We are looking at how God views the church, the importance of the church, the role we play in the church and so forth because this is how God has designed this time, this age, in which the church is vitally important in the work of God. We must understand that to understand how God thinks and for us to have a biblical worldview.
We saw a little bit as to who and what the church is last time. However, what is the church to do? I don’t think we can improve much over Acts 2:38 where we have Peter preaching the first sermon in the church age, we call that the Day of Pentecost, as he is proclaiming to the Jewish people their need for a Savior and what they have done to Christ in the crucifixion of the Lord. He preaches a very powerful sermon filled with Old Testament Scriptures and so forth. When he is done, we come to Acts 2:37 and many of the people there are convicted by the Holy Spirit to turn to the Lord, but they don’t know what to do and so they ask Peter what they should do. He answers them in Acts 2:38 where it says, “And Peter said to them, “Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Peter made it pretty clear: 1) repent, 2) turn from your sinfulness and turn to the Lord, and 3) he says to be baptized. He says to be baptized not to be saved, but to show people that you are saved. Then he says that “you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” So, God’s Spirit would enter in and be within them. That is the first thing we see.
So, the local church then is involved in evangelism. In Acts 2:41, it says, “So then, those who had received his word were baptized; and that day there were added about three thousand souls. And they were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers.” We find in Acts 2:41 that they are reaching out to people around them who need Christ. It says in Acts 2:40 as he speaks to them, he is witnessing to them and he exhorts them, it says, “And with many other words he solemnly testified and kept on exhorting them, saying, ‘Be saved from this perverse generation!’” So, what do these people need? Peter said that you need to be saved, or rescued, from what is called a “perverse generation.” Now this is not just talking about the Jewish people. Later in the book of Philippians 2:15, we have a very similar thing as Paul is speaking on this subject and he calls the generation of the world around us a “crooked and perverse generation.” Not only crooked, but perverse. So, we have a world system that is out of alignment with God. They are not walking with God. They are polluted by sin. They are corrupted by sin, and that is where the unsaved person is. To have a biblical worldview from the perspective of the church of God’s people is to understand that the world around us is filled with corruption and the people living in the world are corrupted by sin. That is of course taught throughout all of the New Testament . . .
