Power in the Church
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2022 · 11 September 2022
The church exists on earth for the purpose of its own development. Jesus uses believers to bring about the salvation of other believers. This is what the apostle Paul reminds us of when he says, “How will they hear without a preacher? How will they preach unless they’re sent?” It is the church’s responsibility then to send out its people to proclaim the gospel to gather the rest of God’s people.
The declaration is made by our Lord that when He comes, “You will be witnesses unto Me in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost part of the earth.” We’ve gone through the Day of Pentecost. We’ve seen the coming of the Spirit. The birth of the church has taken place. The church has begun to grow through the means of the proclamation of the gospel.
This church is exploding. Acts 6:7, “The Word of God kept on spreading. The number of disciples continued to increase greatly in Jerusalem. There’s no diminishing and now it has swept through a great many of the priests who are becoming obedient to the faith.” In Acts 8:6, “Here the crowds with one accord were giving attention to what was said by Philip as they heard and saw the miracles which he was performing.”
A church is a gathering of believers in a local place. They come under the leadership defined in Ephesians 4:11, “When the Lord ascended, He gave some gifts to His church. First, apostles and prophets, followed by evangelists and teaching pastors. They are for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry for the building up of the body of Christ. The church is the body of Christ.
It is a church that matures. It grows up in grace and in the knowledge of Christ through the proclamation of divine revelation, so that they are no longer tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine. People in church should become frustrated if no one is providing food for their spiritual development. Many churches just want to entertain unbelievers.
The church should be Christ-like. The commitment of Christ was to seek and save the lost. So Christ-likeness is not only spiritual maturity and holiness, but it is as Christ did, have the passion to seek and save the lost. That is the fulfillment of our commission. But you cannot be fully Christ-like in the church until it is part and parcel of your life to speak the truth in love.
Evangelism is at the heart of what we do. It is the objective and the goal. It is why the Lord left us here, but it also is the byproduct of our spiritual development. Evangelism is our mission, but it doesn’t occur effectively. It doesn’t occur spiritually by the working of the Holy Spirit unless you have Spirit-filled, maturing, Christ-like believers. They are the ones that reproduce.
In Acts 5:12, we see five elements for the early church’s evangelistic impact. They were growing and were going everywhere, proclaiming the truth. They’ve been threatened by the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. They understood that’s why they were in the world, that they existed to speak the Word with confidence. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the Word of God with boldness.
This is the purpose of every church in every age: to gather for fellowship, the apostles’ doctrine, prayer, the breaking of bread, mutual ministry, service, love, being fed the Word of God. Then in Acts 5, we see the horrible sin of a couple who professed to be believers but lied to the Holy Spirit. So it was immediately judged by God such that both of them were killed right on the Lord’s Day.
God Himself did the disciplining. So the church was purified that the church began again its ministry of evangelism. The first element is purity. The church that will have an impact must be pure. If that is our gospel, then it better be visible. That is why a corrupt pastor, corrupt leadership and corrupt people who identify themselves as a church is such a devastating thing on evangelism.
God no longer disciplines regularly in the church, although 1 John says, “There is a sin unto death.” There is a time when God may take a life. He did it in Corinth, “Some of you are weak and sick and some of you are dead, you sleep because of desecrating the Lord’s Table.” So there are times when the Lord Himself disciplines in a church by taking a life. We can assume that still goes on.
God has turned the discipline over to the church. It is our responsibility to follow the patterns of the New Testament commands to holiness. Matthew 18, “If your brother sins, go to him, confront his sin.” If he repents, you’ve gained your brother. If he doesn’t, take two or three witnesses. If he still doesn’t repent, tell the church. If he still doesn’t repent, put him out of the church.
God showed us the severity of sin and showed us the severity of His reaction to sin in the opening of Acts 5. 1 Peter 4:17 says, “Judgment must begin at the house of God.” And we have the responsibility to do everything possible to sustain purity in the church. The world rejects the gospel anyway until a divine miracle takes place in the heart. That’s the work of the Holy Spirit.
Look at verse 12, “And through the hands of the apostles many signs and wonders were done among the people. And they were all with one accord in Solomon’s Porch.” It was an elevated porch beside the great temple court. People would gather in the temple for morning sacrifice, evening sacrifice and all day long for prayers. There was no church building, so the believers met there.
Verse 13, “Yet none of the rest dared join them, but the people esteemed them highly.” To be held in high esteem for your virtue, for your passion, for your confidence, for your boldness is necessary. The church has to be both a testimony to virtue and a testimony to judgment. The mass saw the church as a group of people who had been transformed. They held believers in high esteem.
Their lives had been transformed, but there was no movement on the part of the people to rush in and become a part of this. Why? Because the word spread rapidly of what had just happened with two people in the church. They knew that the church is a place of transformation, but also a place of judgment. We do know God has turned over to us the responsibility of discipline.
You cannot accomplish the purposes of God in evangelism by downplaying sin and the purity of the church. Churches that are full of sinning people, believers and unbelievers, and never dealing with sin will cause it to be flooded with hypocrites, with people who want to make social contact or be a part of activities. When the church becomes that, it cannot be the platform for effective evangelism.
