What does it take to be saved | Sunday Sermon

Well, if you remember our story last week, we were in the area of Galatia, as Paul and Barnabas had been sent by the church in Antioch of Syria on a missionary journey.

They had gone through the island of Cyprus, they had gone north into Phoenicia and went through Perga and then up to Pisidian Antioch and through Iconium and Lystra and Derby.

And through that whole period, they had preached the gospel wherever they went.

They had planted churches, they established disciples.

Paul was almost martyred in Lystra through stoning.

Okay, but they went through that whole thing and then they made their way back through the cities, appointing elders, and telling them to remain in the faith.

And they had come all the way back, we got all the way back last week when they came back to their home church in Syrian Antioch, and they had related all that the Lord had done through their ministry in their missionary journey.

And so they've been at this point in the church in Antioch of Syria for quite a while now, and they're teaching, they're discipling, they're just strengthening the church, and then suddenly in our story here in Acts 15, it says, Some men came from Jerusalem and they were teaching the brothers, unless you're circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.

The question being asked and answered in the passage today in Acts chapter 15 is the same question that we're going to ask and answer today.

Acts 15 · chapter mention

And that question is this: what does it take to be saved?

Remember at this point in church history, the church had begun to reach the Gentiles.

When the gospel first came to Jerusalem, the church was all Jewish people, right?

Peter had stood up and preached, and 3,000 came in, and but everybody was Jewish.

For a long time, the only people that believed, the only people that were Christians were Jewish people.

And now God's begun to take the gospel to the Gentiles.

And so Gentiles are coming into the kingdom.

And so churches are being planted everywhere.

They've received the Holy Spirit.

And at some point, some sincere Jewish people, they're trying to understand how this works for Gentile people to follow a Jewish Messiah.

And so they're saying, hey, listen, if you really want to be saved, you know, like we're real happy that you've decided that you believe in our Jewish Messiah, okay?

Put this gently.

But, you know, we're happy that you believed in our Jewish Messiah, but that's not gonna be quite enough for you, okay?

Because if you really want to be saved, you need Jesus plus.

You gotta have Jesus plus circumcision, you gotta have Jesus plus Moses, you gotta have Jesus plus obedience to the law and becoming fully Jewish.

But I want to stop and pause here for a second because we went through this whole passage on Thursday morning.

We went through Acts 15, we went through Galatians, you know, not the whole Galatians, but we did parts of Galatians along with Acts 15, and this word circumcision kept coming up over and over and over and over again until I was looking around and I started to see some of the eyes of the women kind of glazing over and rolling back in their head because it feels like this is a conversation where he's just addressing men.

He's just talking to men and he's not talking to the women.

And yet that couldn't be further from the truth because the teachers from Jerusalem are not merely saying, Gentile men, if you want to be saved, you've got to go through this medical procedure.

What they're saying is, Gentiles who want to believe in our Jewish Messiah have to become fully Jewish in order to be saved.

But remember to be Jewish, like what does it mean to be Jewish?

What did that mean to them?

Well, to be Jewish is to be a biological descendant of Abraham.

To be a descendant of Abraham was to be an heir of all the promises that God had given to Abraham.

And so the issue at stake is this: if you want to become part of the family of God, you have to become part of the family of Abraham, the heir of God's promises, and that promise included the Messiah.

So you got to be Jewish, you got to be a descendant of Abraham.

And so the question they were trying to answer is what does it take to do that?

And the answer that the circumcision party was giving them was well, you have to convert to Judaism first, and then you can be a Christian.

You have to take upon yourself the whole Jewish covenantal way of life.

But how do I do that?

Well, it to in the first century, a Gentile converting to Judaism had to go through some things.

They actually had to go through baptism.

I know we think of baptism as like a Christian thing, and it is.

But baptism didn't start just with the church.

Baptism was used by the Jews to bring a Gentile person who wanted to worship the God of Israel into the covenant people.

They would do a ritual cleansing of baptism.

Then they would want to bring an animal, you can bring that list back up.

They want to bring an animal sacrifice.

So you had to bring an animal offering to the temple in Jerusalem.

Okay, then you had to be obedient to the law of Moses, which means one of those things is dietary restrictions.

You couldn't eat certain foods, like you couldn't eat pork, you couldn't eat lobster.

How many of you guys like lobster and shellfish?

I hate that stuff.

I do not have any desire to eat a bug.

Even if it comes from the ocean, I ain't eating no bug.

That thing's got six legs and antennas.

That's a bug.

Okay?

Gross bug eaten.

So you can't, if you like eating bugs, you can't eat bugs because now you gotta follow the law of Moses.

You can't eat pork, okay?

And you gotta, not just food, but there's this, you know, clean versus unclean distinction that you have to basically make in every part of your life.

