Host addresses financial supporters and algorithmic limits before dissecting Acts 2:46, arguing early church daily meetings were voluntary organic practices rather than tyrannical commands. Distinguishing between apostles of Christ and the church, the speaker posits these gatherings described temporary new covenant inauguration instead of binding ecclesiastical rules. While noting Paul's first-day offering instructions imply official Sunday assemblies for worship, the host concludes these daily acts remain descriptive, not prescriptive, to avoid overly binding consciences within a Reformed framework. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Informal Gatherings vs Official Command00:09:20
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Was the early church being tyrannical when they met daily?
Acts 2 46.
Or do you see it as a temporary aspect of the inauguration?
Great question.
No, I don't think it was tyrannical.
I think, you know, for one, you had another level of authority that we just don't have today.
You had apostles of Christ.
For the record, the word apostle, it literally translates as just a messenger or errander.
So it's just, you know.
So my point is the apostle, you know, all human authority is vested authority.
And apostles would be no different.
So the apostle doesn't have any inherent authority in and of themselves.
So here's the question when you're measuring the authority of an apostle, an apostle is just an errander.
So the question is who sent them on an errand?
That's how you gauge what degree of authority they have.
So, if it's an apostle of the church, which there were in the book of Acts, that's what Barnabas was.
Barnabas is an apostle of the church.
He's sent down to the church at Antioch to see what's going on there, see if their doctrine is sound and those kinds of things.
And he's sent as an errander from the church at Jerusalem.
And so, he's not an apostle of Christ, an eyewitness of the resurrected Lord and commissioned by Christ and endowed with authority, but he is still an apostle of sorts.
He's an apostle of the church.
So, you have apostles of the church and you have apostles of the church.
You only have a few apostles of Christ with a very clear criteria for them.
And apostles of Christ, what makes them more significant in their authority is an apostle, no matter what kind of apostle it is, an apostle is an errander.
So the question is who sent you on the errand?
If you were sent directly by Christ on an errand on his behest, that Christ is the one who sent you, then you're speaking for Christ.
And so that's Christ's authority.
The church's authority is nothing to scoff at, but the church's authority is subservient to Christ's.
Authority, who is the head of the church?
So we had apostles of Christ.
And so if apostles of Christ are saying we need to meet daily, then Christ, in a sense, is saying we need to meet daily.
And then, yeah, I would agree with your assessment that it's probably because of this temporary season of the inauguration of the new covenant, the beginning of the Christian church.
But I think more likely, that would be my kind of secondary answer, possibility, but my primary, my inclination is to say that they were meeting together primarily of their own free will.
That it was not so much, hey, if you skip, you know, if you meet on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, but skip Tuesday, you're in sin because this is an official ecclesiastical order that you are disobeying.
I think it was less of that.
And I think it was more of simply the sense that when the church says they're meeting together daily, I don't believe that it's necessarily church, an official gathering of the saints for the administering of the ordinary means of grace.
So, what I mean is, like, so Paul mentions, for instance, he says, when you are gathered together on the first day of the week, that you should take a collection, an offering, bring in your first fruits offerings, so that when he comes, he can collect this offering that's already been gathered rather than having to, you know, try to coerce or, you know, try to get people to come up with some kind of donation when he arrives.
And he's going to take this offering to another church that was experiencing hardship and financial disparity.
And so, but the point is, Paul, I know it's Brief.
I know it's not the strongest case for the Christian Sabbath and Christ renewing the Sabbath by virtue of his resurrection, raising from the dead on the first day of the week, renewing the Sabbath from the last to the first.
But that would be one scriptural example.
The point is, Paul knows that many of the Christians are gathered together every day, daily, for the breaking of bread and prayer and to commit themselves to the apostles' teaching.
This is the daily practice of the church.
But Paul assumes that everyone will be gathered together on the first day of the week.
And I don't think he just says you're gathered together all together every day of the week, but on the first day of the week, that's the day that you get paid.
