ENGAGE
If I were to ask you if you’re prejudiced, most of you would probably say “no”. You probably consider yourself to be a very unbiased, accepting and loving person. But the fact is that even committed disciples of Jesus have prejudices. And one of the reasons those prejudices are such a big problem is that we’re blind to them most of the time.
TENSION
And to help you see that, I’m going to do something that might be quite painful for many of us. In just a moment, I’m going to put a series of pictures up on the screen and as each picture comes up I want you to honestly answer this question for each picture: If God were to bring this person into my life, would I be willing to share the gospel with him or her?
[Show pictures]
Did that make you uncomfortable at all? I sure hope so. Because sometimes I think God has to shock us in order to help us see what we’re really like, especially when it comes to our prejudices.
TRUTH
This morning we’re going to see that even a godly man like Peter had some prejudices that kept Him from being an effective witness for Jesus. And Jesus had to do something very dramatic in his life in order to shock him into seeing those prejudices. So we’re going to take a look at his story and see what we can learn from that with the hope that God won’t have to do something quite so dramatic to help us recognize and deal with our own prejudices.
We’re now in the 7th week of a 9-week series from the book of Acts that we’ve titled “Gathered to Go”. Together we’ve been learning about how Jesus gathered His disciples together to form the church, not just for their own personal benefit, but primarily for the purpose of taking the kingdom of Jesus and bringing it near to others – first in their own community of Jerusalem, and then outward to Judea, Samaria and finally to the “ends of the earth”.
By now, you probably already have a pretty good idea of what our main theme is going to be today, so I’m going to give it to you right up front and then we’ll build on that.
The kingdom of God is brought near to others
when we allow Jesus to break down our prejudices
Before we look at our passage this morning, let’s take a moment to define “prejudice”:
“prejudice” -
“to prejudge” =
“preconceived judgment or opinion”
(Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
To be prejudiced simply means that we prejudge another person based on what we see before we get to know him or her as a person. And if we’re honest, I think we would all have to admit that we do that to varying degrees at least some of the time. And unfortunately, we do that even when it comes to bringing the kingdom of God near to others. Have you ever looked at another person and thought, “There is just no way that person will ever become a Christian?” I know I have. And when I have that mindset, it’s going to be really hard for Jesus to use me in bringing His kingdom near to that other person, isn’t it?
But the good news is that Jesus is not only capable of breaking down those barriers, He actually delights in doing that if we’ll just let Him.
Go ahead and turn with me to Acts chapter 10. Once again let me remind you that you can find the book of Acts right after the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John near the beginning of the New Testament.
I’m going to summarize for you what happens in this chapter and then we’ll read some of the key verses as we go along.
This chapter is the story of two men who are separated by about 30 miles geographically, but whose prejudices separate them far more.
Cornelius is a Gentile Roman soldier stationed in Caesarea, the provincial capital that was home to the governor. [Show map] Under the governor’s command were 3,000 soldiers, including the Italian cohort. Cornelius served as a centurion, which meant he was in charge of 100 soldiers. Although, as we’re going to see, Cornelius was not yet a disciple of Jesus, he was a God-fearing man who gave generously to the poor there in Caesarea and who prayed frequently.
Peter, a Jewish apostle of Jesus, was staying at Joppa, about 30 miles to the south, the same city where hundreds of years earlier the prophet Jonah had embarked in his attempt to flee from God.
These two men both had prejudices that were hindering Cornelius from putting his faith in Jesus and becoming His disciple so God is about to work behind the scenes in order to bring them both face to face with their prejudices so that He could help them both overcome them.
God begins with Cornelius and comes to him in a vision and tells him that God has heard his prayers. He instructs Cornelius to send some of his men down to Joppa to bring Peter to see him and Cornelius immediately obeys God.
The next day, as those men are on their way to get Peter, Peter is praying himself, and God also appears to him in a vision. Let’s pick up the account in verse 10:
[Read Acts 10:10-16]
In this vision, God lowers a large sheet that is filled with all kinds of animals. Having spent the last couple of weeks reading in Leviticus, I am now very familiar with the distinction that God makes between “clean” animals, which the Jews were permitted to eat, and “unclean” animals which they were not to eat.
I’m just going to tell you right up front that this is one of my favorite passages in the Bible since it means that I can eat my baby back ribs, pulled pork and bacon with absolutely no guilt whatsoever since a pig is no longer to be considered an “unclean” animal.
But that is only the surface issue here. Interestingly enough, Jesus had already taught Peter that lesson back in Mark 7 when He said that it is not what goes into a man’s stomach that defiles him, but rather the evil that is in his heart.
Just to make sure that Peter got the message this time, God repeats the same vision three times. But there is a deeper message here. God is also confronting the deep prejudices that Peter held toward the Gentiles. As we’ve discussed before and as I’ll address again in a moment, those prejudices had been developed primarily as a result of reading the Scriptures through the lens of his own preconceived ideas about the Gentiles. So like most of the Jews of his day, Peter used the Bible to justify the idea that Jews were somehow superior to the Gentiles.
