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Acts 15:13-21 — Breaking Down the Walls Between Jews and Gentiles
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Good morning. As we prepare to worship together, I want to remind us of who our God is. Our God is great and highly worthy of praise because his greatness is so vast, profound, and incomprehensible to us as humans.
From Job, we read: "As for me, I will seek God and I will inquire of him, and I will commit my cause to him—the God who does such great and unsearchable things, such marvelous things without number." God's works are so great that we cannot even number them.
And finally, he is an everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth, who does not become tired or weary, and there is no searching of his understanding. He is so vast, so amazing, so beyond our comprehension. We get tired and sick, but he never does. We are simply not on the same playing field as God.
As we continue our series in Acts this morning, we're focusing on a pivotal moment when God guided his people to remove barriers and make his salvation accessible to all. He allowed us to approach him—the holy God—not through keeping exacting requirements, but through faith in Jesus. As part of a globally diverse community, we come to worship our holy God together.
Last week we started looking at Acts 15, which is a really key chapter and a key moment for the early church. Some quick background: the book of Acts tells how Jesus has risen from the dead and ascended to heaven, but he sends the Holy Spirit, so Jesus is still at work in the world through his church. His message is spreading all around the world.
So far in Acts, the message has been focused around people who are Jewish. Jesus' ministry was to the people of Israel. But as we go through the book, God starts to move among people who are not Jewish—people from the other nations. We call these people "Gentiles," which simply means "nations."
But this is really challenging for the people of Israel. Their whole history has been about being separate from other nations. God chose them as his people through Abraham to be a light to the world. But now the barriers are being broken, and people are struggling with what to do.
The church comes together in Jerusalem for a council to make a decision: Do all these people from other nations who are starting to follow Jesus need to become Jewish—by being circumcised, following the food laws—or can they follow Jesus just as they are? Some people were saying no, they have to be circumcised and become Jewish, or they cannot be part of us. The church was wrestling through this tension.
This is a story about how people from all different nations and cultures have been able to be in God's family. It's about what it means to be invited into God's family to worship him, and what it means to worship him alone.
Before verse 13, there had been intense debate. Peter gets up and talks about how God is calling these people. God saved a Roman centurion and did not require him to become Jewish. So why should the church?
Then James, the authority figure and leader of the church, speaks: "When they finished, James spoke up. Brothers, listen to me. Simon has described to us how God first intervened to choose a people for his name from the Gentiles."
James affirms what Peter just said. Peter said God is rescuing these Gentiles and giving them the Holy Spirit. If God is doing that, why should we require they become like us? We would be opposing God.
What James says in that one sentence is actually a profound paradigm shift for the people of Israel. James talks about the nations as the people of God. But in the Old Testament, for many people of Israel, they were the people of God, and then there were the nations. There was "the people of God" (Israel) and then "all the other nations."
But now James is saying: "God is taking a people from the nations." This is a fundamental flip. God's heart is to have a people called to worship him from all nations, from all backgrounds. This was a significant paradigm shift the early church had to grapple with.
James doesn't just rely on what God is doing by the Spirit. He looks to scripture. He says:
After this I will return and rebuild David's fallen tent. Its ruins I will rebuild and I will restore it that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord. Even all the Gentiles who bear my name, says the Lord, who does these things, things known from long ago.
This is a quote from the prophet Amos. God had promised that there would be another king who would come like David—a son of David—who would be the true king of Israel and the true king of God's people. This king would bring restoration to Israel, but also to the whole world.
That king is Jesus. Jesus has come as the king of Israel and Savior of the world to rescue and unite God's people and bring new creation through his death and resurrection.
The key insight: When the true king comes and restores God's people, it wouldn't just be for Israel alone. It would spread out to the whole world. And this was always God's plan. From the beginning, God's heart was that Israel would be blessed by him and then would be a blessing to all the nations. Israel was God's chosen people—not despite everybody else, but for the sake of everybody else.
There's something really interesting about the tabernacle of David mentioned here. David had set up a tent in Jerusalem with the ark of the covenant—a sign of God's presence. Surrounding it were singers and musicians who would praise God and worship day and night. David appointed leaders to give praise and honor to God and declare his great works.
And here's what's fascinating: as these people in Jerusalem were praising God, they were speaking about all the world coming to praise God, all the nations coming to worship him. This is from 2 Chronicles 16, echoing Psalm 96:
Sing to the Lord, all the earth. Proclaim his salvation day after day. Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous deeds among all peoples. For great is the Lord and most worthy of praise. He is to be feared above all gods. For all the gods of the nations are idols, but the Lord made the heavens.
They were in Jerusalem praising God, but they were declaring: "Our God is the true God. Therefore, everybody in all the world is called to worship him." Everyone is called to recognize him and let go of all other gods. In a sense, their worship became a form of witness and even evangelism.
One commentator puts it this way: "Israel's praise of God in the temple and the synagogue was meant to be overheard by the pagans around about." The temple itself, the praise going on, was a declaration that this is the true God and he is so great. Later, in synagogues, their worship was also a witness.
Now we celebrate that we are included in the people of God because of Jesus. When we gather to worship or live lives that honor Jesus and declare that he is the true God, that also is a form of witness and evangelism. The very fact that we come together is a way to declare that God is true, valuable, and worthy of our time and attention. When we declare that he is the ultimate one, we're declaring the truth about how things really are.
James makes his judgment: "It is my judgment therefore that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God." They don't have to be circumcised. They don't have to follow the food laws. They don't have to follow all the old covenant laws.
But James doesn't leave them without guidance. He says:
Instead, we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals, and from blood. For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times, and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.
