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series: God's Servant in the World next message: Life Together previous message: The Message Worth Hearing

The descriptions of important occasions in the Bible are often understated. We’re going to study a section of Acts 15 that has this quality. There are no romantic leads or supercharged car chases, no mysterious strangers appearing from the shadows. But a very important time in history is being described here.

Acts 15:1-11:

Some men came down from Judea and began teaching the brethren, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of
Moses, you cannot be saved.”
And when Paul and Barnabas had great dissension and debate with them, the brethren determined that
Paul and Barnabas and some others of them should go up to
Jerusalem to the apostles and elders concerning this issue.
Therefore, being sent on their way by the church, they were passing through both
Phoenicia and Samaria, describing in detail the conversion of the
Gentiles, and were bringing great joy to all the brethren.
When they arrived at Jerusalem, they were received by the church and the apostles and the elders, and they reported all that
God had done with them.
But some of the sect of the Pharisees who had believed stood up, saying, “It is necessary to circumcise them and to direct them to observe the
Law of Moses.”
The apostles and the elders came together to look into this matter.
After there had been much debate, Peter stood up and said to them, “Brethren, you know that in the early days
God made a choice among you, that by my mouth the
Gentiles would hear the word of the gospel and believe.
And God, who knows the heart, testified to them giving them the
Holy Spirit, just as He also did to us;
and He made no distinction between us and them, cleansing their hearts by faith.
Now therefore why do you put God to the test by placing upon the neck of the disciples a yoke which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear?
But we believe that we are saved through the grace of the
Lord Jesus, in the same way as they also are.”

This account begins in the city of Antioch of Syria. Paul and Barnabas, and for a time John Mark, had traveled throughout the region identified on Roman maps as Galatia. It was to the churches there that Paul wrote the book of Galatians in the New Testament. Under duress at times, they had been able to share the gospel and establish churches in various cities. They had returned to Antioch, and at the end of chapter 14 there is a description of the church gathered to hear the stories of how God was at work among the Gentiles. The result was unity, joy, and worship because of the good report of the things that God had done.

Now in chapter 15 it says that to this place, Antioch of Syria, some men came from Judea. Jerusalem was the heart of Judea. It was the city where the temple had been built and many of the prophets had preached. It was the place where Judaism had its deepest roots. It was the place where Jesus was executed and raised from the dead. The first Christians were from Jerusalem. The church’s most respected leaders had stayed in Jerusalem even as the gospel was being thrust into other places. Most ordinary believers and the senior leadership of the church in Jerusalem would not have had much association with Gentiles.

So those who came from Judea would have had high status and knowledge of the history of the ways of God. They would also be least aware of the new wind of the Spirit blowing among the cities of Cyprus and Galatia. These newcomers insisted that Gentile converts needed to take on the experience and outward expressions of Judaism.

There are a couple of things that we would do well to be clear about. These travelers from Judea declared, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.” When you hear the term “saved,” what comes to mind? Perhaps it is rural billboards announcing, “Jesus saves,” or urban street preachers with a King James Bible yelling at passersby, “Sinner, be saved!” The term “saved” has fallen on hard times in modern parlance. It’s associated somewhat with a narrow and perhaps unthinking sort of Christianity. But what salvation means is both marvelous and important. It never goes out of fashion.

What is salvation? These Judean visitors mentioned in verse 1 would deny salvation to those who didn’t meet their standard, but what were they denying? Salvation is being given the best vision of yourself that you can imagine, and beyond. It’s being told that you are valued and loved, that God’s plans for you are more remarkable than you can conceive of, that his intentions for you are greater than you could have hoped for.

Most of us hate at least some part of ourselves, and at some point we stop hoping that change is possible. But the promise of salvation turns that on its head. It means that we don’t need to hide the tragic things about ourselves, the brokenness, the failures, the hurts we have inflicted on others, the dark and wicked things. All these are forgiven and taken as far from us as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12).

To be saved also means that we are God’s servants in the world, and he is using us to accomplish things that will last forever. Our bodies are falling apart, relationships end, technology becomes obsolete. We invest a lot of ourselves in things that later become dusty and old and need to be replaced. But salvation means that God is accomplishing through us what will last forever--beautiful, eternal things.

A conditional salvation

So the argument in verse 1 denies that you may begin life from God, and in verse 5 the argument is modified slightly to deny that you may sustain life from God, if you don’t meet certain standards. God’s blessing requires you to act in certain ways, achieve certain status, appear a certain way. To fail is to be denied life from God.

This is familiar logic isn’t it? We’re used to being told that unless we measure up, meet a standard, do well, win the competition, we cannot have what we long for. It goes back to our earliest days when our parents, meaning the best, gave us messages about how much they wanted us to achieve. We measured ourselves against our siblings from the earliest days and often came out looking worse than they did.

