Where Always Is Heard an Encouraging Word
Acts 15:11-31
Sermon by Rick Crandall
McClendon Baptist Church - June 13, 2007
*Encouragement is such a wonderful thing. Mark Twain once said, “I can live for two months on one good compliment.” (1)
*We all need encouragement, and believers, God wants to cheer you up. His Word is filled with encouragement for all who will receive it.
1. So be encouraged because God’s grace is sure.
*We started tonight with that wonderful statement of faith Peter made in vs. 11, “We believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved in the same manner as they.’’
*The early church leaders had come together in Jerusalem to deal with the false teaching of legalistic believers. They claimed in vs. 1 that, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.”
*The question then was: Do we have to keep Old Testament law in order to be saved? And the loud and clear answer was “No.” We are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ!
*King Duncan explained that this is so critical to us, because ultimately, the only thing the law can do is condemn us. As Duncan said, “If we are saved by keeping all the laws and ordinances, then all of us are doomed.
-Henry Moorhouse tells of a lady who said to him, ‘I can’t see how a person who has broken just one of the commandments can be as bad as another who has broken five or even all of them.’
-Moorhouse explained to her that God had actually given only one law which consists of ten different parts. ‘Look at this watch of mine!’ he said. ‘If you counted all its cogs, you would find many. If you ruined only one, you might leave the other parts in perfect condition, and yet this would be a broken watch and would no longer run.’
-The woman still couldn’t see the point; so he said, ‘Suppose you were hanging over a [cliff], suspended by a chain with ten links. If someone took a hammer and smashed every link, where would you go?’
-She answered, ‘To the bottom of the canyon, of course.’
-‘But if he severed only one link, what would happen?’
-‘Why, that would be just as bad. I’d still fall and be killed!’ (2)
*Suddenly she got it. She grasped the truth that ‘whoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.’ If we had to be saved by keeping the law, then we would all be doomed, but we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ! And in these verses God confirms the Gospel of grace.
1-First, grace was confirmed by God’s works. As we see in vs. 12, “Then all the multitude kept silent and listened to Barnabas and Paul declaring how many miracles and wonders God had worked through them among the Gentiles.
2-Grace was confirmed by God’s works, and by God’s Word. As James began to tell them in vs. 13-15, “Men and brethren, listen to me: Simon has declared how God at the first visited the Gentiles to take out of them a people for His name. And with this the words of the prophets agree. . .”
*Then James quoted verses from the Old Testament book of Amos, including this great news for us in vs. 17, “So that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord, even all the Gentiles who are called by My name, Says the Lord who does all these things.”
*There is hope for the rest of us! There is hope for the lost! There is hope for all who will trust in the grace of God in the Cross of Jesus Christ!
2. Be encouraged because God’s grace is sure, and because God has made our spiritual life simple.
*Starting in vs. 19&20, James proposed to write a letter to clear up this controversy. James said:
19. "Therefore I judge that we should not trouble those from among the Gentiles who are turning to God,
20. "but that we write to them to abstain from things polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from things strangled, and from blood.
*Then in vs. 28&29, we see the requirements spelled out in the actual letter:
28. For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things:
29. that you abstain from things offered to idols, from blood, from things strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell.
*One thing that stands out in this letter is the simplicity of these spiritual requirements: Not 400 things to avoid or 40 things to avoid, only 4 things to avoid. Paul talked about the simplicity of the Gospel in 2 Cor 11:3, where he said, “I fear, lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.”
1-The great news in this simplicity is that we are released from the convoluted burden of the law.
*I worked for the Air Force for six years as a contract negotiator and price analyst. It was a very rewarding, but sometimes frustrating job. I worked with a great group of people, but the regulations were mind-boggling. The basic regulation that we used was the “Armed Forces Procurement Manual:” Thousands of pages written in the most obscure gobbledygook you can possibly imagine. Ask three people the same question on any topic and you would usually get at least two different answers!
*The scribes and Pharisees had turned the Old Testament law into something like that. As William Barclay wrote,
-“Take the case of carrying a burden. Jer.17:21-24 said: ‘Take heed for the sake of your lives and do not bear a burden on the Sabbath day.’ So a burden had to be defined. It was defined as ‘food equal in weight to a dried fig, enough wine for mixing in a goblet, milk enough for one swallow, honey enough to put upon a wound, oil enough to anoint a small member, water enough to moisten an eye-salve,’ and so on and on.
-It had then to be settled whether or not on the Sabbath a woman could wear a brooch, a man could wear a wooden leg or dentures; or would it be carrying a burden to do so? Could a chair or even a child be lifted? And so on and on the discussions and the regulations went. (3)
*Here is part of what the scribes said about writing on the Sabbath day:
-“To write was to work on the Sabbath. But writing has to be defined. So the definition runs: ‘He who writes two letters of the alphabet with his right or with his left hand, whether of one kind or of two kinds, if they are written with different inks or in different languages, is guilty. Even if he should write two letters from forgetfulness, he is guilty, whether he has written them with ink or with paint, red chalk, vitriol, or anything which makes a permanent mark. . .
-But, if anyone writes with dark fluid, with fruit juice, or in the dust of the road, or in sand, or in anything which does not make a permanent mark, he is not guilty. (4)
2-Thank God for the simplicity of the spiritual life we have in Christ! We are released from complex burden the law, but at the same time, we are restrained by love.
*This love is the reason for the “necessary things” James mentioned in his letter. As he said in vs. 28-29, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: that you abstain from things offered to idols, from blood, from things strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell.”
*My first thought was, “What in the world is James talking about? Why pick out these things?” The reason why is because James was concerned about Gentile Christians keeping their fellowship with Jewish believers.
