Freed to serve - Acts 15v19-35

So Acts chapter 15.

Acts 15 · chapter mention

The Bible, it is a it's a bit like a library.

It's actually 66 books, but it is not just information about God.

Christians believe and experience the Bible as the place where we meet with the true and the living God.

So with that in mind, let me pray.

Almighty God, Heavenly Father, we thank you that you desire to be known, for people like us to know you and to know your love for us.

And so as we hear your word read and then preached, help us to receive it as it really is.

Not only the words of men, but first and foremost the words of the living God.

We pray in your name.

Amen.

Now before I read, just a brief word of introduction.

What difference does it make when you know that you are loved?

When a wife knows that her husband loves her, when a child knows that his mum and dad love him, when a person knows the solid love of a friend.

What difference does it make when you are loved?

Now that is what we long for at its best, to be loved.

And that then enables amazing things.

People can do amazing things when they are loved.

The Christian faith is God's love for Christian people through Jesus Christ.

That is the Christian faith.

And here is what entrances and empowers the Christian man or woman, the Christian boy or girl.

It is this the God who made me and to whom I belong, the God against whom I have sinned, that I don't love him as I ought, I don't love others of his creatures as he wants me to.

Nonetheless, he loves me.

And so he sent his son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to die for me and to obtain forgiveness for me and to welcome me as an adopted child into his family.

And that kind of love, it is truly unconditional.

God does not love the Christian person because she is good or he does good things or religious things.

Every other religion on earth teaches you must climb a ladder to God.

But the one true God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, he is unattainably high and holy, yet he chooses to come down.

He loves broken and sinful people like me because he wills to love.

He chooses to love.

He extends to people like you and me what the Bible calls grace.

And knowing the grace of God, it changes everything.

It changes how we relate to God.

Simply we love him because he first loved us.

And, and this is getting us ready for our reading, and it changes the way we relate to other people and especially to other members of the Christian family.

Now, for some of us I know this is what first drew us to the Christian faith as we saw how Christian people loved and cared for each other.

Now, we come to our Bible reading.

We're in the book of Acts, we're working through the book of Acts, this term at Emmanuel.

The book of Acts tells the story of the growth of the Christian church in the first decades after Jesus' death and resurrection.

And today's Bible reading is all about the Christian community, the church, that was formed by God's unconditional love, and that is transformed by God's unconditional love.

Now, what we read about here, and in a sense we're stepping into the middle of a story, what we read about here is prompted by a crisis.

It's a few years after Jesus' death and resurrection.

There is a particular church.

They've received the gospel of Jesus.

And some people had come into this brand new church, and they were saying something different.

They were saying you must do various things for God to love you.

Actually, God's love is not entirely unconditional.

So, what is the church then going to do?

So, let me read.

I'm going to read Acts chapter 15, verses 1 to 35.

Acts 15:1–35

Let's hear the words of God.

But some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.

And after Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question.

So, being sent on their way by the church, they passed through both Phoenicia and Samaria, describing in detail the conversion of the Gentiles, and they brought great joy to all the brothers.

When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and the elders, and they declared all that God had done with them.

But some believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees rose up and said, It is necessary to circumcise them and to order them to keep the law of Moses.

The apostles and the elders were gathered together to consider this matter, and after there had been much debate, Peter stood up and said to them, Brothers, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe.

And God, who knows the heart, bore witness to them by giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us.

And he made no distinction between us and them, having cleansed their hearts by faith.

Now therefore, why are you putting God to the test by placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear?

But we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.

And all the assembly fell silent, and they listened to Barnabas and Paul as they related what signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles.

After they finished speaking, James replied, Brothers, listen to me.

And with this the words of the prophets agree, just as it is written, After this I will return, and I will rebuild the tent of David that has fallen.

I will rebuild its ruins, and I will restore it, that the remnant of mankind may seek the Lord, and all the Gentiles who are called by my name, says the Lord, who makes these things known from of old.

Therefore, my judgment is that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God, but should write to them to abstain from the things polluted by idols, and from sexual immorality, and from what has been strangled and from blood.

For from ancient generations Moses has had in every city those who proclaim him, for he has read every Sabbath in the synagogues.

Then it seemed good to the apostles and the elders with the whole church to choose men from among them, and send them to Antioch with Paul and to Barnabas.

They sent Judas called Bar Sabbas, and Silas, leading men among the brothers, with the following letter.

The brothers, both the apostles and the elders, to the brothers who are of the Gentiles, in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia, greetings.

