Whose Standards Run the Church?

Transcript

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[0:00] God, we ask for your blessing on this word today, that you would speak to our hearts and engage our minds as we put to practice the words that you have spoken. These things we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

[0:19] So it seems there's a common phrase in virtually every church at some point or another, and that is, but we've always done it that way. And it sort of feels as though this is what they were thinking in the early church in this passage. Like we do today, they had their reasons for wanting to keep things as they have always been. And they are complex reasons. But when we dig deeper, they just seem to fall short. And we still struggle with those very same things today. Maybe not the exact. Same struggle. But when we really dig deep, it's the same reasons.

[1:03] So the book of Acts spans about 30 years. And they're the first 30 years of early Christianity. And our passage today seems to take place right around 20 years after the resurrection of Christ. And so as we saw, there's a big problem that develops there. The earliest church was 30. And it was early Jewish in its makeup. Jesus, after all, himself was the Jewish Messiah. And all of his earliest followers were Jews. And after his resurrection, those who made up the early church were either Jewish by birth or Jewish by conversion.

[1:45] So the earliest church had a definite Jewish core. And of course we know that God always intended for the church to be inclusive of God. And that was the case for the Jews and the Gentiles alike. And Jesus reflected that in his ministry and his charge to the disciples to go make disciples of all nations. But nevertheless, the earliest church was made up of Jewish Christians. And that was changing little by little. But about 12 years in, things really got stirred up. Peter had a confusing dream. And in it, God revealed to him that nothing was going to change. Nothing God created could be unclean. Nothing that God made clean could be unclean. And immediately after that vision, Peter was called to the house of Cornelius, who was a Roman centurion. So in other words, he was a Gentile. And he was a very Gentile Gentile. Because a Roman centurion had a very ingrained sense of Roman culture.

[2:53] So Cornelius was worshipping his own gods. When an angel of the Jewish God appeared to him and told him to send for a man named Peter, who would be able to tell him about the one true God. And that is the background for what Peter is going to say in the meeting in Acts 15. Peter paved the way in the early church for Gentile believers to be welcomed back in Acts 10. So it's about eight years before our passage today. And just as an aside, he was criticized for doing this, and he even had to give an account for it in Acts 11. So this is not a sudden problem. This is a growing problem with growing conflict and growing tension over the course of very nearly a decade.

[3:48] A persecution of Jesus' followers took place in Jerusalem, and the early believers started to flee. So they went to about 300 miles north of Antioch. And word about Jesus spread there to both Jewish and Gentile people. So first to the Jewish believers, or to the Jewish, the word of Jesus spread. And then maybe whispers got out to the Gentile people. And after those whispers, maybe it became louder and louder. So pretty soon, there was a gathering of Gentile people who were interested in this Jesus person.

[4:28] And a lot of them began putting their faith in Jesus. Then the growing number of non-Jewish followers of Jesus began to present a problem. Because these people came from paganism, and they didn't follow Jewish scriptures. And furthermore, the Jewish people had a really painful history of being oppressed and being persecuted. By Gentile nations. And so there was hesitance to want to open up their churches to people who were unlike them. And there was also a certain amount of fear in doing so. And then with this sudden explosion of non-Jewish Christians, the Jewish Christians were very quickly becoming outnumbered. So that put them at a risk of Jewish people becoming the minority of the church, and even possibly taking over. So some people were sick.

[5:26] So some people were sick. So some people were sick. name and Paul was his Roman name and when Saul started to preach the Gentiles he began to use his Roman name and make it easier to relate to his Gentile or non-jewish audience it's a very small aside note but it shows that relating to the Gentile culture was important and wasn't going to harm the Jewish culture and the the people listened to Paul and Barnabas and their numbers increased even more and then that brings us up to Acts 15 so the Pharisees were known for holding on to a tight we've always done it this way sort of an attitude and we see it in their arguments with Jesus and we see it here in this passage the Pharisees were very much in positions of wealth and power in Israel and on the surface that seems legit and perhaps something that we can't really say is true but it's true and it's true and it's some of them were worried about going against the law and about dishonoring their commitment to God but in a more general sense most of the Pharisees did not want to give up their wealth and their power and their influence and so if they changed their interpretation of some of these laws to honor God and to honor God's people it would actually threaten the Pharisees way of life they

[7:16] enjoyed their status quo and they enjoyed their power and being able to be the ones to interpret the law because it suited them and it benefited them so the law itself is not bad upholding the law was actually in God's plan for the Israelites God would not have given the law if it was flawed or oppressive in any way in fact the law is meant to be freeing the original intention of the law was meant to honor the people and honor God and honor God's creation and honor the self but the structure of the rulers and authorities in Israel had become corrupt and desired wealth and power take the situation back in Matthew 12 1 through 8 the Pharisees tried to stop the disciples from picking heads of grain on the Sabbath the disciples were hungry and they were hungry and they were hungry and they'd been walking a great distance but it was against the Sabbath Sabbath law to harvest grain on the Sabbath so Jesus pointed out that even David broke the law of the temple to feed his hungry people and that the Sabbath was created for people and not the people for the Sabbath Jesus had the correct interpretation of the law and it was the interpretation that revealed God's heart and intention for his people but the Pharisees

