"Repentance that Leads to Life" (Acts 11:1-18)

Transcript:

Your Bibles with me to Acts, chapter 11. We'll be reading verses one through 18. If you're using a Pew Bible, this is on page 1093. 1093.

Hear now the word of the Lord from Acts 11:1 18. 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 Gentiles also God has granted repentance that leads to life. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Please be seated, and as you're taking your seats, let's join our hearts together this morning in prayer.

Gracious Heavenly Father, we need help to interpret this passage. It seems so distant from us. These issues, having been settled 2,000 years ago, might seem on the surface far from us. But Father, I pray that this morning once again you would fill us with Your spirit, that you would give us hearts to understand, eyes to see and ears to hear all that is contained here from the Gospel of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And we pray that if there are any here who do not yet know Jesus, that you would grant to them repentance that leads to life.

This morning we pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

Well, the text that we are considering today addresses a burning concern that none of us have. And it answers a deeply vexing and perplexing question that none of us are asking. This issue dealing with the Gentiles and their lack of circumcision and their failure to follow food laws from the Old Testament seems on the surface to be a million miles away from our day to day concerns in our homes, in our workplaces, in our churches. And yet at the core of this, the question that this is putting right before our eyes is the question that is in ongoing way a burning question for each of us to think about. Namely, will the church continue to reach those who are not our people, those who are different from us, those who are far separated from us, those whose lives are unclean and unholy and messy.

Now, again, this is a text that is really difficult in some ways to preach because I don't want this to descend into some kind of lecture about first century Jewish purity laws. And so I spent a lot of time praying and prayerfully considering how this might challenge us. I searched around on the Internet trying to think how might I really portray the deep need that this presses against us. And so this morning, as I'm preaching this, my prayer for me and my prayer for all of us in this church is this text would refresh the vision that each of us have for the power of the Holy Spirit to draw near to Christ by faith in the repentance that leads to life, those who are far off from the kingdom of heaven. And so this morning, our theme then is this, that Christ's Holy Spirit alone makes you clean of guilt and shame.

Christ's Holy Spirit alone makes you clean of guilt and shame. We're going to talk a lot about cleanness this morning. Tonight we'll talk about a related, but different concept, righteousness. But today we're talking about, first of all, what is ceremonially unclean. Ceremonially unclean is the first section of this text in verses one through three.

And second, what God makes clean. What God makes clean is the second section in verses 4 through 15. And then third, cleansed cleansing through repentance that leads to life. Cleanse through repentance that leads to life in verses 15 through 18. So let's start with section one.

Ceremonially unclean in the first three verses. It should not perhaps be a surprise to read that the news of what had happened in Caesarea spread very quickly throughout all Judea and Jerusalem. We read in verse 1. Now, the apostles and the brothers who were throughout Judea, heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God. In many ways, this is the good kind of gossip.

This is good news that we want to be quick to share about what God is doing in the world. But it also should not surprise us about what happens in verses 2 and 3. Namely, that as word spreads around very quickly, self appointed wet blanket brigades arise to try to extinguish and what the fire of the Holy Spirit is spreading through the world. And so we hear in verse two that when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcision party, literally those of the circumcision, not all those who were circumcised, but those who saw a special and an ongoing importance for circumcision and food laws and for all of the rituals and rites of Jewish ceremonial cleansings, should have an ongoing significance in the church. And those of the circumcision or the circumcision party criticized Peter, saying, you went to uncircumcised men and you ate with them.

Now, they raised no particular concern that the word of God had been received by these Gentiles. They wouldn't have. In the Old Testament, many Gentiles came to believe in the God of the Jews. And that was celebrated as uncomfortable as it might have been to see new people coming into the family of God. Nevertheless, these Gentiles that they followed through with their repentance would become circumcised and they would take up all of the laws of Jewish ceremonial cleansing and purity.

But here there seems to be a step that has been skipped in their eyes. Here, rather than seeing these Gentiles come to be circumcised and to take up a new way of living by finding, following all of the food laws, Peter defiled himself in their eyes by associating and even entering the home of a Gentile that was unclean that would defile and pollute him. But not only that they he ate with them. Now that just doesn't mean that he ate a meal. They were all bringing their brown bags and sat around a table together.

