Latest / Gen Truth | Conquering Adulting through faith in Jesus / 16. A Key to Spiritual Growth—And It’s Not What You Expect

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16. A Key to Spiritual Growth—And It’s Not What You Expect · Gen Truth | Conquering Adulting through faith in Jesus

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Hey friend, welcome to Gen True Podcast show.
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My name is Daniel Pemgol.
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I am loved by God.
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I am loved by my amazing wife and fearless son.
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I am called and gifted by God to teach his word.
Would you be kind to allow me to speak into your life as we journey through the setbacks, the opportunities? and the mysteries we encounter as young adults.
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I will be exploring timeless truths in God's Word that would strengthen us through our adulting journey.
If you're ready, I'm ready.
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Grab your earpiece and let's go for a walk as we talk.
Hello, welcome to Gentry podcast show.
My name is Daniel and Pamago, and I'm excited that you're here with me today.
We're going to continue our conversation.
around spiritual discipline and we're going to look at Acts chapter 2 from verse 42.
It says, They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer.
Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles.
All the believers were together and had everything in common.
They sold property.
and possessions to give to anyone who had need.
Every day they continued to meet together in the temple's court.
They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and joined the favor of all the people.
And the Lord added to their number daily, those who were being saved.
Lord, we thank you.
Thank you for the honor and the privilege that we get to.
Hear your word, hear your teaching, we ask that in this few moments together you'll speak to our hearts, challenge us, call us to grow, and give us the grace to respond to your call.
In Jesus name, Amen.
today we're looking at one of the core disciplines of the early church.
fellowship.
my question today is, are you devoted to fellowshipping with other believers? Are you devoted to fellowshipping with other believers? And those are strong words, like we've covered before, that devotion is a strong commitment, a strong resolve to persevere, no matter what the situation is.
to be committed to doing these things.
And so today it's all about fellowship.
how we engage in community with our fellow believers.
Fellowship is participation, sharing, communion around the embrace of the gospel by the people of God.
I like this definition.
A relationship between individuals that involves a common interest and a mutual active participation in that interest and in each other.
fellowship is you and I participating in a common interest.
What was the common interest of the early church, We find that in verse 41.
Verse 41 tells us what the common interest was.
It says those who accepted them his message This is talking about Peter's message preaching the gospel those who accepted his message were baptized And about 3, 000 were added that day out of all the people who listened to the gospel and the Peter and the disciples preached and their Pentecost But 3, 000 of them accepted the gospel, accepted the good news of Jesus, accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior over their lives.
And they were baptized.
They confirmed that message, by baptism.
And as a result of that, they were added into the group of 120 of them who were already disciples of Jesus.
That became the foundation of their fellowship.
Their common interest was Jesus.
Their common interest was that he died and he rose again for all of us.
And so their common interest was that they, they have accepted the gospel and they have chosen the same savior, the same Lord, the same Messiah.
And they've chosen to live their lives.
In response as disciples of Jesus, that is the common interest of the early church biblical fellowship emanates from our relationship with God.
we can't have biblical fellowship.
Without a relationship with God it's out of the overflow of what he does in us and through us That he pours his love out to us that we're able to out of that love that he's given to us out of that Forgiveness that he's given to us were able to overflow with that to our community of faith And so we see the same idea in 1st John chapter 1 verse 7.
it says if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus, his son, purifies us from all our sins.
If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, speaking of our relationship with God, then we have fellowship.
which one another, because what Jesus did on the cross, now there's therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
both Jews and and people from all over the world can come together because God's love has been poured out to us.
He has given us a new nature and now we can fellowship together as brother and sisters in Christ.
And this is powerful We see an incredible, generous church that rally up together to love each other, to meet with each other daily, to sacrifice when they need to.
To cover each other's needs, to worshiping together, to eating together.
It's like the perfect church, no strife, there is no, offense.
this is and overflow of God's work and His Holy Spirit working in the hearts of the people.
To doing what they can't do And so three expressions I want to highlight of this love as the disciples continue to follow Jesus.
The first one is they prioritize being together.
The Bible says that they met every day, all the believers were together.
And in verse 46, it says every day they continue to meet together in the temple's court.
further down, it says they broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts.
So we see that they made a decision.
They prioritized fellowshipping with one another.
They prioritized being together it wasn't something they just left to chance.
It wasn't something they took for granted, but it was something that they were intentional about because of what God was doing in them and it overflowed with love for their fellow believers.
they prioritized meeting together at the temple courts, meeting at home, sharing meals.
They just prioritized being together.
What an example for us as believers in the 21st century to prioritize being together.
The second thing that we see here is they met each other's need.
I love that phrase that they said, it says they had everything in common.
It doesn't mean like they had the same clothes and the same toothbrush and anything like that.
But that statement means that because if you remember, the story of how, God fearing believers had come over for Passover.
And it was in that time where, the disciples get filled with the Holy Spirit and they start to speak in other tongues.
And the Bible says that, there are God fearing Jews in Jerusalem So some of them would have come 50 days before Passover.
people from all over the world.
And so they're all gathered in this city and they hear the gospel and their hearts are transformed.
And all of a sudden it changes their plans.
Some of them would have planned to go home after Passover.
But because of what the Holy Spirit had done in them, they gave their lives to Jesus.
They committed to joining and being added into the church.
And so many of them, didn't plan to stay for this long extended time.
So what would happen is if someone needed something or someone needed an extra, a room, a place to stay or whatever the need was for, especially for these believers who had traveled from far who are now pretty much.
I made a decision to stick with the fellow believers rather than going straight home.
They wanted to be grounded in their faith.
So the believers started to sell and some of them sold and shared things.
