Jews, Gentiles, & Moses – October 18, 2026

Hello, my name is Jill, and the Old Testament reading is found in Amos 9, 11, and 12.

On that day, I will raise up the meeting tent of David that has fallen and repair its broken places.

I will raise up its ruins, and I will rebuild it like a long time ago, so that they may possess what is left of Edom, as well as all the nations who are called by my name, says the Lord, we will do this with the word of God.

Hello, my name is Lou.

The New Testament reading is found in Acts 15 and 19 through 21.

Therefore, I conclude that we shouldn't create problems for Gentiles who turn to God.

Instead, we should write a letter telling them to avoid the pollution associated with idols, sexual immorality, eating meat from strangled animals, and consuming blood.

After all, Moses has proclaimed been proclaimed in every city for a long time and is read aloud every Sabbath in every synagogue.

The word of the Lord.

Thank you for standing if you're able for the gospel reading.

Today is found in Matthew 5, 17 through 20.

Don't even begin to think that I have come to do away with the law and the prophets.

I haven't come to do away with them, but to fulfill them.

I say to you very seriously that as long as heaven and earth exist, neither the smallest letter nor even the smallest stroke of a pen will be erased from the law until everything there becomes a reality.

Therefore, whoever ignores one of the least of these commands and teaches others to do the same will be called the lowest in the kingdom of heaven.

But whoever keeps these commands and teaches people to keep them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

I say to you that unless your righteousness is greater than the righteousness of the legal experts and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

The gospel of the Lord.

Please remain standing with me as we pray this morning.

I'm going to move the table here real quick.

Alright, Jesus, we come before you this morning as your people.

And one of the distinguishing features that you said that would mark us as followers of Jesus is that we would know your voice.

And then that by the strength of the Spirit we would follow.

So we asked today that you would help us to hear you.

You would turn our ears, turn our attention to you, to what you're saying, so that we can hear, but not just hear.

Give us the strength to understand, and not just understand, but would you teach us and show us how to live in the way, the way that leads to life.

Help us, we pray.

And all God's people said, Amen.

You may be seated.

Good morning, everyone.

My name is Jason.

I'm one of the pastors here.

If you are new or newer or visiting with us, we're absolutely uh delighted that you're here.

So thanks for coming.

Um, and we'd love, as Stephanie said earlier, to get a chance to meet and connect with you.

Uh, want to do just a quick public service announcement.

If you've not attended one of our vision meetings, uh, there's still time to sign up.

So we have 20 more spots uh available for this coming Saturday.

And then uh because we filled up all the other ones, we're gonna open another one on uh Wednesday, November 4th.

Uh so that screenshot should come up here.

That should give you a chance to sign up for either Saturday morning at 9 or the uh Wednesday, November 4th from 6:30 to 8:30.

If you're like, do I really need to go to one of these?

Like, yes, please come.

Like the hope would be to have 500 of us go through uh one of these meetings between 350 and 400 uh right now.

Raise your hand if you've already been to one of them.

Yeah, if you see a hand raised, you can ask them, like, hey, should I come?

And then they'll tell you uh all about it from there.

So thank you all for making uh time to do that.

Last week, uh our youth pastor, Pastor Brock, uh brought us back to uh our series through the old testament.

Or sorry, our series through not the old testament, through Acts.

Slightly different from one another, but it's fine.

Uh we're gonna be back in Acts from now until Advent.

Uh, then we'll take a break for a little while and then be back in Acts again because Acts is a really long book.

Um, but we'll be here for a few more weeks.

Uh, the series is entitled Kingdom Movements.

Uh, we actually began all the way back in February.

Today will be in Acts chapter 15.

Acts 15 · chapter mention

So if you have a Bible, you can turn there or you can follow along in the screens.

If you were to ask some people, like, hey, out of all of the books of the book of Acts, like which chapters are the most important?

Uh, people might say something like Acts 2 and talk about Pentecost.

They may list a couple of other ones, but it's not likely that anybody's gonna list Acts 15.