And that's as far as it went. It probably means that Peter himself was eating, eating unclean food. Again, this is a Scandal that doesn't trouble us in the least. This is an issue that was shocking in the church, that really fails to touch our hearts, I think, because these issues were settled so decisively by what happened 2,000 years ago and the way that those events were recorded in the Scriptures, the texts that we have been studying these last few weeks, Acts, chapter 10 and chapter 11. But the issue here is one that has an ongoing significance.

The people of God here, rather than rejoicing at the expansion of the Gospel, they are circling their wagons to protect cultural and religious boundary markers, even the very boundary markers that God himself had now abolished. They were offended because Peter associated with those who were just not our kind of people.

Now, this is where I find a real challenge to this text. It should cause all of us to ask ourselves, are we more concerned with surrounding ourselves with people who make us comfortable because they are like us, people who share in the comfort that we have known in the past? Or are we more concerned about bringing salvation to the ends of the earth by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, reaching those who are furthest away from the kingdom of God? And so in our neighborhoods, in our job sites, in break rooms and family gatherings, at church on Sunday mornings, when we encounter someone who smells like smoke or alcohol, when we start talking with them and realize pretty quickly that their lives bear the scars of divorce or children born out of wedlock, or they are currently in an ongoing way entangled in some kind of sexual immorality, when they speak with foul language and boast about their sin, when they rant in person or perhaps in social media in favor of abortion and sexual immorality? The question is, how do we see these people?

Do we see them as precious souls who were made in the image of God, in whom that image has been marred and defiled and defaced because they are still now to this point, in captivity and bondage to sin and the devil? And are our hearts burdened with sharing the gospel of Jesus that can liberate them from those sins that have so far oppressed them over the course of their lives, even when they are not aware of the chains that hold their souls captive? Or do we withdraw from them? Do we close our mouths and sort of slip back into the shadows? Or worse, do we join in them with their sins?

Do we see them as, and fear them as possible defilements to our lives and pollutions to our purity and people who might make us unclean by association with the messiness of their lives? Are we more concerned with safety and stability in our own lives or with the salvation of those who desperately need the Gospel. Well, again, that makes this text a little bit more pressing. The APostle Paul in 1st Corinthians 5 gave a very clear warning, though, that we are indeed called to separate from uncleanness, to separate from impurity, to separate from sexual immorality. But then he made a very important distinction.

He says, I wasn't talking about those in the world. I was not at all meaning that we should separate from the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or the idolaters. Since then you would need to go out of this world. It's just not possible. What he says then is that we are to separate from believers whose lives do not bear the marks of repentance that leads to life, who are still in that sin even while they profess the name of Christ.

But for everyone else, the message is clear. We're not to withdraw. We are certainly not to join in the sin. But rather we are to recognize that God has providentially put these people in our paths because he wants them to hear the message of Jesus from our lips.

We cannot reach people if we constantly keep them out of our reach. But how do we walk the line? How do we reach all people without blurring God's truth when their lives are marked with constant blurrings of God's truth? You know, when I think about these questions, I think a lot about a job that I held in high school. I worked at Papa Murphy's Pizza.

I don't even know if they deign to have something like that kind of a chain pizza area in this area. So I don't know if any of you have even had that. You have the best pizza in the whole world. And so I don't know if you need that here. But where we worked, we weren't quite as blessed.

We had a store, though, where in this pizza place. I met a lot of people because there was a lot of turnover. I worked there throughout high school. Many of them were high schoolers also, and many of those who were living very rough lives. But I also worked with a lot of fully grown people who were also working there, and they had extremely rough lives a lot of the time also.

That really is why I think about this time in my life is a lot of times there were only like two people on staff, me, and I was maybe working with some other person. I had a lot of time to talk and to share stories and to listen to what was going on in their lives. And again, I heard things that still are disturbing to me to this day, that they would share with me about things that were going on in their lives. And it was a question that I wrestled with then and continue to wrestle with now. How do I love these people?

