Gimme that Old Time Religion

This video from Sergeant York really sums up the point of the sermon this week.

We started a new series on the Four Essentials of the Christian Life.  This comes from Acts 2.42, which states, “And they persisted in the Teaching of the Apostles, the Fellowship, the Breaking of the Bread, and the Prayers.”  What is interesting in this verse is who persisted in these things.

This was the crowd of 3000 that converted and were baptized after Peter’s sermon on Pentecost.  Now the 120 believers that were together in the upper room just had their membership increase 2500%, and these are the four things that they thought were the most important for these new Christians to have as a part of their new lives in Christ.  Each week for the next four weeks we are going to look at each one of these aspects of the Christian life.

This week we look at the Teaching of the Apostles.  This can also be translated as the Doctrine of the Apostles.  This is the faith handed down to us from the Apostles.  When these events first took place, this was the verbal teaching of the original Christians as they spread out across the Roman Empire.  Only later were these teachings written down into what would become the New Testament.

At the very least we need the Bible for this teaching, this old time religion.  But it cannot end there.  There are over 38,000 different Christian denominations in the world today, and most of those claim to use the Bible as their only rule of belief.  Just having the Bible is not enough.  There needs to be some uniform understanding of interpretation for the Bible as well.  This is not because there ought to be one body that declares what is right or wrong, but because the Holy Spirit is involved in teaching the Scriptures to us.  If God the Spirit is the one that helps us understand the Scriptures, then there ought not be 38,000 different interpretations of what is right.

In order to begin understanding Scripture as the Spirit has guided the Church, one would do well to start reading some of the writers during and just after the Apostolic period to see how those first Christians understood the Gospel message.  Clement of Rome was a traveling companion of Paul and Peter.  Ignatius of Antioch was made the lead pastor of the Church in Antioch after Peter and Paul left and was martyred not long after the Apostle John.  The Didache is literally the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles and is dated to the middle of the first century, the same time as the Apostles lived and taught (and some believe that Matthew wrote the majority of it).

This is just a beginning!