Um, but it may actually be one of the most critical chapters in the whole book, and one of the most critical in the entire New Testament as well.

Uh, but it's a chapter that is often misread, often misunderstood, and actually used quite frequently in ways that go against what the text is actually saying.

So we're gonna read the chapter much more closely today.

That's my basic way of saying this is another one of those nerd Sundays.

Um so for all of you who love that part of me, welcome.

Everybody else, hi.

Uh but a little bit of background into Luke.

Luke is volume two of a two-volume work by, or sorry, Acts, volume two of a two-volume work by Luke.

Luke is a Gentile follower of Jesus from Antioch, which is a city in south-central Turkey.

As far as we know, Luke is the only non-Jewish writer of the New Testament.

Um, all of the other writers are Jewish.

Luke comes from a Gentile perspective.

Acts is covering about 30 years of church history and narrates the expansion of the kingdom of God through the church from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria to the ends of the earth, which at that point in time is Rome in that known sort of world.

But the book of Acts is more than just the geographic movement of the gospel, it is also a movement in which we see the gospel cross ethnic, cultural, and religious barriers.

The catalytic sort of event for that is in Acts chapter 10, when Peter shared the gospel with Cornelius.

Acts 10 · chapter mention

Cornelius is a Roman military officer, so he is a Gentile, he's not Jewish, but he himself is a God fearer, which means that he worshipped Yahweh, he worshiped the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but he was uncircumcised.

And so as Peter is talking to Cornelius and his household about Jesus, the Holy Spirit falls, just as it had on Pentecost in Acts chapter 2.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

And so Peter is like, okay, well, it's clear that God is moving here.

They believed, and he said, well, they should go ahead and be baptized and join the church.

But this became a point of conflict because Jews and Gentiles didn't like one another.

This was not sort of like, oh, great, like our best friends are now coming into the church.

This is more like we don't associate with them, we don't talk to them, we avoid their homes, we avoid any association at possible, and now we're being invited to worship and share the Lord's meal together.

So you can imagine the kind of suspicion and resistance and tension that this is causing, and really becomes a dominant theme throughout the New Testament is how do Jews and Gentiles live together as the new family of Jesus.

But underneath all of that tension really is about a is there's a sub-conversation around everyone's favorite book of the Bible, Leviticus.

And how Leviticus is being read and interpreted and implied and applied in the first century.

So we're gonna do a quick tour back to Leviticus.

You're like, oh, he was serious when he said nerd.

Um, we're gonna go back there for a little bit.

We were here uh a couple of months ago.

We're gonna come back really quickly.

So the book of Exodus, the book right before Leviticus, ends with the completion of the tabernacle and then the presence of God coming and filling that place so that God has now drawn near to his people again, as he had in the garden.

And we switch to the book of Leviticus, and Leviticus seems like it's just a book about like blood and guts and bodily fluids and all of those things.

You're like, I'll skip that and go to the next one, and then you get to numbers and it's like a lot of lists.

You're like, I'll skip that one and go to the next one, and then you're in Matthew, um, because you just gotta keep skipping for a uh for a while.

Uh but underneath Leviticus is this question: how do humans draw near to God and live?

God has just come and made his home with us again.

How do we draw near to the presence of God and survive it?

That's the underlying sort of question of Leviticus.

And in the middle of Leviticus, there's a really key passage that says this that one of the things that people are meant to do is to distinguish between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean.

So Leviticus, the logic of the book is that there are two realms.

There's the holy, which is God's realm.

So this would be increasing levels of holiness with inside the temple in the tabernacle itself.

And then there's the common realm, everything else.

And in that common realm is subdivided between the clean and the unclean.

So it sort of looks like this a little bit.

There's the holy and there's the common, and the common is divided between the clean and the unclean.

Now, when we hear clean and unclean, we immediately think about hygiene, whether or not somebody bathed that day, or maybe diet, do they eat certain places and certain foods with certain additives and all of those kind of things?

Leviticus is not thinking in those terms.

