You're listening to audio from Faith Church, located on the north side of Indianapolis. If you'd like to check out more information about our church and ministry, you can find us at faithchurchindy.com. Now, here's the teaching. Hey, Hey. Happy New Year, everyone.

Happy New Year. Thank you. Welcome to the 1st Sunday at Faith Church in 2025. Okay. A little less excitement there.

Alright. It it it does feel weird to say 2025 out loud. Even as I was trying to type it, I kept typing 2024. But at least, I mean, 2025 is a big round number. Right?

Yay. Anyone? It's also, someone told me after 1st hour, it's also a big square number. It is the only number you'll probably live through unless you live to 2116 that is the product of 2 whole numbers multiplied times themselves. 45 squared is 2025.

So I just felt like I needed something to say until all the kids were gone, before jumping in so I didn't I didn't lose anyone. So from from math to to scripture, That's that was a segue. It happened. How many of you have set New Year's resolutions? Okay.

Not too many. That's good. That's good. Now how many of you though are here, you're you're awake, you're caffeinated, and you're invested in Sunday morning because, like, for you this year, it's not a resolution, but, like, this is the year you're gonna dig in to your relationship with God and with the church? Okay.

Alright. We've got a few people. Thank you. I appreciate that. I am not a huge fan of New Year's resolutions.

Not to discourage anyone else from doing it, but I did decide I was gonna, try to start a new habit, a new discipline this year. I spent more money than I should have on a journal called the 3 year diary. That's the only part of the journal I can read. Everything else in it is in Japanese because the best stationery comes from Japan, so the only part that I can read in English says 3 year journal or diary on the front. Have you ever heard of one of these?

A few of you have. So the way it works is you've got a page for each day, and the top third of that page is designed for that day this year. So like 1 12025. And you go all the way through the journal, you know, writing a couple of lines every day until you go back to the beginning in 2026. And then, you know, the benefit of one of these journals is that as you start to write, hey, January 1, 2026, you look back at what happened the year before, what you were thinking and and feeling, you know, 1 year previous.

It's the 5th, and so far I've successfully done it 4 days. I forgot this morning, because I was, you know, last minute prep for for this. So I'll have to do that when I get home. But I I got this because I thought it and I know there's, like, digital versions of this and and all that too, but I kinda like the paper and pen approach to it. It's like permanent and it's limited to just 5 lines.

But I got it. I decided I wanted to start this habit or discipline because, you know, the older I've gotten, the the more I've realized how important it is to to look backwards. I mean, part of it is I'm realizing how much I'm forgetting. The other part of it is, like, there's there's a lot in in the past that kind of informs who I am and where we're going, you know, where I should be going forward. I know there there are a lot of people who say, right, why look backwards?

You're not going that way. But there's a lot of clues to the past. The past bleeds into the future in bad ways, but in good ways as well. We look backwards in order to know where to go forward. Now I say all that because that's that's why this morning we're taking a little bit of a different approach to jumping back into the book of Acts.

If you've been with us, you know, we've been all the way up into Acts 21. We've been slowly working our way through this book, this theological history of the early church, the origin story of, you know, what we're doing right now, because there are so many lessons for us to learn from how the church started that informs who the church is today, what we're doing, where we're going today. Now we're up to a point in the story where the narrative is gonna shift away from all of those stories of planting churches and starting churches, and the narrative is gonna shift on to Paul, this great church planter that we've been following, oh, gosh, since, like, chapter 13. But it's just his experience going forward, how God is using him to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth, to even to Rome. Well, our our whole study of acts has been an exercise in looking backwards to help chart a path forwards.

So we're gonna do that kind of in microcosm today. It's why we're calling this Sunday, Faith for the Future, not just because we want to explore what faith might look like in the future, if we're patterning ourselves off of what we see in Acts, but also because we wanna exercise faith for the future of faith, church. We want to trust that God is is leading us somewhere, that there's something unique that he's calling us to do because we're a we're a unique group of individuals who've come together to form faith church. There isn't another one like us. So God's got something just for us.