I know a man who is highly placed and very influential in business, economics, and even politics. I remember once watching him make a fool of himself when he was introduced to a particular professional athlete. He fawned over this man, acting immature and unsure of himself. Yet in other circles my friend would intimidate everybody in the room. I realized something about him: he had been a kid who didn’t get picked for the team. The “jocks” of the world had the status he wished he could have. He was now a very successful man, yet he was uncertain of himself among accomplished athletes.

We might be told that unless we get into an elite university, our life is not worth living, or unless we are thin and beautiful, we will be rejected, or unless we have a good job, no one will respect us.

Every few years a new book is published naming itself the latest authority on raising children, and such books always contradict the last book that made such claims. For instance, one will say that what we really ought to do to raise effective children is to give them limits and direction, set high standards, expect the most of them, enforce consequences. But just about the time parents make these attempts, the next book comes out and says no, we ought to focus on love and acceptance, because you can’t give your children too much approval, and so on. Parents are whipsawed between different versions of good parenting, and they can’t possibly succeed.

“Unless you meet the standard, do it right, accomplish these objectives, you may not have what you hope for.” Whether it’s in your life or the lives of your children, it’s a horrible burden that every human being has been subjected to.

In this text in Acts, God himself is being walled off behind a barrier, and there stands a gatekeeper saying, “What he requires for you to come into his presence and sustain a relationship with him is that you do this thing.” Now, the particulars that were being argued about here no longer have much importance. Circumcision is seldom an issue for those who want to know God in a Christian setting. Nobody I know really wrestles much with kosher laws, keeping the customs of Moses, Sabbath restrictions, Jewish holidays, performing in the world of external Judaism. (I’m sure there are some places in the world, perhaps Israel, where those are issues.) But it remains true that there is a kind of instinctive response in human hearts when we’re told what to do, how to mark ourselves physically, in order to gain something important that we long for. We are spiritually susceptible to that argument over and over again, aren’t we?

I lost my wedding ring a couple of years ago. Besides feeling like an idiot for losing it, I felt terrible about walking around without a wedding ring on. I know men who take off their wedding rings for the wrong reasons--because they don’t want to appear married in certain settings, or because their marriages are in turmoil. I had exactly the opposite reaction. I love my wife, and I want people to know I respect my marriage. I want to be marked as a married man. I worried that the absence of an external marker would be misinterpreted as a statement of my heart.

I came to Christ in the winter of my sophomore year in high school, and the next fall when football season came around, I determined to set myself apart as a Christian by avoiding swearing during football season. I failed miserably. It was just weakness in habits of speech, and I’m pretty sure now that seventeen-year-old boys’ uttering crude epithets to sound tough is not one of God’s great concerns. But I felt I was failing God, and it was as if somehow he would withdraw from me in my failure. I had a sense of loss: “He’s done so much for me--why can’t I do this simple thing for him?”

“Unless you accomplish the standard, you cannot have his life.” That argument resonates in scores of ways. We accept life with markers, restrictions, the measurement of others.

Allen Iverson is one of the best basketball players in the world. He looks like a fast-moving billboard, because he is covered with tattoos--up his neck, around the side of his head, all over his arms and legs. An interviewer asked him why he did that to himself. This is a guy who came from the mean streets, and he spent some time in jail. He briefly went to college on his way to the NBA, and now he is making millions of dollars every year. He can adopt any sort of look he wants. But he said, “What’s important to me is my home boys, keeping it real with them. This is the way we look where I came from.” Allen Iverson undergoes the required marks for acceptance.

When the troublemakers came from Judea to Antioch, they must have said something like this: “You Gentiles used to worship with wicked practices in the temples of idols. You used to wear the clothing associated with Roman excess and idolatrous worship. Some of you were lazy slackers. Some of you were sexually promiscuous. Some of you were lying cheats. You came from all sorts of horrible places. And Jesus died on the cross for you, shed his blood out of love for you! He suffered terrible torment so that he could know you. So aren’t you willing to deny what you were in order to adopt the appearance of godliness? Aren’t you willing to suffer the humiliation and pain of adult circumcision? Who do you think you are, with your background, freely enjoying God’s love now?” And vulnerable Gentile believers were defenseless and had no answer before the erudite teachers from Jerusalem.

The challenge to bad thinking

Then of course the great thing about this story, and what makes it so important for history, is that Paul and Barnabas, God bless them, stood strongly for the gospel. They challenged those who were saying such things, and not only debated them but yelled at them. It says there was great dissension in Antioch. They refused to agree that what these teachers were saying represented anything like the heart of God. The unresolved debate led to a need for answers, and so the believers sent a delegation to Jerusalem to talk to the other apostles to find out what God required.

What I want us to consider is the role of godly leadership under these circumstances. What did Paul and Barnabas, and later Peter, say and do? How did they help? What were their convictions, which eventually were significant enough to establish the church on the foundation of grace that we’ve held on to with God’s help in every generation since then?

