Introduction
We have been studing Acts, this awesome book that picks up right at the end of the life of Jesus Christ and takes us on a journey through the first 30 years of the Christian church, the lives and the ministry of the followers of Jesus. Acts 1:8 left us with the famous final words of Jesus Christ. Jesus said to his disciples,
Acts 1:8--And you will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere—in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
They started from Jerusalem, then they would go to Judea, the province just south and west of Jerusalem, a little closer to home, a little closer to Jerusalem. They are going to go even farther away, up to Samaria. Finally, he says that it isn’t going to stop there, but they are going to the ends of the earth. That is where the message of Christ’s forgiveness is going.
What an exciting mission that is, what a vision from Jesus; that now that he has died on the cross for sins and paid the debt that we all owed God, the judgement that we should have suffered for ourselves. Now he says, ‘if you receive my life and death for your sins you will be forgiven,’ and you will have the Holy Spirit inside you, and you’re going to spend eternity in heaven.’ That is the message that they get to take out to everybody. Acts 2-7 tell of the exciting witnesses of the apostles, filling out Jesus’s commission. But unfortunately, in Acts 2-7 they haven’t even left Jerusalem yet, in fact they have barely left the temple. Most of this has taken place in one place in Jerusalem. But something very significant happens.
Acts 8:1--All the believers except the apostles were scattered through the regions of Judea and Samaria.
A persecution breaks out, led by a guy named Saul, and the believers were forced to scatter. Luke uses the same language from Jesus’s original commission to them. Luke goes on to tell them of four very significant conversions in Acts 8,9, and 10. The first of which is in Samaria. A guy named Philip goes up to Samaria and leads practically the whole town to Christ. We saw the significant racial tensions between the Jews and Samaritans and what a difficult barrier that would have been to cross, and yet, because of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the healing began. We also saw that he sent Philip down toward Gaza to lead this high-ranking Ethiopian official to Christ on his way back to Ethiopia. We saw last week that he sent the churches worst enemy, Saul, up to Damascus where he leads him to Christ through the believers there.
This week we are going to see a fourth and very significant final conversion story where we are going to see the gospel break out into the Gentile population. Finally, the Greeks, it’s not just the Jews, but the Greeks are finally going to come to know Christ. He is going to do it, not through Saul, who you would expect. When he rescued Saul, he said he was going to be his chosen instrument to take the gospel out to the Gentiles, the Greeks, the non-Jews. But no, tonight, this initial breakthrough to the Gentiles is going to be through the apostle Peter.
Peter at Lydda
Picking up where we left off in Acts 9:33,
Meanwhile, Peter traveled from place to place, and he came down to visit the believers in the town of Lydda.
This would be a town about 25 miles northwest of Jerusalem. Now that Saul is a Christian, it looks like the persecution let up significantly on the Christian church. They had some more freedom of movement. It looks like Peter used to get out from time to time and visit the Christians in the towns surrounding Jerusalem. Maybe he would do some teaching, some healing, some encouragement, whatever they needed there. He heads up to Lydda on a major road heading out to Jerusalem and it says,
There he met a man named Aeneas, who had been paralyzed and bedridden for eight years.
This guy has this chronic illness where he can’t move.
Peter said to him, “Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you! Get up and roll up your sleeping mat!”
And he was healed instantly.
Eight years of debilitating sickness and a single word from Peter released the power of Jesus in his life. He is healing people just like Jesus did, remember that guy Jesus told to pick up his mat and walk?
Then the whole population of Lydda and Sharon saw Aeneas walking around, and they turned to the Lord.
Peter Raises Tabitha
A significant revival breaks out here because of this miracle that Peter does. It looks like he decides to hang around for a little while to do some ministry there. But while he is there, something happens,
There was a believer in Joppa
Again, we are moving another 10 miles further northwest. It is almost like God is slowly leading Peter away from headquarters. He knows that there is something he wants to do, and he needs to be far away from the rest of the crew in Jerusalem for this to happen.
named Tabitha (which in Greek is Dorcas). She was always doing kind things for others and helping the poor.