And how do I also share the truth of the Gospel of Jesus with them? Well, in the next two sections, that balance is going to be laid out. First, we're going to see what it means to love them. Second, we are going to see where the truth comes in. So let's look at the second section.

What God Makes Clean. What God makes clean, verses 4 through 15. It's really important and instructive that Peter does not brush off these criticisms. He doesn't say, don't you know who I am? Don't you know that I was an apostle of the Lord Jesus?

How dare you ask me these questions? He doesn't say that at all. Rather, he sees this as an opportunity to share what the word of God has been spoken to him as an apostle of the Lord Jesus, so that the rest of the church comes to understand. He recognizes that these questions are honest interpretations of the Scriptures that were laid down in the Old Testament. But he now needs to share and to help people to more fully understand what the Scriptures are teaching, what God's Word is teaching, even in scriptures that have not yet been written down.

This is going to be a regular theme that we encounter in the Book of Acts, that what the church believes, what the Church preaches and teaches and practices is always judged. And the Church is always eager to judge what they do by God's word. We're seeing a very tumultuous time with lots of changes here. But at every stage, everything is proven by God's Word. And so in verses 7 through 10, we read the first word, God's Word, to Peter.

In this vision of unclean food, in verse seven, rise, Peter, kill and eat. And then when Peter protests, and it's actually interesting, the language here is a little bit different from what we saw in chapter 10. It is much closer to echo the words of the prophet Ezekiel. When God asked the prophet Ezekiel to make for himself and prepare for himself food on a fire, that the fuel of the fire was supposed to be human dung that would have been unclean for him. And Ezekiel, a priest, pleads that nothing unclean has ever entered my lips.

And in the old covenant, God relents. And he said, go ahead, use animal dung that will not be unclean. And that's what they go with. But here, each time the Lord speaks back To Peter, rise, Peter, kill and eat. And then in verse 10, we read, what God has made clean do not call common.

No longer. Like Ezekiel, as God saying, okay, you can go back to what's comfortable. You can go back to the ceremonial food laws. He insists, what God has made clean do not call common. The second place we read about the word of the Lord is in verses 8 through 12, particularly verse 20, when these three Gentiles appear, or when these Gentiles appear and God tells Peter to go with them, making no distinction.

Verse 12. Now these two ideas go together. When the distinctions between the foods, the unclean and clean foods, were abolished, so also the distinctions between people were abolished. Go with these Gentiles, for they were no longer unclean. Go with them without distinction.

The third place where we see God's word in action is the message of salvation. What Cornelius had asked to send for Peter to come tell him is the message by which, and this is what the Lord is telling, the message by which you will be saved, you and all your household. The key here in all of this is that God had sent Cornelius to ask for Peter to come to him because God had annihilated the boundaries that had separated people in order that the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ might come near to people who had for all ages been far off from God.

Now, the more fundamental thing that's happening here is that we are seeing a fundamental redefinition of how cleanness and uncleanness works, holiness and defilement and purity works. In the Old Testament, uncleanness, defilements, pollutions, were contagious. Even if you were a priest who had cleansed yourself and you were ceremonially clean and you had sanctified yourself as holy in order to enter into the holy places to do ministry. If you walked out of the temple and encountered something that was unclean, a dead body or someone else who was remaining in their uncleanness, a leper, a woman with a discharge of blood, these kinds of things would have defiled you. Your Holiness, having left the temple, would not transfer to them.

Their uncleanness would be contagious to you. Jesus turned all of this on its head. Jesus did not keep his distance from lepers for fear that they would contaminate him. Jesus went and touched them to cleanse them. Jesus did not keep his distance.

Although he didn't know that the woman was suffering a discharge of blood when she reached out to touch the hem of his garment, he felt power go out of him. That was not her uncleanness. Transferring to him that was His Holiness, sanctifying and cleansing her. The Pharisees kept their distance from the morally unclean, the tax collectors and the prostitutes. But Jesus dined with them in order to heal them from their uncleanness.