Now I'm gonna take us through a couple of different passages and I promise we're not gonna look back and say, like, oh, hey, look, the early church worshiped, like, we should worship too. Or the early church taught or prayed or cared for the needy or gathered in groups or or shared the gospel. We should do that too. I'm just gonna take that for granted. That we should do that.

We're already doing that. We're gonna continue to do that. What's been gripping me in rereading acts to get back up to speed with where we're going in the next couple of months has not been so much what the church has done, but how they did it. You know, the the motivations, the attitudes, what I wanna call 4 characteristics of the early church. If you're taking notes, I mean, you could write down attitudes or motivations if you wanted to, but characteristics is the word, that I'm going with.

These are are ways of living that the early church embodied that that I believe god is calling us to live into in 2025. And we're only gonna look at 4. I'm sure we could find way more if we had a couple hours to spend together and didn't mind getting snowed in together. But we're just gonna look at the 4, and the 4 we're gonna look at are these. These four characteristics, undivided followers.

See this over and over again when we're reading Acts. People are undivided followers. They are family storytellers. Again, I'll explain what these mean in a in a minute. Undivided followers, family storytellers, everyday apprentices of Jesus, and everyday missionaries.

And when we go back through ACTS, we see undivided followers, family storytellers, everyday apprentices, everyday missionaries just leaping from the pages, and I'm a little excited. I can't wait to show you. So if you are you ready to jump in? Did you bring your ACTS journals with you this morning? I know it's been a couple of weeks.

If you don't have one, you can grab a black bible underneath the seat in front of you. ACTS is, like, 5 eighths of the way through or something like that. Somebody can do the math and check me. But we'll be jumping around a little bit in Acts, so stretch out your fingers, get your thumbs ready, pop your knuckles, and let's jump in. Acts 17 verses 23.

And there's plenty of places we could go to see this, but the first characteristic that I notice when I read back through acts is just how radically changed the people who encountered Jesus were. Over and over again, we see their whole focus, their whole life's direction was unequivocally and irreversibly shifted from the the idols or the power or the money or the prestige that they'd been chasing, and and it was moved onto a wholehearted, undivided, uncompromising following and worshiping of of the living God through Jesus. You know, Acts 17, Paul's in Thessalonica, one of these Greek city states. He goes in the synagogue of the Jews, and in verse 2, Luke tells us Paul went in as was his custom, and on 3 Sabbath days, he reasoned with them from the scriptures explaining, proving that it was necessary for the Christ, the Messiah, to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, this Jesus who suffered and rose from the dead, the the one that I proclaimed to you, he's him. He's the Messiah.

He's he's the Christ. You know, and Luke tells us not not too many Jews were convinced and believed, but he makes a point to tell us that a great many of the people, the men and women who were culturally Greek, you know, they'd grown up in Thessalonica or in Greek cities around, they these were people who had who were in the synagogue because they'd already become convinced that the one true God of Israel was the one true God, and they're trying to figure out how to follow him. And then Paul comes with this this message of grace in Jesus, and a great many are are convinced and and come to faith. And it's these these men and women whose lives are are so radically changed that their lives become a testimony to the grace of Jesus. It's testimony.

They become a testimony to the people around them, so that later when Paul is writing a letter back to the church in Thesalonica, he says, in effect, he says, everywhere I go, people tell me about you, about how, like, they can see your lives, they can see you turn from idols to serve the living in the true God. It was like your your reputation has just spread out. Everyone everywhere is hearing about how radically your lives have been changed. And that doesn't happen just in Thessalonica, whether it's there or in Berea or any of the other cities that Paul planted churches in. We we get this one consistent theme coming through all of those stories.