Tabitha was a godly old woman, kind of like a modern-day Mother Teresa, she is well known for her good deeds. Unfortunately, Luke tells us the Greek translation of her name, which is Dorcas, which makes it a little hard to take her seriously for the rest of the story. Unfortunately, Dorcas is dead.
About this time she became ill and died. Her body was washed for burial and laid in an upstairs room.
They’ve got a dead Dorcas on their hands. They’re like, ‘wait a minute,’
But the believers had heard that Peter was nearby at Lydda, so they sent two men to beg him,
“Please come as soon as possible!” So Peter returned with them; and as soon as he arrived, they took him to the upstairs room. The room was filled with widows who were weeping and showing him the coats and other clothes Dorcas had made for them.
‘We miss Dorcas so much, look at this shirt she made me.’
But Peter asked them all to leave the room; then he knelt and prayed.
Just like he saw Jesus do when he raises the little girl.
Turning to the body he said, “Get up, Tabitha.” And she opened her eyes! When she saw Peter, she sat up! He gave her his hand and helped her up. Then he called in the widows and all the believers, and he presented her to them alive.
We have the first instance of an apostle raising someone from the dead, just like Jesus did multiple times.
The news spread through the whole town, and many believed in the Lord. And Peter stayed a long time in Joppa, living with a tanner named Simon.
What does it mean that he was a tanner? Neither tanning bed nor spray tan were involved here, they hadn’t invested those yet. No, he is a tanner of hides, like it says in some of our bibles. They would take animal skins, dry them out, dye them sometimes if they wanted to, they would prepare them to be used for other purposes. This guy Simon, the tanner of hides, agrees to let Simon Peter stay there for a time. This is interesting, because this guy was a tanner, that was not a religiously neutral profession. Ben Witherington says,
“Tanners, because of their contact with the hides of dead animals, were considered unclean by more scrupulous Jews.”
They had dietary law in Judaism and there was a whole list of animals you weren’t supposed to eat. God doesn’t say why animals are or are not on the list for eating, but it has these long lists of animals in chapters like Leviticus 11. Not only were they not supposed to eat these unclean animals, they weren’t supposed to touch the dead bodies of these animals or else you would be rendered unclean. Being rendered unclean didn’t mean you were cast out forever, it just meant that you had to wait until the next day in order to go offer a sacrifice. You couldn’t participate in normal life until a waiting period was over. Part of what God was doing there, part of it was for health reasons, but part of it is that he was trying to make a difference between his people (the Jews) and the non-Jews. He wanted them to be known as different. He also, in some cases, was trying to prevent them from participating in the pagan religious practices that the other nations did around them. He is trying to preserve the Jewish nation. They have to deliver the scriptures, they have to deliver the Messiah, so he set up these dietary laws to keep them separate. It involved laws of clean and unclean. These tanners could be rendered unclean because of their constant contact with these dead animals.
“In fact, the Mishnah and Talmud suggest they were despised because of their ongoing uncleanness caused by their trade, not to mention the bad smell associated with the tanning process.”
Witherington, Ben, The Acts of the Apostles. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 333.
It says that Simon the tanner lived by the sea, because it smelled bad. I guess there is a Dirty Jobs episode where he goes to a tanning facility and the host is like, ‘this is the worst smell I have smelled in all the years of doing this show.’ There are dead animals lying around, dead animal skins lying around, it would look like some sort of haunted house horror flick for animals. And so, you have all these animals there, and Peter, not really known for his consistency, seems to have no problem staying with this unclean tanner, which is kind of ironic considering some of the objections he is going to make later on in this story.
Cornelius’s Vision
In chapter 10 verse 1, we see the action moves even further north.
