When Peter walks into the house of Cornelius, a Roman Gentile who follows the Jewish God Yahweh, everything about the gospel movement changes. Until this point, the gospel was good news for the Jews; their long-awaited Messiah had come to the world to rescue them from Sin, Satan, and Death. But now, this good news is opened up to include even the worst pagan Gentiles. Jesus isn’t just the Savor of the Jews, he’s the Savior of the whole world. Just like Peter must realize how big and inclusive this good news is, we too must learn what it means to preach and proclaim the gospel to everyone around us. By confronting our own biases and committing to the global movement of the gospel, we too can participate in the story of salvation that God has been telling since the beginning of time.

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 Hey, if you have a Bible, uh, open up to Acts chapter 10. This morning is kind of part two of, uh, part one. I guess part is part two of a two part teaching through the book of acts are actually specific chapters of 10 and 11. Pastor Trey preached last week on Peter and Cornelius, and we’re gonna pick up right where he left off in verse 23.

As you’re turning there to ax chapter 10. Let me pray for us, and then we will get going. So, Father, we thank you for this time in the space. God, we thank you for, uh, the opportunity that we have to come and to gather with each other to direct our attention, our focus towards you, to hear from your word, to learn, to serve each other.

So Father, I pray that over the next few moments, uh, that you would just allow us, uh, to hear from you clearly, help us put aside any distractions that we have. Um, any worries, any fears, any anxieties? Um, over the next few moments, we asked that you would just speak to us, that you would, um, help us to learn something new about you, about each other, about ourselves.

We ask that you stir our affections towards you and towards each other. We ask that you would give us opportunities as we leave this place to live out the gospel message. So that we might be a light to the world around us. Father, we pray all this in your name. Amen. Uh, supposedly Gandhi, uh, once walked into a church service looking for salvation.

Uh, if you know anything about Gandhi, you know that he grew up, uh, sort of at the height of the Indian caste system, which was a, uh, hierarchy that would, uh, give a person value based on, uh, on their social status, their family of origin, or their skin color. It was very discriminatory and it was really prevalent in the country of India.

Uh, Gandhi, uh, was looking for spiritual solutions to this problem, which he saw was obviously a problem. And what he found was that Christ was the most compelling alternative to any other religion that he had studied, including his own Hinduism. So he goes to church. And as soon as he enters the church service, He’s greeted by an usher who kindly asks that he finds a church more suited for his low standing on the caste system.

That church would not welcome him because of his skin color. Gandhi will later go on to say this, If Christians have caste differences also, I might as well remain Hindu. As you know, Gandhi then spread Hinduism, uh, throughout India and became, uh, influential not for his discipleship to Jesus but for his adherence to, uh, the Hindu religion and faith.

And I can’t help but wonder how his story might have been different had he been greeted and welcomed in the church that he tried to visit. Because Christians have always struggled with division. God’s people have always struggled with division. Human beings have always struggled with division. From the us versus them mentality that’s plagued the nation of Israel in the Old Testament to the complicit cooperation of many churches that would segregate themselves based on civil, based on, uh, skin color at the height of the civil rights movement, Christians have always struggled to tear down these natural divisions and barriers that exist between different groups of people.

people groups, and it’s not just a Christian problem. It’s a human problem where Christians have been meant and called to unite people of all socioeconomic and racial and ethnic backgrounds. We’ve often been complicit in separating people based on those very things. And that’s exactly where we’re at in the book of acts.

So here’s the story so far, if you’re visiting or maybe you just kind of forgot, cause we’ve been in Oxford like four months now. Um, here’s where we’re at. The book of acts is a story. It’s a story about the growth of the gospel movement from its origins in a small Jewish attic to its spread throughout the rest of the Greco Roman world.

When the story starts in the beginning of the book of Acts, Jesus’s job on earth is done. He’s about to leave. He’s done all the work. He’s died. He’s been resurrected. He’s done the healing and the teaching, but now he’s going to commission, send out his disciples to continue doing that work that he started while he was with them.

