ENGAGE
I want to begin this morning by asking you to fill in the blanks in the two statements at the top of your sermon outline. Just write down the first thing that comes to mind and not what you think I want you to write down.
In order to be a “good Christian” you must:
In order to be a “good Christian” you must not:
TENSION
If all of you were totally honest with what you wrote down, there are probably a lot of different answers out there. And those answers are influenced to a large degree by your upbringing and your church background.
For instance, if you’ve been a part of a church that emphasized tithing, you might have written down that you must tithe in order to be a “good Christian”.
If you grew up in a home where you were abused by an alcoholic parent, you night have written down that in order to be a “good Christian” you must not drink.
There is nothing inherently wrong with those kinds of convictions. In fact, if God has developed those kinds of convictions in your life, you really should not violate them until God changes them. The Bible is clear that if we do something that violates our conscience then that becomes sin for us.
But when we take our personal preferences and convictions and try to impose them on others, both inside and outside the body of Christ, we often put up barriers that impede our ability to bring the kingdom of God near to others.
TRUTH
And that is exactly what happened in the early church. So this week as we wrap up our series of nine messages from the book of Acts, we’re going to see what we can learn from the way the leaders handled that issue.
We left off at the end of Acts 13 last week, with Paul and Barnabas in Iconium. They spoke boldly there for some time, even in the face of tremendous persecution, But when there was an attempt to stone them, they left and went to Lystra and Derbe and continued to preach the good news of Jesus. [Show map]
But eventually Jews from Pisdian Antioch and Iconium came there to Lystra and stirred up the people and this time they actually did stone Paul. But failing to be deterred, Paul just went on to Derbe and continued to strengthen the disciples there. After that Paul and Barnabas returned to Syrian Antioch to the church that had first sent them out on their missionary journey.
That brings us to the beginning of Acts 15
[Read Acts 15:1-2]
A group called the Judaizers had come from Jerusalem and were teaching that no one could become a Christian unless they first became a Jew and were circumcised according to the Jewish Law. You can imagine the problems that this was causing in the church there in Antioch, which consisted almost entirely of Gentiles. I have to believe that there weren’t too many men who were eager to sign up for the new members’ class if that was going to be a requirement for membership.
After debating the issue with those men, Paul and Barnabas return to Jerusalem to bring the issue before the apostles and the elders in what is usually referred to as the Jerusalem Council.
There are two important questions that this group of apostles and elders must address here:
1. Is there anything else required for salvation other than faith in Jesus alone?
2. How are we supposed to fellowship with each other if one group sees something as a right and the other group considers it to be defiling?
After what was undoubtedly some vigorous and contentious debate, several of the church leaders responded. The first to speak was Peter. He addresses the answer to the first question about what is required for salvation.
[Read Acts 15:7-11]
Peter is referring back to his encounter with Cornelius that we looked at a couple weeks ago in chapter 10. And the argument he makes goes something like this:
“When I went to the house of Cornelius and shared the gospel with the Gentiles who were gathered there, none of them were circumcised. And I didn’t make Cornelius take the ham out of the oven or quit eating bacon with his eggs. I just preached the good news of the death and resurrection of Jesus and when they responded in faith and put their trust in Jesus, the Holy Spirit came upon them with power in the same He has done for all of us Jews.”
The second argument that he makes is that these Jews were trying to place a burden on the Gentiles that they hadn’t been able to bear themselves. The Law had been given to the Jews not as a way for them to be saved, but rather to show them that they needed someone to save them. He reminds them that the point of the gospel is that God did for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves through His Son, Jesus.
So the answer to the first question is a firm “no”. For both Jews and Gentiles there is nothing else required for salvation other than faith in Jesus alone.
After Peter finishes, Paul and Barnabas share more about what God has been doing among the Gentiles. When they finish speaking, James, the half-brother of Jesus and the leader of the church in Jerusalem, speaks. He is going to answer the first question about salvation, but he is also going to address the second question about how two such disparate groups can have fellowship.
[Read Acts 15:13-21]
James essentially gives the same answer to the first question that Peter had given and which Paul and Barnabas had confirmed. But he approaches it from a different perspective. He quotes the Old Testament prophets like Amos, Jeremiah, Isaiah and Daniel to prove that God always intended to make a new people from all tribes, tongues, and nations who would not be identified by their ethnic background or their religion, but rather by their common faith. And since that was God’s plan from the beginning, there was no reason to ask the Gentiles to become Jews.