In Caesarea there lived a Roman army officer…
We are even further up the coast now, another 40 miles north of Joppa, up the coast to the town of Caesarea. You really couldn’t get a more non-Jewish city that Caesarea. This was named after Caesar himself and built by Herod the Great. It was about as Greco-Roman as you could get. There were all kinds of temples interspersed throughout the city, there was an amphitheater, a hippodrome for the racing of the horses, there would have been Olympic Games going on here, you’ve got your naked Greek wrestlers. The Jews would have seen this city and said, ‘this is so gross, I can’t believe I’m in Caesarea.’ It’s kind of the opposite of Jerusalem. Jews had a very negative view of Gentiles and that would have made the city even more unclean. You can read ancient Jewish literature about what a despised city Caesarea was, and they said it shouldn’t have been a part of Israel at all. There was a roman army officer there at Caesarea,
named Cornelius, who was a captain [centurion] of the Italian Regiment.
He is in charge of 100 soldiers stationed there. The Jews hated Gentiles, they hated the Romans, they definitely hated the Roman army. This is about as bad as you can get. But this guy Cornelius actually seems like he was a pretty good dude.
He was a devout, God-fearing man, as was everyone in his household.
God fearers were Gentiles who somehow come into contact with the Jewish community, they would see the scriptures, and they would be like, ‘this is different than my pagan religion and I like it.’ They might learn the scriptures and they would try to observe some of the practices. The big barrier was that they didn’t want to go as far as getting circumcised as an adult, and you can see where they are coming from. This guy was very devout, he had led his whole family into being a god-fearing household,
He gave generously to the poor and prayed regularly to God.
This guy seems like a really good dude, but in spite of all that he was still an outsider. There was a glass ceiling where gentiles could only rise so high, and it was a very low level they could rise too. John Stott, I like the way that he puts it,
“It is difficult for us to grasp the impassable gulf which yawned in those days between the Jews on the one hand and the Gentiles (including even the ‘God-fearers’) on the other…The tragedy was that Israel twisted the doctrine of election into one of favouritism,”
God had chosen the Jews for a mission to deliver the scriptures and to deliver the Messiah. He did say that there needed to be some separation from these pagan religions. For a couple of reasons. (1) Their religion is super messed up and (2) so they didn’t blend in with the surround cultures. God said, ‘I have an important message and a savior that I need to send through you guys.’ They had taken that choice of God where he had chosen them for a mission and they had elevated it to racism, to prejudice, that they were better than them. That was a blatant misunderstanding of the doctrine of election. They,
“became filled with racial pride and hatred, despised Gentiles as ‘dogs’, and developed traditions which kept them apart. No orthodox Jew would ever enter the home of a Gentile, even a God-fearer, or invite such into his home (see verse 28). On the contrary, ‘all familiar intercourse with Gentiles was forbidden’ and ‘no pious Jew would of course have sat down at the table of a Gentile’. This, then was the entrenched prejudice which had to be overcome before Gentiles could be admitted into the Christian community on equal terms with Jews, and before the church could become a truly multi-racial, multi-cultural society.”
John R. W. Stott, The Message of Acts: The Spirit, the Church & the World, The Bible Speaks Today (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 185–186. Also quoting Edersheim, Jewish Social Life, pp. 25–29.
One of the unique features of Christianity is its ability to adapt to different cultures while still keeping its core of truth. And the church simply was not doing that at this point. It was bound up in the shackles of culture, of Judaism and God needs to break that out because he wants the whole world to hear about his message of salvation.
One afternoon about three o’clock, he had a vision in which he saw an angel of God coming toward him.
He is praying and God sends an angel to talk to him.
“Cornelius!” the angel said. Cornelius stared at him in terror. “What is it, sir?” he asked the angel. And the angel replied, “Your prayers and gifts to the poor have been received by God as an offering! Now send some men to Joppa, and summon a man named Simon Peter. He is staying with Simon, a tanner who lives near the seashore.” As soon as the angel was gone, Cornelius called two of his household servants and a devout soldier, one of his personal attendants. He told them what had happened and sent them off to Joppa.