And as promised, he sends them help. He gives them the Holy Spirit. Uh, this happens in Acts chapter two. This is the moment called Pentecost. And this is when the church is born. And honestly, for a while, things are going pretty well. Now. The first few chapters of acts say that thousands are added to the church every day.

And they live their lives giving, uh, serving one another, giving everything that they have for the greater good of their community. But eventually things don’t go so well. And the persecution that starts with the stoning of Stephen, who was one of the men chosen as a deacon, to serve this growing church, uh, he’s murdered.

That persecution just gets worse, and we’re gonna see how that happens in the later book of Acts. But the gospel is still at work. As we noted a few weeks ago, even in the midst of persecution, as the disciples are going out spreading the good news that Jesus rule and reign has come here on earth, Under persecution and oppression, people are still compelled by this new way of Jesus.

We learned about the Ethiopian eunuch, who was born in a family outside of God’s family, who saw something attractive about God’s people, learns about the Messiah from Isaiah 53, and gets baptized somewhere on a desert road between Jerusalem and modern day Syria. Dan. God is still at work in and among his people.

We learned about Saul, the murderer turned missionary who oversaw the stoning of Stephen, encountered Jesus on the road to Damascus, and give his life for the sake of this new gospel movement. Saul, who will later write two thirds of the New Testament. And last week, we saw Peter. How as a devout Jew, Peter, one of the original 12 disciples of Jesus, has his personal prejudice confronted by the good news of the gospel.

The Jews no longer have special access and privilege with God. Gentiles are also included in this new family that Jesus is creating. So we learned about Cornelius last week, how he’s a Roman centurion considered a Gentile, someone not born within the family of God. How he follows the Israelite God. He’s fed up with the pagan gods of the Romans and the Greeks, and he decides to give his life to Yahweh.

He receives a vision. An angel comes to him and he says, hey, send for a man named Peter. He’s gonna tell you all about the good news of the gospel, and so he does that. As a centurion, he has authority, he has power, he sends men out to go get Peter and bring them back to his house. And the crazy thing is that Peter goes.

It’s a huge moment for Peter, we talked about this last week, that is going to start his marathon, but it’s a dangerous one. For Peter to associate, As a Jewish person, to associate and be in the same house as a pagan gentile was unheard of. This is actually going to get him in trouble later with the Jews, and more importantly, this has the potential to dismantle the entire Christian movement so far.

So with that, let’s pick up where we left off last week, Acts chapter 10 verse 23. The next day he got up and set out with them, and some of the brothers from Joppa went with him. The following day he entered Caesarea. Now Cornelius was expecting them, and had called together his relatives and his close friends.

When Peter entered, Cornelius met him, fell at his feet, and worshipped him. But Peter lifted him up and said, Stand up, I myself am also a man. While talking with him, he went in and found a large gathering of people. Peter said to them, You know it’s forbidden for a Jewish man to associate with or visit a foreigner, but God has shown me that I must not call any person impure or unclean.

That’s why I came without any objection when I was sent for. So may I ask why you sent for me? Cornelius replied, Four days ago at this hour, at three in the afternoon, I was praying in my house. Just then a man in dazzling clothes stood before me and said, Cornelius, your prayer has been heard, and your acts of charity have been remembered in God’s sight.

Therefore, send someone to Joppa and invite Simon here, who is also named Peter. He is lodging in Simon the Tanner’s house by the sea, so I immediately sent for you, and it was good of you to come. So now we are all in the presence of God to hear everything you have been commanded by the Lord. Now, After last week, uh, we kind of left off with a question, an unanswered question.

And we talked about Peter and how his prejudice against the Gentiles is being confronted. We talked about the vision with the sheets and the lizards and, uh, weird stuff. You can go back to last week’s message and listen to it then. But the question that we left unanswered is actually really important for us to answer this morning.

