24 February 2026
Two snapshots of the earliest church, one taken just after Pentecost and one taken a few chapters later, show exactly the same picture: believers who held nothing back from each other, met constantly, and gave until it hurt. Harry set out to ask what that word "devoted" actually demands, and why a quality so basic to the early church seems to be one of the hardest things for the church to hold onto today.
Editor's note: This article is a written summary based on the substance of Harry's Bible study on this passage. It is not a verbatim transcript, and while it aims to reflect the heart of the teaching faithfully, it cannot fully convey the warmth, care, and encouragement of the class itself.
Opening Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of your word and for the privilege of gathering together in the Name of your Son, Jesus Christ. As we open the Scriptures today, we ask that your Holy Spirit would illuminate our minds and soften our hearts, that we might hear your voice, grow in the knowledge of you, and be equipped to live and speak for Christ. We commit this time of study into your hands, in Jesus' Name, Amen.
Harry began by noting that Luke summarises the whole life of this brand-new community, the very start of the Church, under four headings: devotion to the apostles' teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer (Acts 2:42). The word "devoted themselves" carries the sense of attending constantly, being earnest, persevering, giving oneself with diligence, continuing steadfastly. It is not a one-off decision but a settled, repeated practice, and it recurs through Acts: the disciples "continued with one accord in prayer and supplication" before Pentecost (Acts 1:14), and afterwards "continued daily with one accord in the temple" (Acts 2:46).
Harry pointed out that this pattern started at the top, with the apostles themselves, who had spent three and a half years watching Jesus and were now imitating what they had seen. The same steadfastness shows up later when the Twelve, faced with a practical dispute over the daily distribution of food, refused to be drawn away from their priorities: "We will turn this responsibility over to them and will give ourselves continually to prayer and the ministry of the word" (Acts 6:2–4). Devotion, Harry stressed, meant guarding the main things even when good and pressing needs competed for attention.
Harry illustrated how uncomfortable real devotion can be with a personal memory: in an interview, when he emphasised that he needed to give quality time each day to prayer, he could see from an elder's body language that the man was not comfortable with that answer. Yet Scripture keeps pressing the same point — "Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful" (Colossians 4:2), and "Be joyful in hope, patient in tribulation, continuing steadfastly in prayer" (Romans 12:12). Harry observed that this word so often occurs alongside prayer precisely because prayer is usually the first thing believers let slip. He described a familiar cycle: the Church earnestly prays for revival, revival comes, the Church eases off praying, and revival comes to an end — except, he noted, in Seoul, South Korea, where Prayer Mountain has kept that devotion alive.
Harry also pointed out that the same word is used of ordinary work: "This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, who give their full time, attending continually, to governing" (Romans 13:6). If we are paid to do a job, he argued, we owe it our whole-hearted effort — and the same is even more true of the Lord's work. He used the picture of the small boat kept ready for Jesus so the crowd would not crush him (Mark 3:9) to ask who was really serving whom: the boat waited, ready, for the Lord to use it, and believers are called to the same posture — ready and waiting to serve the Lord continually through the Scriptures, fellowship, breaking of bread, and prayer. Harry named devotion as a quality sorely lacking today, visible in marriage breakdown and in people drifting from church to church rather than committing themselves anywhere.
Turning to the first of the four devotions, Harry recalled that Jesus himself was committed to teaching, and that people were amazed because he taught with authority, unlike the teachers of his day who simply quoted other rabbis: "They were amazed at his teaching, because his words had authority" (Luke 4:32). Just before his ascension, Jesus commissioned his disciples to carry that same teaching forward: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations... teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you" (Matthew 28:18–20).
Harry showed how effectively the apostles carried this out — even their opponents testified to it. The Sanhedrin complained, "We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name... yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching" (Acts 5:28). By Acts 13, this teaching had spread as far as Cyprus, where Paul confronted the sorcerer Elymas, who was trying to turn the proconsul Sergius Paulus away from the faith; Paul struck him blind, and the proconsul believed, "for he was amazed at the teaching about the Lord" (Acts 13:6–12).
Harry explained that the Greek word behind "fellowship," koinonia, literally means sharing in common — a partnership, a spiritual communion, a word often used of the mutuality found in marriage. In this passage it describes real, shared life: believers together, holding everything in common, selling property to give to anyone in need, meeting daily in the temple courts and eating together with glad and sincere hearts (Acts 2:44–47), and later being "one in heart and mind," with no one claiming private ownership of their possessions, so that no one among them was needy (Acts 4:32–37).
Harry traced this same word elsewhere in the New Testament: Paul describes the churches of Macedonia and Achaia making a "contribution" — the same word, koinonia — for the poor believers in Jerusalem (Romans 15:26), and commends the Macedonian churches who, out of extreme poverty, begged for the privilege of sharing in that gift (2 Corinthians 8:1–5). Harry noted that all of this flowed out of the believers' fellowship together in the Holy Spirit — "the fellowship of the Holy Spirit" (2 Corinthians 13:14; Philippians 2:1–4) — and appears again as the "right hand of fellowship" extended to Paul and Barnabas by James, Peter and John (Galatians 2:9–10). He also pointed to John's description of fellowship with the Father and the Son (1 John 1:3–7), noting that John does not mention the Holy Spirit there because he is countering the heresy of Docetism, which denied that Jesus had truly come in the flesh.
On the breaking of bread, Harry acknowledged real uncertainty over what exactly the phrase describes — whether it refers specifically to the Lord's Supper or more broadly to shared meals, of which the Lord's Supper was part. He noted this is genuinely hard to settle, since in the earliest church the Lord's table was itself part of a larger communal meal. Either way, he said, the phrase points to the intimate interaction and mutual acceptance that marked community life, and eating together was clearly a significant part of how the early church lived.
On prayer, Harry noted the sheer weight of biblical material behind it, across the Old and New Testaments and throughout Luke and Acts. A community that prays together, he said, is a community that seeks God's guidance and direction rather than relying on feelings or human intuition — actively submitting itself to the Lord's leading, a pattern that recurs again and again through Acts. Harry pointed out that this way of life was no "flash in the pan": the same picture of wonders, awe, shared possessions and daily fellowship in Acts 2:43–47 reappears, essentially unchanged, in Acts 4:32–37.
Harry's real target in this session was not admiration for a golden-age church but a direct challenge to how comfortably ordinary and private most churchgoing has become. He wanted the class to feel the force of that word "devoted" — constant, earnest, costly — and to ask honestly whether they give that kind of sustained attention to Scripture, to one another, to shared meals, and above all to prayer, or whether, like the elder whose body language gave him away, they are quietly uncomfortable with the idea. The point was not nostalgia for Jerusalem but a live question for now: what would it actually look like, and cost, for this church to be marked by the same relentless togetherness and generosity — and what, in truth, is holding it back from living that way today?
Closing Prayer
Heavenly Father, thank you that we are gathered here in the Name of your Son, Jesus Christ. Father, by the power of your Holy Spirit, open up our hearts and our minds that we might understand your words in the Scriptures and get to know you more, that we might live holy lives, and that we might share the Good News about Jesus in the power of your Spirit, for the building of your Church and the extending of your Kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven, in and through Jesus Christ, Amen.