He did this right away. They head down the coast 30 miles to Joppa.
Peter’s Vision
The next day as Cornelius’s messengers were nearing the town, Peter went up on the flat roof to pray. It was about noon, and he was hungry.
They would hang out on the roof back then. That was their living room, plus you get a breeze off the ocean. Might have blown some of the stench out of there too. Peter is looking for an opportunity to pray, it’s almost lunch time and he heads up.
But while a meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw the sky open, and something like a large sheet was let down by its four corners. In the sheet were all sorts of animals, reptiles, and birds. Then a voice said to him, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat them.” “No, Lord,” Peter declared.
I love that sentence, you’re either saying, ‘No’ or ‘Lord’ they really don’t belong together. If it’s no, it’s not the Lord.
“I have never eaten anything that our Jewish laws have declared impure and unclean.”
Peter’s like, I got that list memorized, I know what I can and can’t eat and there is stuff in that sheet that I can’t eat, and there’s stuff in that sheet I can’t eat that is touching the stuff that I can eat! God’s like: Beef? Yeah! Monkeys? No! Can I eat and owl? No. Worms? No. Grasshoppers? Actually, yeah! You can eat grasshoppers. It’s pretty unclear why but Peter knew them all. And he also knew that he had never eaten anything unclean. This is interesting because this is probably the late 30s AD. That’s seven years since Jesus died, which would have made it eight or nine years since Mark 7, where it says that Jesus declared all foods clean. You can eat anything you want and here is Peter, seven years later, still observing the law that Jesus rendered null and void.
But the voice spoke again: “Do not call something unclean if God has made it clean.”
That’s a pretty central point to this passage that we are studying. Don’t call something unclean, if God has made it clean. Peter doesn’t get it, because it says,
This happened three times.
So once again, Peter denies Jesus three times. And suddenly,
Then the sheet was suddenly pulled up to heaven.
Well that is a confusing prayer time right there. I guess he was hungry, maybe he was like, ‘was this just me being so hungry that I thought about eating something unclean?’
Peter was very perplexed. What could the vision mean? Just then the men sent by Cornelius found Simon’s house. Standing outside the gate, they asked if a man named Simon Peter was staying there. Meanwhile, as Peter was puzzling over the vision, the Holy Spirit said to him, “Three men have come looking for you. Get up, go downstairs, and go with them without hesitation. Don’t worry, for I have sent them.” So Peter went down and said, “I’m the man you are looking for. Why have you come?” They said, “We were sent by Cornelius, a Roman officer. He is a devout and God-fearing man, well respected by all the Jews. A holy angel instructed him to summon you to his house so that he can hear your message.” So Peter invited the men to stay for the night.
Invites three Gentiles into his home to crash at his place, well I guess Simon’s place. I guess he figured they have all the dead animals in there, what’s three Gentiles going to add to the unclean level. The boys back in Jerusalem will probably never find out about this anyways right?
Peter in Caesarea
The next day he went with them, accompanied by some of the brothers from Joppa. They arrived in Caesarea the following day.
You can imagine Peter walking through this town, Greek stuff everywhere, and he’s feeling a little uncomfortable, he is not used to running in this circle. But it says,
Cornelius was waiting for them and had called together his relatives and close friends.
There were probably 30-40 people assembled here waiting for Peter to show up.
As Peter entered his home, Cornelius fell at his feet and worshiped him.
He’s still confused spiritually.
But Peter pulled him up and said, “Stand up! I’m a human being just like you!”
We don’t worship people here.
So they talked together and went inside, where many others were assembled. Peter told them, “You know it is against our laws [“traditions”] for a Jewish man to enter a Gentile home like this or to associate with you.