And that question is this, uh, what’s the deal with the Gentiles? It seems like a lot of the biblical story has to do with this apparent division that exists between the two people groups, the Jews and the Gentiles. If you read any part of the New Testament, you’ll likely encounter the Apostle Paul saying something about there no longer being Jew or Gentile, or how the Gentiles have been grafted in to God’s family tree, or how you and I are not supposed to live by the pagan Gentile way of life.

Even Jesus had some weird things to say about Gentiles too while he was on Earth. Matthew chapter 10, for example, this, this really odd story where Jesus, uh, while he’s still on earth, is about to send out his disciples, 72 of them, and he is gonna say, Hey, go and preach the good news, uh, to all the houses that you encounter.

He equips them and he sends them out with a caveat, he says, but don’t go to the roads that lead to Samaria or to the Gentiles. In other words, I want you to go preach the message, but don’t bother with the Gentiles. Just stick with your own people for now. Even more offensive is five chapters later in Matthew 15, there’s a story of a Gentile woman, a Canaanite specifically, who hears about this traveling Jewish rabbi who heals people and she goes to him and asks for healing for her daughter, that a demon would be cast out of her.

And at first Jesus just ignores her. He keeps on walking. And the disciples, uh, are telling Jesus the louder that she’s begging Jesus not to have compassion on her. The disciples tell Jesus, Hey, send this Canaanite Gentile woman away. And Jesus finally turns to her and he addresses her, but he essentially calls her a dog, uh, which as you can imagine was very derogatory.

Now hold those two passages in your mind. We’re going to come back to those a little later. So to understand just how serious this divide between Jew and Gentile was, and how radical this story in the Book of Acts is, we have to do a little bit of digging. So, uh, bear with me. Over the next few moments, um, this is going to be a little teachy, and then we’ll get to the preachy part, uh, later.

It’s going to be a little teachy, um, over the next few moments while I, um, kind of give, um, I do this all the, I think every time I preach, this is what ends up happening. I’m going to give an overview of the entire biblical story up until this point. Is that okay? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you guys are excited about it.

All right. Stay awake. Okay. Here’s the biblical story. It starts shocking, uh, with creation. God creates the world, teeming with life and with beauty. God is present there, and God ordains the world to run a certain way as He intends it. But notice, what does God do right after creating the world and humanity?

He chooses part of His creation, and He sets them apart. This happens with Adam and Eve. We’re told in Genesis 1, that Adam and Eve alone are given the image of God. Not all of creation, just Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve as God’s representatives. There’s a lot of backstory about what that means when it says that they’re given the image of God, they’re made in God’s image, and they’re told to fill the earth and subdue it.

Long story short, this is royalty language. This would have been common language to an ancient Near Eastern reader reading this for the first time. They would have understood this as a royal mandate. Adam and Eve are given a job represent God. his goodness and his presence to the rest of the world around them.

But as you and I know, the story continues from that point. That’s not how things play out. Instead, they seize autonomy for themselves, and rather than submitting to the rule and reign of Jesus, of God at that time, they Uh, they seize the rule and reign for themselves, and instead of spreading God’s goodness and, and presence to the rest of creation, they actually spread sin, Satan, and death to the rest of God’s good world.

And so at this point, God begins his rescue mission. He’s going to redeem and restore all of creation back to him by defeating those three enemies that humanity has introduced, sin, Satan, and death. But have you ever noticed how God plans on doing that? In Genesis 12 we get this story that we talked about a few months ago with our peacemaking series where God chooses a specific family group and he does exactly what he did in the garden.

He sets them apart. The first three verses of Genesis 12 This is what it says. The Lord said to Abram. That’s Abraham. Go from your land, your relatives, your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you. I will make your name great and you will be a blessing.

I will bless those who bless you. I will curse anyone who treats you with contempt and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you. So this is God’s MO. Set aside a people from all of creation and give them a job. In this case though, it’s not just Adam and Eve. It’s a whole family that God chooses.