This is a difficult passage, and people have different interpretations. But in context, these practices tended to go together in one place: the pagan temple. The people coming to follow Jesus from other nations were living in a culture saturated with worship. Everyone had a god. Everyone was worshiping in some way. It was just part of life to go to the pagan temple, offer your meat to the idol with the priests, and eat together as part of the community. Other practices involved there included strangled animals, blood, and sexual immorality.
What James is really saying is: You can follow Jesus and don't have to be circumcised, but you need to stop going to pagan idol temples. You can't keep doing that.
Turning to God shouldn't be made difficult, but it does involve turning away from other things. James declared that turning to God involves turning away from the worship of false gods.
This actually gets to the core of the whole issue. The Jewish people were struggling with circumcision and food laws because those things were representative of being separate and protected from the worship of false gods. They served a purpose.
But the issue has always been about the heart. Someone could be circumcised and Jewish but still worship idols—and this happened repeatedly. The real issue is to worship God in the heart. Someone might think, "Well, surely it doesn't matter if they just participated in pagan temples as long as they weren't worshiping in their heart?" But James—and Paul in other places—says: "No, flee from idolatry. Move away from that way of life. Don't go near the worship of other gods."
Why? Because it is both spiritually dangerous, and it is also a bad witness to the gospel. If Jesus is the true God, it means other gods are false. Don't participate in idolatry. It compromises the movement, especially to other Jewish believers. But more importantly, it's not God's heart. God's heart is that people who turn toward him also turn away from other false gods.
There's a helpful comparison in marriage. Marriage is an amazing gift God has given—when two people come together and commit themselves to each other in love. But that commitment involves a clean break with all other relationships. All previous romantic relationships are gone. There's no hope for them, and there's no future romantic relationships. It's this one relationship alone.
If someone is coming into marriage, they have to give up those previous relationships. It wouldn't make sense to be married and spend time at a previous girlfriend or boyfriend's house, or go on dating sites, or attend singles gatherings. Those things aren't appropriate. They would damage the marriage. They would also be a bad witness—it would confuse what marriage even is if you're just living as you did before but calling yourself married.
It's the same with God. People are coming and turning to him. They're declaring their allegiance to him even through baptism—which is turning away from all other false gods and saying Jesus is the one true God. So it makes sense that James would say: "Don't participate in pagan temples. Avoid them and follow Jesus." There needs to be a clean break with those practices.
In our culture, it's a bit different because we live in a secular culture. It's not always clear what it means to worship other false gods. But people still do worship false gods. Turning to Jesus involves turning away from other false gods—such as other religious practices like New Age religion. If there's been engagement with those things and you turn to Jesus, there's a need to turn away from those and not participate in them anymore.
Sometimes people coming to Jesus have an idea that "Now we have started to worship. We come to worship Jesus. But before that I was just secular. I didn't worship anything."
But the truth is: everyone is always worshiping. The essence of worship is making something ultimate—making something God, even if you don't call it God. Worship is expressed through sacrifice. Whatever is the most important thing, the thing you sacrifice other things for, is your god and what you worship.
Money is seen as the ultimate form of security and is worth giving up and compromising other things to get.
Romance or sex is seen as the ultimate thing—the true thing needed above all else.
Career success is what some make ultimate.
Here's the challenge: often the idol is a good thing, a gift from God. Family can be an idol we sacrifice for instead of God being ultimate. Lifestyle, comfort, convenience—these aren't bad things, but they're not God. They're gifts from God.
Perhaps in our culture, the defining idol is simply ourselves. Our culture is saturated with individualism. We see ourselves as our own god. We can decide how we want to live and what we want to do, and nobody should stop us. In some ways, the unforgivable sin is to deny yourself or to stop someone else from expressing who they want to be.
But that is not true.
The invitation to follow Jesus is the exact opposite of that. The invitation is to deny ourselves, to take up our cross, and actually find our life by giving it away. We find that life is found not with us at the center, but with God at the center.
In our culture, turning away from false gods might not necessarily mean not going to certain places—although if places could lead to sin, maybe that is required. But there's a need to consider: What have we sacrificed to? What have we made ultimate in our lives? What are we putting in the place of God that is not God?
To turn to God, there needs to be acknowledgement and a turning away from those other things. We don't come to worship while clinging to our idols. We cast our idols and worship God alone. We surrender and offer sacrifices to him.
The ultimate call in the New Testament is that the sacrifice we offer is ourselves. We offer ourselves as a living sacrifice. As Janette was praying earlier, we give all of life to God. We consecrate it to God. And this is so awesome because it means that all of life can then be an act of worship. Whatever we're doing, no matter how mundane, if we're doing it to God, it can be an act of worship.
The New Testament highlights two main forms of spiritual sacrifice:
1. Prayer and Praise — declaring that God is God and he is worthy.
2. Generosity to the poor — reflecting God's love through serving and helping, particularly those most in need.
At the start of Acts, God saves Cornelius, a Roman centurion. An angel appears to him and says: "Your prayers and gifts to the poor have come up as a memorial offering before God." Cornelius's faith in God was being expressed through praying to him and giving generously to the poor. The angel refers to those things as a memorial offering, a sacrifice of worship.
Hebrews tells us:
Through Jesus, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that openly profess his name—and do not forget to do good and to share with others. For such sacrifices God is pleased.
We're invited to express our worship of God through:
All of that is worship. It shows that God is true and God is worthy. And because God is defined by love, we reflect that back to him and to others as well.
When we turn to God, it means making him ultimate. It means giving him our total loyalty and allegiance. Therefore, it means a clean break from anything else that would take that place, anything we would sacrifice to. And the good news? He offers us freedom, forgiveness, and a life that is truly alive—centered on him.