Since we have heard that some persons have gone out from us and troubled you with words, unsettling your minds, although we gave them no instructions, it has seemed good to us, having come to one accord to choose men and send them to you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We have therefore sent Judas and Silas, who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth.

For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements, that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality.

If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well.

Farewell.

So when they were sent off, they went down to Antioch, and having gathered the congregation together, they delivered the letter, and when they had read it, they rejoiced because of its encouragement.

And Judas and Silas, who were themselves prophets, encouraged and strengthened the brothers with many words.

And after they had spent some time, they were sent off in peace by the brothers to those who had sent them.

But Paul and Barnabas remained in Antioch, teaching and preaching the word of the Lord with many others also.

Thanks be to God for his word to us today.

Here is the very, very heart of the Christian faith, that we are saved by God's grace and not by our works.

Here is the moment when the Christian faith was growing out of the Jewish religion as the fulfillment of the Jewish religion, Jesus Christ being the promised Messiah.

But at this moment, a poisonous lie crept in.

There is nothing more important.

Everything that was said in verses 1 to 18, you can boil it down to a couple of words in verse 19.

Do not trouble these new Christians.

Do not place a burden on them.

The glorious message was this: we are saved by God's grace, not by our works.

The backdrop to this chapter was a colossal division in the ancient world, one that most of us probably can't wrap our heads around.

The division between people who were Jews and people who were Gentiles.

The Jewish person in the first century, he felt like he was on the inside track with God.

Whereas Gentiles, non-Jews, people not from the biological family of Abraham, they are outsiders, they are far from God, they are dirty, they are unclean.

Now, in the story of the book of Acts, we see how the gospel has gone to Gentiles, to pagan Romans and Greeks.

And there were some folk in the Church of Jesus, they'd come from a Jewish background themselves, and they were troubled.

And sometimes this does happen.

You find people, even today, people with a what you might say a churchy background, they find it hard to accept another person who comes into the church from a different culture, perhaps from a different kind of lifestyle.

And those Jewish background believers, they thought, yes, you need to have faith in Jesus, but you also need to do Jewish things.

You need to get circumcised after a man.

You need the ceremonial law to get you right with God.

It was Jesus plus your works.

To which the Jerusalem Council said, that is a lie.

That is a lie.

It undercuts the whole message of the whole Bible, which is a message of grace.

And it said, Do not trouble these brand new Christians, do not burden them with an impossible, crushing burden.

You cannot earn friendship with God.

Some of us will know that.

You have tried, maybe you're even still trying through the things that you do, maybe good things or religious things, in order to rack up merit with God.

And it's a crushing burden.

Perhaps you've learned and you know from the Bible that God is unfathomably holy.

He is not like us.

The gulf between us and him is so great.

And to try and ascend a ladder of goodness to him, well, it's a crushing and impossible climb.

It is burdensome in another way, too.

This false message of Jesus plus your own good works.

It is burdensome in this respect, it destroys relationships.

There might be one person in a church that's been infected with this lie.

One person looks down in pride on another, another person looks up in despair.

I could never be or do what he or she does.

And so the counsel at Jerusalem, they gave an invitation, which is the Bible's invitation, and it has always been God's invitation.

Salvation, a friendship with God for sinful people, it is by the grace of God, that is the free gift of God.

It's received through faith, that is simply extending empty hands and receiving a gift, the gift of all that Jesus Christ has done.

And that is the only way that anyone ever has been, can be, will be made friends with God.

And that was a wonderful message for these people to hear.

Acts 15, it started in the little church in the Syrian town of Antioch.

A bunch of men and women and boys and girls from a whole array of pagan backgrounds.

They were religiously idolatrous, they worshipped false gods, they were morally bankrupt.

Yet the one true God had loved and cleansed them through Jesus and welcomed them into his family.

There is something incredible about the gospel of Jesus, the good news of Jesus.

It is utterly exclusive.

There is one way and only one way to be friends with the one true God, and that is through his Son Jesus Christ and faith in him.

It is also gloriously inclusive.

Any ethnicity, any background, any sin, that person, that man or woman, boy or girl, welcomed freely when they come to this Jesus and receive his gift.

Now, that's really what I've just said is that is really a summary of verses 1 to 18, which I preached through last Sunday.

Now, for some of us, that might be a new message.

And if so, let me encourage you to take away one of these uh booklets.

