Frontier Church

Acts 17 is the ultimate showdown of how ancient cultural ideology & philosophy is most relevant to our time. Paul was confronting the most influential and culturally forming ideas in history and they are directly connected to our day. This passage reminds us of our message to those ideas and how to engage cultural ideas and real people, while exposing the issues of our hearts. We will look at:

1) Humanity's common faith and common story

2) How secular worldviews break down

3) The core issue: Our story deals with suffering.

The reason Christianity grew and is still relevant today, is that it is the only story of any faith system that deals with the issue of suffering.

"He who has a why to live for can deal with almost any how." -Viktor Frankl

Acts 15:1-21

This passage has a critical theological debate that is often ignored in sermon series. But this debate teaches us incredibly important things about the gospel itself. Truth matters because truth has consequences for how we live. No other religion offers freedom from burdens like Christianity because Christ took on our burdens for us. We'll hear a powerful testimony of how God uses community to reveal things to us and to teach us about him.

We'll look at our cultural assumptions that play into this passage, and then see 1) how we mistake the real Law + real Gospel; 2) how a Spirit-led community helps us discern wisdom + truth; and 3) how the Way of Jesus cleans the heart & offers the freedom the human heart craves.

The book of Acts is all about the earliest Christianity. It shows us something about the character of the earliest Christianity, especially about where the church got its power. No matter what your culture or what your class, no matter what conceptions and categories you come to the Bible with, it will smash some of them. Tomorrow we'll look at a section with two key episodes... The conversion of an outsider in "The Ethiopian Eunuch" and the conversion of the ultimate insider, The Pharisee Saul who'd become the Apostle Paul.

This story about Philip and the Ethiopian will show us the inclusivity of Christianity; the exclusivity of Christianity; and the grounding for both. Most people see Christianity as either inclusive or exclusive, but the fact is Christianity is both. We then come to perhaps the most famous conversion story in the history of the world: the conversion of Saul (who becomes Paul). This is the man who sought to do the most harm to the earliest Christians, but then God saves him and he becomes the writer of about a quarter of the New Testament.

"Conversion" is a controversial term. We'll let Jesus define it and see how conversion stories can vary in nature, but there are certain elements that must be present if you have really been "converted"... As always, conversion requires a turning and trusting the story of God rather than our own.

Phil Chan is giving us a special message out of Acts 10, looking at the story of Cornelius + Peter. This incident is a critical juncture of when the church was primarily Jewish but opening to the Gentile world... We'll see how this juncture was happening, and how the gospel began reaching the rest of the world by Peter (the leader of the early church) coming to a moment where he had to see "the other" through the lens of Jesus beginning with a profound encounter.

Scholars believe that when early Christians were under the leadership of the apostles and the church in Jerusalem, they had become somewhat passive.

When they were scattered all of that changed: they had to gather up the courage to communicate to total strangers what they had learned. They were less eloquent and less experienced than the apostles but, in the end, they proved to be extraordinarily effective because they were 100s and 1,000s times more numerous than the apostles and because they could only deliver a simple, authentic message about what had just recently transformed their lives.

They did not have prepared messages; they did not have theological degrees; all they had was the Spirit, the apostles’ teaching, and the Gospel they could bring in word and deed. We'll follow this development with Philip and the Samaritans, look at:

How does the Kingdom of Jesus Work to Renew All Things?

-Everyone living their purpose, free of circumstances

-The effect of living our purpose

-The choices we make, because of our purpose

The first ever "Christian" sermon saw an environment of supernatural miracles, manifestations, encounters, and the launch of the first church... a mega-church:). But the power of the sermon cut them to the heart.

WHY?

We're going to see how the Spirit's Sermon (through Peter) addresses the heart of the human condition by looking at the:

-Barriers to Our Hearts

-How Hearing the Gospel Renews our Hearts

-How to Communicate Jesus to People's Hearts

Acts Series

The trajectory of Luke’s narrative in Acts constructs the history of the beginning of the church as a promise from Jesus Himself. That promise foretells the arrival of the Holy Spirit and the global spread of Christianity throughout the ancient world.

