Acts 4:32

And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul.

Unity among Christians to be desired

Melancthon mourned in his day the divisions among Protestants, and sought to bring Protestants together by the parable of the war between the wolves and the dogs. The wolves were somewhat afraid, for the dogs were many and strong, and therefore they sent out a spy to observe them. On his return, the scout said, “It is true the dogs are many, but there are not many mastiffs among them. There are dogs of so many sorts one can hardly count them; and as for the worst of them,” said he, “they are little dogs, which bark loudly, but cannot bite.” “However, this did not cheer me so much,” said the wolf, “as this, that as they came marching on, I observed they were all snapping right and left at one another, and I could see clearly that though they all hate the wolf, yet each dog hates every other dog with all his heart.” I fear it is true still; for there are many professors who snap right and left at their own brethren, when they had better save their teeth for the wolves. If our enemies are to be put to confusion, it must be by the united efforts of all the people of God; unity is strength. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Unity requires dissimilarity

Unity subsists between things not similar and alike, but things dissimilar or unlike. There is no unity in the separate atoms of a sand-pit; they are things similar; there is an aggregate or collection of them. Even if they be hardened in a mass they are not one, they do not form a unity; they are simply a mass. There is no unity in a flock of sheep; it is simply a repetition of a number of things similar to each other. But in Christian unity we find something very different, for the Christian Church is made up of dissimilar members, without which dissimilarity there could be no unity. Each is imperfect in itself, but each supplying the deficiencies of other members of the body spiritual, as do the physical members of the physical body. Now, if you cut off from the spiritual body any one member, as in the physical body, you destroy the unity of the whole body. (T. H. Leary, D. C. L.)

Unity assisted by fire

There was a blacksmith once who had two pieces of iron which he wished to weld into one, and he took them just as they were, all cold and hard, and put them on the anvil, and began to hammer with all his might, but they were two pieces still, and would not unite. At last he remembered what he ought never to have forgotten; he thrust both of them into the fire, took them out red-hot, laid the one upon the other, and by one or two blows of the hammer they very soon became one. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

The social instinct

I. God’s voice assures us that “it is not good that the man should be alone”: and knit into the very stuff of our personality is the instinctive dread of loneliness and the craving after intercourse with our fellow-men. We know that it is only in fellowship with others that the life which belongs to us as men can find its essential exercise and development. Conscience, justice, sympathy, honour, pity, love: these are but a few of the words whose whole wealth of meaning lies in a man’s dealings with his fellow-men. Every principle of morality, every safeguard of reason, every canon of taste, depends for its significance, if not for its sanction, on our position as members of a great community: and it was by a true and deep insight that the Greek declared that he who would live in solitude must be either more or less than man. The social instinct is astir in the very act of self-consciousness: and I would show something of the reality of the satisfaction which is offered to it in the Church of Christ--God’s answer to the needs of man.

II. There are two ways in which we may measure the adequacy of any communion and fellowship into which we are invited. Sympathy lives, so to speak, in two dimensions: breadth and depth: and we may call it great either for the extent which it can cover, or for the inner depths which it can reach. So, too, it may be cramped and narrow, either because it moves within a scanty range, or else because its diffuse activity hardly goes below the surface of life. And in correspondence with these two measurements of sympathy, there are two distinct ways in which the desire for communion may seek and seem to find its satisfaction without reference to Christianity.

1. On the one hand we may find an almost infinite scope for sympathy and fellowship, if we share or understand the wants and hopes and aims of our generation, and so bear our part in its corporate action. Probably there never was an age which offered wider range more varied opportunity, more hopeful schemes for such an exercise and development of the social instinct. Whatever help we have to give, we can pass at once into commerce with hundreds of our fellow-men. Whether the feelings with which we go out into the world are mainly benevolent, political, or scientific, we are at once admitted to a tract of interest and work in which the social instinct moves without the fear of limitation.

2. It is when the other measurement is forced upon us that we feel the practical defect of a purely natural communion, however wide and intelligent, with our fellow-citizens or with mankind. Every human soul has energies, mysterious and profound, which find no exercise or answer in that diffusive interest which is ever losing, in intensity what it gains in width. For while our inner life looks out to no horizon, in our social relations we are hemmed in on every side: in each wider range of fellowship, more of our personal feelings and convictions have to be repressed or misunderstood: as we pass from love to friendship, from friendship to acquaintance, from acquaintance to association, at each stage we feel that less of our true self is active and satisfied, that we are exchanging the full and blessed sympathy “where hearts are of each other sure,” for the excitement and effectiveness of living in a crowd. And from the partial and superficial communion which thus beckons on and disappoints in ever-widening fields of ever more restricted feeling, most men turn to seek in friendship or in home a sympathy which has less to fear from the second measurement of which I spoke. Probably we all know the intense relief of passing from the jar or compromise of society at large into some inner sphere of love where “we mean what we say, and what we would we know.”

