Tag Archive | gentiles

Acts 15 – is it all a show ?

Sep26

Good morning y’all. Today we are studying acts 15.

Be blessed 🙂

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I was particularly interested in verse 8. God knows people’s hearts. Nothing is hidden from Him. We can pretend and lie to man and ourselves but we can’t pretend to God. Bible says in Hebrews 4:13 that nothing is hidden from God….

The psalmist hit the nail on the head in Psalm 139 when he said there is no where to hide from God.

God sees our motives and knows when we are genuine or not. He won’t accept any form of lip service or show from us and that’s why in the book of John, He (Jesus) tells us that the father seeks those who would worship Him in spirit and in truth.

The Pharisees in our chapter today where focusing on the outward righteousness. To them they believed the gentiles can’t be christians unless they have fulfilled all the religious rites. Not that the Pharisees in question where doing the rites anyway to please God. They were doing it more for a show off, for people to see them and think they are all that and very holy people. No wonder Jesus gave them a good telling off in Matthew 15:2-9

“Why do your disciples disobey our age-old tradition? For they ignore our tradition of ceremonial hand washing before they eat.” Jesus replied, “And why do you, by your traditions, violate the direct commandments of God?  You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you, for he wrote, ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship is a farce, for they teach man-made ideas as commands from God.’ ” (Matthew 15:2-3, 7-9 NLT )

They tried to get the Gentile to also focus on the outward. They wanted to put the burden of the law upon them.

God is not all about you spending time on the outward. Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying we shouldn’t observe whatever outward ritual but the key thing is the intent of our heart. What’s our motive when we get on the stage to sing? What’s our motive when we serve at church, when we are present at every activity? Are we doing it so we can get the praise of men, so they can see us and be like, ‘Wow! She’s on fire for God!’ If that’s why we do what we do, then we need to go back to God and repent.

Paul nicely and politely put them back in their place. He explained to them (in verses 8 – 11) that the gentiles had a genuine love for God and God approved them by filling them with the Holy Spirit. This qualifies them!!!

“God knows people’s hearts, and he confirmed that he accepts Gentiles by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as He did to us. He made no distinction between us and them, for He cleansed their hearts through faith. So why are you now challenging God by burdening the Gentile believers with a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors were able to bear? We believe that we are all saved the same way, by the undeserved grace of the Lord Jesus.” (Acts of the Apostles 15:8-11 NLT )

That’s the goal of the law to put a burden on the people. Thank God we are saved by grace and not by the law. The law in its own doesn’t have power to save us. If it could, then there would have been no reason for Jesus.

I pray God will remove every idol from our lives that’s standing in our way of giving him true worship, in Jesus’ Name. Amen

Thanks for joining today. Pls feel free to share your thoughts on the chapter.

Have a blessed weekend 🙂

***With God all things are possible***

Acts 10 & 11 – New way of thinking…

Sep21

Good evening y’all. Today we are studying acts 10 and 11.

Be blessed 🙂

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Prayer is an important part of our lives as Christians.  I once heard a preacher say “a prayerless christian is a powerless christian”. Even Jesus himself often retreated to pray and He taught His disciples to do the same.

We see in this chapter how the prayer of one man and His household brought about salvation to the Gentiles. Verse 1 & 2 says:
“There was a certain man in Caesarea called Cornelius, a centurion of the band called the Italian band, A devout man, and one that feared God with all his house, which gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God always” (KJV).

It’s most likely that during one of his prayer time, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a vision asking him to send for Peter.

Peter was also praying when he fell into a trance in which God showed him how wrong his thinking was regarding what was clean and unclean.
“About noon the following day as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray” (v10 NIV)

It is in the place of prayer that God reveals secrets to us,  gives us instruction and direction. That why the bible tells us to pray without ceasing.  See this article by Courtney from GMG on  How to Create a Prayer Closet – Your War Room

It’s not in our place to judge people or deem them unworthy of God’s love. Often times we look down on people. We judge them because they don’t fit into our ideal or they don’t have same color as us or even speak like we do, or because of their past or background. So we conclude they are of no good and can’t be used by God or receive God’s mercy. Even same was said of Jesus. In the book of John, when Philip was trying to tell Nathanael about Jesus, Nathanael responded and said “can anything good come our of Nazareth? To him it was impossible for someone as good as Jesus to come out of that town but God had other plans. This is the reason why we can’t pick and choose who we preach the gospel to for we don’t know what God has planned to do through them.