But that still didn’t take care of the problem of how the Jews and Gentiles were going to be able to fellowship within the body of Christ. That is where verses 19-20 come in. Let’s begin with the overall principle first, and then we’ll talk about how the solution that James suggests supports that idea:
The kingdom of God is brought near to others
when I gladly lay down my rights for the good of others
In order for us to get to the heart of the matter here, we need to talk about the two major aspects of the Jewish Law.
• The “moral” law, which is primarily expressed in the Ten Commandments, provides general moral principles that apply to all people at all times. Therefore, it was not done away with through Jesus. In fact, you will find that Jesus and the New Testament writers affirm nearly all of the moral law, so it is still binding on us as New Testament Christians.
• The “ritual” or “ceremonial” law was the part of the law given to the people of Israel that was for a particular people at a particular time in order to help them live lives that were distinct from the surrounding nations. Among those ritual laws were the laws concerning sacrifices, as well as the ones specifically addressed by James here – circumcision and laws regarding eating meat sacrificed to idols or meat from animals that had been strangled or which had not had their blood drained from their bodies. By the way, just as a quick side note, the prohibition against eating blood has nothing to do with eating your steak rare or medium rare.
James suggests just three restrictions on the Gentiles here:
• Abstain from things polluted by idols
• Abstain from sexual immorality
• Abstain from eating blood – the prohibition against eating a strangled animal is really part of that since when an animal was strangled it wasn’t possible to drain its blood from the body.
So why these three? That’s a question we talked about for a while on Monday morning.
Let’s deal first with sexual immorality. The laws about sexual immorality were part of the “moral” law. As we’ve already pointed out, there was no attempt by either Jesus or the early church leaders to remove the requirement to adhere to that part of the law. So why does James pick this one and not murder, or stealing, or adultery? More than likely that was because the Gentile culture of the day was a lot like our culture in which sexual immorality was just accepted as the “norm”. So that was the one aspect of the moral law that was being openly rebelled against by the Gentiles and therefore the one that was most offensive to the Jews.
The other restrictions suggested by James all dealt with the “ritual” or “ceremonial” law. For the Jews eating meat that had been offered to idols or an animal that had been strangled or eating meat from which the blood had not been drained would have all been defiling to them. So James is essentially saying to the Gentiles is that they shouldn’t make it difficult for the Jews to have fellowship by engaging in a practice that the Jews considered defiling, even if they weren’t bound by the same restrictions and had a “right” to do that themselves.
Later, when he writes his letter to the church in Rome, Paul is going to address that same issue again in chapter 14. Perhaps he was thinking back to his experience here in Jerusalem, when he encouraged the believers in Rome to “pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding” (Romans 14: 19) by not putting a stumbling block in the way of a brother.
James also makes it clear that the Jews were not to hold the Gentiles to the ritual law when it came to the practice of circumcision. That was a practice that was just as offensive to the Gentiles as eating the wrong kind of meat was to the Jews. So James calls on both parties to lay down some of their rights for the good of the other party.
After James finished speaking the apostles and elders penned a letter that outlined their decision and sent it back to the church in Antioch with Paul and Barnabas and two other men. With that letter the peace was restored there in the church and Paul and Barnabas and the others were able to continue their work of strengthening the disciples.
The kingdom of God is brought near to others
when I gladly lay down my rights for the good of others
APPLICATION
HOW TO LAY DOWN MY RIGHTS FOR THE GOOD OF OTHERS
1. Be “re-gospeled” daily
I don’t have to tell you that we live in a culture in which people have a tendency to hang on to their “rights”. While I am grateful that we live in a country where we do have many rights, it sure seems to me that this whole emphasis on the rights of individuals and groups has increasingly divided us as a people. Much of this insistence on “my rights” grows out of a sense of entitlement and the idea that I deserve certain things in my life. And unfortunately that mindset has overflowed into the church to at least some degree.
I’m not sure exactly what the antidote to that problem is in our culture, but in the church the remedy is for each one of us to be “re-gospeled” each day. Some of you are probably asking if that is even a real word. Not surprisingly my spell checker flagged the word “re-gospeled” but I know it’s a real word because I stole it from a sermon from Matt Chandler.