But notice God’s end goal. All the peoples on earth will be blessed through you. Because God’s people were always meant to live separate but stay open. The biblical story from this point on, I’m gonna be honest, it gets a little, it’s easy to get bogged down in. Uh, you have this grand narrative that happens in Exodus where basically Abraham listens to God, he grows, his family becomes what’s called the nation of Israel, and the book of Exodus starts off this way.

Abraham’s family, this chosen people, Israel, the Jews, are under the oppression of the Egyptians. And the book of Exodus tells the story about how God saves them from captivity and brings them out into the wilderness, promising them a future land. But after that really epic Exodus story that all of us are really familiar with, uh, you get this sort of mundane list of laws that take, take up most of the space in Leviticus numbers and Deuteronomy.

Um, It’s hard to read. Uh, I get it. They’re boring. It’s just a lot of lists and regulations and codes and things like that. And they’re all seemingly arbitrary. If we read them today, they don’t make a lot of sense outside of the context that they were written in, but they all serve one broad purpose. Set Israel apart from the world around them.

And there’s the divide. If God’s chosen people is the nation of Israel. That means the rest of the world is not God’s chosen people. The word Gentile, when we say the word Gentile, that comes from the Latin translation of the Greek word that’s used in the New Testament text, which is ethnos, which simply means the nations.

From this point on, Israel is always described as a nation chosen from among the rest of the nations or the Gentiles around them. We can’t miss this. God has always intended to save the whole world, Gentiles included. The purpose of Israel being chosen and set apart was so that they can do what Adam and Eve didn’t do in the garden, which was represent the goodness of God around them, be set apart, obey God’s law, and represent God’s hope to the world, to the wicked nations around them.

Buried amidst the Israelite laws of sacrifice and regulations and dietary prohibitions are specific laws detailing how Israel is going to deal with people from these other nations. What does Israel do when they encounter people who aren’t God’s chosen people? When they encounter Gentiles? There’s actually a lot of laws that explain exactly what they’re supposed to do.

I’ll give you two examples. Numbers 15 verses 14 through 16. When an alien resides with you, Read Gentile there. When a Gentile resides with you or someone else is among you and wants to prepare a food offering as a pleasing aroma to the Lord, he is to do exactly as you do throughout your generations.

The assembly is to have the same statute for both you and the resident alien as a permanent statute throughout your generations. You and the alien will be alike before the Lord. The same law and the same ordinance will apply to both you and the alien who resides with you. Another example in Isaiah 56, you might recognize this from the story of the Ethiopian eunuch, is the prophet Isaiah explaining what the kingdom of God is going to look like.

No foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord should say, the Lord will exclude me from his people. And the eunuch should not say, look, I am a dried up tree. Jump ahead to verse six. As for the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to become his servants, all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it, and who hold firmly to my covenant, I will bring them to my holy mountain and let them rejoice in my house of prayer.

Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be acceptable on my altar, for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations. This is the declaration of the Lord God who gathers the dispersed of Israel. I will gather to them still others besides those already gathered. From the beginning of the biblical story, God has always been working behind the scenes to save Gentiles alongside Israel.

Here are a few examples. Melchizedek the priest. He’s a priest of Yahweh. We’re not told where he comes from. We know he’s not part of God’s people because he goes to Abraham. We have no idea who Melchizedek is, but he’s somewhere outside of God’s family who God has interacted with and saved. In fact, he’s a priest of Yahweh.

Rahab the prostitute, if you’re familiar with that story, is not a follower of Yahweh until she hears and acts faithfully towards God’s people. Abraham was technically a Gentile before he was called out. Ruth, the book of Ruth, is a Moabite woman joined into the family of God and she ends up getting a whole book of the Bible named after her.

God is always meant to save the entire world. God’s mission has always been to use Israel, to bless the other nations. Israel was meant to live separate, to obey the Torah, the law that God had given them, but stay open, receive any foreigner or any Gentile who is willing to follow God, like they are a member of the family.

