Call Us Christians
Notes
Transcript
Now the apostles and the brothers who were throughout Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcision party criticized him, saying, “You went to uncircumcised men and ate with them.” But Peter began and explained it to them in order: “I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision, something like a great sheet descending, being let down from heaven by its four corners, and it came down to me. Looking at it closely, I observed animals and beasts of prey and reptiles and birds of the air. And I heard a voice saying to me, ‘Rise, Peter; kill and eat.’ But I said, ‘By no means, Lord; for nothing common or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ But the voice answered a second time from heaven, ‘What God has made clean, do not call common.’ This happened three times, and all was drawn up again into heaven. And behold, at that very moment three men arrived at the house in which we were, sent to me from Caesarea. And the Spirit told me to go with them, making no distinction. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man’s house. And he told us how he had seen the angel stand in his house and say, ‘Send to Joppa and bring Simon who is called Peter; he will declare to you a message by which you will be saved, you and all your household.’ As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell on them just as on us at the beginning. And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ If then God gave the same gift to them as he gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could stand in God’s way?” When they heard these things they fell silent. And they glorified God, saying, “Then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance that leads to life.”
Now those who were scattered because of the persecution that arose over Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to no one except Jews. But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene, who on coming to Antioch spoke to the Hellenists also, preaching the Lord Jesus. And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number who believed turned to the Lord. The report of this came to the ears of the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch. When he came and saw the grace of God, he was glad, and he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose, for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. And a great many people were added to the Lord. So Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul, and when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. For a whole year they met with the church and taught a great many people. And in Antioch the disciples were first called Christians.
Now in these days prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch. And one of them named Agabus stood up and foretold by the Spirit that there would be a great famine over all the world (this took place in the days of Claudius). So the disciples determined, every one according to his ability, to send relief to the brothers living in Judea. And they did so, sending it to the elders by the hand of Barnabas and Saul.
Have you guys ever done something wrong or maybe broken something, but when your parents or a teacher asked you about it, you said someone else did it? We call that blaming; we say it’s their fault. Why would we do that? Usually because we’re afraid of getting in trouble. When I was little, if I knocked something off a shelf or a table and it broke on the floor, I didn’t want my parents to be mad at me. The easiest thing to do was to blame my brother.
That’s not something that just kids do, but even young people and adults do that. We make excuses for why our school homework didn’t get done, when we had plenty of time and resources to do it. If something doesn’t go the way we want it to at work, we can try to make excuses that it’s our fault—someone else didn’t do their job. Usually when we blame someone else and don’t take responsibility, we’re lying. That’s not a good thing; we have to be careful and tell the truth.
So sometimes we try to pin things on others, but we also have to be careful that we don’t take too much credit. In our passage today, a group of people are going to tell Peter they don’t like what he was doing and that he’s wrong for doing it—they criticized him. Peter could have just said, “I know I’m right. It doesn’t matter what you think.” He could have tried to take credit.
But what we’ll find is that Peter tells them what God did. It’s not about him, it’s that God had showed him it was okay and good to do what he did. He was telling them it was okay for them to be around other people who were different from them, because God said this. That was the truth, and we can call that humility. Humility is about serving, putting them before us.
Just like we’re not supposed to lie, we’re to tell the truth, we’re also called to be humble and serve, not to brag or boast about ourselves. It can feel good to do something well, right? If a quarterback throws a game-winning touchdown or a basketball player hits a game-winning buzzer-beater, usually the whole team, sometimes even the fans, get around them and lift them up and treat them like a hero. That person could take all that happiness and pride and say, “Yep, we won because of me.” But a humble player would say, “It took our whole team playing how we did the whole game, not just me at the end to win that game.” That would be humbly telling the truth.
I want you guys to think about and put that into practice this week. If you’ve done something wrong, don’t lie and blame someone else, tell the truth. But also if something goes really well and someone helped you, tell the truth and let them be thanked and honored too.
The past couple weeks we’ve followed the account of what happened at Cornelius’ house. Peter shared the good news of Jesus, and he witnessed faith in Gentiles. We’re not talking about a generic knowledge-type faith, but they were filled with the Holy Spirit. So, for the third time, we’re going to hear the details of all that took place, a pivotal series of moments that led believers to understand God’s desire, it wasn’t original to Peter, God’s desire for unity among all his people.
From there, we’re also hear how the gospel spread. Back in Acts 2, we read about a crowd that came to hear those who had been filled with the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. The crowd was people from all different parts of the ancient world who had come to Jerusalem. Among the places mentioned, some were north up and around the bend of the Mediterranean Sea as well as south and west into northern Africa. That’s where the places we read about today were located.