Here is what I mean by that word. Every day of our lives we need to remind ourselves of what God has done for us personally through the gospel. We need to be reminded that we are nothing more than sinners who have been brought near to God, not by anything we have done, but solely by the grace of God, expressed to us through the sacrifice of His Son, Jesus. We need to be reminded that we aren’t “owed” anything by God or by the church.
That is essentially what Peter and James had to remind both the Judaizers and the Gentile Christians there in Jerusalem. Both groups needed to be “re-gospeled” and to be reminded that neither group was superior to the other because they had all come to be part of the same body in the same way – through faith in Jesus alone. Therefore, neither group had any right to insist that the church do things “their way”.
The gospel is the great equalizer because it puts every single one of us on the same footing before God regardless of our race, our religious background, our wealth, our education or any other factor that might tend to otherwise divide us. And when I remind myself each day of what God has done for me through the gospel, I’m a lot less likely to insist that the church do things my way and a lot more likely to lay down my perceived rights.
2. Don’t let my personal preferences and convictions become a burden to others
We all have personal preferences and convictions and there is nothing inherently wrong with that. In fact, our convictions can be a really good thing and help us live a godly life. But they become a problem when we try to insist that others conform to them.
That is what was going on there in Antioch. There was nothing wrong with the Jews following their own beliefs and convictions and being circumcised or refraining from eating certain kinds of meat. The problem came about when they insisted that the Gentiles, who did not share those same beliefs, also follow those same rules. And by doing that they put up an unneeded barrier and burden that prevented many of those Gentiles from doing what was more important – putting their faith in Jesus.
Far too often in the church, we still have unnecessary conflict because people want to hold on to their own personal preferences about things like the kind of music they like, the volume of the music, whether the lights should be bright or dim or the color of the carpet or the paint on the walls. And when we insist that the church follow our own personal preferences we place an unneeded burden on the church, its leaders and the other people in the body.
The same thing can be true with our own convictions. There are a lot of issues that aren’t addressed specifically in the Bible where we have the liberty to develop our own convictions. But unfortunately, in a lot of cases, people have laid a burden on others by insisting that they hold to those same convictions. That often takes the form of the two statements we began with this morning:
In order to be a “good Christian” you must:
In order to be a “good Christian” you must not:
Let me give you a few examples of where I’ve seen this firsthand:
• Things like smoking or drinking alcoholic beverages. Smoking is never addressed in the Bible and while drunkenness is a sin, and there are warnings about misusing alcohol, there is no prohibition against drinking alcoholic beverages in the Bible.
• Where to send your kids to school. On one hand I have heard people claim that no Christian should ever send their kids to a public school and on the other hand I have heard others claim that home schooling is wrong.
• Mothers who work outside the home. Again, there is nothing in the Bible that either prohibits mothers from working outside the home or requires them to do so. I’ve shared with you before that Mary and I had some personal convictions about the importance of her being home with the kids while they were young. But we never tried to impose those personal convictions on others.
• Politics. I have actually seen some people claim that it’s impossible to be a Democrat and be a good Christian and I’ve seen others claim that if you’re a Republican you’re heartless and therefore you can’t be a good Christian.
These are all examples of areas where having some personal convictions that are based on Biblical principles is probably really helpful in living a godly life. But when we try to take those personal convictions and insist that others follow them, then we are needlessly placing burdens on them.
3. Live as covenant people
There is a difference between a contract and a covenant. While I could give you all kinds of legal definitions of a contract, in its simplest form a contract is simply, “if you do this for me, I will do this for you.” We enter into contracts all the time in our lives:
• Every time I buy goods or services, I enter into a contract. “I will give you this amount of money and in return you will give me some product or perform some service on my behalf”.
• Some of you parents enter into a contract with your kids. “If you finish your homework, then I will give you the password for the wifi.”
• We even enter into contracts with God sometimes. “God, if you make sure that I get this new job, then I’ll start tithing.”
Unfortunately, we often bring that kind of a contract mindset into the church. And that can play itself out in a number of ways:
• “If the church will just do this for me, then here is what I’ll do for the church.”