So you remember Matthew 10, that passage where Jesus sends out his disciples and he tells them not to go to the Gentiles. This is why. Because God’s method has always been to set apart a people for himself, show them what it looks like to follow him, and then bless the world through them. When Jesus sends out the 72, he’s saying, I’m still dealing with Israel.

There’s going to come a time where you’re going to reach the nations, but not yet. Now I’m dealing with Israel. So the story goes, God meant to save the entire world through Israel, but somewhere along the way, Israel lost the plot of the story. And rather than being a beacon of hope to the hostile and wicked world around them, Israel.

fails. They fail by assimilation. So instead of living separate, following the law of God, they give up the law of God for the worship of idols. They start looking like the world around them. They don’t live any more differently than the other nations around them. They start making sacrifices to false gods and engaging in prostitution and all sorts of wicked things that God tells them specifically not to do.

But they also fail by isolation. They abandoned their mission of representing God to the world around them, and they soon make enemies out of the very nations that God has called them to bless. And I know we’re skipping over a lot of the biblical story. There’s a lot of questions about warfare and things like that.

Ask me later. God’s mission has always been to save the world through Israel. Israel gave up on that mission. And you and I are tempted to do the same thing today. We isolate ourselves, maybe we assimilate into the world around us, or we make enemies out of those outside of the church, the very people that God has called us to bless.

By the time we get to Jesus, things between Jews and Gentiles are, um, they’re pretty bad. Because of their disobedience to God, the Jews are basically all but wiped out, exiled and living under the oppression of Gentiles. If you were a person living in Jesus time, If you were walking the streets of Galilee in the first century, uh, you were likely to hear things about the Gentiles that made you, uh, not like them.

It would build on your bias and your prejudice against them. The Gentiles, uh, they were pagans. They worshiped a plethora of gods, a whole bunch of gods. They were dirty. They were morally abhorrent and they were the least deserving of God’s grace. In fact, it was their sin that this promised Messiah was going to deal with.

You’d also hear things about the Jews. You’d hear that the Jews were stuck up, that they were particular, oddly particular about the food that they ate and they were lazy because they demanded a whole day off work every week. There’s a rumor going around at the time that, um, the Jews would even steal all the goodies, the treasure from the pagan temples, uh, because the, the thinking went along like this, uh, the Jews don’t believe that those gods exist.

And so the offerings and sacrifices and treasures that are, uh, given to those gods really aren’t given to anybody because the gods don’t exist. So they would take them for themselves. They would rob the temples and make themselves wealthy. As a rumor, I don’t know if there’s any historical validity to it, but that was something that people at this time believed.

All of this to say, Things between Jews and Gentiles are not good. And this is a story that Peter knows. This is the story that he grows up in. But here’s what happens in Acts chapter 10. Peter sees that because of Jesus, something’s different. So let’s pick up in verse 34. Peter began to speak. Now I truly understand that God doesn’t show favoritism.

But in every nation, the person who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. He sent the message to the Israelites, proclaiming the good news of peace through Jesus Christ. He is Lord of all. You know the events that took place throughout all Judea beginning from Galilee after the baptism that John preached, how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, and how he went about doing good and healing all who were under the tyranny of the devil because God was with him.

We ourselves are witnesses of everything he did in both the Judean country and in Jerusalem, and yet they killed him by hanging him on a tree. God raised up this man on the third day and caused him to be seen, not by all the people, but by us, whom God appointed as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.

He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be the judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him, that through his name, everyone who believes in him, Receives forgiveness of sins. So Peter’s world is turning upside down. He’s prompted by the Spirit to go to this Gentile man’s house, this Roman centurion, Cornelius.

And he goes. And what does he do when he gets there? Did you catch it? He shares the gospel. It’s the fulfillment of everything that God has been promising since Genesis 12 and on, and it’s happening right before Peter’s eyes in the house of a Gentile man. Now, this is the gospel that Peter shares. I think it’s important that we notice this because it has a lot of implications for how we live today.