Verse 14 says, “And believers were increasingly added to the Lord, multitudes of both men and women.” People were not joining the church on their own, they were believers in the Lord, multitudes of men and women were constantly added to their number.” It grows when true believers in the Lord are added. That’s the work of the Lord Himself. He is building His church.
Jesus said in Luke 9, “If any man will come after me let him deny himself, take up his cross, follow Me.” That’s what it means to be a Christian: self-denial, cross-bearing, and a life of obedience. You heard the testimonies of the young people who wanted Christ more than their sin, who wanted Christ to deliver them not only from the guilt, but from the power and presence of their sin.
They wanted to be transformed. That’s why you join a church, because you’ve come to Christ and want to be delivered from sin. I’m not talking about legalism. “We’re not going to grow if we tighten everything down and become obsessed with sin.” Yes we grow because the Lord will grow His church. It’s hard for people as true believers to give a convincing testimony about the work of Christ.
Number two is power, unique to the apostolic era. Verse 15, “so that they brought the sick out into the streets and laid them on beds and couches, that at least the shadow of Peter passing by might fall on some of them.” Verse 16, “Also a multitude gathered from the surrounding cities to Jerusalem, bringing sick people and those who were tormented by unclean spirits, and they were all healed.”
There is no parallel to the history of the Christian church. This massive array of miracles: casting out demons, healing diseases, raising dead people, controlling nature, done by our Lord Jesus Himself. And also by the apostles after the Lord has ascended back into heaven. The apostles are still doing miracles to such a degree that everyone is being healed and being delivered from Satan.
Now all of this is happening after the apostles had been forbidden to do anything. They had been confronted by the authorities who were so disturbed. It was demanded of them that they stop all preaching and all of this that was essentially turning the world upside down in their words. But they didn’t. It just inspired them to be bolder and the power was really astonishing.
Listen, this is not a miracle-working church. This is a church with miracle-working apostles. There’s a big difference. Scripture makes that distinction. Our Lord Himself, early in His ministry when He called together His apostles, gave them authority over disease and authority over demons. He gave them the power to do miracles. That is why the apostle Paul speaks of the signs of an apostle.
There were specific signs that identified an apostle, and not just anybody could manifest those kinds of signs. Paul told the Corinthians that signs, wonders and mighty deeds were the signs of an apostle. There were only 12 apostles. Judas was eliminated. Matthias takes his place. Paul is later on added as an apostle out of season. The ministry of signs and wonders was apostolic, and it was miraculous.
The sick were being healed. People were coming from absolutely everywhere. The streets must have presented a strange picture in those days. Now remember, the church has exploded. There are thousands of believers, and they don’t have anywhere to go. So when they want to have an assembly, they came together on the Lord’s Day likely in the temple courtyard and took over the temple.
But the streets are alive with these believers, and the apostles are moving among them. Their power is so visible that they believe that even the shadow of the apostles would heal them. Now, the Word doesn’t say that his shadow healed anybody. It says the people believed his shadow could heal. In ancient documents there is this belief that the shadow of a person is powerful.
Parents, for example, would run to draw their children away from the shadow of someone they feared, away from the shadow of someone they disliked. Children would be pushed into the shadow of an influential, noble person. So maybe this is just part of those kinds of superstitions, but it does let us know that the people knew the immense power of Peter and the other apostles.
This is only for the beginning of the church age. Miracles were only a part of the beginning. Why? To validate them as the preachers of the truth since they were speaking the Word of God. How do you know they are? There’s no New Testament, so how do we know they’re speaking the Word of God? We know because they have divine power. Those are the badges of truth.
The apostles don’t last, and they fade in Acts. And the miracles disappeared as well. At the end of Acts, there are no more miracles. The miracles are fading even with the apostle Paul still around. He’s leaving people sick here and there. As the Holy Spirit began to reveal truth, and it began to be written down and circulated, they were validated by the Scriptures, not by miracles.
How does that apply to us? It applies to us, because we have the record of all that power in Scripture. We don’t have apostles doing miracles. We have a lot of false apostles running around doing false miracles, but we have the complete divinely-inspired record of all the apostolic miracles in the New Testament. So we own the record of the power of God displayed in the church.
We also possess the power of the Holy Spirit who is doing the marvelous work of conversion. But does it mean that we can draw from these miracles? What if people don’t believe the Scripture?” I don’t expect them to believe the Scripture, but they can’t be saved unless they do. But they won’t unless God does a divine miracle and opens their eyes so the Scripture comes alive.
All the power displayed in the early church becomes as alive today to that person who sees the truth in that city. There were a lot of people who saw the miracles and never really believed. I’ve read all about them. I’ve studied them. They’re part of the fabric of my faith as much as if I was there. To make evangelism effective, a pure church has this powerful record.
If you want a comparison, go back and look at the history of Islam and compare the record of Muhammad, who used human standards with the record of the New Testament, with Christ and the apostles. So, power belongs to the church and the record is established in Holy Scripture, and Scripture will defend itself. The more it becomes clear to you, the more it rings true and consistent.
The world cannot stand a powerful church drawing its power out of biblical authority. So persecution is maybe more predicable right now in our lifetime than ever before. This doesn’t threaten our evangelism. We would have more of it if Christians were bolder. But we’ll have to save that discussion of persecution for next time. I have a lot more to say. Let us pray.