*William Barclay explained it this way, “How could a strict Jew [keep company] with a Gentile? To make things easier James suggested certain regulations that Gentiles ought to keep.
-They must abstain from the contamination of idols. One of the great problems of the early Church was that of meat offered to idols. Paul deals with it at length in 1 Cor 8-9. When a heathen sacrificed in a temple, often only a small part of the meat was sacrificed. Most of the rest was given back to him to make a feast for his friends, often in the temple precincts, sometimes in his own house. The priests received the remainder which was then sold for ordinary purposes. No Christian must risk pollution by eating such meat for it had been offered to an idol.
-They must abstain from fornication. It has been said that chastity was the only completely new virtue that Christianity brought into the world. In an impure world the Christian had to be pure. [This was especially necessary to mention because the Gentile believers were coming out of a culture where prostitution was not only legal, it was part of the local religion.]
-They must abstain from things strangled and from blood. To the Jew the blood was the life and the life belonged to God alone. Therefore all Jewish meat was killed and treated in such a way that the blood was drained off. The heathen practice of not draining the blood from a slaughtered animal was obnoxious to the strict Jew. So was the method of killing by strangulation, so the Gentile is [asked] to eat only meat prepared in the Jewish way.” (5)
*Of course God always wants us to be holy and sexually pure, but in adding the dietary restrictions, God was asking the Gentiles to bend over backwards, at least a little bit, to keep peace with their Jewish brothers. And God wants us to bend over backwards for each other.
*I have seen people do that here in our church every time the need arose. Maybe they didn’t agree with something, but they keep first things first. They bent over backwards out of their love for the Lord and His people.
*We are released from the law, but restrained by love. It is a simple, yet powerful thing, and an encouraging thing.
3. Be encouraged because God has made our spiritual life simple, and because Godly believers have been willing to serve.
*We see them in vs. 22: “Then it pleased the apostles and elders, with the whole church, to send chosen men of their own company to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas, namely, Judas who was also named Barsabas, and Silas, leading men among the brethren.”
1-What did these leaders do to encourage the early church? First they went on the road for the Lord. They were willing to go the distance for the Lord. Today people describe it as getting outside the four walls of the church, and we have to do that, because being a Christian is not just about coming to church, it’s about going out into our community for Christ.
*Tom Moncrief and Gary Green are encouraging examples for us this week of VBS. They have been driving vans going to pick up children to hear the Good News about Jesus. Today we had 189 children plus 101 volunteers for a total of 290 in VBS!
2-These believers went on the road, and they reported the good news. We see this when they took that vital letter back to the believers in Antioch. Then in vs. 27, we see that they also “sent Judas and Silas” to “report the same things by word of mouth.” They reported the good news and we see the result in vs. 30&31, “So when they were sent off, they came to Antioch; and when they had gathered the multitude together, they delivered the letter. When they had read it, they rejoiced over its encouragement.”
3-These disciples reported the good news. They even risked their lives for the cause of Jesus Christ.
*James gave great credit to Barnabas and Paul in vs. 25&26, when he said, “it seemed good to us, being assembled with one accord, to send chosen men to you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
*These great men of God were willing to risk their lives. And it brings the question: What are we willing to risk for Jesus?
*We read of pioneer missionaries like Adoniram Judson and Hudson Taylor. Over in Burma, Judson was lying in a terrible, filthy jail with 30 lbs. of chains on his ankles, his feet bound to a bamboo pole. Another prisoner, a non-believer sarcastically asked, “Dr. Judson, what about the prospect of the conversion of the heathen?” Dr. Judson’s instant reply was, “The prospects are just as bright as the promises of God.” (6)
*What faith! Adoniram Judson was willing to risk his freedom. What are we willing to risk for Jesus?
*During a terribly trying time in the work of the China Inland Mission, Hudson Taylor wrote to his wife, “We have twenty-five cents--and all the promises of God!” (7)
*What faith! Hudson Taylor was willing to risk going into poverty. What are we willing to risk for Jesus? God wants us to get out on the road, report the good news, and take a risk for Jesus.
*Brent Baker shared this poem called “The Edge of the Cliff.”
“God said, ‘come to the edge.’
We said, ‘the edge is too high.’
He said, ‘come to the edge.’
We said, ’we may fall and be crushed on the rocks below.’
He said, ‘come to the cliff.’
We said, ‘but we are afraid.’
He said, ‘come to the edge.’
And we came, and he pushed us off and we flew.” (8)
Conclusion
*Barnabas and Paul and countless more believers came to the edge and they flew. Be encouraged tonight believers. Let’s fly!
1. KERUX ILLUSTRATION COLLECTION - ID Number: 1891 - SOURCE: Reader’s Digest - TITLE: The Fine Art Of Encouragement - AUTHOR: Mark Littleton - DATE: 11/1/89
2. Original source: “Life and Light” - Found in christianglobe.com sermon “Battle with the Law” by King Duncan - Mark 2:1-12
3. Barclay’s Daily Study Bible, by William Barclay - THE MAN WHO CAME BY NIGHT - John 3:1-6
4. Barclay’s Daily Study Bible, by William Barclay - THE ETERNAL LAW - Matt 5:17-20
5. Adapted from Barclay’s Daily Study Bible, by William Barclay - THE LEADERSHIP OF JAMES - Acts 15:13-21
6. (The Presbyterian Advance) - illustration found on christianglobe.com - Search: faith
7. (W. Wiersbe, Wycliffe Handbook of Preaching & Preachers, p. 242.) - illustration found on christianglobe.com - Search: faith
8. SermonCentral sermon “The Call to Leadership” by Brent Baker - Exo 3:1-14