First, these leaders cared enough to get involved. They didn’t distance themselves from the problem. Shepherds, elders, and other leaders in the church have to be willing to get in the trenches with folks who are being threatened. The elders of the church are not just a board of directors that signs off on policy and issues proclamations. They know real people, and if those people are being lied to, they stand beside them and defend them. That is the first thing we see Paul and Barnabas do, with jaws clenched, saying, “No, no! There is no gatekeeper to God’s presence. It’s not true that unless you perform you may not know God. Nobody has the right to say those things as if they came from God himself.” They challenged the bad thinking.

The second thing we can observe here about the leaders Paul, Barnabas, and Peter is that they were the ones who understood the gospel correctly and taught it well because they were engaged in the ways of God in the world. They went on mission trips, saw Gentiles converted, prayed with new believers, visited the sick, got thrown in jail. They followed Jesus into real places and fought real battles. That helped them understand the gospel better than those who merely had an intellectual knowledge of things. They had seen Gentiles fall on their faces with tears in their eyes, loving God for his love for them. They didn’t treat Gentile faith as a theory. In fact, that was Peter’s whole argument: “God called me to go where I didn’t want to go. But at Cornelius’ house I saw God’s salvation come to uncircumcised Gentiles.”

It is easy to lead when circumstances are positive. It is uncomfortable to say no and argue for the truth. But Paul and Peter themselves were among the greatest failures to follow Christ in all of history. Peter denied the Lord, a humiliation he would carry forever. Paul persecuted the church in his early days, hated Christians and loved to see them killed and their homes destroyed and their families ruined. These two would never forget that they were recipients of the love of God. They would insist, even when it was difficult, that God’s grace did not depend on external compliance and successful keeping of the rules.

Ray Stedman used to quote a poem by John Oxenham:

He drew a circle that shut me out,
Rebel, heretic, a thing to flout.
But God and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!
(1)

May God give churches leaders who will say difficult things when necessary, because their hearts are founded on the grace they’ve received and the desire to give it away.

Peter made a couple of important points in his speech. First, he said that God knows hearts and cleanses hearts. He is not interested in what you look like on the outside, in narrowly defined behaviors, in incremental measurements of unimportant things. He said, “God knows the hearts of the Gentiles, and he claims them.” The barriers that the gatekeepers put up, God destroyed. “I was there when Cornelius and his family gave their lives to Christ, when the Spirit of God took up residence in them. And there was never one discussion about circumcision, about Sabbath-keeping, about kosher food, or anything else. We know from God’s own actions that he doesn’t care about the things that you say he cares about.”

The other point Peter made was this: “Why do you put God to the test by placing upon the neck of the disciples a yoke which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear?” There is extraordinary humility in this statement. He observed, “No one ever succeeded at being a Jew. Nobody ever made God happy doing these things. Our fathers didn’t. Moses’ generation didn’t. We’ve all made our best effort, and none of us ever got it right. We need the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Gentile believers are Christians because they need the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Why would we promote as essential to a relationship with God, the very thing that we gave up in order to know Jesus ourselves?” Remember Jesus’ word about the Pharisees: “They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a finger” (Matthew 23:4). The terrible secret about religious legalists is that they make others jump through hoops they refuse for themselves.

Finally, Peter said, “We are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus….” That is the heart of the gospel and that is the message that changes the world. Moses’ customs, Jewish laws, religious activities, markings that advocate God in some way--none of those mean anything compared to our Lord Jesus Christ, the gift-giving love of God, the passion he has to know us. There are no barriers.

The desire to earn God’s acceptance

Let me observe in conclusion that the problem of legalism, rule-keeping, barrier-building, gateways to God, and so on, is not just the fault of bad teachers, religious hypocrites, or those who pompously impose requirements on people. The deepest problem of legalism is that we don’t really want God to dispense grace; we want to earn our salvation ourselves.

At the end of Galatians Paul said in effect, “If you Gentiles are circumcised, you have made a terrible choice. You must believe that God loves you apart from what you do in order to know his love at all.”

But he ends the book with a subtle observation: “Let no one cause trouble for me, for I bear on my body the brand-marks of Jesus” (6:17). He wasn’t referring to ritual circumcision. He had other scars. They came from jagged stones that people threw at him, before they left him for dead. His scars came from beatings and rejections, hurts on the inside and wounds on the outside. What he was saying was, if you have been captured by God’s love and you love him back, you are going to want your life to show it. The markings will be there--not those of religious ritual, not created by self-effort. You will become someone who is marked by the Lord.

NOTES

(1) John Oxenham, quoted by Ray C. Stedman in The Case of the Valuable Pearl , ã 1971, 2002, Peninsula Bible Church, Palo Alto, CA, www/pbc.org/dp/stedman/behind/0458.html; internet.

Scripture quotations are taken from New American Standard Bible, ã 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Catalog No. 4763
Acts 15:1-11
23rd Message
Steve Zeisler
May 25, 2003

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series: God's Servant in the World next message: Life Together previous message: The Message Worth Hearing