You can see them on the map. The red area is where we’ve been, in and around Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. The black star is the region just to the north, right on the coastline, called Phoenicia. The yellow star is the island of Cyprus. The green star is the city of Antioch. We’re also going to hear about some believers coming from Cyrene, that’s the purple star hundreds of miles to the west on the north coast of Africa. The last place added in this passage is Tarsus, the pink star just northwest of Antioch. We know there were believers already scattered around the ancient world, but now we have record of the gospel being intentionally taken to these places.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, each month in the CRC’s Banner magazine, editor-in-chief Chong has an editorial towards the beginning. In the most recent issue, he writes about “‘How’ Matters.” This is some of the article, “One of the things I learned from 15 years of campus ministry is that ‘how’ matters. How we carry out good intentions to reach good ends makes a difference. Why and what we do matters, yes, but how we do it also matters to God…I have…heard from unbelievers who complain about the evangelism methods of Christians on campus. Some Christians were too aggressive. Many unbelievers felt like objects or targets of Christian evangelism. Some Christians came across as ‘know-it-all jerks’ because they lacked intellectual humility, refusing to ever admit ignorance or mistakes. These young unbelievers were turned off less by Christianity’s message but more by its messengers. ‘How’ matters in evangelism...”
He writes more, but this is how it concludes, “I have observed Christians wrongly stereotyping their opponents’ viewpoints in order to disparage them. I have read Christians citing false or misleading information in defense of their positions. Some even resort to name-calling and mockery when they run out of good, solid arguments. These are not God-honoring, neighbor-loving, or truth-seeking ways of engaging conflict. Even if we believe our cause is just and true and our goals noble and godly, we cannot justify that any method will do as long as it brings ‘success.’ The end does not justify the means. ‘How’ still matters to God. We can do better, trusting in God to honor our faithfulness in the how.”
We begin this morning by taking up this challenge: “How” believers go about life, including when there are disagreements and differences, matters. One of the most important parts of life is relationships. We develop relationships, through love, for marriage, for family, for friendship. We develop them in our work, our careers, or for business. We have relationships with one another as Christians, with our congregation, and with other congregations. We also have relationships, whether we recognize them or not, with unbelievers. How we live out our faith matters not just in some of these relationships, but in all of them. Chong is right, as he said in the beginning, “Why and what we do matters,” the message, the reason behind action or speech matters, “but how we do it also matters,” and it matters not just to us; “it also matters to God.”
Too often, people claim, and this may include some or many of us, to have no filter. “It’s just part of my personality to blurt out whatever comes to mind. That’s who I am, people just have to deal with it.” Yet most of us can discipline ourselves. Over time, all of us can learn and grow in the exercises of being “quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry.” We can think more about what we want to say or do and how we should present ourselves. We can be more aware, “If I do this…” or, “If I say that, will I come off as aggressive and arrogant or as caring and humble? Will we present ourselves in a way that invites openness and warmth and vulnerability or do we close ourselves to those who are different from us?” A harsh-sounding word of discipline has its place. Critique or criticism isn’t always a bad thing, but do we share any grace in it?
Notice what happened in our passage—a criticizing process that ended up requiring a change. Peter had been with Cornelius and his guests about 60-70 miles away from Jerusalem. That seems far enough, at least in my mind, that those in Jerusalem would have to wait for him to return to give a report. Peter had been gone for a bit. Chapter 9 told us he was traveling the country, he visited Lydda, he went to Joppa, and then to Caesarea. Now he’s come back to Jerusalem. What was his reception like?
Evidently even without telephones or news broadcasts or any type of social media messaging, word got around back then. “The apostles and the brothers throughout Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him and said, “You went into the house of uncircumcised men and ate with them.” The tone seems to have been one of “How dare you? You can’t do that!” As I’ve mentioned before, based on what they understood, how they were interpreting the law, this was a problem. However, they didn’t ask Peter to first explain what he had done, help them to understand before they drew their conclusions. No, they jumped right to the accusation.
Yet Peter rationally explained what had happened. He had done this only because God had revealed it was okay for him, and for all God-fearing Jews to accept their God-fearing Gentile neighbors, and “who was [he] to think that he could oppose God?” What happened after he told them the truth? A dramatic change of heart and of conviction, “They had no further objections and praised God, saying, ‘So then, God has granted even the Gentiles repentance unto life.’”
This was a major change—there’s no doubt about it. Major changes require understanding, require time for accepting, require adjustment and certainly grace. And yet having heard the truth from Peter’s mouth, these brothers in the faith didn’t say, “Well, fine. If God says we must accept them, then we’ll accept them, but it won’t be easy.” No, they praised God that he had done this among them, that he was welcoming all who would believe into forgiveness and life.