You've got to separate yourself from the overall kind of outer Gentile world.

And finally, if you were a man, then you had to be circumcised.

Okay, and so all of those, apart from the last one, applied to both men and women.

Okay, so in order to become a descendant, an offspring of Abraham, and an heir of God's promise, every Gentile had to go through all of those things.

And so at this council in Jerusalem, every single Gentile person who wanted to follow Christ had something at stake.

And this is why Paul's letter to the Galatians is so important.

See, he wrote the letter to the Galatians right around the same time as this council in Jerusalem.

This was a big issue in the church.

Because basically, what was happening is that some of these Jewish Christians were bringing a heresy into the early church.

The heresy is this you have to do something because Christ is not sufficient for your salvation.

And so you need Christ, but you need other stuff too.

You get Christ, but you got to add these things to it.

But that's not the gospel that the apostles were preaching.

And so Paul had gotten word at some point that these missionary journey he and Barnabas had gone through, where they had taken the gospel of these people, where they had risked their lives, where they had gone through so much, where they had planted these churches, they had established disciples, where they had laid hands on elders, that this heresy is coming into these churches.

And it wasn't too long after they got back to Antioch.

And so he writes the letter to the Galatians, but in chapter 3, he says, This in Christ Jesus, you're all sons of God through faith.

He said, For as many as of you of you as were baptized into Christ, have put on Christ.

He said, There's neither Jew nor Greek, there's neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

What he's saying here is he's saying, look, we're all on level ground at the cross.

There's no one that has an advantage or a disadvantage.

You don't have an advantage because you're Jewish, you don't have a disadvantage because you're a Gentile.

And reverse is true.

You're not at a disadvantage because you're Jewish, and you don't have an advantage because you're a Gentile.

We're all equal.

We bring our brokenness to him.

We don't have anything worthy to bring him.

We have nothing to contribute to our salvation.

And so we're all equal at the foot of the cross.

And he says, This listen, are you paying attention?

This part's important.

He says, and if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring.

And heirs according to promise.

So the Jews' argument was, you have to become part of Abraham's seed, part of his offspring, part of his family.

You have to be entered into the covenant family.

Okay, and in order to do that, you've got to jump through all these hoops.

So Paul's answer is no.

The answer to how a man or woman can become an heir of Abraham is not by becoming Jewish, it's by putting on Christ.

It's by placing your faith in Christ for your salvation.

So that brings us to the first point that we're going to find in our passage today in Acts 15, which is this you can't save yourself.

In verse 7 it says, 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'll be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.

Peter stands up.

After hearing some of this debate and some of this thing going on, Peter stands up.

He's like, You guys remember, God's the one that brought me from the village of Lida and Joppa up to Caesarea to the house of Cornelius, where I preached to that Gentile, who, by the way, was not circumcised, was not Jewish, did not follow the law of Moses.

He probably ate lobster.

That's gross, but he still did, right?

And so he just was saved by faith and he received the same Holy Spirit.

He's like, Why are you trying to put a yoke on these Gentile believers that not even our ancestors or we are able to bear?

We're not able to do it.

Why would you tell them they have to do it?

Why do you think we needed Jesus?

Because we couldn't do it.

In other words, why are you putting other standards on them besides Christ?

Paul, in his epistle to the Philippians in chapter 3, okay, he's addressing the same issue.

He says, watch out for those dogs, those mutilators of the flesh who will come into the church and tell you you need something more than just Jesus to be saved, to tell you you got to go through this medical procedure in order to be a Christian.

He's like, they think that they're special because they're Jewish.

He says, though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also, if anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more.

He says, They want to come impress you with their Jewish credentials.

I have a more impressive resume than they do.

Go ahead and bring that back up, Lori.

He says, I was circumcised on the eighth day of the tribe of Benjamin.

I'm a Hebrew of Hebrews.

As to the law, a Pharisee.

In other words, it doesn't get any more strict in adherence to the law than a Pharisee.

As to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

What he's saying by saying that is when it comes to just being externally obedient and just committing your whole external life to obedience to what the law said, he was blameless.

Now that doesn't speak to his heart condition and what was going on the inside, and Jesus spoke to our heart.

But he's saying, as far as how perfectly he obeyed the law, he basically did it perfect.

But it didn't deal with the inward corruption and the sin of his heart.

But his point was that even with all that, it wasn't enough.

Basically, what he's saying is if you want to try to earn your righteousness through obeying the law of Moses, you're gonna have to be better than me.

But he says, you're probably not gonna be better than me.

And even if you are, it's still not gonna be enough.

Because you can't earn your own righteousness.

So he goes on in that passage and he says, but whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ.