Everywhere people turned to God, they became these undivided followers of Jesus. If you're taking notes, undivided followers. That's the heading for this section. And I think the the reason that people became undivided followers is they were just, maybe in a way we can't quite get, they were just blown away by overwhelmed by the love that God had for them, that God showed them first. I mean, for us, we just take it for granted.

God is loving. Right? But they lived in a time I don't know if you've ever read Greek history mythology, Roman mythology, any of that stuff about the gods. There there were no gods that loved you. There were gods that used you, that needed your sacrifices.

There were gods that took advantage of you and abused you. I don't know gods that loved you. Paul shows up preaching that message, that before we showed any sort of love or loyalty towards god, god loved us first and gave his own son for us. The apostle John said the same thing. We we love God because he loved us first.

God loved us first. This is radical. And so these first followers of Jesus were just compelled by God's love for them in a world where the gods did not love you. They became undivided followers of the god who loved them. That's why everything they did, I think, was was centered in worship.

Worship as a as a church family together and and, of course, worship on their own and families by themselves. But I think it's this idea of being undivided followers that that that God wants us, Faith Church, to grow in in 2025. I could ask the question. What what about us? Are we individually and as a church growing as undivided followers of Jesus, you know, compelled by the love that god has for us first and then centering our lives on expressing that love back to him and and to one another.

For each one of these, I wanna share with you guys just a a couple of applicational questions, questions you could ask yourself when you're spending some time alone before God or maybe in a community group or in a a friendship or in your relation other relationships. When I think about being an undivided follower of God, kind of the the questions that come to mind for me are, like, how how much more of my heart did I give to god in 2024 than in 2023 or in 2022? How has god's love for me, my love for him changed the day to day? You know, so my daily habits or commitments or commitments to the the community of faith that that loves god together. Am I kind of on that that trajectory where more and more of the center of my life and my time and and who I am is is expressing itself in worship of God and who he is?

I think god is calling us to grow as undivided followers in 2025. That's faith for the future. Of course, there's more we can learn from acts. That's just the first characteristic. I'm already feeling convicted, but I've got 3 more, so we're gonna keep going.

I'm particularly drawn to the story of Priscilla and Aquila. In Acts 18. You can turn a couple of pages to the right in your Bibles or your scripture journals to, Acts 1826. Maybe you remember these 2, Priscilla and Aquila, they're a husband and wife, sort of entrepreneurial team with business interests all over the the empire. They came to faith in Jesus in Rome before all the Jews were kicked out of Rome at one point, and and they made their way towards Corinth, that's where Paul met them.

Worked with them for a year and a half before traveling with them to Ephesus and then saying, hey. There's a few believers here. Why don't you guys stay, start building this church? Paul had to go on to Jerusalem and then come back. So they're they're in Ephesus.

They meet this guy named Apollos. Do you remember this story? Paul Apollos was just brilliant preacher, just a really gifted young guy. Didn't quite have all of the theology figured out yet. Like, he was most of the way there, but a few things were just not quite right.

In in Acts 18/26, Luke tells us that Priscilla and Aquila were listening to him preaching, teaching in a synagogue, and afterwards they they took Apollos aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately. And it's it's not not that he was completely wrong, but there's just there's some stuff that needed fixing. It's kind of a simple comment from Luke, but there is a lot packed into just this one verse. First, it's just the fact that Apollos was even willing to listen to Priscilla and Aquila. Less skilled, lower social standing.

Like, why why bother listening? And Priscilla and Aquila were willing to kind of step up and put themselves out there and go to the the flashy guy on stage and and say, hey, Would you mind? Could we talk to you a little bit? I think there's a few things maybe, that you need to think about. This is the guy who probably coulda argued them into the corner.

What I think this shows is there's just a ton of of humility on everyone's part, humbly offering correction, humbly receiving it. A couple years ago, I, I got my hands on a book called When Narcissism Comes to Church, And I read the whole thing straight through in one sitting because it it was really provocative and really challenging. But, anybody wanna guess, one of the, like, top three professions in terms of number of narcissists in that profession? Politicians. Preachers.