“Nazareth!” exclaimed Nathanael. “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” “Come and see for yourself,” Philip replied”(John 1:46 NLT)

Peter was faced with a similar issue. God knew that he would struggle with the idea of hanging out with gentiles, hence the Lord revealed it to him in a dream. Even Peter himself confessed in verses 27 – 29 that he was only at Cornelius house because of the vision God showed him.

“While talking with him, Peter went inside and found a large gathering of people. He said to them: “You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile. But God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean. So when I was sent for, I came without raising any objection. May I ask why you sent for me?” (NIV)

His obedience led to the Cornelius and his family’s salvation, and even the rest of the gentiles (including you and I).

Acts 11
The rest of the apostles were not happy that Peter went into the house of a gentile and also ate there.  To them, a gentile is unclean and could potentially defile them. They had not yet caught the revelation Peter had. So Peter had to gently explain all that had transpired to them.  In the end they were won over and happy about what God was doing in their midst.

I’m amazed at the apostles though, because Jesus’ promise to them in Acts 1: 8 was that they will preach the gospel all around the world. I guess the apostles assumed it will be only for the Jews in the world

“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. And you will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere—in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8 NLT)

I guess they did what we probably are prone to doing as well, which is putting God in a box and thinking that He only likes certain things because that’s what we like.

“We all get into mental ruts and often need a whack on the side of the head to jar us into new and better ways of thinking. Also, we all bring a lot of wrong-thinking baggage with us into the Christian life. If we are to grow into being more like Jesus, every once in a while God has to take a 2×4 and gently whack us on the side of the head to help us change our thinking.

We’ve seen how the Lord whacked Peter in preparation for his going to the house of the Gentile centurion, Cornelius. No Jew would think of going into a Gentile’s home, much less eating with Gentiles, for fear of contracting ceremonial defilement. The Lord Jesus had clearly told the apostles to go into all the world to preach the gospel to every creature. But in their centuries-old Jewish way of thinking, the disciples thought that Jesus meant for them to go and preach to Jews who were scattered all over the world. The thought of preaching the gospel to pagan Gentiles and of those Gentiles coming to salvation without first becoming religious Jews was simply unthinkable.

But now the unthinkable has happened for Peter. He wisely had taken six Jewish believers with him to Cornelius’ house, who witnessed what God was doing. They all saw the Holy Spirit fall upon the Gentiles in just the same way as He had fallen upon the believing Jews on the Day of Pentecost. But now Peter goes back to Jerusalem and the Jewish believers there call him on the carpet because he “went to uncircumcised men and ate with them” (11:3).

A lot of pastors just skip over these verses, since they repeat the story of chapter 10. But whenever Scripture repeats something, we need to take notice. There is an important lesson here that we might be prone to miss. Our text shows how God changed the thinking of these Christians on a matter that was essential for the spread of the gospel. If the Gentiles had been required to adopt Jewish rituals and ceremonies to be saved, the gospel would not have spread around the Gentile world as it did, and it would be a different “gospel.” The Holy Spirit inspired Luke to include this story twice so that the Jewish believers especially would see that salvation is not a matter of adopting Jewish rituals, but rather of God saving people of every race through faith in Christ alone”. (Excerpt by Stephen J Cole, Lesson 27: How God Changes Our Thinking (Acts 11:1-18), https://bible.org)

I pray we will allow the Holy Spirit work in us freely and correct any thinking that is not in line with that of God. I pray we learn not to put God in a box or try to force Him to fit into our ideas. In Jesus’ name we prayed. Amen

Thanks for joining today. Please feel free to share your thots on the chapters 🙂

Have a blessed evening 🙂

***With God all things are possible***