3. And having found the refreshment and confidence of such sympathy, most men come to live a double life: passing across day by day from the diffuse and shallow fellowship of the wide world to the quiet trust and swift intercourse of the chosen few: trying to supplement the extent of one communion by the depth of the other: even as the great poet of our day cries--

“God be thanked, the meanest of His creatures

Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,

One to show a woman when he loves her.”

But must we put away for ever all thought and hope of any communion which shall be at once both wide and deep? Is there any power which can bring the souls of men together in a sympathy without either exclusion or reserve?

III. “I believe in the communion of saints.” This is the answer of the christian church: she, and she alone, still clings to the hope and promise of a fellowship and sympathy which shall be at once deeper than any depth which a man can fathom in his own soul, and wider than the world itself: a brotherhood into which the most ignorant and outcast and sinful may through penitence find entrance, a brotherhood in which the most sensitive and thoughtful and exacting soul shall never feel or fear the touch of cruelty or stupidity, but ever be led on from height to height, from strength to strength, from glory to glory, by the answer of a love which never is out of sight, and yet never can be outstripped. By what means then does the Church propose to make good her promise of a sympathy both wide and deep? Must we look back for the plainest answer to these questions to the days when “the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul”? It is, in deed and truth, a humiliating necessity. But still we cannot doubt that the Divine spirit of that communion is with us now: we know that, for all the noisy and obtrusive quarrels which are the shame and plague of Christendom, the strong love which held together the souls of martyrs and evangelists, the love which was stronger than death, is among us still: that in pure homes, in the fellowship of Christ’s work among the poor and suffering, we can still see, in the perfect harmony of self-forgetful work, the inherited secret of Christian unity and the earnest of its achievement in the Church triumphant. But there is one plain ground of fellowship which lies so near to the experience of our daily life, that it is easy for all to see and measure. For at the outset, Christianity, and Christianity alone, sets before us all one Lord. Alike in earth and heaven we are to be brought into the true fellowship one with another by a service and devotion which is not mutual but common: by seeking first the same Lord and Saviour. The real secret of sympathy is to love in the first place, not one’s friend, but that which he loves better than himself: and the fulfilment of the social instinct is found in the concentration of all hearts upon the one true God. We shall better understand what the communion of saints may be, in proportion as we can give our hearts, our strength, our lives, to Him who gave Himself for us--to Him who, since He was lifted up from the earth, alone can draw all to Himself, and link them in the one sufficient sympathy of one unending Love. For “if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another.” (F. Paget, D. D.)

Neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.

Nothing our own

Their conduct was answerable to so great a change as had been brought over their spirits. In several respects it was singular; such as befitted their special condition, but was nowise applicable to any other community or any after generation. Among these was the community of goods;--a usage into which they fell by a natural consequence of the relation in which they stood to one another and to the rest of mankind, and even by their own position and expectation upon the earth. They were few, and they were brethren. If they had been numerous, or if they had been divided, the idea would have been from the first as impracticable as it soon became. But at the outset it almost forced itself upon their observance. What was wealth to them? They were set upon a profession of self-denials. There was nothing that they cared to purchase or inherit in the places that were so soon, as they imagined, to be destroyed. Their minds were attracted but by incorruptible treasures and enduring abodes. For this reason it was, that none of them said “that aught of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.” Let us trace a few lines of reflection over so great a subject. What can we consider our own? Relatively, in certain connections, and to a certain extent, everything that we can conceive of. All the objects that delight the senses, all the pursuits that interest the attention, all the truths that occupy and nourish the mind, are ours. We have no need to become the proprietors of anything, in a commercial sense, in order to make it belong to us. The poor borderer upon a rich domain may use and enjoy it more than its real occupant and lord. He who borrows a book from a wealthy library may render it more truly his than it is the collector’s, whose name is written in it, but whose understanding has never grown familiar with its contents. Whatever we can avail ourselves of for the purpose of our instruction, of our profit, of our happiness, is our own. Whatever we can put away at a calm distance from us, doing without it and feeling above it, is more than our own. The fruits of our endeavours are ours, the days of our being, the circumstances of our condition, the pictures of our fancy, the associates of our hearts. The universe offers itself to the eyes that can love its beauty, not only as a spectacle, but as a gift; and the very Lord of that boundless whole is manifested as the portion of obedient souls. Since everything we know is imaged in the mind, and the mind is ourself, we may call the powers of nature and the lessons of wisdom our tributaries, wherever those powers are surveyed or those lessons embraced. But if we are ready to be elated with such a description of the extent of the authority that has been committed to men, we have but to take into view that opposite truth which accords better with the expression of the text, and account that none of the things which they possess are theirs, in any absolute sense. We may say, with the apostle to his Corinthians, “All things are yours.” But then we must add, in the words of the same great testifier, “Ye yourselves are not your own; ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.” Let us turn to this side of our theme, and remark some of the leading particulars that belong to it. None of the things which we possess are absolutely our own.