Therefore, when Peter heard Jesus give the Great Commission in Matthew 28, in which Jesus commanded him and the other disciples to go make disciples of “all nations” or when Jesus told him just before His ascension that he was to be a witness “to the ends of the earth”, Peter just assumed that Jesus was talking about Jews who had been scattered abroad. It never entered his mind that Jesus could have been talking about pagan Gentiles.
While Peter is still thinking about what his vison means, the three men that Cornelius has sent to bring Peter back to see him show up at his front door. And obviously Peter is at least starting to get the meaning of the vision because he does something he would have never done prior to the vision – he invites these three Gentile men into the house and likely even eats a meal or two with them. The next morning, Peter accompanies the three men back to Caesarea. Let’s pick up the account in verse 24:
[Read Acts 10:24-33]
By the time his men return with Peter, Cornelius has invited a bunch of his family and friends come hear what Peter has to say. When Cornelius tries to worship Peter, we see further evidence of Peter’s change of heart when he tells Cornelius that he is merely a man, too. And then Peter comes right out and admits his prejudice against the Gentiles. When he says that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with the Gentiles, he is actually misstating God’s commands, but he is certainly sharing his long time understanding of what He thought God had commanded. But he immediately shares how God had shown him that what he had thought for so long was wrong and that he would no longer consider any other person to be unclean.
In response to Peter’s question about why Cornelius had sent for him, Cornelius tells of his own encounter with God. I’m pretty sure that as Peter and Cornelius shared their stories, both of them and all of the others gathered there that day realized pretty quickly that God had been working behind the scenes to expose some deep-seated prejudices in order to make this encounter possible. Now that those biases had been brought to the surface and dealt with, Peter could share the good news with this gathering of Gentiles.
And in the final part of the chapter, we see that those Gentiles put their faith in Jesus, were filled with the Holy Spirit and were baptized as a testimony of their faith.
So we see clearly here that…
The kingdom of God is brought near to others
when we allow Jesus to break down our prejudices
In many ways, chapter 10 of Acts represents a crucial turning point in the development of the early church. Up to this point, with the exception of the Ethiopian Eunuch we saw back in chapter 8, the church consisted only of Jewish believers since Peter and the other apostles had wrongly assumed that the salvation offered by Jesus was for the Jews alone.
Unfortunately, this event doesn’t end the prejudice that most of the Jews exhibited toward the Gentiles. When Peter goes back to Jerusalem to report what happened here, he is met with opposition from a group called the “circumcision party” who claimed that a person had to become a Jew and be circumcised before they could become a Christian. But once Peter recounts what happened there in Caesarea, they first fell silent and then praised God for bringing salvation to the Gentiles as well.
And even Peter doesn’t completely overcome his prejudices after this event. Later in Antioch, Peter made it a habit to eat with the Gentiles. But as soon as some members of that same “circumcision party” showed up, he quit doing that because he was afraid of what they might think. So Paul had to rebuke him and remind him not to return to those old prejudices.
APPLICATION
So far this passage probably doesn’t make us all that uncomfortable because we’ve been dealing with someone else’s prejudices. But if this message is going to do us any good, we have to personalize it and apply it to our lives. As I pointed out earlier, even if we don’t think we have any prejudices, the truth is that we all have them and if we want to be able to bring the kingdom of Jesus near to others then we have to let Jesus break them down. So let’s spend a few minutes talking about…
HOW TO LET JESUS BREAK DOWN MY PREJUDICES
1. See others through His eyes
Before Peter could share the gospel with Cornelius, he had to first see Cornelius through the eyes of Jesus and not through his own near-sighted spiritual eyes.
If we could just learn to do this, we probably wouldn’t even need the remaining three principles that we’ll talk about this morning. In particular there are two important aspects of how Jesus sees each person that we need to keep in mind.
Every person is created in the image of God and…
• is unique
Every one of us in this room have been created in the image of God and yet every one of us is different. Unless you have an identical twin, your DNA is different from everyone else here today. Some of us are short, some of us are tall, Some of us have blue eyes, some have hazel eyes and some have brown eyes. Some have brown hair, some have red hair, some have grey hair and some have no hair. And probably for some of you we don’t know what your real hair color is. Some of you have higher IQ’s than others. Some of you are athletic and some of you are not. But as we learn in the Psalms, God made each one of us exactly as He desired:
For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.
(Psalm 139:13–16 ESV)
If we just thought of every other person in those terms, it would immediately put an end to our prejudices, wouldn’t it?
• has intrinsic worth
Because each of us has been created by God exactly as He desired, that means that we all have intrinsic worth to Him. In fact, we all have so much worth in the eyes of Jesus that He was willing to give up His life on the cross to make it possible for every one of us to have a relationship with Him right now and to live with Him for eternity. And if every person has that kind of worth in Jesus’ eyes, who am I to prejudge them just because they are different than me?