First, Peter shares that Jesus is king. So when he says in verse 38 that God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, he’s playing off of royalty language again. So to anoint someone was to declare them a king. You would pour oil on their head and say, hey, you’re going to be kings.

What happens to David when he’s anointed king by the prophet Samuel? But notice Jesus isn’t anointed with oil on his head. He’s anointed with the Spirit and with power. And this is where the gospel has to start. Jesus Jesus is the ultimate ruler over all creation. Imagine what this must be like for this Roman Gentile man, Cornelius, to hear that he’s grown up his whole life hearing that, uh, Caesar was the head of the body.

Fun fact, when Paul uses that language in 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 12, uh, that we are the body and that Christ is the head, uh, that’s actually really familiar language, because at that time, if you were a Gentile, you would have been raised to believe that Caesar was the head of the body, and everybody served a purpose in that body, uh, to work to support the head.

Your duty as a citizen of the state was to make the body function and support Caesar. Now, who does Cornelius hear as king? It’s Jesus. Jesus is the one ruling the career, the cosmos. Jesus is the one that Cornelius has to submit his life to. You and I follow Jesus, a king, not just a rabbi. We talk about Jesus as a rabbi a lot, and that’s vitally important.

We follow the teachings of our rabbi, but we also submit to Jesus as our king. But the second thing, Jesus brings a kingdom. Notice what Peter says Jesus came here to do. Save individual people from an eternity in hell from their individual sins? Does Jesus do that? Yes. That’s not what Peter highlights here.

Peter says Jesus came and he went about doing good and healing all who were under the tyranny of the devil. This is our fundamental problem. You and I, as much as we want to follow King Jesus, we are incapable of following King Jesus. We replay the story of the garden every single day, where Adam and Eve were told to live under the rule and reign of God and submit to His authority.

They seize authority for themselves. And we do the exact same thing. But notice what Peter says. We live under the tyranny of the devil. We need rescuing not just from our sins, but also from the world around us. We live at our church. We’ve done teachings on this at length in the past. How by default, when you and I are born, we’re not born naturally following Jesus.

We follow our own desires. We fall prey. We’re victims that we contribute to the wickedness of the world around us, but we are also affected by the wickedness of the world around us. And scripture is clear that Satan has dominion over the world. He’s working to, to pull people and hide the good news of the gospel from them.

And when Jesus comes on earth, he’s not just saving us from our individual sins. He’s doing that, but he’s doing so much more than that. Jesus is taking back his stolen ground. Jesus is restoring creation back to him by establishing a kingdom. Jesus is doing what Israel could not do, save the world from its enemies, sin, Satan, and death.

See, Jesus doesn’t just save us from an eternal life in hell. He does that, but he also does so much more than that. He saves us from hell on earth. from the tyranny of the devil, and he comes to bring healing. So Jesus comes announcing the good news that his rule and his reign has started. That’s the good news that he preaches in Matthew four, when he goes and he spreads the gospel, it’s this, Satan no longer has dominion over this territory.

I’m taking back my ground. I’m ushering in my rule and my reign here on earth. So when you and I accept Jesus, we are brought into this kingdom. We are given a family. We live in this weird overlap between heaven and earth where we work to participate in God’s work here. The death and the resurrection of Jesus is God’s way of putting his stake in the ground.

Sin can’t take us, Satan can’t have us, and death cannot hold us. The third thing. Everyone who repents and believes is a part of this kingdom. Verse 43, the last, uh, verse in this little section here, Peter says, all the prophets, meaning all the prophets in the Old Testament, and Peter, and the apostles who are spreading the good news of the gospel, all of those people testify about him, about Jesus, that through his name, everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins.

So anyone who repents to repent is to acknowledge your sin, to admit that God’s way is better and to restructure your life under the rule and the reign of King Jesus. That’s what it means to repent. Anybody who does that is brought near to God and granted life in his kingdom. Our sins are forgiven.