Politicians, I think, also made the list along with police officers, but preachers stand on a stage and tell people what God wants them to hear. Is it any surprise that narcissism can creep in? But then you see a story like this, and every teacher, every preacher in the story is like, I'm we're nothing special. Like, we're not the point. Jesus is is the point.

You know, people who teach and preach the Bible are, like, not the main attraction. We're we're like the tour guides at a cultural heritage site. My in laws are in Egypt right now, so our phones are blown up with pictures, you know, dug in front of the pyramids, and dug in front of the sphinx, and dug on a camel, and dug trying to stay awake after jet lag. You know, pictures pictures like that. And I noticed there's no pictures of the tour guides.

It's not why you go to Egypt. And preachers, teachers, people who who teach the word of God, we're not the point. We're not special. Jesus is. And that comes through so clearly in just this one phrase that that that these 2 were able to talk with the 3rd and explain the way of God a little more accurately.

You know, Priscilla and Aquila, they don't show up again, in Acts. We're fairly confident they were still in Ephesus when Paul came back, got to work with them for a couple years before going on to Rome and working with the church there. But what I love about Priscilla and Aquila, Apollos and others is that they're what I I would call family storytellers. People who keep telling the story that defines the family just over and over and over again. It was everywhere they went.

I think Rome, Corinth, Ephesus, Rome again. They're telling the story of Jesus and building the church into a family around that that story. They're serving the church, investing in the church, pouring themselves out for those who are coming together as the family of God, not because they are anything special, but because Jesus is. So what about us? Are we growing as family storytellers, people who are building the family of the church by telling the story of God's grace over and over again.

So we gotta keep telling the story to each other, to our kids, to people who don't know Jesus yet. So some, some applicational questions for you if you wanna jot these down to think about or talk about with friends later. One question. Are are you am I deeply embedded in the family of the church? Not so much for what I can get out of it, but what I can give.

Am am I are are we investing in one another for the long haul? As we wanna see people grow across the years. Or here's here's the most direct and pointed question. I apologize in advance. Who what person?

Who would give your name as the person who's most helping them grow in their faith in Jesus? Who would give your name as the person most helping them grow in their faith in Jesus? I I think god is calling us to be family storytellers in 2025, to grow in how we tell the story that makes us a family. That's that's faith for the future. Alright.

We're halfway through. Two more characteristics to go. Do you guys wanna keep going or should we just call it here and sing us out? Let's do it all. Say, lord, I need you.

Okay. Alright. 2 more 2 2 more characteristics. If you've been bouncing around your Bible with me, jump all the way back to the beginning, Acts 2. Acts 242.

It's a famous verse. I had to memorize it in Bible College and in seminary. It's we get one of these great summary statements about what the early church was like. This is right at the beginning, long before any of the missionary church planting trips. This is still when the church is almost completely just confined to Jerusalem.

Peter has just preached his one big great sermon at at Pentecost, and 3,000 people have come to faith in Jesus. And the early leaders, these 11 guys who had spent their spent 3 years with Jesus, are suddenly given the task to lead 3,000 people and growing in their relationship with Jesus, and they're like, what do we do? So verse 42 summarizes the life of the early church. They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and the prayers. If I were to paraphrase that in our language, I'd I'd say they focused on growing together through through the word and through relationships.

They shared meals and they worshiped together. And and what I love about the verse is okay. You remember these 11 guys? There used to be 12. 1 of them hung himself, after betraying Jesus.

So 11 guys are left. We call them the disciples in the gospels when they're following Jesus. Now they're called the apostles. They went from disciple means learner, apostle means leader. So they've kinda shifted their roles now.

They get a new title. And the way I picture the scene is these 11 guys are looking at each other, 12 technically because they'd elected another one, but whatever. And they're looking at each other and they're, like, 3,000 people. Now what? And there's panic until Peter goes, let's just do what Jesus did.