He said, Indeed, I count everything as a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord.

He said, For the sake, for his sake, I've suffered the loss of all things, and I count them as rubbish.

He's like, All my achievements, all the respect I had through the Jewish community and the religious establishment, all of the accolades, I count them as trash, as refuse, as rubbish, just compared to knowing Christ and being known by him and being found in him.

He says, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes through the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ.

Paul's saying the same thing as Peter.

Peter said, We believe that we're gonna be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just like they will.

He's saying we Jews who follow Christ believe that we're gonna be saved just by the same grace that saves those Gentiles who don't have the law.

He's not saying the Gentiles can be saved like us Jews.

He's saying us Jews could be saved like them, who don't have all those things, but they're saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone.

Not by being Jewish, not by observing the Sabbath, not by having medical procedures, not by eating certain foods, and not by being perfect in our own power, but by belonging to Jesus.

See, God's law is good, his perfect standard is good.

There's nothing wrong with his law.

The problem is us.

We're not good.

You're not good.

And you might be sitting there thinking, well, I'm kind of good.

Like, geez, Jeff, that's kind of mean.

I'm kind of good.

Like, I'm better than the people around me.

I know people worse than me.

But see, that's our problem.

We compare ourselves to the people around us.

We compare ourselves to the people we see on the news or to that guy over there who's bumping his music, and maybe his car goes like this or something.

We're like, I'm better than that guy.

Maybe you're not better than that guy.

The problem is that God's not comparing us to one another, God's comparing us to himself, and his standard is perfection, and we're not perfect, but you know who is Jesus is.

Jesus is perfect, and that's why it's gonna bring us to this point right here.

Jesus did what we couldn't do.

See, the message of the gospel is that not God decided his law is too hard, it's just too hard.

The standard's too high, so we're just gonna lower the standard now.

Okay?

No, the gospel's not that he's lowering his standard.

God's standard is perfect.

He said, Be holy as I am holy.

Okay?

But we can't be holy, can we?

And so we stand condemned.

And yet God loved us so much that he desired to redeem us without lowering his standard.

And so God sent his only son that all who believe in him would not perish, but have everlasting life.

The reason that Jesus came into the world was for this purpose: to fulfill the righteous requirement of the law on our behalf, to stand as our representative before God.

And he obeyed the law and he fulfilled everything before God, before he obeyed, he fulfilled everything that the law of God required for our blessing.

In order for us to receive the blessings, right?

God gave the law to Moses.

He said, if you want blessing, these are the things, these are the standards, these are the things you have to fulfill in order to be blessed.

Jesus came and he fulfilled all of those things, all those stipulations of the contract, so that we could be blessed, and then stood in our place and he took and absorbed the full punishment for our disobedience to the law, for breaking the contract.

And so listen, you're like, yeah, Jeff, I've heard this for like the last 40 years in church.

Well, you need to hear it again.

You need to hear it again because our instinct is idolatry, our instinct is rules, our instinct is religion.

So you need to hear it again.

Okay, here's the deal because of what Jesus did, there's nothing left for us to do.

He obeyed perfectly for us, and he paid the price perfectly for us.

And that's why Paul in Ephesians 2 he said, For by grace you've been saved through faith.

And that's not of yourselves, it's a gift of God, not a result of works, lest anyone should boast.

Because if it was by works, we'd all be proud of ourselves, wouldn't we?

And sometimes when we don't understand the gospel, we do get proud of ourselves.

Well, my life is so much cleaner than those people over there.

I've got myself all put together.

I'm not like them over there, that tax collector.

I'm not that hippity hop fellow over there.

And we want to judge other people around us.

But Paul's saying, by grace you've been saved through faith.

It's not of yourselves, it's not a result of works, lest anyone should boast, for we're his workmanship.

Okay, we're not our own workmanship, we're his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which he prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

And so that brings us to our third point.

How does the Bible tell us we can be saved?

Well, in Romans 10 9, it says this if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and if you believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Now there's other things that come after that, aren't there?

Well, there's baptism, there's obedience, there's sanctification, there's becoming a better person, there's obeying God, there's you know evangelism, there's learning, there's discipleship, there's all these things, but you know what?

None of that stuff saves us.

Those things all flow out of our salvation, and they're the evidence that our salvation is real.

And so that brings us to our fourth point.

We're moving through these quickly, aren't we?

Stop adding things to Jesus.

Stop adding things to Jesus.

In the first century, it was Jesus plus circumcision, Jesus plus becoming Jewish.

But our problem is that we still have a tendency to do this.

Jesus plus baptism.

Or maybe it's Jesus plus our particular kind of baptism.

You didn't do it right, you gotta redo it over here.

Or if you want to be a part of the real church, you gotta come and you gotta go through our process and do our baptism.