There’s nothing you can do to out sin the grace of God, anyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish or if you’re a Gentile, which I’m willing to bet is like 90 percent of us here. If you’re ethnically Jewish, that’s great. Come and talk to me afterward, I have a lot of questions. Most of us are Gentiles. And you remember that story in Matthew 15 about Jesus and the Canaanite woman that he calls a dog?

This is the point of that story. Jesus is showing this woman what happens is she’s persistent. Jesus ignores her. She’s persistent. Jesus calls her a dog. She’s persistent. There’s a little bit of wordplay there where Jesus basically says, like, the good meat that’s served to the children, you can’t give that to dogs.

Meaning, I’m here for the house of Israel. That’s the good stuff. These are the children. You’re a dog. And she responds with, yeah, but even the dogs get the scraps that fall off the table. She’s persistent. It’s her faith that saves her, not her ethnicity that keeps her away from God. That’s the point of that story.

When Jesus sees her faith, he rewards her and he heals the woman’s daughter from where he’s at. He doesn’t even go with her. He just says, your faith has healed your daughter. It’s our faith in Jesus, our willingness to submit ourselves to the rule and reign of God that gets us into his kingdom. Now How are we doing?

Are we okay? Just alright? Teachy part is done. Kind of. What does this mean for us? I have three thoughts, and then we’ll close. First thought is this. The gospel story is not centered around you. Paul 2. He says that you were also Gentiles. And he means that ethnically, like there were people again, all of us in this room, we were once far from God, ethnically, not included in the family of Israel, but spiritually, we were once born outside of God’s chosen people.

We were aliens. We were foreigners to the mission and the family of God. But the gospel is so much bigger than that. And for those of us who believe this gospel, that it’s just about you and Jesus, that God saves you as an individual from your personal individual sins, is an incomplete gospel. Because God doesn’t just save you from your sins, God is saving humanity, a people group, who’s willing to submit to him from their sins.

So when you respond to the invitation, when you say that I’m going to believe in Jesus, I’m going to put my faith in Jesus. It’s not just you and Jesus. It’s you and the family of God that God has been setting apart and creating since the beginning of time, you’re joining into the kingdom. You’re brought into a family.

You are adopted is the language that Paul uses later in the new Testament. That means that your core identity is not just as a single follower of Jesus. When you come to church you are gathering with the body of believers, the other family members, members of the kingdom who have given their lives to live under the rule and the reign of Jesus.

You are not saved by yourself and that is such good news. The second thing this means, we too are called to live separate but stay open. So Israel again was meant to live separately. They were given a way of life to live. They were given, uh, mandates and laws that were meant to set them apart from the world around us, but they were meant to do that so that the world around them would be blessed, that they would be a beacon, a salt and light to the world around them that’s overrun by the tyranny and the oppression of the devil, the hostility and the wickedness.

You and I have the exact same mandate today. We are called to live separate. We follow the way of Jesus, not the way of the world. How you live matters. And for those of us who’ve been sold this gospel that says like, hey, it really doesn’t matter. You get a one way ticket to heaven. It doesn’t matter how you live.

Grace covers it all. Do whatever you want because at the end of your life, you’re gonna go to heaven. It doesn’t matter. That’s not how the Bible talks about discipleship. Or salvation. When, when Jesus says he is the way, the truth, and the life, he’s making a claim that he is objective truth. Yes, but he’s also saying, I am the way.

These early Christians were called followers of the way. When we commit to following Jesus, we commit to living like Jesus. We follow the lifestyle of Jesus, a lifestyle that doesn’t look like the world around us, but like Israel, our obedience to the way of Jesus is not for our own good. We don’t participate in these practices just to make ourselves feel better.

We participate in these practices for the good of the world around us. We live separate and we stay open. Like Peter and the Jews around Judea, we too have biases. We talked about this all last week. Our default, every human being is born with this innate default, this, this movement towards people who look like us, who think like us, who act like us, who come from our same background, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, our same culture.