Jesus taught us. Let's teach them. Jesus spent time with us. Let's spend time with them. Jesus ate with us.

Let's eat with them. Jesus led us in worship. Let's lead them in worship. Like, we're just gonna do with them what Jesus did with us. From the very beginning, the leaders of the church are just trying to help new followers of Jesus learn to follow Jesus in the same way they learn to follow Jesus, spending time with him, learning from him, patterning their lives and their interactions with each other off of of his.

We give it, you know, all sorts of different names. You call it sanctification or discipleship or followership. I like the word apprenticeship because, you know, that word kinda has in it that idea of, like, the young adult who wants to learn a skill, they go find a master and, like, apprentice themselves to to that person to learn the skills, learn the way of life that makes you good at that particular vocation. Whether you're a blacksmith, carpenter, plumber, electrician, Christian, like, apprenticeship is the same. Find a master and follow them.

Find Jesus and follow him. Learn to be a everyday apprentice. So what about us? Right? Everyone who turns to Jesus becomes his disciple, his follower, his apprentice, learning to live the way of Jesus in just everyday life, everyday apprentices.

So again, some some application questions. You can think this through in your own life or or with those that you, kinda do life with. Ask, hey, is my everyday life patterned on the life of Jesus? Prayer and sacrifice and service and work, not not in my own power, my own strength, but relying on the power of the Holy Spirit. Am I learning from Jesus how to actively live as Jesus did?

You know, am am I growing more and more like Jesus, imitating him, relying on the spirit just in everyday life? And we can't do that on our own. It takes a community of apprentices to form everyday apprentices. It's why everyone in the the early church was all in. If we kept going in those verses, we'd see just how deeply embedded their lives were with one another.

They were all in because no one in God's family goes unnoticed. Everyone was invested in everyone else's growth as an apprentice to Jesus. I think God is calling Faith Church to grow as everyday apprentices in 2025. It's faith for the the future. What would we look like a year from now if all of us individually and together had grown in the way we patterned our lives off of Jesus?

Now there's in the time I don't have left, there's one more characteristic from the or everybody just looked at the countdown clock, didn't you? Started to draw attention to that. Red means I'm doing great in case you were wondering. That's what red means and it counts up because that's bonus time and it's saying good job. Look how much time you're filling.

Alright. One more characteristic from the early church. Flip back to Acts 19. There's an idea we talked about a couple weeks ago, a couple months ago I wanna bring back out. In Acts 19, Paul is in Ephesus.

He started out as he always did, preaching in the synagogue about the Messiah, about Jesus, and then he faces opposition here, and so he relocates to a lecture hall across the street, continues teaching and preaching, and in in verse 10 of Acts 19, Luke tells us this arrangement continued for 2 years and then he gives us this maybe it's hyperbole but I think it's I think it's grounded in fact so that all the residents of Asia heard the word of the Lord. All the residents of Asia. Now don't think of Asia as the continent we think of it today, as a smaller region had that name back in in Paul's day. But still, they're scattered across hundreds of city states, thousands of square miles, and overflowing on the dozens of islands. We know without a doubt, Paul is not the one who reached every city, every island, every mile.

To make an impact like this, you need more than just professional missionaries. You need everyday missionaries. You need everyday missionaries who worship with the family of God and serve one another, growing in their relationship with God, with each other, and then who go with the gospel just to where work and life takes them. Everyday missionaries aren't necessarily being sent around the world. They're just being sent home, sent to work, sent to where they play, where they study, to friends and neighbors and coworkers and teammates.

And everyday missionaries don't do what they do because they feel guilty or because they're worried that God is, you know, might be mad at them if they don't say anything or because some evangelists along the way came along and did a training and said, by the way, if you don't say anything and that guy dies and goes to hell, it's your fault. Fault. Everyday missionaries are not motivated by fear or guilt, they're motivated by love. They're motivated by remembering that when they were wandering, someone walked along with them. Everyday missionaries are just those people who are walking with people who are wandering away from Jesus.