[8:47] were not the only ones who were able to do that the law was the law that God gave the Pharisees a certain amount of authority and control by keeping strict human-based interpretations of the law they were able to keep their positions of power and authority which also kept a steady and healthy flow of money in their pockets and a change of the interpretation of the law even one that's seemingly insignificant insignificant as plucking heads of grain on the Sabbath presented in opposition to the law and ultimately threatened their seats of power so if you have people who are starting small with one little opposition who's to say it won't get bigger and this threat of Jesus was one that was growing in their minds and so Jesus starting off with something small like plucking heads of grain on the Sabbath was actually quite a great threat to the Pharisees power and authority and so they were able to keep their positions of power and they saw it coming and now way up to acts 15 this Jesus movement has been growing and growing and their their way of life is being threatened even more or when Jesus overturned the tables in the temple the foreigners were and the poor had been charged excruciating rates to change the money and

[10:07] buy animals for sacrifice and it was to the point where it inhibited people from being able to worship God and to get to the point where they were able to get to the point where they were able to as they were intended to be able to worship him. And so Jesus made it clear that the temple was meant to be a place where all were welcome to come and worship God, but that hit the elders and the Pharisees and the moneylenders right in the pockets, and that was not acceptable to them. So the motivation of the Pharisees and the Jewish authority was ultimately, for the most part, greed and self-interest. They didn't want their way of life challenged, and they held positions of power that ensured they could continue on their way of life as long as the growing threat of Gentile Christians could be held at bay. But even without these perverse and ungodly interpretations, the weight of the law is heavy. Peter reminds us that even the Jews were unable to bear the yoke of it. It was part of God's plan to show that it is impossible to entitle a church to be a church of God. It was part of God's plan to show that it is impossible to entirely bear the weight of the law without the help of Christ. And so further, he says that all are saved the same way,

[11:20] not by perfectly upholding the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. That is how people are saved, Jew and Gentile both, and you cannot make human laws that say differently. So when we look at our book in chapter 6, Sung Chan writes that in biblical theological terms, racism can be defined as the establishment of human standards that replace the standards of God. And that's what was happening in the early church. Whether it was obstinance at not wanting Gentile culture to be included or to take over Jewish culture, or whether it was fear of the Gentiles oppressing them and hurting them, or whether it was a desire to hold on to their authority and power, those were all ultimately human motivations that ended up shaping the response to the Gentile culture within the church. So it took people who were willing to put their human motivations and desires aside to look at God's standards to really make a difference. They had to look at scripture and at the example that Christ had set for them, and they had to be willing to give up their claim to power. And that's a big thing. It's not just about the power, but it's also about the power of God. And so I want to get to the root of this, a big point that Seung Chan makes in his book also is that we have to be willing to give up our human

[12:48] motivations and most of those human motivations are power or greed essentially of some sort. And this seems superficial because as Christians we should already know that we're not the ones in power. We should already know that God is the one who holds all the power and yet we tend to engage in these little battles and we tend to want the power for ourselves. So we have to be willing to give up our claim to power and look to God to be the one in charge. And sometimes it hurts because sometimes that looks like giving up our power in order to empower someone else. And sometimes it hurts because we're not the ones in power. And that's why we're not the ones in power. And that's even more because it looks like giving up our power in order to empower someone that we fear or that's different from us or that might just change things in a way that we don't want or don't expect. But sometimes that's what it takes. And we haven't changed a single bit since the days of the early church. Just look at the crusades and then look at the genocide of Native Americans. Our ancestors forced the Native Americans into schools that would have them reject their own culture and adopt the Anglo culture. And their refusal meant death.

[14:21] And only once they adopted Anglo culture were they allowed to take part in the gospel. And we still do this today. It's more subtle sometimes and that's true but that's equally dangerous. We make laws and rules in our government and in our churches that honor one group above the others.

[14:44] And one thing to note is that the numbers don't really necessarily equate to power. So Sung Chan writes that the Gentile Christians were fast outnumbering the Jewish Christians. Just as we notice that Caucasian Christians today are quickly becoming the minority as far as numbers are concerned. But the Jewish Christians are the ones who are the most powerful. And that's why we're not the only ones in power. The Jewish Christians still held the power in their church. They held the power to make decisions. Their culture was still the dominant culture. And they were the ones who made the rules, passed the judgment on situations, ensured the rules were followed. And it was their culture that informed these decisions. Just like it is still today the Caucasian Christians who hold this sort of power over the church and that needs to change. And so that's why James in this passage may be an important, a more important example to us than even Peter. Because both were Jewish Christians but James had more to lose so to speak. He was a leader amongst the Judaizers and it was in his best interest to keep the status quo up. It would have been better for him as an individual if the number of Gentile believers remained lower than the Jewish believers

[16:03] and for Gentiles to adopt Jewish culture. But he put his own desires aside and he listened to God. He had something to lose and he willingly gave it up for the sake of the gospel. Because when he listened to God he saw that God's will was for the Gentiles and the Jewish people to worship together in harmony and for the cultures of both to be honored. So we need to look at our practices and ask ourselves some questions. Is this something that excludes any particular group from worshiping here or something that makes worshiping here uncomfortable or difficult for any group? And if so we need to ask ourselves why we carry these practices. The comfortable and the easy answer is often but we've always done it that way. But we might find that we have practices that establish human standards, and replace the standards of God. And in that case we really need to dig deeper and deeper, figure out what those standards are. And if those standards are human standards that replace God's standards then we need to replace the practice altogether.

[17:22] If we find ourselves lacking in either of those questions then we need to make a change. And being a Christian means surrendering our power and allowing God to be the one in charge. So are we willing to surrender our standards to the standards of God in order to honor others even at a cost to ourselves? That is our priority. So let's go and make that our goal and priority not just this week but as we continue to grow. That is something we should continue to grow in. Let's pray.

[18:01] Dear God we thank you that we are able to be a part of your life. We thank you that you are ultimately in charge. God we ask that you would help us to surrender our goals and our motivations to be more like yours. God replace our motivations with yours. These things we pray in Jesus name.