2. Ask him to show me my prejudices
This principle is pretty self-explanatory, so I don’t think we need to spend much time here. Again, this is one of those prayers that I can confidently say that God delights in answering. And I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather have Jesus reveal my own prejudices as I spend time talking to Him in prayer than having to be hit over the head with a spiritual 2x4 to see my prejudices.
3. Don’t bring my prejudices into my Bible reading
Let me just say right off the bat that this is much easier to talk about than to do. We all bring certain prejudices with us into every area of our life and that is true with our Bible reading as well.
That is exactly what Peter and many other Jews had done. They had read things into the Scriptures that just weren’t there so they came to believe that being God’s chosen people meant that they were superior to the other nations around them, even though God had made it quite clear that He hadn’t chosen them because they had anything at all to offer Him. In fact, they had completely missed the idea that God had chosen them to be the people through whom he was going to bless all nations of the world by being His messengers who would take the good news of Jesus to everyone.
Most of the perversions of Biblical Christianity throughout history have come because people have read the Scriptures through the eyes of their own prejudices. And usually when that happens, people start twisting the Scriptures to support their pre-conceived ideas. And in many cases, they become quite skilled in doing that.
So throughout history we find people using the Bible to promote such disparate movements as the Crusades, cults that call themselves Christians but who deny the very basics of Biblical Christianity, slavery, and the prosperity gospel, to name just a few.
I can’t possibly begin to list all the different prejudices that we bring to our Bible reading, but let me point out some of the most common, with the hope it will help you identify some that you might unknowingly be bringing into your Bible reading:
• Racial prejudice. Several years ago, I ended up playing golf with a couple of African American pastors and one of them invited me to one of the services they were having that week leading up to Easter. So I went one morning and thoroughly enjoyed that worship experience. But one of the things that became obvious that day is that the way I see certain passages in the Bible is certainly influenced by the fact that I am white and that the way they view the Scriptures is influenced by the fact they are black.
• Gender prejudice. There is little doubt that men and women can view the same Scripture passage much differently – especially when it comes to passages that deal with the differing roles of men and women in the home, the church and in our culture. And that often leads to either undervaluing or overvaluing the roles of men and women and using the Bible to justify those prejudices.
• Economic prejudice. This is especially easy to do here in the United States where even the poorest of people are extremely rich compared to the rest of the world. And when we do that it makes it pretty easy to ignore all the passages that deal with the rich because we don’t consider ourselves to be rich, even though by Biblical and world standards, we are.
• Sin prejudice. There is a tendency for us to read into the Bible in a way that excuses or lessens the severity of whatever sins we struggle with, while at the same time overemphasizing the harm of the sins of others.
• Theological prejudice. There is nothing inherently wrong with theology, which is man’s study of God and religion. Used properly, theology can actually help us understand the Bible. But we become sold out to some particular theology it actually hinders our ability to understand the Scriptures.
• Political prejudice. Believe it or not Jesus is not a Republican or a Democrat. He is not a conservative or a liberal. He really isn’t concerned at all with red states and blue states. Unfortunately, I see more and more evidence of this kind of prejudice in our culture, and to be honest at times I’ve gotten caught up in it as well. So I’ve had to confess that to God and to make some changes in my life to guard against reading the Bible through the lens of my own political beliefs.
At least to some degree, we see that Peter had fallen prey to almost every one of these prejudices as he approached the Scriptures.
4. Seek to understand those who are different than me
I have to think that at least one of the reasons that Peter held the Gentiles in such disdain is that he never really got to know any of them as people. He went to his favorite Jewish restaurant to eat and drink with his Jewish buddies. He read only the Jewish newspaper. He watched nothing but the Jewish News Network and listened only to the Jewish talk radio hosts. And they all just kept feeding his prejudices.
But once God engineered this whole set of events and he actually spent some time with the three men Cornelius had sent in the home where he was staying in Joppa and then spent the whole day traveling with them the next day and when he talked to Cornelius and his family and friends, he began to see that all his preconceived notions were wrong and that these Gentiles weren’t nearly as bad as he had been led to believe.
When is the last time that you really made an effort to sit down with someone who is different than you are and get to know them? When is the last time that you asked them some questions because you had a genuine interest in finding out more about them? When is the last time you read a different newspaper or watched a different newscast or read a different commentator just so you could better understand people who are different than you?
We could obviously learn a lot from Jesus here. Even though He never sinned, he hung out with sinners. Even though He was a man, he often violated cultural norms and spoke to women. Even though He was a Jew, He got to know those who were not.
INSPIRATION
The kingdom of God is brought near to others
when we allow Jesus to break down our prejudices
ACTION
So what changes do you need to make in your life so that if God brought any one of these people into your life you would be willing to share the gospel with him or her? [Show same pictures I showed at the beginning]