And so that's the day you should bring your offering.
Or because it's the first fruits, it needs to be the first day that you.
I don't think that, you know, for one, that's not the way that fruits work, right?
So when we give our first fruits, most people give monthly because they get paid monthly, or they give, you know, weekly because they get paid weekly.
And we want to give first fruits, not just what's left over.
And to do the first fruits, you have to give the first from when you receive the fruit, when you're paid.
But if you're a farmer, you receive fruit once a year.
You may actually only give annually when you actually harvest.
It depends on your vocation.
It depends on all those kinds of things.
So I don't think Paul is saying everybody gets paid weekly and everybody gets paid on the first day of the week.
No, I think Paul is saying the church is gathering together informally, organically, daily, but there's some kind of official gathering that the Apostle Paul assumes that's taking place on the first day of the week.
So that would be the logical context that everyone's there to take an offering.
And so, anyway, so all that being said, you know, I am, I'm confessionally reformed.
1689, Reformed Baptist, particular Baptist.
I am Sabbatarian.
I hold to the Christian Sabbath, which has been held for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years by Protestants, that we are still Sabbatarian.
The Sabbath belongs to the moral law of God, the Ten Commandments, and not the ceremonial law of God, which has been fulfilled but also abrogated by Christ.
But rather, it belongs to the moral law.
But the Sabbath has been not removed, but renewed because Christ is Lord of the Sabbath.
And as Lord of the Sabbath, he doesn't remove the Sabbath, but renews the Sabbath from the last day of the week to the first.
And he does so by virtue of his resurrection.
And then he appears to the apostles also on the Lord's day, the first day of the week.
And then he appears to the apostles a week later, again, on the first day of the week when Thomas is now there.
And Paul mentions, you know, he emphasizes the first day of the week, this assumption that you're all going to be gathered together for the ministering of the ordinary means of grace, and that that would be the proper context to take an offering.
I think that there is biblical merit, and there's certainly merit in church history.
Confessions and creeds and these kinds of things.
And so I would hold to the Christian Sabbath as a Reformed Protestant.
All that being said, again, I think that what's probably happening with the church meeting daily is we still do that now, 2,000 years removed from Christ's earthly ministry.
My church, many members in the church gather together on just about a daily basis.
You have one family in your home for dinner, you're going to visit these other families, you're doing a Bible study with so and so, and these aren't church sanctioned programs.
I don't do a bunch of midweek programs.
Like I said earlier, I don't think the church needs to be a tyrant.
There's a difference between the authority of counsel and the authority of command, right?
A lot of times as a pastor, I'll counsel someone, but if it's not directly from scripture, then I'm not going to command it, which means I'm not going to overly bind their conscience.
I'm going to leave room for them to disagree.
And so I don't necessarily think that this is under an apostolic command that every member of the church is gathering corporately together for the Lord's Supper.
They're breaking bread.
I think that there's a difference.
This is not like 1 Corinthians 11 that's referring to the Lord's Supper.
And I think that first day of the week gathering on the Lord's Day versus breaking bread daily and committing themselves to the Apostles' teaching and prayer, I think that that's more so referring to potluck meals, that people are just in each other's homes, exercising hospitality, sharing a meal together, praying together, discussing doctrine and theology and the Apostles' teaching together, and spurring one another on to love and good works in this informal, organic thing daily.
But then the whole church, not just subgroups of the church, but the whole church gathers together on the first day of the week.
For the preaching of the word, praying of the word, singing of the word, and hymns and psalms and spiritual songs, and seeing, S E E I N G, of the word, and the only two images that have been prescribed directly by Christ himself, which is baptism and the Lord's Supper.
And that also would be the proper context for receiving an offering.
I think that that's so.
Anyway, so I don't think it's tyrannical because I don't think that it was an official ecclesiastic or apostolic command.
Describing Daily Church Life00:00:24
I think that this is not prescriptive, but rather descriptive.
The book of Acts is describing the daily life of Christians.
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