Spiritually, the Old Testament featured a vision for sanctification that was marked by vigilant boundary keeping, by withdrawal, by retreat from defilements. But in the New Testament, sanctification is entirely different. It is by bold confidence. It is by advancing directly into the kingdom of darkness to liberate those who are still held captive there. It's a path that our Lord Jesus blazed the trail for.

And he calls us to follow in his footsteps, to bring the gospel, the light of the Gospel of Jesus, into the darkness. Where is your heart then, toward messy sinners? Is your heart to keep your alcoholic uncle at a distance or to find ways to bring him the message of salvation? Is it to block on Facebook that immoral friend from your childhood, or is your heart stirred to pray for her? Is it to find creative ways of ducking into your house without getting drawn into a conversation with your foul mouth neighborhood?

Or is it to find ways to invite that neighbor to church, to serve that neighbor in Christ's name, and to share the gospel of Jesus with that neighbor? Sinners cannot be delivered from their sin and misery at a distance. But there's still the question, how do we avoid being defiled? Yes, maybe defilement doesn't transfer by physical contact, but does Paul not ask us to remember that good or that bad company corrupts good morals? He does.

He says that. And so we are called to reach people, but we are not called to be dragged down into their former unclean ways of living. So what else? What's the other piece of this? Well, here we are to see that we are called, not just to associate them, although that's the necessary first step, but we're called to bring them the news of deliverance out of sin and misery.

If we love these unclean sinners truly, we must help them put off their sin through repentance that leads to life. And this leads to the third section, cleanse through repentance that leads to Life in verses 15 through 18. Now, if we had any doubt about whether what happened here was the Pentecost for the gentiles in verses 15, commentators point out this makes it very, very clear, the language is all the more clear that that's the association we're supposed to make. And so we read about in verse 15 that the Holy Spirit fell on them just as on us at the beginning. That's a reference back to Pentecost in Acts chapter 2.

And then we read in verse 16, and I remembered the word of the Lord, how he said, john baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit. That was from earlier in Acts chapter one, before Jesus ascended, He said, wait in Jerusalem for the giving of the Holy Spirit. For John baptized with water, but in a little while you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit. He's referring back to the promises of Jesus about Pentecost that were fulfilled at Pentecost. But so far those promises have not extended.

The blessings of Pentecost have not been transferred to the Gentiles, but now they have. And Peter says in verse 17, 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? Now, if we were looking down on these members of the circumcision party, those of the circumcision, and certainly we read more about them later in the New Testament, and some of them don't totally get the message at this time, and they sort of get hardened in their views that salvation had to require circumcision first. Jesus plus circumcision. But at least for now, and probably for some, this question was settled.

Verse 18. They heard what the Word of God had stated. They saw what God had done. And verse 18, 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. A turning away from sin and a turning toward Christ in salvation.

Not bypassing, not as a necessary first step by going through circumcision or food laws, but going straight to Jesus Christ salvation. They brought them out of their uncleanness not by ceremonial rites and rituals, but by bringing them to Jesus in repentance that leads to life in faith and trust and joyful obedience. Well, our application to this text is that Christ's Holy Spirit alone makes you clean of guilt this morning. Maybe you are convicted today as you are hearing the Word of God. Maybe I named your own situation.

Maybe you are convicted today about the uncleanness of your life. Maybe you try to laugh or boast about your sin, but deep down you know that your life is an unclean, unholy mess. Maybe it is something that everybody knows. Maybe it is something that nobody knows except you and God knows about. As you think about even where you have been this week, maybe this morning you are filled with guilt and shame, as you see the great contrast between your uncleanness and the holy, holy, holy God.

And maybe you're also tired because you've tried every ceremonial ritual that you can think of to cleanse yourself. Probably not circumcision, probably not the keeping of Jewish food laws. But let me ask you this. Have you tried to soothe your defiled conscience by volunteering or donating to the right charities? By offering some kind of support?