There is some correlation, maybe in the hygiene sort of realm, but Leviticus, the categories of clean and unclean are really about proximity to God, about drawing near to the presence and surviving.

So access to the temple and about inclusion in the people of God, inclusion in the covenant.

And so those categories are applied in two different ways.

There was an idea of ritual uncleanliness that didn't have anything to do with sin, and then there was a moral uncleanliness, which is what we think of as sin.

But anything that is unclean cannot come into contact with the holy and live.

The unclean must become clean, and then there can be proximity or contact with the holy.

Now, in the first century, Gentiles were just seen as inherently unclean.

They are always and forever unclean unless they decide to stop being Gentiles and become Jewish.

Which meant becoming circumcised for adult males, challenge, maybe a little bit there for that conversation for another day.

Then then being ritually immersed in a mikveh, uh, ritual sort of bath, precursor to baptism, and then offer a sacrifice and then begin to live as a Jew.

So if a Gentile was a God-fearer, like Cornelius, somebody who worshipped Yahweh, who was righteous, who obeyed the law, he was morally clean, but because he was uncircumcised, he was considered ritually unclean, he was not circumcised, he was not part of the covenant, he was an outsider, and from that perspective, there was no pathway for him to go from clean to unclean, or from unclean to clean without a full conversion, which meant there was no pathway to forgiveness and no pathway to salvation.

And then Acts chapter 10 comes along, and Peter shares the gospel with him.

Acts 10 · chapter mention

The Holy Spirit comes, and all of a sudden everybody's minds are blown because something dramatic happens.

Rather than the unclean doing the work that they needed to do to become clean in order to come in contact with the holy, the holy came in contact with the unclean and made him clean.

And all of a sudden the actor changes and the director changes, and everybody's like, wait a minute, the order just got reversed.

The holy came to the unclean, made him clean, and not just clean, made him holy, a receptacle, a mini tabernacle holding the very presence of God.

And so Peter's like, well, get baptized.

Like, who am I to stand in the way of all of that?

But this was what was met with so much suspicion and resistance.

It's that tension that resurfaces in Acts chapter 15.

Acts 15 · chapter mention

Rather, Paul and Barnabas returned from Antioch on their first missionary journey.

Uh, they've been there sharing the gospel with Gentiles, and now this Acts 15, that was a lot of runway, but now we're on the ramp.

Here we go.

So some people came from Judea, they came up to Antioch, and they were teaching the family believers this.

Unless you are circumcised according to the custom we receive from Moses, you can't be saved.

They're going back to that old playbook.

Like, listen, this is how this works.

You have to be circumcised, you have to become Jewish, and then you can have all of this access.

But Paul and Barnabas, they took sides against those Judeans and argued strongly against that position.

And the church at Antioch said, Well, how are we gonna settle this?

So they sent Paul and Barnabas and several others from Antioch to go to Jerusalem, like HQ to headquarters, to set this question before the apostles and the elders.

They're like, hey, we shouldn't just settle this on our own.

We really need to convey a church meeting.

Um, so the apostles and the elders and Jerusalem gathered to debate the issue, and we now have the first church council, one of millions to follow.

With the primary question before them is the nature of conversion.

The question is: do Gentiles need to become Jews before becoming Christians?

That's what they're debating.

And after much debate, let's pause there for a second.

The early church was a place where it was safe to debate ideas, that they wrestled with stuff and managed to stay in relationship with one another.

Mind-blowing.

I know.

And even people that were very different from one another were doing this, mind-blowing.

But Peter stood up and addressed them after they debated and said, This fellow believers, you know that early on God chose me from among you as the one through whom the Gentiles would hear the word of the gospel and come to believe.

Like I had this unique experience of being there on that day with Cornelius.

And God knows people's deepest thoughts and desires, and he confirmed this by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us.

It would happen the exact same way.

And he made no distinction between us and them, but he purified, he cleansed, right?

To go back to those Leviticus categories, their deepest thoughts and desires through faith.

So why are you now challenging God by placing a burden on the shoulder of these disciples that neither we nor our ancestors could bear?

