have. They seem to love when there is nothing for them in return. There is just some component in them. There’s a sixth dimension. There is a sixth sense in them,” and there is, it’s called the Spirit. We have the 5 senses but we have a sixth sense and one of the crowning and even foundational aspects or elements of this sixth sense is love for one another.

He says here in verse 3 of Psalm 133, “I will command a blessing on them.” He has commanded the blessing. Now, this blessing comes as a result of the unity. They are walking in the Spirit. They are united in God’s truth and then God sends a blessing on them. Then he uses another phrase “life forevermore.” So when you read that, and you’re thinking about ancient Israel and it says that God is commanding a blessing on them and then he says life forever, that’s more than just the nation of Israel, that has to point to the salvation we know in Jesus Christ because it’s an eternal salvation. So I think the point is: when the blessing of God comes on the united people of God, there should be a presentation to the world of the Gospel and of the truth that wins others to Jesus Christ. There is an evangelistic presentation, if you will, out of a church that is truly united. I mean after all, think about it, if you’re in a church that’s known for division and strife and back-biting and all kinds of stuff like that, how can you go out in the world and say, “Listen to our Gospel that changes your heart. Listen to our Gospel that makes you loving and sweet.” You lose any veracity. You lose any validity if you don’t have that in your church. So there’s a real power and a real presentation that comes out of our unity.

Let me just refer right quick and we’ll be done, I’ll let you out a little early tonight but over in Acts 5, would you turn there real quick? I haven’t preached on this in a long, long time. You know, when you stay in a church 35 years, you have to cover a lot of truths over and over because if you don’t, you’ll start thinking up truths that aren’t there because there’s just too much time to not repeat some things. We’ve looked at this before but it’s been a long, long time. It’s the story of Ananias and Sapphira and it’s interesting that by Acts chapter 5, there is this great, great revival called Pentecost and the Spirit of God has fallen on the church and thousands upon thousands upon thousands are genuinely saved but, now listen, there will always be collected in with them false professors. There will always be counterfeits. In every great awakening, in every great revival that’s ever been recorded in the history of the church, there has always been a counterfeit revival with it.

Well, that’s already started to here People just kind of got in on the movement. It was real exciting and there are some false professors and 2 of those are named Ananias and Sapphira. Acts 5:1, “But a man named Ananias, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property, and kept back some of the price for himself, with his wife’s full knowledge, and bringing a portion of it, he laid it at the apostles’ feet.” Verse 3, “But Peter said, ‘Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back some of the price of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not under your control? Why is it that you have conceived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men but to God.’ And as he heard these words, Ananias fell down and breathed his last; and great fear came over all who heard of it.” That phrase “great fear” is a very important phrase. It means the church started getting right with God. Those who weren’t right got purified. The idea of fear here means a reverence, a reverential focus on God. Trivial things. When God starts killing people during the worship service, trivial things go away. You get your heart on, “Okay Lord, what are you telling me? I want to be right with you,” and that’s what happened here

Verse 6, “The young men got up and covered him up, and after carrying him out, they buried him. Now there elapsed an interval of about three hours, and his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. And Peter responded to her, ‘Tell me whether you sold the land for such and such a price?’ And she said, ‘Yes, that was the price.’ Then Peter said to her, ‘Why is it that you have agreed together to put the Spirit of the Lord to the test? Behold, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out as well.’ And immediately she fell at his feet and breathed her last, and the young men came in and found her dead, and they carried her out and buried her beside her husband.” Now the point is: the people were voluntarily bringing all their possessions, selling them and giving the proceeds to the church so they would have ample monies to take care of all these pilgrims that had gotten saved from all over the world and feed everybody and house everybody and just take care of everybody. It was actually a communism but it was a holy and godly communism. It was a one time event for a special situation. This is not a biblical endorsement of what the world today would call communism at all.

It was voluntary and so Ananias and Sapphira are wanting the glory like the others got, the honor that others got, lied and said they were giving everything when they were only giving a portion of it. It wasn’t the fact that they didn’t give everything, it’s that they wanted the glory as if they did give everything and that kind of false counterfeit spirit damages the unity of the church. You see, when you’re walking in the flesh, you mess up the unity because it’s a spiritual unity and flesh and spirit are against one another.

So God at this point, at this time, knew he needed to purify the church and restore a true spiritual oneness because something was on the line. So much to come out here. I’ll preach it again sometimes and will exegete it and unpack it but notice again, verse 11, “And great fear came over the whole church, and over all who heard of these things.” Again, a cleansing, a revival in individual hearts of reuniting in God and focusing on the Lord. Verse 12, “At the hands of the apostles many signs and wonders were taking place among the people,” here’s a key phrase, “and they were all with one accord,” that’s unity, “in Solomon’s portico.” But the unity came after Ananias and Sapphira’s compromising and hypocrisy was dealt with. You want unity in the church? You’ve got to deal with compromise and hypocrisy. Now, we always deals with these things with compassion and confidentiality and love but it has to be dealt with or you’ll not know spiritual unity in the church.

Verse 13, “But none of the rest dared to associate with them.” Now, “the rest” meant those attenders who were not yet converted or those who just got swept into the great movement but were not truly belonging to the Lord. They just sanctified the church. They just left. So the numbers went down a bunch. Then it says, “however, the people held them in high esteem.” A lot of people in the community were backing off from associating with the church but yet they respected them because they thought they were genuine and real and there was something powerful going on when God kills people during their worship services.

Verse 14, here’s what I want you to see and we’re about done, “And all the more believers in the Lord, multitudes of men and women, were constantly added to their number.” So here we see a great presentation of witness that went out to the community. After true unity was restored, true evangelism was restored and true blessings of evangelism was restored. You see, the purity of the church affects the power of the Gospel. Did you hear that? The purity of the church affects the power of the Gospel. There are a lot of churches, now, don’t misunderstand me, we should always be trying to win lost souls but there are a lot of churches that would probably do well to pull back on their enthusiasm about evangelism and get more enthusiastic about the purity of the church. But it is both and, of course, it always is.

So the church as the body of Christ is to present to the lost world a true Gospel that’s backed up by true unity that the Spirit of God creates among us and within us. God, I think, is waiting to pour his blessing out on that kind of a church. It’s interesting to me that the significant multiplication of our ministries around the world have come in the years since we gained a blessed, mature, spiritual unity in this church. It really did. There was a long season, Dos and I talked about it for a long time, a long season where: why aren’t things going on in these efforts we’d like to have to plant churches and pastors?

There were things happening but not much but then all of a sudden it just began to exponentially just go forward for the glory of God.

Let’s stand together in prayer, alright?