“My Fathers Business”
Acts 1:1-2, John 14:8-21, and 20:19-23
“The Ancients frequently marked the graves of their dead with the symbol of a broken pillar.” They expressed their sense of the incompleteness of this life. Such a symbol would not apply to the life and death of Jesus. “It is finished.” When a Biography ends at a tomb, we may write finished and erect our broken Pillar, but when it ends with “He was received up into Heaven and sat on the right hand of God.” We are reading just the 1st chapter!
Mr. Winston Churchill speaking in the British House of Commons on the North African victory said, “This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end. It may be the end of the beginning.”
I: The Cross and Resurrection Were but the Beginning.
1. Now the followers of Christ were to apply Christianity to a sick and dying world.
a. Jesus had passed into the Churches hands a sure cure for the deadly diseases of Sin.
b. The Victory of the Cross and empty Tomb was to be reflected in the application.
2. The application must now be taken beyond the Laboratories.
a. Beginning at home and then to the whole world.
b. The failure would not be in the deadliness of the disease, but in the failure to apply the remedy.
c. Their was a sick world in every sense of the Word.
“Is your Carpenter keeping busy these days? Is anyone bringing him to work? Yes, my Carpenter is very busy these days, he is working day and night building a coffin for your Empire.”
3. The Disciple learned that those sad days of cross, grave, and departure was but the blessed beginning.
4. Jesus came to “seek and to save that which was lost.”
II: “As My Father Hath Sent Me Even so Send I to You.” John 20:21.
1. It costed Jesus to come.
2. At all cost, he finished his work.
3. The Cross, the Grave and the Resurrection was the place where the Church was to take up the work Jesus began to do.
4. The Great French Sculpture finished his Fathers work.
5. Jesus began both to do and to teach. He never separated works from his teaching.
6. Every Christian is under obligation to help finish the Job Christ began to do and teach.
III: Jesus Expects Every Christian to Help.
1. Only Christians can do His work.
2. Through the Home.
3. On the Job.
4. Through the Churches. His work must be completed.
The Church is God’s Organization. Through which the work of Christ must be completed.
The book of Acts is the story of the Continuity of the Doings and Teachings of Jesus.
We don’t worship one who did and taught in an ancient day, but one who is doing and teaching now through His church.