1. Not our worldly goods. Who created them? He who made them to be transitory. Who bestowed them? He who has a right to take them back. For what purpose have they been lodged in the hands of prosperous men? For their special benefit and gratification? Yes. But for their occupation, their exercise, their trial also, and more. In the first place, the changes of events prove to us that we do not hold’ by any absolute tenure what we seem to hold; for how often it is suddenly snatched from us, or drained gradually away! So much for chances. And then come in the settled decrees of our condition and the demands of our consciences. Consider them both, and you will see how amply they vindicate the expressions of the text as applicable to all men and times and places. You will have no community of goods; and indeed we can scarcely conceive of any social project so unnatural, so unjust, so impracticable. Yet still the goods of the wealthiest cannot choose but flow into the community. He must part with them, whether he will or not, and regularly part with them. He can have no enjoyment from them but by their use, and their use is their perishing. They are not his but as they pass, and when they are gone whose are they? They must be spent and distributed, and return into the common stock from which they were amassed. Reflect further on what the various obligations of life admonish us ought to be. Are we not stewards and debtors, rather than owners and lords, in the portion that is allotted to us? Much is due to the service of our brethren; and all is in pledge to Him, to whom the whole must be accounted for. Benevolence, justice, and truth are greater apostles than Peter and James and John; and honest contributions must be brought and laid down at their feet.

2. Our friends and the objects of our affection are not our own. You look into the faces of those you love, and take them by their cordial hands, and they seem to be yours, because their countenances have been always bright towards you, and you are well assured that their help is ready in the time of your need. But how many such have circumstances parted, and misunderstandings estranged! And how often has death severed the tie which no trials of life could weaken! Children are in a sense your creatures. None can share with you your parental rights. I will not say, that they may so disappoint your hope as to leave little disposition to rejoice in their belonging to you; that they may so grieve and burden your lives as to lead you to wish that you had been childless. But at least you are well aware, that what no temptations of after days might be able to make unworthy of your regard, the decree of heaven may remove from your side. The infant and the youth are as liable to be summoned away in their unsullied freshness, as the grown man in the fulness of his strength and the midst of his labours; and how can you claim as yours what is so changing and so frail? Rejoice, rather, that they are in better hands and at a wiser disposal; that their portion is in the assignments of an eternal Providence; and that their true Proprietor is the Holy Father, whose angels have a charge over them here, and who will never dismiss those blessed ministers from their office of love. (N. L. Frothingham.)

The unity of the early Church

I. The unity. “The multitude of them that believed were of one heart and sou!.” The Church of that day was a great contrast with the world, where there were “wars and rumours of wars,” envious and jealous hatreds. Unity ever set forth in New Testament as a fundamental conception of the Church. Christ prayed for it. Apostles strove to preserve it. The ideal we should ever keep before us.

II. The manifestation. “Neither said any of them that aught of the things that he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.” This a convincing evidence of their unity. Teaches the surpassing love of that brotherhood of Christ. The principle is just as true to-day. The Church is a partnership in preaching the gospel and in good works.

III. The causes. By examining the context we may discover some of the causes or conditions.

1. Fidelity. They had been entrusted with the gospel. They had faithful leaders (Acts 2:14; Acts 3:12; Acts 4:3; Acts 13:19). They had faithful people (verses 24-30).

2. Prayer (verses 24-30).

3. Recognition of God’s providence (verse 28).

4. Holy Spirit (verse 31). Notice it came in answer to prayer. To believers (cf. chap. 2:4)

. Churches need renewals (cf. Acts 2:4; Acts 4:31)

of Holy Spirit.

IV. The results.

1. Great spirituality. Scatter the embers of a dying fire and it goes out. Rake them together and you have warmth and glow. So with a divided and a united Church.

2. Great power. “A city set on a hill,” etc. Such a Church can make the powers of darkness tremble. Keep this ideal before us and we shall be a united, spiritual, and aggressive Church. (E. E. Curry.)

Apostolic socialism

I. The reasons which led the first Christians to form themselves into a community having all things common.

1. From the moment of the founding of Christianity the duty of living for others was insisted on. John the Baptist said, “He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none,” etc. Nor was Jesus less explicit. “Sell that ye have and give alms.” “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” and many other passages which embody the principle of true socialism.