The way in which Luke introduces the promise of the Spirit informs us that Jesus’ ascension will take who He was and what He did on earth and release it with multiplying power into our lives and throughout the world.

The Ascension (Acts 1:1-11)

The biblical description of Jesus’ ascension is not stating (spatially) that Jesus is in outer space (otherwise Luke would have provided an account similar to the ‘heavenly journeys’), but that Jesus now permanently bears a new relationship to us as our King––i.e., the One who governs our actions, hears our needs in the throne room, leads us in battle, empowers our efforts, and wisely guides the fate of our lives.

The Promise of the Spirit shows us that "ascension" will take who He is and what He did on earth & release its multiplying power into our lives & throughout the world... It is inviting Theophilus and us if we want to take part in this promise of the Spirit. If so:

1. ASK THE QUESTIONS

2. TASTE (& SEE) THE FRUIT

3. EXPERIENCE THE CLOSENESS

Challenges that Acts Presents to us Today:

OUR MISSION. Acts demonstrates the priority of sharing our faith with others. These early evangelists sought to show that Christianity could answer the questions people were asking, and the records of the speeches indicate that their message was strongly content-oriented––i.e., they had something valuable and meaningful to say when the opportunity arose.

OUR CIRCUMSTANCES. Second, Acts presents a vibrant community that is passionate about the mission of the Church irrespective of their immediate circumstance.

OUR COMMUNITY. And more broadly, to a Western society in which individualism reigns, the earliest Christian community presents a people who strove to hold all things in common…

We continue our "Fall Heart Reset" leading to our fall series launch, as we have Ryan Macdonald from Foster the City and Southlands Church with us giving a message on "Growing in Compassion in a Compassion-less World" out of Luke 10. The message starts with a powerful testimony pertaining to this subject in our community by Lamar and Sarah Bontrager.

How should we hear this parable for our time? Let it motivate us to action. Let it point us to Jesus. He'll be sharing his family's story in foster care, and inspire each of us to offer to God what we can... it starts with compassion. Come let your hearts be re-set, re-stored, and re-visioned!

Practicing compassion requires repentance

Practicing compassion requires proximity

Practicing compassion requires offering resources to God

Read more of the wonderful work he's apart of at fosterthecity.org

A special Sunday as we begin to cast our vision into our fall, we invite our community into a "Fall Heart Re-set" over the next couple weeks... Before we all get bombarded and committed to the responsibilities, pace, distractions, and chaos of our culture (both good & bad), we want to take a Sunday to re-set and re-align our hearts, and let the ways of Jesus draw us back to vision, peace, joy, and faithfulness that can handle anything- loss, suffering, disappointment, exile, inflation, and political chaos!

The Books of Acts if all about "power". The key is suffering. Perhaps we have gotten revival all wrong? What is the fruit of true revival? How do we live + build for true revival and renewal? How do we equip Jesus followers for suffering? We'll look at some examples in Acts and church history of where we are aiming as a people that live for the renewal of all things, and the message will land on the 4 Marks of Community that Builds for Revival, looking at four features of the first "small community groups", and how we might work to recover them:

1) A Different Kind of Bible Study

2) Utterly Honest Confession

3) Everyone Elevated

4) Always Moving in Two Directions

Daniel and Exile shows the tension of 2 things that arise in exile:

1) "To Give in" (Assimilate)

2) "To Get away" (Separate)

3) Creative Minority (The 3rd option that Daniel lives out)

There's always a window to a third option! It's the idea of a creative minority. This is a phrase coined by the late historian, Arnold Toynbee, and his work on the rise and fall of empires and then made popular by Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. The basic idea is that a group of people on the fringe of culture – so, a minority. An ethnic minority, religious minority or whatever – who rather than default to separatism ("let's get away") or syncretism ("let's give in") are creative and together, as a community, they work for the good for the healing and the renewal of the wider culture that is in decline.