So if someone needed a toothpaste, they, someone would go, okay, cool.
I have some, you have some of this.
So they had everything in common, meaning that there were, there were needs in the community because of this unique situation.
people went out of their way.
to meet the needs in this community so that everyone had, the basic needs met.
And this is what was going on here.
And I love that, that the church was not blind to the needs of the people in the congregation.
And the church here is not an institution.
The church is the people.
it was people like you and I.
Who are like, okay, Joe doesn't have this.
Okay.
Andrew doesn't have this.
We're gonna, we're gonna give, give it to him.
We're going to give, give that to him and we're going to supply that need.
And the last one I want to highlight, the third thing is that they worship together.
I love how it says they praise God together.
They came together regularly, prioritized being together.
They met each other's needs, but they also worshiped together.
And it's such a powerful thing that as believers, wherever we find ourselves, worship is not limited to Sunday services, but wherever we find ourselves as we congregate, as we meet, as we, we fellowship together, that we can worship our Lord Jesus, even in conversation And so we see three things highlighted in the display of fellowship.
As the believers, we're all building this new community and I think it's really important and it challenges us to look inward and ask ourselves, Are we prioritizing fellowship with believers? in the West.
we build caves for ourselves.
We have houses and apartments.
They're literally like caves.
And so we have everything in there.
We have our food, we have everything we need.
We work from home, we work out from home.
We ask Uber to bring food home.
We chat with our friends from home.
We even sometimes attend services from home.
And with all of this isolation, sometimes when we finally make it to having some level of interactions, With people, we feel exhausted.
inconvenienced.
We're like, I didn't plan this conversation.
I didn't plan to stay this long.
we become so independent, that we fail to actually be interdependent on each other.
I don't know about you, but a church I go to, shout out to Revelations, you know, our pastor would oftentimes would say, touch three people, say this to this person.
when you're sitting in the pews, you can feel the awkwardness.
Sometimes the person's like, I don't know you.
So I didn't want to touch you.
I don't want to say anything to you.
sometimes you can feel, especially when you don't know the person, this awkwardness.
sometimes we go to church, we're sitting next to someone and we don't even lock eyes We don't say hello and we're just in and out.
I'm just going to come in, hear the word, hear the worship, and I'm out.
That is not the example the L.
E.
Church set for us.
The L.
E.
Church set an example for us.
By the work of the Holy Spirit, it wasn't like they were trying to do something to show off, but by the Holy Spirit, they allowed the Holy Spirit to work in them, so they could love those around them.
I think this is a challenge for us.
It's a challenge for me.
This is a challenge for you.
That we need to prioritise meeting regularly.
I know there could be a million services online, but I think we need to prioritise meeting regularly.
We need to prioritise fellowshipping with each other regularly.
We need to prioritise meeting each other's needs.
Because here's the thing.
If you don't get close to someone and be involved in their life, there's a high possibility that you wouldn't notice a need But the more we relate to each other and we're in close relationship with each other, we tend to see what people need and we can meet those needs.
And the Holy Spirit can prompt us to meet those needs or to bring someone in our community who can meet those needs.
And sometimes it doesn't look as grand as selling your house.
but it can be an encouragement.
Maybe you should just turn up to church every Sunday or turn up to groups with an encouraging word.
You just have a word for someone to encourage them.
Maybe it's a prayer.
Maybe you just intercede for someone who is in need.
Maybe it's just time.
sometimes people just want you to spend some time so that You can listen to them.
They just want to be heard.
They just want to be seen.
It can look differently for every one of us, depending on what the situation is.
But when we're involved in community, the Holy Spirit can nudge us to meet the needs of people.
And the last one is Let's prioritize worship.
It's quite interesting that sometimes we, we gather as believers and it's very hard for us to have conversations around God.
It's hard for us to have a conversation where we, we were just praising God.
talking about what God is doing in us and challenging each other.
We can talk about every other thing else, every other thing on social media and society.
But when it comes to that, sometimes our conversations are just.
I want to encourage us to bring the conversation that says that we're praising God, that we're praising God.
Imagine if when you gather with friends, you can praise God.
talk about the wonders of God.
the goodness of God.
the character of God in those conversations.
I have a friend, Martin Peterson, when we were in Bible college, he had a white, a small white car.
I can't forget that car, because we would be driving and we'll be having conversations around anything and Martin would switch the conversation.
And he would just bring God into there.
He'll bring prayer.
he'll just start to pray and declare who God is in the middle of the conversation.
And I just love that, that no matter where he was, he, he was able to just switch.
And I love that.
And that's what we get when we have biblical fellowship, when we have a Christ centered community.
That we can worship God.
There's no restriction in our conversation that every moment we can worship.
today, as I end this, I want to encourage us to fight for our community of faith.
And how we fight for it is by prioritizing it.
I don't mean just attending church service, but being committed to fellowshipping with the people of God.
My question to us is, will you choose to devote yourself to fellowshipping with other believers? Father we thank you for the honor and privilege to call you Abba Father.
I thank you for my brothers and sisters who are also part of this family.
And I ask that you would give us the wisdom, the courage to prioritize fellowshipping with one another.
To meet each other's needs and to worship together as one in Jesus name.
Amen.
Thanks for listening.
Have a great day.
Hey friend, I hope this episode has impacted you, encouraged you, and enlightened you in some way.
If so, would you please share this episode right now with a friend? I also would love you to please take 30 Seconds to leave me a review on Apple Podcasts.
This will be a double blessing to me because I get to hear from you and also to hear how this show has impacted you.
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My handle is Daniel and Pam go and I pray that our God will fill your heart with peace right now.
In Jesus name.
Amen.
Thank you for listening.