Maybe by a yard sign or a post on social media of the right causes? By coming to church every time the doors are open? Even by diving headfirst into every ministry that we offer here, by walking around even today with a smiling, cheerful public face, while inside you know that nothing you do is enough, that nothing you do is able to cleanse your conscience before God. For some of you, your shame may be so deep that you find yourself literally cleaning, cleaning your house, cleaning your diet, cleaning your body. But you still feel unclean.

The only way to get clean is by what's held out in this passage. Repent from your sin, turn away from it, and turn in faith to the Lord Jesus Christ by the cleansing power of the Holy Spirit. What we confessed earlier is the only hope of the gospel. That the Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, came into this world, that he lived a clean, holy life surrounded by uncleannesses. His Holiness changed them.

They did not defile him. He lived, he died, he rose again. And as he hung naked on the cross, he was clothed with your shame and your guilt for your sin, so that he might then turn around and clothe you in his perfect righteousness. And this is held out by repentance from sin and by turning to Jesus Christ for salvation. Again, verse 18 talks about this repentance that leads to life.

That's still your way to salvation this morning. As we talked about earlier in the series, repentance, the word literally means a change of mind. But it's not just to change your opinion. I used to like this and now I like that. It's a change of mind that prompts a searching change of your heart.

I don't just have a new opinion. I want something new for my life that then flows out into a full change of life. This repentance leads you out of death and it leads you into the life that is in Christ Jesus by faith. Because again, Christ's Holy Spirit alone makes you clean of guilt and shame. Do you feel defiled and polluted today?

Run to Jesus. Or maybe this morning you were convicted Today By God's word about the way that you have kept sinners at a distance. Well, I want to also point to what happens in this text. So were the circumcision party. So were those who had a very overly rigorous, a legalistic view of what had to happen for sinners to come to Jesus for salvation.

But God's word changed their hearts when they heard what God had said, when they saw what God had done, they glorified God, saying then to Gentiles also, then to the foul, unclean, polluted, defiled Gentiles also God has granted repentance that leads out of those impurities to life again. You're called to repentance to change your mind about the way that you were thinking about people in a way that just doesn't change your opinion, but that brings about, prompts a change of your heart toward them that flows out into a change of the way that you live your life in contact with them. Change your mind to see the glory of God in these image bearers, no matter how defiled that image may be because of their bondage, to see sin. Pray that the Holy Spirit would lead you to see the value of these image bearers and to have new faith in the power of the Gospel to change the hearts of those who are furthest from the kingdom and ask the Holy Spirit for opportunities and boldness to change your life where you actually open your mouth to speak the Gospel with messy, unclean people who surround you every day. All of us, Jew and Gentile alike, are unclean not because we lack circumcision or we fail to follow the ritual laws of Old Testament food laws, but because of our sin.

All of those were just a picture of the defilements of our sin. We cannot make ourselves clean. We never could. We never will be able to make ourselves clean by rituals, by works, by our own efforts. The only way to be cleansed is through faith in the Gospel message of Jesus Christ and him crucified and by the power of the Holy Spirit to cleanse you.

To be rid of our guilt and shame, we must believe what Christ has done by the power of his Spirit. And remember that we are called to declare among the nations that the Lord reigns. We are called to help rid others of their guilt and shame. We are called to carry the message to them even while they are still dead in their sins and trespasses, just as we once were. Well, let's turn to the Lord in prayer.

Heavenly Father, we pray that you would deed change our minds, that you would change our hearts. That you would change our lives. That our lives would bear faithful witness to Jesus Christ. Not as clean people who can boast in our cleanness as though we have cleansed ourselves, but in the recognition that all this is because of mercy. That all this is because you have brought near to us the kingdom by the preaching of the gospel of Christ.

And that as much as we needed it, so too do our neighbors. And so we pray that in break rooms and at work sites and in dining rooms and living rooms and on social media you would stir our hearts to pity those who do not yet know Christ. And you would prompt us to take the hard steps of sharing the gospel even where it may not be welcome. We pray that your Holy Spirit would then apply what we cannot. We pray this all in the power of Christ's name and through the hope that we have in the power of the Holy Spirit to convert sinners.

It's in Jesus name we pray. Amen.