“We Can’t Save Ourselves”
Genesis 17:1-2, 9-15
Acts 15:1-21
Good Christian people, with the best of intentions, have been having disagreements from the very beginning.
Sometimes, a dispute can lead to new insight and understanding.
It happens in marriage.
Most of us have heard marriage counselors say that it is normal and even healthy for married people to have disagreements and maybe even arguments from time to time.
While these things are no fun and we don’t want to go through them, a disagreement, when it is honestly processed, can lead to greater clarity, and a stronger bond between two people who love one another.
And it’s also been said that it’s a good thing when people can agree to disagree and still be friends.
Some of my favorite people in the world, some of the people I love the most and respect the most think very differently than I do on all kinds of issues.
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church had a good rule of thumb.
He said, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things charity.”
The church fight that happened in Acts 15 was over something essential.
It had to do with the nature of salvation.
There was a certain group of people, “believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees” who had heard a rumor that individuals were being baptized and welcomed into the Church without being circumcised.
This group believed that a person cannot be saved unless they are circumcised.
In other words, they believed that you cannot be a Christian unless you are a Jew.
If you don’t accept the law, Christ will not accept you.
It’s easy to demonize these Pharisaic Christians, but truth be told, as we read in Genesis, God’s Covenant with God’s people was based on circumcision.
It had always been this way.
And Christianity began as a Jewish sect.
Jesus was a circumcised Jew.
The first male disciples were circumcised Jews and the first people who made up the church were Jewish converts—all circumcised, except for the women of course.
For all their lives their very identity was framed by the rite of circumcision and the Mosaic Law, both of which were instituted by God.
Another thing is that the early Church didn’t have a New Testament to lean on as part of their Scriptures.
The early Church was the New Testament.
To make a long story short, these early leaders inherited a long-standing and deeply held religious system, and they had to discern, how this Old Testament system related to Christ’s death, Resurrection, and Ascension.
These were huge decisions.
Now, to make things even more complicated, something strange was happening.
Uncircumcised folks started to receive the message of Jesus Christ and they were being saved right and left.
What were the disciples to do about this?
What were the church leaders to do?
Did they need to force these uncircumcised male Christians to go under the knife to make their salvation legitimate, or was the grace of God in Christ enough for their salvation?
The Christian Pharisees believed in grace as did the other Jewish Christians.
They had accepted God’s grace in Christ.
But they were so bound to the Law that they were, understandably, confusing the non-essentials with the essentials.
And in doing so, they were making life more difficult for not only the Gentile Christians but for the Holy Spirit as well.
To figure out what to do, the church called a meeting--the Council at Jerusalem.
Jerusalem was the early Church headquarters where James, the brother of Jesus was the leader.
“The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses,” argued the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees.
The apostles and elders met to consider this huge question that had many implications for the future of the Church.
If what these Pharisaic Christians were saying is true, then the grace of God in Christ is not enough for salvation.
You have to add the law of Moses.
Finally, the Holy Spirit, working through Peter nudged him to stand up and address the group.
And what he said, was essentially this: “We believe that we are saved by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. Period.
If we are going to rely on circumcision to save us then we are in big trouble.”
It’s a difficult thing to trust grace, sometimes.
I know I am continually trying to add rules and regulations to my life to justify my salvation or make it more secure.
I sometimes have a hard time believing that God loves me and accepts me, the sinner that I am.
My mind tells me, if I do this or don’t do this I might lose my salvation.
Do you ever do that?
Do you ever add extra rules and regulations onto the requirements for salvation…for God’s acceptance of you or others?
I think it’s a normal and understandable thing to do.
And I think we all do it to some extent.
But that’s not how it works.
There is nothing we can do to earn God’s favor, there is nothing we can do to lose it.
God is the One Who saves us through the blood of Christ—we can’t save ourselves.
It’s all a gift and it is available to all.
After Peter’s speech, Barnabas and Paul tell about the signs and wonders that have happened in their ministries.
These testimonies bear witness to God’s saving work which was happening among the uncircumcised.
And so, they relied on experience confirmed by the Scripture passage quoted from Amos to make their decision.
In the United Methodist Church, we use something similar to make difficult theological decisions.
It’s called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.
It consists of Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience.
All these things are weighed and given much careful thought when it comes to deep theological decisions about God’s will for the Church.
Christians down through the ages—from the very beginning--have found that Reason, Tradition, Experience and Scripture interpret each other.
After a moment, James took the floor and spoke for the Church: “We will not make it difficult for the Gentiles that are turning to God.”
For grace is enough!
Then he says, “Instead we should write them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals, and from blood.”
And why does he decide on this?
He says, “For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.”
Every city and town in the world had Jewish inhabitants at that time, according to the Jewish historian Josephus.
So, wherever you went, people would be used to hearing what the law of Moses said.
And since the Christians were proclaiming that in Jesus the law and the prophets had been fulfilled, and because this proclamation was always going to be at best puzzling and at worst offensive to most people, James was encouraging the Gentile Christians to do their best not to offend their non-believing Jewish neighbors.
They didn’t want the Law to get in the way of Gentiles coming to Christ and they didn’t want their freedom in Christ to get in the way of the Jews coming to Christ.
It’s a good compromise.
Later, in Colossians 2, for example Paul would make it clear that whether you eat or drink food offered to idols doesn’t matter for Christians as long as you are not offending or being a stumbling block to unbelievers by doing so.
That is the most important part of this.
Not getting in the way of people’s ability to come to Christ!
Amazingly, right after this incident, in Chapter 16, Paul meets Timothy and Chapter 16:3 tells us that “Paul took Timothy and had him circumcised because of the Jews who were in those places, for they all knew that his dad was a Greek.”
Paul and the early Church were willing to do whatever was necessary to reach people for Christ, and they were very successful at it.
They went from basically nothing to becoming the largest religion in the world in very short order.
Today people are turning away from Christianity in droves.
Are we willing to do whatever is necessary to reach our community, our neighbors, our family members for Christ?
So many people are living with little to no hope.
And Jesus is the hope of the world.
So many people feel they don’t measure up or aren’t good enough for God to love them and save them.
“It is by grace we [are] saved, through faith—and this is not from [ourselves], it is the gift of God—not by works so that no one can boast,” Paul tells us in Ephesians 2:8-9.
“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
This is freedom.
This is life.
This is the Good News of Jesus Christ.
This is what it’s all about!!!
Let’s get to work making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world!!!
Praise God.
Praise God.
Praise God.
Amen.