Our natural default is always to draw those people near to us and to push others out. Luke wants to hammer this point home. We didn’t read it, but the rest of the chapter, the first half of the chapter 11, Luke tells this same exact story again. So after, uh, uh, Peter explains the gospel, Cornelius and his whole household get saved and they get baptized, which is really exciting, and then Peter goes on and he’s confronted by Jewish people that say, Hey, weren’t you just at a Gentile’s house?

What are you doing over there? And Peter tells this entire story again from start to finish, including Cornelius’s dream and everything that he just said. If you’re reading carefully, uh, you notice that what Luke has done is he’s told this account three times now. Luke wants to hammer this idea home. To be a follower of Jesus is to be open to any and all people who repent from their former way of living and thinking and redirect their devotion and their allegiance to King Jesus.

No matter what they’ve done, No matter what they look like, no matter where they stand on the political spectrum, we are open to anybody who’s willing to submit their lives to King Jesus. The third final thought before we close is this. You cannot be a passive participant in the kingdom. See, Jesus ends his time here on earth with a mandate.

Matthew 28. It’s a famous line that all of us know, go and make disciples of all nations. And I can’t help but take note as I read through the book of Acts, the urgency and the action that the early church had. There was a deep longing and desire to bring others into their community, a longing, if I’m honest, that I’ve noticed the church at large has lost.

Many of us, not all of us, many of us repeat the sins of Israel. We’ve made enemies out of the very people that God has called us to reach. To be a member of the kingdom is to be an active member of the kingdom. To be joined to the family of God, to follow Jesus, is to cultivate a desire because of your love for God that overflows to love for others.

A desire that brings others into the family that God is creating. For some of you this looks like this. Going across the world. You want to actually go to the nations. You want to go to the Gentiles. For some of you, God is calling you to do that. To participate in what he’s already doing there. Honestly, the more I read of the biblical story, the more I’m convinced that there is nowhere in the world that God isn’t already active.

So when we go to the nations, when we take these mission trips across the world, we aren’t bringing God to lost pagan people where he currently is absent. God is there. God is doing a work. We see that throughout scripture. God is always calling people to himself. When we go to the nations, we are participating, joining God in what he’s already doing there for others of you.

It’s not going to the nations. It’s just going across the street to your pagan neighbors, to the people that God has put you in a neighborhood to bless specifically with the practice of hospitality. Even a step below that, maybe God isn’t calling you to do either of those things. Maybe there’s more little baby steps you need to take, like just beginning the practices.

All these things that we talk about at our church, practicing Sabbath and simplicity and scripture and peacemaking. Maybe you have yet to do any of it, and that’s okay. There’s no shame. This is all invitational. But let me be honest, you’re likely going to stagnate in your faith until you start following the way of Jesus.

And what’s gonna happen, the more you give your life to Jesus, The more Jesus is going to increase your love for others, maybe that’s the next step for you. Maybe that’s your takeaway from this passage next. Or maybe it’s even more simple, but much more difficult. Maybe the way you respond to this text is by actually doing what Peter had to do, which is confront your own biases and your own prejudice.

Maybe you need to actually deal with the people in your life that you don’t like. Those that you would consider resident aliens. Foreigners in our land. Strangers. Sinners. Outcasts. Eunuchs. Maybe that’s the invitation. Which again, all of us have biases. That’s what Acts is about here. God is saving the world.

God is, we’re in the middle of the story. Us here at Passion Creek Church, we exist for the purpose that God has put us here for, which is to make our city a better place by bringing others into the family of God. And so as we close, um, I just want to, I want to create space for us to respond to this. Um, we respond in a lot of different ways.

So I’m gonna invite the band. You guys can come on up. And I’m gonna invite everyone else, if you’re willing and able, would you stand as we prepare for worship? And as you stand, uh, I’m gonna invite us to, to close our eyes. And we’re going to pray and just create a space to, again, to respond to God and the ways that he’s, he’s reaching and speaking to us individually.

So I invite you now close your eyes and, and I just want to pray this way.

Would you come Holy Spirit?