This was not the laws of the Old Testament that said they couldn’t interact with the Gentiles or enter their homes, these were additional rules that the rabbi’s added to the law because they were like, ‘well we want to make extra sure that people don’t sin, so let’s add some extra rules to the law.’ They called it building the fence around the law. They thought they couldn’t risk getting close enough to touch what they shouldn’t touch or do the things they shouldn’t do. So, they added layer upon layer of legislation to the law to specify things like, what does it actually mean to keep the Sabbath, and how can we make sure that people don’t work on the Sabbath, and what does work really even mean? But God never told them not to associate with Gentiles. In fact, he said that Israel is supposed to be a light to the nations. You run into problems when people start adding to the word of God.
But God has shown me that I should no longer think of anyone as impure or unclean.
He was getting it, that vision related to food, but the point of ‘don’t call anything unclean if I have called it clean,’ he realized that there is much broader application and that he has been wrong about a lot of things. He says, ‘I have been wrong about a lot of things, this is new to me, I have never been in the home of a Gentile before, but God is at work in my life and he is teaching me to love people the way he does.’ He says,
So I came without objection as soon as I was sent for. Now tell me why you sent for me.” Cornelius replied, “Four days ago I was praying in my house about this same time, three o’clock in the afternoon. Suddenly, a man in dazzling clothes was standing in front of me. He told me, ‘Cornelius, your prayer has been heard, and your gifts to the poor have been noticed by God! Now send messengers to Joppa, and summon a man named Simon Peter. He is staying in the home of Simon, a tanner who lives near the seashore.’
Luke is repeating this for us because it’s important. We are going to see this story repeated several more times in the next couple of chapters in the book of Acts, for emphasis. He is showing that God is at work here and that this is fully and completely from God, this movement to the Gentiles.
So I sent for you at once, and it was good of you to come. Now we are all here, waiting before God to hear the message the Lord has given you.”
Talk about a receptive audience. How cool that Cornelius didn’t keep this to himself, but he went out and got as many people as he could to hear this too.
Then Peter replied, “I see very clearly that God shows no favoritism.
And isn’t that the point here? God shows no favoritism
In every nation he accepts those who fear him and do what is right.
Which at first almost sounds like, ‘as long as you are a good person, you’ll go to heaven.’ But that’s not what he’s saying, that can’t be what he’s saying. Otherwise why did Cornelius need to go find the synagogue and why did Cornelius need to go get Peter? No, he was responding to the light that God showed hm and God gave him more light and more light. No, the emphasis here is on every nation. God is gathering a people from every tongue and tribe and people and nation; it says in the scriptures.
This is the message of Good News for the people of Israel—that there is peace with God through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all. You know what happened throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee, after John began preaching his message of baptism.
He is going into a historical rendering of the life of Jesus, the message of Jesus, the good news.
And you know that God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. Then Jesus went around doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.
Yes, this is a spiritual battle they have entered into. The devil on the one side, Jesus on the other.
“And we apostles are witnesses of all he did throughout Judea and in Jerusalem.
That was their job, to be his witnesses.
They put him to death by hanging him on a cross, but God raised him to life on the third day. Then God allowed him to appear, not to the general public, but to us whom God had chosen in advance to be his witnesses. We were those who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.
This was no ghost; he was eating with them.
And he ordered us to preach everywhere and to testify that Jesus is the one appointed by God to be the judge of all—the living and the dead.
Yes, to preach everywhere, he says. And Peter is realizing how far short they’ve fallen from that charge to go and tell everybody everywhere.
He is the one all the prophets testified about,
The Old Testament scriptures laying down prediction after prediction pre-authenticating the Messiah.
saying that everyone who believes in him will have their sins forgiven through his name.”
That’s exactly the message of the prophets. He was pierced for our transgressions, Isaiah says.
Even as Peter was saying these things, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who were listening to the message.
He gets up to the part where he says believing in Jesus and at that moment it looks like they put their trust in him and the Holy Spirit fell on that room in a very obvious way.