This is one of the Gospels, this is Luke's Gospel, one of the eyewitness accounts of Jesus' life and death and resurrection, his teaching about himself and about us and how we become friends with him.

You'll find a pile of them on the table by the door.

It is the very best of possible reads.

But then, and if you would look down in your Bibles, then we come to verse 20.

Verse 20, and there is a but.

Do you see?

But we should write to them to abstain from.

There are some things, you brand new Christians, that you do need to abstain from.

Now, what is going on here?

The council says, don't burden them, don't trouble them.

But are they saying there are some burdens to following Jesus?

Is there a complete contradiction going on here?

And obviously the answer is no.

This is not a list of things to do to be saved, it's not a list of divine brownie points to be earned.

And I've tried to sum it up, and this is the second half of our reading, I've summed it up in that second heading.

Jesus' grace, it makes us free to serve.

Now, before we get into the nitty-gritty, let me try and give you an overview of what's going on here.

In the council at Jerusalem, various voices were heard, various apostles, leaders of the church.

James, he explained that God wanted to include the Gentiles, but he wanted to do so without alienating believers from a Jewish background, because God had a plan for a united church, a church of all shapes and sizes of people, but one family.

People from wildly diverse backgrounds, and this is the experience of the Christian church, one of its glories, the people who otherwise might likely have hated and easily offended each other, yet drawn together into one family where they serve God and serve each other with a whole heart.

Now, that's the message here, really.

I'll try and show you how we get there.

In verse 20, James gives this list, three things to abstain from.

In verse 21, he gives a reason, and here's the reason: there were Jewish people everywhere, the law of Moses, the Jewish law was preached everywhere.

There were Jewish Christians in the church.

They were still working out how to apply Moses' law as Christians.

So, converts from a Gentile background, be kind to them, be patient with them.

And so he gives this short list.

Stay away from things polluted by idols, sexual immorality, and offensive food.

You're saved by grace, you're fully included.

Salvation in Jesus is free, but freed people use their salvation well.

People who are loved by Jesus in this remarkable way, then love like Jesus.

And that means they will love their new Christian brothers and sisters, and they won't want to do anything that hurts their conscience.

Now, those three things listed in verse 3.

Why those three things?

Why abstain from these things?

Well, they were things deeply associated with the Gentile world, the world from which these new believers had come, and because these were important lines, if you like, within the law of Moses.

Read about them in the book of Leviticus.

So things polluted by idols.

Imagine we could get in a time machine and we go back to the ancient world.

Maybe think of the world of the Odyssey, a world of Zeus and Poseidon and Athena and so on.

Idols, offerings to idols, it was a daily and central part of life.

Think of the food sacrifices which the gods required.

Now, Jewish people found that offensive.

The one true God finds that offensive.

He wants his people to have nothing to do with it.

The fake gods are just fake gods.

But behind the fake gods, you discover Satan and demons.

They lurk behind idols.

So, Gentile Christians, run a mile away from these things.

You used to be slaves to them.

You are now freed from slavery to idols.

Be faithful to the Lord.

So, second, then, abstain from sexual immorality.

Now, we did not invent anything goes in terms of who sleeps with whom.

Again, if we are in our time machine and we go back to the ancient world, we look at the Canaanites in the time of the Old Testament, or the Greeks and Romans in the New Testament era, they were absolute experts, tragically, in depravity and perversion.

The Jewish people in the ancient world, it grieved them, and it grieves God, the God of the Bible, who's got a particular plan and a pattern, a good one for men and women and relationships.

But wonderfully, this God, this God of grace, he loves to save people out of both idolatry and sexual immorality.

It's a thing, isn't it, that can make a person feel so unclean, so unforgivable.

Yet Jesus loves to clean sinners.

And so the word to these Gentile Christians was look, you're cleaned and forgiven.

Now flee from this thing, abstain from it, have nothing to do with it, don't slip back into it.

You're freed by Jesus to be pure.

The third thing.

Abstain from what has been strangled and from blood.

And probably those two things go together.

We're talking about killing animals for food in such a way that the blood remained in them.

It was forbidden for Old Testament Jews.

It was not kosher.

And the Old Testament law explained why.

Blood mattered.

And if you know the Bible story, you know, the way of salvation, the way to be ripe with God, it is through blood.

Blood mattered.

Blood back then was for atonement, for sacrifice.

An animal died in the place of a guilty worshipper.

Those blood sacrifices were a gift from God and a picture of the sacrifice, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shed his blood on the cross.