On the contrary, we believe that we and they are saved the same way by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The word there is the word yoke upon them.

And this is not simply about circumcision, though that was the presenting issue, but that really what he's saying is we shouldn't put the burden on them, which suggests that they can obtain salvation through obedience to the law.

That they can, by doing all of the right things, move from being unclean to clean and to holy through their own efforts.

Because it didn't work for us that way.

In fact, all throughout the New Testament, Paul and other writers say this has never been true.

Nobody has ever been able to do that.

Abram believed, and then it was credited to him as righteousness.

He had faith.

That's what came first.

And then circumcision came as a sign of the covenant.

Israel was rescued from Egypt.

They were saved, and then they were given the law.

They were not given the law in Egypt and then said, hey, if you do all of this right, then maybe someday I'll come and help you out of this mess.

No, God rescued them and then gave them the law that they might learn how to live as freed people.

But everyone has always been saved by God's grace.

That's the only way it's ever worked.

Through faith.

And they go on and they build this argument and they reference a couple things.

They talk about Peter's vision and the testimony about Cornelius, and then Paul and Barnabas.

They talk about the signs and wonders that they saw among the Gentiles, and then they go to the scriptures and they say, and all of this actually aligns what we've been promised before.

And they go and they quote the Old Testament.

They go to everybody's favorite promise, uh prophet Amos, and they quote our Old Testament reading and said, No, no, no, Amos told us that when David's household is re-established by the Messiah Jesus, then Gentiles, the nations, will come to faith in him and they'll share in the kingdom.

This shouldn't surprise us.

This has been the story all along.

And so they're there and they're all together in community.

They're discerning and they're hearing testimonies and they're going to the scriptures, and then they conclude out of that communal discernment that this is the way that it should be.

And that conversation around them not having to be circumcised, then though raises a second question in the middle of it.

And the question that gets raised is what about the role of the law and the life of Christians?

What about Moses?

What are we gonna do about that guy?

Because these Judeans who are coming in saying, Well, no, no, no, you have to be circumcised.

Underneath all of that is probably this really deep fear about the law of Moses, about the Torah just being tossed aside.

They loved the law.

They were taught that the law was a gift, that the law revealed what was good and beautiful and true, that the law was meant to guide their lives into righteousness, that the law had marked their community, the law had distinguished them, the law was central to their identity.

And is this just gonna happen where all of that is just gonna get tossed aside?

That's the fear that's underlying some of this conversation.

What's very interesting is that many people read Acts 15 exactly that way.

They read Acts 15 and they say, hey, as we go along, what we're gonna see is that the apostles and the elders are unhitching themselves from the Old Testament.

They're detaching the church from the covenant at Sinai.

They're making this huge demarcation in this way and saying, no, no, no, no, no, none of that matters anymore.

It's all kind of gone away.

And many Christians treat the Old Testament that way, as sort of outdated or irrelevant.

You know, you hold up the Bible and all the pages on the one side are red and all the others are crisp and clean.

Right?

And there's these perspectives like, oh, like we don't need all of that, you know, sort of stuff because like everything is just grace and God doesn't care how we live.

It's shown in Acts chapter 15.

Acts 15 · chapter mention

What we're just supposed to do is follow our heart and do what seems right or do what feels right and be true to ourselves.

And you know, if we just do that, then then you know that's Makes Jesus smile.

Um, that actually does sound like a direct quote from the Bible.

It's um from the book of Judges, which says everyone did what was right in their own eyes.

And if you've said, if you've ever read the book of Judges, this is not the inspiration for a Hallmark movie.

This is not the book that you go and like, I think Disney should make a version of this and then we show it to children.

Um no, like Judges is a Quentin Tarantino film.

Um I mean, it is it's Halloween, so Judges would be like really great for Stephen King adaptation.

And that sense that that, oh, what's happening in Acts 15 is we're just getting rid of the Old Testament and we're saying like how people live no longer matters, that everyone should just do, you know, what that what they want to do, and we should just get rid of all of that, it's actually goes counter even what Jesus Himself taught about the law.

