There is an old story about a lighthouse keeper who worked on a rocky stretch of coastline. Once a month he would receive a new supply of oil to keep the light burning so that ships could safely sail near the rocky coast. One night, though, a woman from the nearby village came and begged him for some of his oil to keep her family warm. Another time a father asked for some to use in his lamp. Another man needed some to lubricate a wheel. Since all the requests seemed legitimate, the lighthouse keeper tried to please everyone and grant the requests of all.

Toward the end of the month, he noticed his supply of oil was very low. Soon it was gone, and one night the light on the lighthouse went out. As a result, that evening several ships were wrecked and countless lives were lost. When the authorities investigated, the man was very apologetic. He told them he was just trying to be helpful with the oil. Their reply to his excuses, however, was simple and to the point: “You were given oil for one purpose, and one purpose only—to keep that light burning!”

Sinclair Ferguson has called it “the inaugural revival of the New Testament.

It would be logical to expect preaching on the Spirit at Pentecost. So it may come as something of a surprise that at the first Pentecost, the preaching was all about Jesus

What did they teach? The epistles? The epistles had not been written yet. The Gospels? There were no written biographies of Christ at that time. What, then, did they teach? The Old Testament, the sayings of Jesus as they recalled them, the Sermon on the Mount, the final conversations in the Upper Room...

These new Christians, under the reign of the Holy Spirit, were hungry for God’s Word. They could not get enough of it.

It is very important that we note this term “continually devoting” because it governs the other characteristics of the church where the Spirit reigns. It denotes a steadfast and single-minded devotion to a certain course of action.

The apostles’ teaching was central to the content of what was to be studied. The apostles, the eyewitnesses of all Jesus had done, would be the ones whom the Holy Spirit would remind of the crucial truths by which the church would be directed for centuries to come (John 14:17, 25–26; 16:13). From the beginning the early church was devoted to hearing, studying, and learning what the apostles had to teach

The real menace to life in the world today is not the hydrogen bomb … but the fact of proximity without community.”

—Murdo Ewen Macdonald

SOURCE: G. Ingle, The Lord’s Creed (Collins, 1964), 17.

. Some scholars have argued that the expression in v. 42 is a technical term for the Lord’s Supper and that this was already separated from their ordinary meals. However, the term describes the initiation of an ordinary meal in the Jewish fashion of breaking a loaf with the hands and giving thanks to God (e.g., Lk. 9:16; 22:19; 24:30, 35; Acts 27:35 note). To ‘break bread’ was to eat together. The adoption of this term as a title for the Lord’s Supper is not formally attested until the second century AD (cf. Did. 14.1; Ignatius, Eph. 20.2

Meals were viewed as sharing, first with God (they prayed at both the beginning and end of meals) and then with one another. An amazing number of scenes in the Gospel of Luke were over meals, and this continued in the early church. Meals provided the core of the theme of fellowship, then spreading to include every area of life. We should be having a lot more people over to our homes than many of us do.

‘and fear came upon every soul’; cf. 5:5, 11). This clause, with its use of the imperfect tense (egineto), suggests ‘an enduring sense of awe inspired by the consciousness that God was at work in their midst, so that they were witnesses of the final drama, and indeed participants in it’. Moreover, many wonders and miraculous signs (polla de terata kai sēmeia) were done (egineto) by the apostles.

What appeared to motivate such generosity was a sense of God’s grace towards them,

Tertullian, who was writing in Carthage (modern-day Tunisia) around A.D. 200, could say:

Contributions are voluntary, and proportionate to each one’s income. They are used to support and bury poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls who are destitute of means and parents, and of old people, now confined to the house, and such as have suffered shipwreck, or any who are in the mines, or banished to the islands, or shut up in prison for their fidelity to God’s church.

They devoted themselves … to the breaking of bread and to prayer (42). That is, their fellowship was expressed not only in caring for each other, but in corporate worship too.

46 And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having favor with all the people

Their worship consisted of two things: “the breaking of bread and… prayer.” I believe “the breaking of bread” refers to the regular observance of the Lord’s Supper, for two reasons. First, the reference comes between two religiously-loaded terms in verse 42—“fellowship” and “prayers

So now we come to this extraordinary description of these Christians in Acts—“gladness”! “Praising God”! Joy has been a characteristic of the church in every period of reformation and revival

We also see here one of the repeated themes of the book of Acts: joy. The early church was marked by joy. Two final statements reveal two significant results of the presence of this regularly meeting, money-sharing, miracle-working, Bible-studying, God-praising group:

Those first Jerusalem Christians were not so preoccupied with learning, sharing and worshipping, that they forgot about witnessing

There is an old story about a lighthouse keeper who worked on a rocky stretch of coastline. Once a month he would receive a new supply of oil to keep the light burning so that ships could safely sail near the rocky coast. One night, though, a woman from the nearby village came and begged him for some of his oil to keep her family warm. Another time a father asked for some to use in his lamp. Another man needed some to lubricate a wheel. Since all the requests seemed legitimate, the lighthouse keeper tried to please everyone and grant the requests of all.

Toward the end of the month, he noticed his supply of oil was very low. Soon it was gone, and one night the light on the lighthouse went out. As a result, that evening several ships were wrecked and countless lives were lost. When the authorities investigated, the man was very apologetic. He told them he was just trying to be helpful with the oil. Their reply to his excuses, however, was simple and to the point: “You were given oil for one purpose, and one purpose only—to keep that light burning!

There is an old story about a lighthouse keeper who worked on a rocky stretch of coastline. Once a month he would receive a new supply of oil to keep the light burning so that ships could safely sail near the rocky coast. One night, though, a woman from the nearby village came and begged him for some of his oil to keep her family warm. Another time a father asked for some to use in his lamp. Another man needed some to lubricate a wheel. Since all the requests seemed legitimate, the lighthouse keeper tried to please everyone and grant the requests of all.

Toward the end of the month, he noticed his supply of oil was very low. Soon it was gone, and one night the light on the lighthouse went out. As a result, that evening several ships were wrecked and countless lives were lost. When the authorities investigated, the man was very apologetic. He told them he was just trying to be helpful with the oil. Their reply to his excuses, however, was simple and to the point: “You were given oil for one purpose, and one purpose only—to keep that light burning!