• “If that other person will just submit to my wishes this time, then I will submit to his or her wishes the next time.”
A covenant, on the other hand, is based on relationship rather than obligation. A covenant says, “Here is who I will become for your sake.” We certainly see that in the covenants that God has made with His people. In every one of those covenants, God says, “Here are my promises of what I’m going to do for your benefit.
Every good marriage is a covenant, not a contract. In fact, in our wedding vows, we acknowledge that things might very well go south in our lives – “for better or worse”, for “richer or poorer”, “in sickness and in health”. But we promise each other that if that happens, we are still committed to doing what is in the best interest of the other person.
Every good church also operates on the basis of covenant. When the people are committed to doing what is in the best interest of the body as a whole, even when the church leaders make mistakes, or someone hurts them or they don’t get their way, then the church can flourish and the gospel advances and the kingdom of God is brought near to others.
Today is the last in this series of messages from the book of Acts titled “Gathered to Go”. For nine weeks now we’ve been talking about how Jesus gathered people together into the church, not just for their own benefit, but for the purpose of taking the kingdom of God and bringing it closer to those outside the church. So I want to take a moment to summarize what we’ve learned over this last nine weeks:
The kingdom of God is brought near to others when:
1. I become a witness for Jesus
2. I live in genuine community
3. I am real with God and with others
4. I am part of the solution
5. I reach my one
6. I take a risk for the sake of the kingdom
7. I allow Jesus to break down my prejudices
8. I press on when problems press in
9. I gladly lay down my rights for the good of others
For the last nine weeks, we’ve been gathering for the purpose of being equipped to go, so next week we’re going to actually go and put into practice what we’ve been learning by actually bringing the kingdom near to those outside of our body. Although perhaps I haven’t done as good of a job as I could have explaining it, this has been the plan from the very beginning of this series. And it is something that we are planning to build into our church calendar on a regular basis in the future to help remind us that the church is the only community that exists primarily for the benefit of those who are not yet members.
ACTION
So next week, rather than meet here at this building, we are going to meet at Legacy Traditional School so that we can serve them. We are not, as some of you may be thinking, cancelling our worship services next week. We are merely moving them to another location.
Worship is more than just singing songs, or listening to a sermon. The Bible is clear that worship is to characterize every area of our lives – our jobs, our homes, our relationship – and not just what we do when we get together on Sunday mornings. One of the places we see that clearly is in this passage from the book of Hebrews:
Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.
(Hebrews 13:15–16 ESV)
In his book, The Air I Breathe, Pastor Louie Giglio comments on this passage:
Our continual sacrifice of praise our all-the-time expression of worship to God – takes two primary shapes. It’s made up of words and deeds…when we care for someone else the passage reminds us, then “God is pleased.” It’s a lot easier to sing a song than it is to stop and touch the broken. It’s a lot less taxing to go to church than to take “church” to your everyday life and to the world.
Next week, we have an opportunity to worship together by “doing good” and sharing some of the resources that God has entrusted to us with others. And I would submit to you that is just as much worship as what we’ve done here this morning.
When I asked the principal what we could do that would best serve them as a school, she asked if we could paint a stripe in their gym. I’ll be real honest I didn’t expect that answer, and that’s not what my preference would have been. And I know that there are some of you who either don’t want to or can’t paint and that’s fine. But I hope that you’ll still come and be a part of our worship next week anyway.
I have to tell you that for me some of the best worship I’ve ever engaged in has occurred when I’ve served alongside of you – whether that has been giving out toys at the Gospel Rescue Mission Christmas party or at one of our work days here at TFC. There are a number of you in this room this morning that I’ve gotten to know much better by serving alongside of you. So even if all you do next week is to come and watch and encourage those who are painting and take the time to get to know others better, you can be an integral part of our worship time.
INSPIRATION
Last fall when our Elders got together to pray about and discuss where we most needed to grow as a church, we all agreed that as a church we need to develop more of an outward focus. The messages from the last nine weeks have been just one part of that emphasis. I think that our 24 Hours of Prayer was also a big help there. By the way, we’re going to do that again the weekend before Easter and I encourage you to sign up to be a part of that.
And I’m really encouraged by what I see. I believe that God is beginning to help us all be much more outward focused and I’m excited to see how He is going to use us all to help bring His kingdom near to others.