And our Old Testament reading said, hey, no, no, no, no.

Like all of this is going to be fulfilled, like, don't toss this away.

And if we read Acts 15 carefully, we actually see something very, very different.

Acts 15 sort of concludes with this in the Jerusalem Council says, It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God.

Now, the way that often gets read is we shouldn't, you know, require anything of them.

What the underlying language is is we shouldn't cause any unnecessary or extra trouble.

It doesn't remove everything that's hard.

Doesn't remove every obstacle.

Discipleship to Jesus has always been at its core.

Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.

They're not simply saying, like, okay, we're just gonna get rid of anything that might be hard in the middle of that.

No, discipleship to Jesus has always been a narrow way, a narrow road.

Uh, what the disciples are saying is we shouldn't try to make it narrower.

Like, it's already narrow, let's not squeeze it even more.

But we the disciples here are certainly not making it wider.

That's not what they're doing.

Instead, they're saying this instead we should write to them and tell them to abstain from food polluted by idols and from sexual innormality and from the meat strangled of animals and from blood, for the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in every synagogue on the Sabbath.

They go through this huge debate and they talk through all of these things, and then they tell them like they should abstain from these four things.

And their rationale behind it is the assertion that Gentiles are familiar with the law of Moses because it has been preached in every city for generations.

So anything that we say to them is not gonna surprise them and shouldn't be an objection to them.

And so they write the official letter which follows, and it lists the four things in this order.

The Holy Spirit has led us to the decision that no burden should be placed on you other than these essentials.

Refuse food offered to idols, blood, the meat of strangled animals, and sexual immorality.

You will do well to avoid such things.

Farewell.

It's my favorite line.

But you ever stop and wonder, like, why those things?

Like, where did they just like come up with that list?

Like, uh, let's just, you know, have an ideation session.

It was like the first church of brainstorm, and this is what they came up with.

But they notice they refer to them as essentials.

Well, it turns out that the list came from somewhere.

The list came from everybody's favorite Old Testament book.

It came from Leviticus, is where it came from.

That as they're sitting there debating and wondering and questioning and praying and debating and listening to the Spirit, they searched the scriptures.

Their scriptures would have been the Old Testament, which they would have seen as still an authoritative role in the life of the church.

And in the Old Testament, there's lots of conversations about Gentiles.

And those, there's some particular passages about Gentiles who have been circumcised, but then there's other passages about Gentiles who are not circumcised but live in the land of Israel.

Those references to Gentiles who are not circumcised, who are living in the land of Israel, are primarily concentrated in Leviticus 17 and 18.

And they list four things that are required of Gentiles who are not circumcised living in the land of Israel, and they're these.

They should abstain from food sacrifice to idols, from consuming blood, from uh meat from strangled animals and from sexual immorality.

And they're listed in the exact same order.

Now, I don't have time this morning to unpack all of those things.

Some of you are like, can we just go into like the strangled animals conversation?

Because you're super confused right now.

We're not going to dive into all of that.

We will maybe another day.

I tried to convince the team, instead of doing Acts to do Leviticus, uh, as like a two-year series, and Stephanie and Brock had some objections.

Um, so maybe next year you can talk to them and help me in that um in that conversation.

I will say where this gets used most often is in conversations, uh, Acts 15 is coming up often in Christian conversations about gender and sexuality.

That's where this is commonly coming up right now.

And saying that in Acts 15, all of the Old Testament is being thrown out.

And so none of those passages should be relevant to the conversations about how Christians consider those really important and really sensitive and really critical conversations about gender and sexuality.

And what we actually find in Acts 15 is they're saying, no, no, no, all of Leviticus 18 should be something that marks the way of Christians who are following the way of Jesus.

Gentiles don't have to become Jews to become Christians, but they can't keep living like Gentiles.

And so in Leviticus 18 or in Acts, the word that they're used for sexual immorality is the word pornea, which is where we get the word pornography.