How about Jesus plus church attendance?

Man, if you're not there every Sunday coming to all the meetings, man, you're not in.

You must not be a real Christian.

Jesus plus tithing.

I mean, if you're not given 10%, are you even saved?

Right?

Just send me that seed money.

Send me that seed money in faith, and I'll send you a prayer cloth.

Jesus plus our denomination.

If you're not in our group, you're probably wrong.

Because we got it all down.

We are the best theologians there are anywhere.

We don't do anything wrong.

If you're not in our group, I don't know.

Or how about Jesus plus our lack of denomination?

Because you know those denominations, they're lost.

Jesus plus speaking in tongues, Jesus plus not speaking in tongues, Jesus plus Calvinism, Jesus plus Arminianism, Jesus plus the right end times view.

Have you heard that one before?

If you don't believe the right thing about how Jesus is coming back, then you might not be a Christian.

How about Jesus plus dressing appropriately before you come into our worship service?

Stephen, how dare you wear shorts into church?

I am appalled, sir.

See, we say we believe in salvation by grace through faith, and then we like to find little ways to add caveats to that.

And some of these things that we mentioned, they are important.

If you believe in Christ and follow Christ, you should be baptized.

If you believe in Christ and follow Christ, you should be part of his church.

If you believe in Christ and follow Christ, you should give to the Lord and to the mission of the church.

You should follow sound doctrine, you should obey Christ in your life.

But the fact is, these things don't save you, they just give evidence that your salvation is actually real salvation.

The thing that saves you, the person who saves you, is Jesus.

Which brings us to our final point that grace changes the order.

Let's bring back up Ephesians chapter 2.

Ephesians 2 · chapter mention

The difference, this conversation is really about the difference between religion versus true faith in Christ.

Because religion says if I just do good works, then I get.

Salvation.

Okay.

But the gospel says.

Oh, cool.

It worked.

I was trying something new on the screen today.

It worked good.

Religion says if I do enough good works, I get salvation.

But the gospel says by grace you've been saved.

Then it's not of yourself, it's not of your works.

It's not of your obedience.

It's not of how good you are.

It doesn't depend on what you did in your past.

It doesn't depend when you lose your temper tomorrow.

You're saved by grace through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, based upon his perfect obedience to the law and based upon his perfect sacrifice that completely paid for every one of your sins that you ever committed or you ever will commit.

Wait a minute, that I ever will commit?

Yes, even those.

He either paid it or he didn't.

And when you get mad tomorrow and you flip off that old lady because she's going too slow and you're just in a like road rage mood or something like that.

The father's not like, okay, son, give me some more blood.

They messed up again.

Jeff did it again.

He blew it.

I need some more of your blood.

No, the price has been paid in full.

And it says we're we're saved for good works.

He said, We are his workmanship.

We're his masterpiece.

We're his project, not our own.

Created in Christ Jesus.

Remember that verse that says we are a new creation?

If you're in Christ, you are a new creation.

The old has passed away.

Behold, all has become new.

Created in Christ Jesus for good works, which he prepared beforehand that we should walk in.

In other words, grace leads to our salvation.

Salvation leads to our good works.

And so we don't obey Jesus so that it'll save us.

We obey Jesus because he saved us.

And so Peter's counsel once again, his testimony, we believe we Jews are going to be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.

And so they go through this whole council, and you know, Peter shares, and James and Barnabas, I mean, uh Paul and Barnabas share about their journey, and some other people share.

And finally at the end of the council, James, the half biological half-brother of Jesus, stands up.

He's the de facto leader of the church of Jerusalem in this time, and he stands up and he renders his judgment.

He says, Therefore, my judgment is that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God.

So, what does this mean, though?

Well, in layman's terms, in 2026 speakers, it means don't make it harder for people to come to Jesus than Jesus did.

Does that make sense?

If you're already a Christian, if you're already in, then don't make it harder for other people to come in.

You know when people like move into a neighborhood and they're like, I got mine cheap, you know, I got mine all cheap and I want to be let in and I want to like have to be able to do whatever I want to do, and then they get into their place, then they want to change all the rules to keep everybody else out, right?

I don't want any other people coming to this neighborhood.

I want to set the rules and want things how I like it.

Okay, don't make it harder for people to come to Jesus than He made it.

And secondly, if you're not in Christ, or if you question whether you're in Christ, don't think you have to add anything.

Don't think that you gotta clean yourself up first.

Don't think that you gotta change your culture, change your behavior, change your join somebody's certain tribe.

Because you're not the one that's gonna save yourself, Jesus is.

I think that's enough for today.

Let's pray, and then we are going to sing that wonderful hymn we all love because he lives.

Amen.