But when the real sacrifice came, Jesus, when he died and rose, all of those food laws were abolished.

Jesus made all foods clean.

Christians can eat blood, they can eat black pudding.

Now the Bible teaches that Old Testament laws like the Ten Commandments, the moral law, they bind all people for all time.

But ceremonial laws, nation-specific laws, things like circumcision, the food laws, they were stamped with a use by date, like the food in your fridge.

So, Christian, you could eat black pudding, but you wouldn't do that if you lived around Jewish background believers.

They're still sensitive to that particular Old Testament command.

So here's this little list given to the Gentile church, and here is what it really boils down to: love God and love your neighbor.

Wholehearted devotion to the Lord in your worship, purity of mind and body, and a deep care for your fellow church members who come from a different world to you.

And you do this not to earn God's favour, but because you have been loved, because you've been embraced by God's grace.

Now, I want us just to try and stop and think for a moment about the kind of Christian community which we see formed here.

The church that is formed by the true gospel of grace.

The Church of Jesus is to take God very seriously and to take each other very seriously.

Serious love and care, such that you would sacrifice your own freedoms, sacrifice your own preferences for another.

It can also be a challenging thing to welcome one another and love one another well.

There is always that danger, the danger that we saw in this poisonous false teaching in Acts chapter 15.

Acts 15 · chapter mention

We won't eat with you, we won't have fellowship with you unless you adopt our customs.

We don't want to insist on things that the Bible does not insist on.

Yeah, obviously, the the Ten Commandments they bind us.

Jesus is in control of us.

Freedom in Christ is not freedom from Christ.

That's one of the terrible lies of the world around us.

But plenty of things are just cultural.

And so it's okay for people to come to church with their cultures, ways of being, preferences, food and dress.

And it might require, it will require, sacrifice.

And that's what the Jerusalem Council asked of these Gentile Christians.

It was not become Jewish, but it was be mindful of your Jewish background, brothers and sisters.

They could have legitimately tucked into their black pudding, but don't.

And if you've got your Bibles open still, there is another example of this.

If you look beyond our reading, down to chapter 16 and verse 3, it is very striking.

So the Apostle Paul he carries on in his mission journey, 16, verse 3.

Paul wanted Timothy to accompany him, and he took him and circumcised him because of the Jews who were in those places, for they all knew that his father was a Greek.

Now, the Apostle Paul hated it when false teachers tried to impose this right of circumcision on Christians.

It was a false gospel, he said.

But he cheerfully circumcises Timothy, not sure how Timothy felt about it, but he cheerfully did this so it would make it easier for Jewish people in the Jewish world to listen and hear this gospel of grace.

Think about a different kind of analogy.

What about alcohol?

Christian people can drink in moderation.

Alcohol is a gift of God.

But suppose you are around Muslims or Muslim background believers.

Well, you would probably give up alcohol.

If you're around people who are strugglers with alcohol, you would think very carefully about what you do with that particular freedom.

And the aim of it all, because you're loved by Jesus and because you love Jesus, you will want together to build this amazing united church.

And so that is the message that the Jerusalem Council passed on to these brand new Gentile churches.

And it was a message which brought them joy and strength.

They write a letter, they send it, they really clearly denounce those false teachers.

And they make sure that everyone hears and understands.

Down in chapter 16, they deliver this as a message to be observed.

You've got to do this.

It wasn't a suggestion, it was a ruling made by the elders from all throughout the region.

And it brought strength and joy.

When you stand back and look at this chapter, which I read and which I've just preached, in some ways it feels a little bit weird and alien to us.

But I hope it shows to you that the following of Jesus and the building of his church is not a small thing or a light thing or a trivial thing.

A passage like this, it shows whether you, whether we have grasped the gospel of grace.

And has that gospel of grace gripped you?

It's really tempting to and very easy to forget grace alone.

And you you began to imagine God's law as a ladder to crime.

You start to treat human rules as rules to get you into God's good books.

But here is the point.

Christian people, we live by the grace of God.

We come in by the grace of God, we go on by the grace of God, and the grace of God makes a church where all believers in Jesus are welcome.

It's where we love God together, and where it's where we learn to love each other.

And truly, there is no place on earth like it.

Let's bow our heads.

I'm going to pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for this, your word.

We pray that you would write it upon our hearts.

Would you give us joy at your love for the first time or the umpteenth time?

And we pray that your love and grace would permeate such that we worship you, we pursue you with a whole heart, and we cheerfully love and serve one another.

And we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.