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November 5, 2006
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Christian Disciplines
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Pastor Brian Shimer
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"Reaching Out Across Cultures"
Acts 10
- When we hear the word "missions" often a first thought is of what happens around the world. But a couple weeks ago I introduced the phrase to you from Acts 17 that "All of Life is a missionary Journey" -- that does not minimize the importance of our involvement around the world, but does highlight the reality that we are doing missions wherever we are living our lives for Jesus. Missions is about sharing Jesus across the cultures and across generations.
When I was a child my siblings and cousins loved to play one particular game on me for I always fell for it. It was the blanket game. They would throw a blanket over my head and say, "Okay, you are sitting on a beach and a friend is drowning in the ocean, before you run to save him what is the first thing you would throw off."
I need to explain that water safety and lifesaving was something we did as a family. We demonstrated lifesaving techniques for our local community in our community pool. I taught swimming and lifesaving from the age of 10 so this was not a wild scenario for me.
But there I sat under that blanket, the description they shared so vivid in my mind that I totally forgot I was covered with a blanket.
"Well, I'd take off my shoes," I would say, and off they would come and I would throw them out from the blanket. Soon to follow would be sweater and shirt and pants and about then it would occur to me, I did not need to take anything else off I only needed to save my friend and then the joke was on me for the thing I had forgotten to "take off" was the blanket.
They loved this game uproariously!
That game reminds me of how I sometimes "see" in life. My perspective is limited because of who I am, where I live, my life experience, what I have been taught. As the Bible says I may have eyes but am not seeing with God's perspective. I may have ears, but may not hear what God hears. I may be Christian but still live with a cultural or family-of-origin blanket over my head.
The nation of Israel heard God's plan for them. They knew the history of Abraham who had been told God had blessed him to be a blessing. They knew of the call of God to be a light and revelation to the Gentiles. Yet, by the time of the first century AD they had Rabbis teaching not to eat with or fellowship with Gentiles.
The Pharisees of Jesus' time who were so right in their opinions that they became wholly wrong in their behavior, to the point that Jesus said in Matthew 23:3, "Do what they say (for they taught correctly) but do not do what they do."
So, God came to Peter and told him of his blanketed perspective: "Throw it off, Peter! See with My perspective! There is someone to save!"
Now to toss aside a lifetime of experience and a taught way of seeing
takes more than willpower, it takes an action of the Holy Spirit.
- This is what it took in Peter's life. Notice, Peter was not seeking a new perspective.
Peter was seeking God, which is a good basis of transformation -- God renews us through the Word. Perhaps Peter was still basking in the amazing work of watching God raise Dorcas from the dead through his prayer. He was just living his life, minding his own business when God interrupted his prayer time by speaking into his life with a very bizarre vision.
One thing you can count on: the living God will use unique ways to get our attention.
This is the only time I can find where He used the "sheet full of animals" vision. And that is the wonderful thing about following the living God, God is God and free to speak through others, through a TV program, through a book, through vision, dream, experience to reach in and throw off our blankets that keep us from seeing with His eyes.
So, Peter, saw this vision, which shook him to the core. Can you imagine? Centuries of teaching and community practice, built upon a misinterpretation of Scripture, and God now clarifying the matter: "nope, you got it wrong, I want to save people and set them free."
So in the vision God says clearly three times (v. 15) "do not call anything impure that God has made clean."
Peter is perplexed by this but God uses it to loosen Peter's cultural trappings -- to unhinge his blanket. God wants Peter to grasp God heart for people, the people for whom He died and rose again-- so God repeats the vision three times and then the Holy Spirit clearly speaks saying: "Some guys have arrived at your house, do not hesitate to go with them, for I have sent them" (v. 20).
Peter understands and does not question this direction. He welcomes the gentile brothers into the house where he is staying and the next day travels with them back to Cornelius' house. Upon his arrival there, Peter is able to declare in Acts 10:34-35: "God does not show favoritism, but accepts people from every nation who fear him and do what is right."
- Missions is about reaching out across cultures but some of the cultural barriers that need to be bridged are not in those around us as much as they are within ourselves. This is what this account lays out for us. God has not limited the Gospel, but we do. Had not God moved to throw off Peter's blanket that obscured his hearing and dimmed his vision, Peter may not have been willing to go with these Gentiles, he may not have been willing to enter their house, but God worked wonderfully so that Cornelius and his household could move from belief in God to saving faith. What a God!