There are all sorts of differences among Christians today, among churches and denominations—how faith is lived out, how worship is done, where people gather, what programs or what ministries they commit to. As we consider our Reformed confessions, we know the theology in them is not the same theology—the same understanding of God and how he works—that other Christians hold to. I’m not saying that anything that anyone stamps the word “Christian” on is automatically truth and must be accepted and God should be praised for. Certainly not! We need to have Scripture and Spirit-guided discernment. We need to watch out for sin and false teaching and false teachers. We need to seek God’s truth.
But there are times when in our seeking truth, especially amid disagreement, difference, or division, we come all too quickly without any grace or listening. There is a bit of a prideful desire that seems to run through the history of Christians by which telling others they’re wrong makes us feel closer to God. Brothers and sisters, would we be willing to remember how we live and how we seek to instruct and disciple others matters. Anger and slander and rejection without any grace-filled consideration is not pleasing to God. Rebuke, if done righteously, is meant for repentance. Sometimes in our zeal, we can be wrong—zeal for tradition does not always mean supported by the Bible. Differences among believers must draw us to seek what brings God true glory.
We turn our attention now to the second half of this passage, which brings us to understand a new identity. Finally, more important than being Jews and Gentiles, people who believe and turn to the Lord are Christians. The term “Christian,” is so familiar to so many of us, that it can be hard to believe there was a time when it was not. But it has an origin, and it was here in this city where Barnabas and Saul were doing ministry together among great numbers of people.
There is some debate if “Christians” was a name that those who turned to the Lord gave themselves or if it was given to them. It’s possible as a note in the NIV Study Bible puts forth that it was “invented by enemies as a term of reproach.” Some scholars and historians believe it was kind of a sneer, a ridicule, to call these people who were following this dead Jesus’ teachings, who they believed was the Christ. Whether that’s where its roots lie, or it is something that the church proudly described themselves with first, the term has stuck.
To be a Christian was a new identity. It was more important than any other identifier that a person might have. Are you a Jew first? No, I’m a Christian. Are you a Greek first? No, I’m a Christian. For us today, are you an American first? No, I’m a Christian. What did that entail? Let’s look at what we find here. Verses 20 and 21, in order to be a Christian, you must have been told “the good news about the Lord Jesus,” and not just heard, but have “believed and turned to the Lord.” Among Christians, verse 23 tells us there is visible “evidence of the grace of God;” these people lived noticeably different, you could see the mercy and love of God change them. Christians were also a teachable people—verse 23, they were “encouraged…to remain true to the Lord with all their hearts,” and verse 26 tells us how Barnabas and Saul “taught” them. Fourth, to go back to something we heard earlier in the book of Acts, verse 29 says they provided help for each other, not only near, but farther away, too.
Maybe this doesn’t seem too striking, maybe it seems familiar, but we’re talking about total lifestyle change. To go from no faith or faith in other gods to believing only in the one true God through his Son Jesus—is a totally different life. To have evidence of God’s grace working in your life, changing your personality and actions and motives, total life change. Having a willingness to learn and grow and remain true—obedience to what you’ve learned—completely different life. To not be selfish, to give to people who you don’t know, because they’re part of the body of believers that you identify with—you’ve bought into the church.
If you confess yourself to be a Christian, to be a believer in Jesus, are these things that are part of a biblical model or example of a Christian present in your life? This is the lifestyle change that happens. Why does a person change? The Heidelberg Catechism captures that in question and answer 32. I’ll read the question, if you would please join me on the answer: But why are you called a Christian? Because by faith I am a member of Christ and so I share in his anointing. I am anointed to confess his name, to present myself to him as a living sacrifice of thanks, to strive with a free conscience against sin and the devil in this life, and afterward to reign with Christ over all creation for eternity.
The reason why any person believes and turns to God, why they evidence grace, why they would remain true to the Lord wholeheartedly and be taught, why they provide for each other is because of who they are connected to. The rationale behind all these lifestyle changes in Acts 11, is because of the change summarized by the Catechism—by faith, we have understood and claimed our belonging to Christ. We are anointed to confess his name, to be a thank offering for him, to strive against sin because he’s against sin, and we look forward to reigning with him in eternal life.
The church was growing, and now we see evidence of it spreading. It didn’t spread just because people shared it, it spread because God’s Spirit was at work in and among the people who were willing to share and who were hearing it.
Brothers and sisters, as you consider your own faith, as you consider what is true, and what being saved by Jesus means, does this resonate? Does it make sense, and does it apply in your life? Times have changed and we live in a much different place, but the hope of all Christians and the call for all Christians remains the same. Hear the words of Psalm 37 verses 3 through 6 as we close, “Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture. Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this: He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn, the justice of your cause like the noonday sun.” Amen.