The Jewish believers
He brought six guys with him as witnesses of this.
who came with Peter were amazed that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out on the Gentiles, too. For they heard them speaking in other tongues and praising God.
That’s exactly what happened in Acts 2, where the Holy Spirit onto the Jews there and the spoke in tongues, they spoke in other languages and now that is what is happening to the Gentiles. It’s not like you have to speak in tongues to show you are a real believer. The point here is that God is saying, ‘Just like you got this and I’m very obviously and miraculously saying ‘yes.’ Now I’m saying that the Gentiles get the same thing that you do.’ They are not second-class citizens anymore. They are full equal partners in this message of life.
Then Peter asked, “Can anyone object to their being baptized, now that they have received the Holy Spirit just as we did?”
He’s like, ‘any objections?’
So he gave orders for them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Afterward Cornelius asked him to stay with them for several days.
There you have it, the story of what could be called the “Gentile Pentecost,” the breakthrough of the final racial barrier. We saw the gospel go to the Samaritans, we saw Peter and John present for that, to authenticate this movement, to bring the Samaritans and the Jews onto equal footing. And now, we see God taking Peter a little further away, getting him alone, all the way up at Caesarea for the breakthrough to the Gentiles and the bringing of the Gentiles into the church on fully equal footing through no one other than Peter himself, the leader of the apostolic band, the guy who Jesus gave the keys to the kingdom. And now, Peter realized he is going to have to Jerusalem and explain himself. That is what we will get to next week.
Are We Putting Up Barriers?
There is one question I want to think about here as we wrap up. There were all these barriers that they had up to keep first the Samaritans and then the Greeks from coming to Christ. I am not sure how conscious they were of these barriers; they were probably a blind spot to many. Peter is like, “I’ll die for you Jesus!” and Jesus is like, “will you just go tell a Greek about me?” And he’s like “ooh I don’t know about that.” We need to think about this question, might we have some blind spots? Might we have some barriers that we are putting up that God never intended to be there, where God says that he wants us to something and we go, “oh no lord, I could never do anything like that, I’m a Christian.”
Here’s a question, can you so others the love of God no matter who they are? Regardless of race? Can you show the love of God to someone who is black? Hispanic? Can you show the love of God to a white person? Or are we so bound up within our own race, within our own prejudices that we feel pretty uncomfortable doing something like that.
What about regardless of politics? Could you show the love of God to a Donald Trump supporter? What about someone who supports a democrat? Could you show the love of God to them in spite of their political persuasion? Communist, libertarian, socialist? What do you think? Or is that just such a turn off that they are unlovable and someone else is going to have to do that? If that’s you, you have a problem.
“I’ll die for you Lord!” Oh yea? If so, will you love that person?
Regardless of their class? What about a poor person? What about a rich person? Someone who was not raised the same way as you. Classism might be worse that racism?
What about and ugly person? A beautiful person?
An annoying person? Can you love them? Or are you preselecting who you will and won’t love?
What about someone who is sinful? I have heard this sometimes. “I was thinking about inviting this person to home church, but I don’t think they’re very godly, I think they’re pretty sinful.”
What are you talking about? Jesus came to seek and save those who are lost, and we are withdrawing from people because they are icky?
Unfortunately, this is what Christians are known for, the things on this list. We have these resentments and these prejudices and unfortunately, they go back to our very earliest days. A lot of them were raised in these ways of viewing people, and Jesus Christ is the only possible deep cure for racism and prejudice and classism and all the distinctions that we set up. God is working on a truly multicultural multiethnic community and that is one of the things I love most about our church, that you see this in our ministry more than you see it in a lot of churches.