And in that list of things in sexual immorality, it goes and it talks about incest, it talks about bestiality, it talks about same-sex relationships, it talks about situations where there can be sexual exploitation and abuse and violence, and it talks about adultery.

And it talks about all of them on the same level, doesn't pull one of them out and say, like, this is the you know, really sort of bad sexual sin.

It says all of these things are serious issues for followers of Jesus and we're meant to actually live our lives in ways that model sexual wholeness in a world marked by sexual brokenness.

It's a really serious thing that the early church is saying here.

And so the two sort of implications from it are definitely that Gentiles do not become Jews to become Christians.

The Old Testament didn't require Gentiles to be circumcised to live in the land of Israel.

And so the New Testament doesn't require Gentiles to be circumcised to live in the church.

But Gentiles are included as Gentiles based on their faith and trust in Jesus.

But the clarity here is they should not live as Gentiles, but should live in a very different way.

So the Old Testament, what the Old Testament required of immigrants living in the land, the New Testament requires of Gentiles living in the church.

And what it's holding together is inclusivity and fidelity.

But holding them together on God's terms.

This is what we're desiring to mark our life together as a church.

We want to be a hospitable and healing community, a place where we say, hey, faith in Jesus is open to everybody.

The grace of God is available to all.

The gospel is going out to everyone, and all are invited to come and follow Jesus and be included in community.

And yet, community itself should be healing in our lives.

It should lead toward us being healed and made whole and living in ways that put on display God's holiness within the world.

And so the second thing is that the Old Testament is actually foundational for Christian ethics.

It's not something that just gets sort of tossed out like, oh, this doesn't matter.

But the early church leaders, James and Barnabas and Peter and Paul, what they're doing in Acts 15 is not setting aside the Old Testament, and neither are other New Testament writers, including this Gentile author, Luke.

Instead, what they're continually doing is seeking the Old Testament to understand who God is and how we should live, what we believe and how we live.

So what distinguishes the Old Testament and the New Testament is not those simple categories, the Old Testament is about law and the New Testament is about grace, or the Old Testament is about law and the New Testament about faith.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

There is grace first in all of them, and then faith, and then showing how do we live as the new people of God.

What the difference is, is Jesus and the spirits.

The difference is that Jesus has fulfilled God's promises, that through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, there is now forgiveness of sin, and not just forgiveness, but we've been set free from its power.

What's different is that the holy came to the unclean and made us clean by grace through faith that we might learn to live in a different way.

That's what's different.

And it's now possible because the Holy Spirit now resides inside of us.

He transforms us and then he takes a residence in us.

He empowers us to live faithful lives.

He teaches us and helps us.

This is why the fundamental identity of the people of God in the New Testament is saints, holy ones.

Not because we're doing this according to our own power.

That the unclean made ourselves clean and we made ourselves holy, but because the power of God now lives inside of us.

So as we prepare to come to the table this morning, I want to just remind us as we come to the table, the table is the weekly reminder that we don't have to clean ourselves up before we come to God.

We don't have to have our lives all together, our theology all figured out, everything sort of like per, you know, packaged all right.

In other words, we don't have to say, like, I need to hide what other parts of my life are broken, and try to, by my own might and power, move myself from the category of unclean to clean.

Instead, we come to the table with a first practice of confessing our sin, being honest about ourselves and about our lives, and we come empty-handed with nothing to offer but ourselves.

And we come saying, okay, here's who we are, and here's all of our lives.

But we're coming to the one who first drew near to us.

We're coming to the holy one who comes to make the unclean clean.

We're coming to the holy one who comes to heal us, to make us whole, to help us in every way, to forgive us and to set us free.

And so when we come to the table, we're just asking him, would you keep working on us?

Like, would you keep doing your work?

Would you keep making us into your image and your likeness until we know the height and depth and breadth of your love for us and until we know what it means to be people who live the way that you always meant for us to live.

And to enjoy the freedom and the joy that comes with us.

So glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, for as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.

World without end.

Amen.