Now wouldn't it be good if I could say, you only need to have God do this once and you are set for good -- that you won't crawl back under the blanket? But I cannot give you that assurance. Just as I would fall for the same game with my siblings and cousins, so we once God has set us free from some of our perverse cultural attitudes will adopt them again.
Peter was fine here. Cornelius and his household were soundly converted, baptized in the Holy Spirit and water, and Peter stayed on and instructed them. In the next chapter in Acts we find Peter defending his actions before the Jewish believers in Jerusalem, and they rejoice with him. But it was not long after this when Peter was in Antioch, that Paul has to publicly rebuke him because he was withdrawing from the Gentile converts and joining the Jewish Christian party there by abstaining from certain foods. Paul wrote in Galatians 2 that Peter had done this because: "he was (fearful) of the conservative Jewish clique that (had) been pushing the old system of circumcision. Unfortunately, the rest of the Jews in the Antioch church joined in that hypocrisy so that even Barnabas was swept along in the charade (Gal 2:12-13)."
But even if we may crawl under the blanket again, it is still important and necessary to get out from under it. As believers we need to continue to be willing for the Lord to show us how our perspective is skewed or altogether blind in certain instances. We need to have God reveal how our ears have become stopped up so that we are not listening to His voice.
It is tough to see where you are "under the blanket" without God showing you. We can live as if that blanket is not there at all. We can go merrily along our way and think we are seeing and hearing just fine, after all the Pharisees were in such a state when Jesus came and told them in no uncertain terms of their blindness.
This past year our daughter Grace spent a couple weekends with a friend's grandparents. Her grandfather had grown up in the deep south and carried in him all of what I would term the typical Old South attitudes toward black brothers and sisters. His language Grace said was so full of derogatory comments, she was amazed that such a person existed.
We are a nation of immigrants. Only those from the Indian nations here before us could say they are natives to the land. However now centuries after our forefathers arrived, we have some 13 million illegal Hispanic immigrants living in the states. This is a hot issue in the nation -- there are many questions and no easy answers. However, does the presence of legal and illegal immigrants mean I need to be prejudiced toward these people? Do I need to blanket my heart and mind and refuse to reach out into their lives because they are recently from a foreign land while we each have forefathers who also were foreigners?
I know of a member in the congregation who finds God using him in ministry to the Hispanics who work alongside him. They see him as a man of peace and know he is a Christian so bring their questions to him. They know when they ask him something they will get a fully "Christian" answer. He says actually he finds his Hispanic coworkers much more pleasant to get along with than the other Caucasians. This man has removed any blanket to this culture and is available to Jesus within it.
- Peter was not asked to go to another country, but only to another town in order to do cross cultural ministry. But to do it he had to "remove his blanket" and see with God's perspective. Where might God be calling us as a congregation to minister.
Sometimes the idea of winning the whole town seems big to me, but would you be willing to have God open your eyes to the block? It takes in this street, a short section of Commerce, Market Street behind us and then a short section of Main. Just one block in the town of Banks.
Could God have placed us on this soil for a reason, to reach across into the lives of those people that God has brought to this block?
What if we saw this block in this town as our mission field. No one on the Market side that I have yet met has any relationship to any church. What if we made these folk and continued to make those across the street our project, and saw it as our calling.
What ideas do you have? Could we take them monthly gifts just to bless them?
Could we remember to specifically pray for them? Could some of those of you who love knocking on doors, knock and meet them, get their names and help us all pray by name? What about the coin laundry down here? Now there is a whole other kind of need expressed there. What ideas does God give you on what we could do? Could we put some Guidepost magazines down there or other Christian literature? Could leave information, fliers, and opportunities there for folk? Could some even do their laundry there once in a while in order to meet those there?
City hall is in this block -- could we remember to pray for our leaders in city government? Could we pray for Police service?
Some have asked me about the drug houses we prayed about a couple weeks back. That tip came through some neighbors on Market Street and there is suspicion of one of the houses on that street. Perhaps God is saying, "Children, take territory for Me."
Some of you could do prayer walks or drive-by praying in this neighborhood. Whenever you find yourself in the area pray for the folk!
How does the Holy Spirit stir this vision in your hearts? How can we make the "Market Street Block" a church mission for which we remove our "blankets" that would keep us from seeing the people there with the perspective of God who calls us to live as Jesus lived to "seek and save" the lost.
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