Here is another question, are we adding additional rules to the gospel? Just like the religious teachers in the day of Jesus. Christians are guilty of this took. You think about the rules that they add; drinking alcohol. There are a lot of Christians who make it sound like that in order to become a Christian you need to acknowledge Jesus Christ as the son of God who died for your sins, put your faith in him, forsake other attempts and your own righteousness AND you’ve got to quit drinking. There are a lot of Christians that even if they don’t say that, it sure seems like it. God says don’t get drunk, because that is bad too, but maybe we should just not go into bars at all because people might be tempted to drink, they might drink, they might get drunk and that would be a sin so we might just stay about of bars. It’s hard to tell where to draw the line.
Meanwhile, Jesus is standing behind the Christians saying, “I never said that! That you have to stop drinking to come to Christ?” Christians are like, “well I would never drink,” and Jesus is like, “Well I did, have you read about my first miracles? Where I made 557 bottles of wine?” Good wine too. And so, we add something to the gospel that never should have been there. And what does it do? It makes it more legalistic and less evangelistic.
Non-Christian music and books and movies. Christians are not supposed to read these because they might be “stumbled”, and those lyrics are “not very edifying.” So, you listen to a song and you are automatically going to do the things the song says? People all the time listen to songs and don’t do the thing the song tells them to do. Christians come up with their whole subculture of Christian music and Christina books and Christian movies and we’ve got lists that we are not allowed to read and lists that need to be burned and this is something that Christians have done throughout the centuries. I remember talking to a guy once and he said, “I became a Christian a couple of years ago, God really worked some changes in my life, I don’t know if you have ever heard of a singer named Dave Matthews? But he has some of the most beautiful music you’ve ever heard, but I had to burn my whole collection when I came to Christ.” I was thinking, man, there are better reasons to burn your Dave Matthews collection. But people are like “oh that would be great, I’ll become a Christian and get rid of all my books and movies and never drink again. No thank you, I am not interested in your Jesus.”
Dancing, the latest fashion, tattoos, piercings. These are things you are just not allowed to partake in if you’re a Christian and Jesus is like, “I never said that!”
Politics are so linked to Christianity with one particular political party, that one girl I knew she became a Christian and she went to talk to her dad about it and he said, “I don’t want to hear about it, I don’t want to become a Republican.”
The sad thing is, most non-Christians are not even hostile to biblical Christianity because they have never even seen it. What they have seen is all the rules that Christians have added to it, and they never get around to telling people the gospel, and frankly they never get close enough to the non-Christian for them to even see their life. We find ourselves guilty of some of the very things we see right here in this passage. Holding to rules God never said that we should hold to, rules that make it hard for outsiders to become Christians, make it hard for us to even have a relationship with them. We need to make sure that we are not doing that.
Here’s the point. God loves all people and he wants them to have a shot, he wants them to hear. That’s what we see in this story. We see him working both in the life of Cornelius and in the life of Peter. He is working in both directions because he wants Cornelius to know Jesus Christ. He has responded to so far to what he has seen, and he wants him to have even more. And Peter, he wants him to learn how to love people like Jesus did. This is really a story of two conversions. There is the conversion of Cornelius and his friends, his close friends and relatives, meeting Jesus Christ. And it is the conversion of Peter starting to realize, “If God calls something clean, who and I to call it unclean? God shows not favoritism.”
God is at work in your life too, maybe you are like Cornelius. You are not a Christina, but you are open, maybe you aren’t that open yet, but you are here tonight so that’s a good start. But whatever the reason, God is moving into your life, he is trying to reach you with his love. He is going to great lengths. He sent other people into your life because he wants you to receive that forgiveness through Jesus Christ. It doesn’t matter ethnicity, nationality, politics, what you look like, how you were raised, because he is the Lord of all. And he is gathering a people of every ‘people and tongue and tribe and nation’ to be in his community.
Maybe you are a Christian. If you are, you should know God is at work in your life too, to make you someone who loves others better, who moves more boldly into people’s lives with the love of Christ, the message of the good news that doesn’t have these hang ups, these blind spots. But he wants to teach you to be a man or a woman who can serve as his witnesses ‘to Judea, to Samaria, and even to the ends of the earth.’