2. Doubtless some would urge that Jesus set the example of founding such a communistic society--not that He required all to part with their possessions, but it would seem that He did require this of the inner circle of apostles. “Lo, we have left all and followed Thee.” “Go sell that thou hast … and come follow Me.” Of this community Judas was the treasurer.

3. Remember again that this took place immediately after the outpouring of the Spirit, the natural effect of which would be the kindling of an enthusiasm which would make them capable of a self-sacrifice impossible to the natural man. It is evident, too, that poverty was very rife, and the newly invigorated affections rendered it impossible for a Christian to feast while others starved.

II. Why was this socialistic scheme abandoned? For it is evident that it did not last long, since we find it nowhere else, nor even here a few years later. The truth is experience taught them that in the existing state of society Socialism would not work. Why? Just the sinfulness and selfishness of men. For society can only prosper if men’s faculties are sharpened, and their energy and industry exerted to the utmost. And it is found that only competition can supply the motive which will induce men to do their best. No doubt if men were perfectly unselfish it would be otherwise, but they are not. When a man’s comfort no longer depended on his own efforts, so that even if he worked harder than others he would fare no better, the spur to exertion would be gone, and he would do less, or even nothing, and thousands would prey upon others. Even the sharp law under which we live, “If a man will not work, neither shall he eat,” is evaded by idle impostors and beggars, but how indefinitely would the number of these social parasites be increased if all had a common right to the wealth of the community. And then again Socialism would give scope for fraud and dishonesty. The basis of any such scheme is that rich and poor give alike all they possess into the common fund. Selfish men, like Ananias, would seek to evade this and to live at the public expense while retaining what others had relinquished. It was this that probably broke up the scheme.

III. Why are these facts recorded? Not merely to teach that Socialism is a mistake, but that it is true as an ideal, but false as a practical system. Its essential underlying ideas are true. It is a Divine instinct which makes us long to give the same blessings to the poor which the rich possess. It is right that each should labour not only for himself but for all. And while we cannot bring all humanity into a communistic society, we must nevertheless keep the ideal of social regeneration on the basis of brotherly love ever before us. (A. M. Mackay, B. A.)

Baptised purses

Miss Margaret Winning Leitch, one of two sisters from Ryegate, Vermont, U.S.A., of Scottish parentage, formerly of the United Presbyterisn Church, now missionaries of the American Board in Ceylon, lately told her scholars the following incident: “A man, being converted, was about to join the Baptist Church. When he was going down into the water to be baptised, upon a profession of his faith in Christ, he handed his pocket-handkerchief to a friend to hold. In doing so, his purse fell out. The friend said, ‘I will hold that too; you wilt not want it to get wet.’ But the man replied, ‘No, when I go down into the water I want my purse to be baptised with me, for that, as well as myself, must be consecrated to the service of the Lord.’” We may well agree with the missionary in her wish that there were more Christian workers with baptised purses.

Remarkable liberality

Perhaps there never was a more charitable man than John Wesley. His liberality knew no bounds but an empty pocket. He gave away, not merely a certain part of his income, but all that he had; his own wants being provided for, he devoted all the rest to the necessities of others. He entered upon this good work at a very early period. We are told that when he had thirty pounds a year, he lived on twenty-eight, and gave away forty shillings. The next; year, receiving sixty pounds, he still lived on twenty-eight, and gave two and thirty. The third year he received ninety pounds, and gave away sixty-two. The fourth year he received one hundred and twenty pounds. Still he lived on twenty-eight, and gave to the poor ninety-two. During the rest of his life he lived economically; and in the course of fifty years, it has been supposed, he gave away more than thirty thousand pounds.

Accumulated riches rightly used

If you go to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, I ask you to find out the monument to John Howard the philanthropist, and you will read upon it that the man who devotes himself to the good of mankind “treads an open but unfrequented path to immortality.” Thank God, that path is not unfrequented now, and many capitalists realise their responsibilities. I was chaplain in Switzerland during August. One morning I was walking up a lovely valley by the banks of a river, and through a rich pasture land, enamelled with flowers, when I was overtaken by a young Swiss lad. He pointed to a mighty mountain at the head of the valley, covered with perpetual snow, and said in French, “Why should the good God have made snowfields and glaciers? “I pointed to the stream, and to the rich grass beneath our feet, and told him that the streams which enriched the valleys all around came from this snow mountain. So there are men who rise above their fellows like mountains above the valleys; riches have accumulated upon them as snow upon the lofty heights; but the sunshine of Divine love has melted the snow, which has flown down in fertilising streams, spreading gladness and prosperity around. (Canon Bardsley.)