Acts 2:42-47

The Fellowship of the Believers
42 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43 Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. 44 All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45 They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. 46 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.


Dig Deeper
Quite a few years ago my wife and I made the decision to invite one of her younger cousins to move to the state in which we live and come join our family for a few years until he could complete high school. This was before our youngest son was born and our oldest son was five at the time so he was pretty excited about the idea of having his 16 year old cousin move in with his. The young man was a pretty good kid who was raised well by his single mom. He had several adjustments to make with this big move, but the biggest for him was to join in the life of our family which was quite different from what he had experienced living with a single mom that often had to work long hours. It was difficult for him to become part of a very involved family when he had gotten used to doing what he wanted when he wanted for the most part. In short, he had to learn to adjust to family life, at least the Burns’ version of family life. It was not something that he had been familiar with but he learned pretty quickly that part of being in a family meant participating in the central aspects of the life of that family.

That is not just true of my family. All families have a rhythm and pattern to their family life, good or bad I suppose. There are just certain expectations that almost all families have and each member knows what it looks like, for the most part, to be part of that family. The early church was no different. They were a family. God always promised that he would remedy the problem of sin through a family of all nations and that is exactly what he delivered in Christ.

As the first group of Jewish believers responded to God’s incredible call to become part of his family, Luke gives us the amazing details of their response. If Jesus came to bring about the church as a religious institution that individuals chose to attend on Sunday mornings, as we have so often reduced the church to in our culture, then this scene makes little sense. The first century had many different kinds of religions and religious groups of all shapes and sizes but virtually none of them looked anything like this. This is just not like anything that would normally be seen as the characteristic behavior of a religious group. In fact, it was rather strange behavior for a religious group. The challenge for us is that Luke’s description of the early Christian community often doesn’t sound very much like our churches today either. Churches in the twenty-first century world tend to look a lot more like a religion than they do families.

Families in that culture shared their lives together. They were committed to teaching and training one another in the word of God (see Deuteronomy 6 for example). They prayed together every day. They ate together. They made decisions together. They made sure that everyone had enough and if they didn’t then everyone else pitched in and shared to make sure that they did. Acts 2:42-47 is the perfect picture of a large group of people that were becoming a family, sharing their lives, and forging a common identity.

The first thing that we are told in Acts 2:42 was that they devoted themselves to was the apostle’s teaching. We don’t have the space here to fully consider what that teaching consisted of, but it is a fair bet to assume that Peter’s Pentecost sermon, using the Old Testament Scriptures to demonstrate Jesus as the resurrected Messiah who demanded the loyalty of the world as its true king, serves as a good outline for much of the early teaching.

The first church family was devoted to the apostle’s teaching but doesn’t that sound like something that a religious group would do? Yes and no. Certainly most religions are committed to some type of central teaching or holy book but within Judaism, from where virtually all of the first believers came, the primary means for learning the Scriptures came from within the family as was called for in Deuteronomy 6:6-9: “These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” Family was the context for devotion to the word of God and it would be no different in the Christian family. They surely continued to take up the charge to learn Scripture and wrestle with the apostle’s teachings in their smaller family groups, but because they all saw themselves as family, they devoted themselves to doing this within their group. So the early church took one important element of Judaism and applied it to their new community, but as we will see, they went far beyond just a family-centered devotion to the Scriptures. They applied the family model to every area of their common lives, something that Judaism did not do.

The next area of devotion was fellowship. Fellowship is a somewhat vague term that does not have one specific meaning and perhaps that’s exactly what Luke intended. They weren’t just devoted to specific weekly gatherings like synagogue services or a specific Sabbath-type day, although they did have special worship gatherings and a day of focused worship, which from the very beginning was on Sunday because that was the day that the Lord was resurrected. The word used for fellowship here is “koinonia.” The word had many applications but in its broadest form it meant the sharing of one’s life. They were sharing their lives and everything about their lives because, again, that’s just what families did. They shared everything to the point where their lives where inextricably intertwined. In fact, it is this word “koinonia” that is translated as “partnership” in Philemon 6 where Paul argues that fully embracing this intertwined life will lead to a full understanding of every good thing that we have in Christ.

This seems almost completely foreign as we look at the landscape of twenty-first century Christianity. We have largely lost devotion to fellowship, to the intertwining of our lives. Our Western minds are so committed to our lives and our own little bastions of privacy that it almost seems offensive to many people to suggest the kind of common life that the early church shared but if they were devoted to it, why should we not be? What might happen if we truly went after being devoted to throwing our lives in together like this? What would it demand of us? What would be the spiritual benefits? These are all questions that I believe can only be answered fully within each individual church family but questions that need to be asked and answered.

The third area of devotion was the breaking of bread. This could include both the regular eating of meals together but also the more specific meal that we call the Lord’s Supper. At first glance the Lord’s Supper doesn’t seem like a family type meal but in the first century that’s exactly what it was. The Supper that Jesus gave his disciples was a new Passover meal, in essence, and the Passover was a meal that was eaten in families so as to remind God’s people what he did for them to give them freedom and create them as his family, his people. That’s precisely what the Lord’s Supper was. It was a reminder to God’s people of what Jesus did for them to create them as a family.

The fourth area of devotion was in the area of prayer. It certainly should come as no surprise that Jesus’ family was one that was dedicated to praying with one another. Their life in Christ was not just some individual spiritual endeavor. In each of these areas of devotion of the Christian community they approached these things as community not individuals. It was Jesus himself, after all, who had taught his disciples that when they prayed they should pray to “our” father who would give us “our” daily bread, forgive “our” debts, and to keep “us” from falling into temptation and the clutches of the evil one.

The records of the early church show them both praying both individually and in groups or as an entire body, but it seems quite apparent that their regular prayers were much more of the central focus than were individual prayers. The early Christians prayed together frequently and they prayed from a group mindset much of the time. This is a challenge for us who are trained to often think almost exclusively in individual terms. It doesn’t mean that it is wrong to pray alone or to pray for our own individual needs, but it certainly is a challenge to regain some of the devotion of the early church to communal prayer.

This new family was together constantly and they were strengthened by the signs and wonders that were performed by the apostles. God had poured out his Spirit in a new way which explains the presence of the miracles. The vast majority of biblical miracles are confined to short periods of time when God offered miraculous verification that he was indeed working in a new way. Although the miracles of the early church weren’t limited exclusively to apostles, that is where they were centered. With this new revelation of God’s people in Christ and the establishment of the New Testament, the need for verifying miracles slowly faded. Appealing to the presence of these verifying signs and wonders, then, as a justification that a true church today will also have these same kinds of signs and wonders is quite problematic. God is capable of miracles whenever and wherever he would like but we must remember that the usual purpose of miracles coming specifically through humans was to verify new revelation and was generally limited to small periods of time. This means that we can certainly pray for miracles from God but it seems unlikely that God would continue to establish communities where people regularly perform miracles due to the obvious fact that Jesus Christ and the New Testament have been clearly established as God’s final revelations.

As a sign of their devotion to God’s family and their love for one another, the believers shared everything they had. They took a radical view of their wealth and possessions by applying a family ethic of common possessions to the group of believers. This was their new family and they would act like it. This was such an important aspect in the early church, that we will consider it much more fully when we come to Acts 4:32-37. Luke ends this passage with an important note, though. As they continued to act like a devoted family, the Lord added to their number daily. It is a reminder that when God’s people love one another and act obediently he will bless them.


Devotional Thought
Are you truly committed to a body of believers as your primary family? Does your church family have the kind of family devotion that we see pictured here in Acts? What can you do today to help increase these things in your church family or bring them about if they’re not there yet?