They just wanna be part of people experiencing the the love and the grace of Jesus that that they themselves have found when they were wandering and someone walked along with them. So again, some questions if you wanna jot these down, write these down, think about later. Who do you know as in, like, could you write down a name? Who do you know that is close to you but far away from god? Who do you know that's that's close to you but far away from god?

And how in 2025 do you want to move closer to those who are far from god? It's not people aren't projects. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about introducing people you love to the God you love and who loves you. So how do you, in this year, wanna move towards people who don't know Jesus and be a redemptive presence in their lives?

I think god is calling us to grow as everyday missionaries. 2025, that's faith for the future, growing as as everyday missionaries. Prepare for this to prepare for this sermon this week, I I went back through and read, you know, Acts up to where we've been. And when I read back through the stories, I kept finding over and over again story after story in which undivided followers of Jesus are compelled by God's love for them to love others. And I kept seeing family storytellers who aren't trying to be anything special.

They're just they're just trying to build a family that's focused on the one who is special, Jesus. In every city, in every town, every church, there's these everyday apprentices who are gathering together around their their master, trying to learn from him and pattern their lives off of him, and they're they're all in because they know it takes a community to to learn to live the way of Jesus. And when I read back through Acts, and I see hidden in the margins all kinds of everyday missionaries, followers of Jesus who walk with people who are wandering far from him because they remember when someone walked with them, when they were wandering. When I read back through these first 20 chapters of of Acts, in short, if I'm gonna sum it all up in one phrase, in the book of Acts, I just keep seeing over and over, Acts is filled with people and churches and preachers and normal people who are just walking the way of Jesus for the sake of people who are wandering without him. That's all they're doing.

They're just living their lives with God for the sake of people who don't know him yet. Walk in the way of Jesus for the sake of those who are wandering without him. And I want that to be true of me. And I want I want that to be true of each of you and all of us together. Now I didn't, I didn't pick those four characteristics out of the blue.

They came straight out of reading acts, but the way I articulated them, I think, comes distinctly from from spending 15 years here at faith, you know, with you all watching and as people I know and love live kinda out these same characteristics. When I when I think of undivided followers, people whose lives are just centered on worshiping God, I I think first of people like my wife, Jenna, but of others like Tom Macy and Tom Waltz and Jane Fleck and Jeff Schultz and Mildred Moore, names you may know and people you may not. When I think of of family storytellers, I think of people like Charlie Kelly and Don Fields, Jackie Kenley and Margaret Johnson and Sarah Cockerham and Nick Carter, people who are investing in building a family around this story. When I think of everyday apprentices, I think of people like Julie Snyder and Keith and Ellie Preston and Claire and Nathan Kingsley and Aaron Kosler. When I think of everyday missionaries, I can't help but think of people like Jan Comer, and Oompa Park, and Bob Blahnik, and Jenny Moore, and Emily Nussbaum, and people who just plead the love of Jesus all over everyone else.

And that's what I wanna be in 2025, growing as an undivided follower, family storyteller, an everyday apprentice, an everyday missionary, walking the way of Jesus for the sake of people who are wandering without him. As we go into 2025, I'm praying that faith, us as a church that will grow, will change in the coming year, and that each of us will grow and change along with in these ways. Growing as people who are walking the way of Jesus for the sake of those wandering without him, that's, I think, faith for the future. So what about us? How do you wanna grow in 2025?

Alright. Let's pray together. Father, we are so grateful that you have given us the story of the beginning of this movement that we're part of, that we can learn from those who first wrestled with following Jesus in a world that is bent against him and can see from their example, their motivation, the just what they did and why and how they did it. I pray that you would help us to grow, not necessarily in everything all at once, but in in the places that you're convicting us and drawing us. Strengthen us where we're weak.

Build us where we're healthy. Encourage us where we're strong, and may we reflect you more in the coming year. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.