Matt Chandler - The Church is Born

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab them. Acts chapter 2 is where we’re going to camp out together today. Last week, we began a 12-week series on the book of Acts, and we said that the reason we were studying this book was to remind and reinforce our church that, by God’s command and leadership, we are to be a church serious about multiplication—a church that doesn’t just focus on itself but rather has its eyes, its resources, and its talents, which God has provided, aimed at making something larger than itself. We want to give and live open-handedly for the glory of God.

We talked about being a church-planting church, a church that is generous with its resources. We want to give money to other churches and to ministries that are doing gospel work around the world. We want to create pathways for our best and brightest to leave The Village Church and plant churches in different parts of the world. We aim to send missionaries to the ends of the earth and to open campuses around the Metroplex. In fact, we have some significant news from this past week: after three years of diligently praying and searching for a building in Plano, we signed a contract on a property in central Plano on Independence Parkway. We should celebrate this; it is the result of three years of prayer and effort!

This brings me back to what I said last week: what we are doing here is not something new but something we have always done. We haven’t discarded old models for new ones; we are simply doing everything we can to maximize the opportunities God has given us for the glory of His name and the building up of His kingdom. Currently, here’s the information I have: we have signed a contract for a building and have 30 days for inspection and other due diligence. The elders have unanimously decided to appoint Hunter Hall as the campus pastor of the Plano campus, which is reason to celebrate, as he has faithfully served the men and women there. More information will come in the next couple of weeks, but I wanted to let you know that we have signed that contract and are looking to soft-launch it, followed by a hard launch next year.

You can see in that announcement that the things we have historically done, we are still doing. In the midst of all this, we are also praying about, considering, and walking alongside the Denton campus as it prepares to transition into an autonomous campus, becoming the first of our campuses to do so. As we walk through the book of Acts, I want to make it clear, early on, that while we will study gospel-centered multiplication as seen in Acts, our sermon series is not solely about the Denton campus’s rollout, nor is it about the gifts of the Spirit, although those will be present. It is not ultimately about prescriptive versus descriptive passages, although both will appear in the text.

We have delved into the book of Acts to observe what God has done from the beginning concerning multiplication. We see this clearly in the verse we covered last week: Acts 1:8 states, «But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.» Everything we read moving forward in Acts revolves around this verse. Repeatedly, we will witness the Holy Spirit’s power coming upon people, and those individuals will become witnesses of God for the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ—in Jerusalem first, then Judea, then Samaria, and finally to the ends of the earth. The narrative in the book of Acts tells this story of fulfillment over and over again, showcasing the gospel multiplying, growing, and spreading to the point that you and I are gathered in this room today.

With that said, I want to answer this morning’s question: How is it that God multiplies His gospel? That is my question for today. Acts chapter 2 is an intriguing chapter, and I’ll tell you why. From my experience, people tend to either love the first 13 verses of Acts chapter 2 or the last four verses, but few spend time on the middle of the chapter, which reveals how God multiplies. The first 13 verses, which we covered last week, describe how the Holy Spirit comes upon the disciples as they pray in the upper room; tongues of fire appear, landing on them, and they begin to…