Excess Baggage Part 1 Series

Projectionist start with BibleConnection_HighDef.mp4

We are so glad you are here this morning, whether in the auditorium or on line! Thanks for joining with us. We are on the front end of a new series that I think you will find challenging, helpful and hopefully freeing.

To get started, how many of you are like me when it comes to getting ready for a trip? I tend to over-pack; I always seem to think I need more than I do. I had to buy a small luggage scale to weigh my luggage if I am flying. I generally squeak in at 47-48 pounds. The bad part of that is that pretty much on every trip I come home with clothes items I’ve never used! Can anyone relate to that?

Then of course, if you load up on the front end, on the back end there is a problem—particularly if you purchase souvenirs. On our last vacation we kept cautioning Colin who seemed to be picking up something every time we stopped somewhere, warning him that he was going to run out of room in his luggage if he was not careful. When we were at the airport getting ready to head home when Colin’s bag weighed over the allotted limit. I wasn’t too worried about it until I found out the overweight fee was not just an extra $35 but $250 for like three extra pounds! We hit scramble mode and took some of his stuff and put it in Myra’s bag and were able to squeeze in at just under the limit with the shared load!

It is one thing to struggle with excess baggage physically. If not struggling with excess transportation fees, struggling with juggling all the extra baggage, right? Often you don’t realize how much extra baggage you have until you try to pack it in the car or move it from the car to the hotel room.

As inconvenient excess baggage is on a trip, in the spiritual realm excess baggage can not only prove inconvenient, at times it can be down-right deadly.

In the book of Acts, Dr. Luke, a Gentile Physician chronicles for us the first thirty years of the development of Christianity. About 20 years in—20 years after the resurrection of Christ—a problem develops. We read about the problem and the solution the early church came up with in Acts 15. The problem is, even though the solution has been there for us to see for over 2,000 years, we in the church still have the propensity to carry the excess baggage that so often makes the Christian life unnecessarily difficult for those of us in the church and unnecessarily resistible to those outside of the church.

Here's what happened. The earliest church was thoroughly Jewish in its make-up. Jesus, after all ,was the Jewish Messiah. All His earliest followers were Jews and after His resurrection those who made up the church were either Jewish by birth or Jewish by conversion. So the earliest church had a definite Jewish core.

Twelve years after the resurrection that began to change. Peter was called to a Roman Centurion’s house by the name of Cornelius. Cornelius was worshipping his own gods when an angel of God appears to him and tells him to send for a man named Peter who will be able to tell him about the one true God. At the same time, God is preparing Peter for this unusual encounter as well. You can read the whole account in Acts 10. That is the background for what Peter is going to say in the meeting Dr. Luke records for us in Acts 15. Peter cracks the door of the early church to non-Jewish people in Acts 10—twelve years after the resurrection of Jesus. He, by the way is criticized for that in the church and has to account for it in Acts 11.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch in Jerusalem, a persecution of Jesus followers erupts in Jerusalem and some of the early believers, called people of the way, flee about 300 miles north to a place called Antioch. Some of these believers continued to talk about Jesus but only to Jewish people; but others began to talk about Jesus and the resurrection to non-Jewish people, Gentiles, and a lot of them put their faith in Jesus. The growing number of non-Jewish followers of Jesus presented a problem. These people came from paganism and didn’t follow the Jewish Scriptures. Barnabas was sent to check things out, and when he saw what was happening, we went looking for Saul of Tarsus who had been converted to the faith while he was in the act of persecuting people of the faith ten years earlier. When Saul arrives, they preach for a year and a whole lot of Gentiles place their faith in Jesus and join the church. Now, if you don’t know, Saul and Paul are one in the same men. Saul is his Jewish name; Paul his Roman name. When Saul started to preach to the Gentiles, he began to use his Roman name to make it easier to relate to his Gentile (non-Jewish) audience. Saul of Tarsus, the once persecutor of the Christian faith became Paul the apostle, the great proclaimer of the Christian faith. Now, this is important: there is no way to explain the conversion of Saul to faith in Christ apart from the resurrection of Christ. He didn’t come to faith because he was reading the Jewish Scriptures (the Old Testament), he didn’t come to faith because he was listening to Christian messages (he thought the message of Christ was wrong), and no one in the early church came to faith because “the Bible says;” they didn’t have a Bible yet. The book we call the Bible did not come into existence until the 4th or 5th Century. In 397 AD at the Council of Carthage recognized the current 27 books we have in our modern New Testament as authoritative. St. Jerome, who translated the 39 books of the Hebrew Old Testament and the 27 books of New Testaments was the first to combine the Old and New Testaments into the first Bible--the Vulgate in about 400 AD. The early church’s message was not about a book but about an event that took place that was verified to by eyewitnesses.