<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Hillside O’Malley SDA Church

Lessons from the Life of Paul

David Shin

Conversion and Conviction

Three Years in Arabia

Gospel to the Gentiles

Hermeneutics

Colossians 2:16

The Lordship of Christ

Romans 7

I Keep Under my Body

I Have Finished the Course

Father in heaven, thank you for this opportunity that we have this morning to be able to gather together as a community of faith.

Lord, we don't want to take this privilege for granted.

The freedom that we have to assemble, to believe according to our conscience, to open the Word of God.

And we pray this morning that divine help would assist us through this process.

May the Holy Spirit impress our hearts and our minds.

May you specifically tailor these feeble words for every heart this morning.

We ask these things in the precious name of Jesus.

We're continuing in our series of messages that we've entitled Lessons from the Life of Paul.

And I invite you to open your Bibles to Acts chapter 2 and verse 40.

The Christian church was in the upper room, about 120 individuals that were gathered in that prayer meeting.

Book of Acts begins in a prayer vigil, a prayer session.

10 days, and on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit fell, and those disciples gathered in that upper room went out transformed from on high and Peter preaches a sermon in Acts chapter 2.

In Acts chapter 2 verse 40, and with many other words he testified and exhorted them saying, be saved from this perverse generation.

Then those who had gladly received his word were baptized on that day.

Now here's an interesting fact about demographics.

In Acts chapter 2, at the baptism, 99% of the church were ethnically Jewish.

You know, when you read the book of Acts you forget that.

Well, they were speaking in tongues and the reason why they were speaking in tongues were all these ethnic Jews from all over the world had gathered together in Jerusalem for the day of Pentecost.

But they were all Jews, they were speaking different languages because they were coming from their respective regions, but when they came into Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost and all these 3, 000 souls were added to the church, they were all Jews.

Now I put 99% on there because there might have been a Gentile or 2 that slipped in there, but I don't think so.

They were probably 100% Jews, and So you have this homogenous group that comprised the early Christian church.

They were all ethnically and religiously.

It's unique because you're ethnically a Jew, but you're also religiously a Jew as well.

Now think about the implications of this.

They all celebrated the same types of holidays.

They were all part of the same culture and this group of individuals were all circumcised.

Circumcision went all the way back to the days of Abraham and if you were a law abiding Jew, 8 days after you were born you were circumcised.

So the Christian church was not ethnically diverse in Acts chapter 2.

3, 000 people, and then you add 120 or so, about 3, 200 people comprised this new community, and they had church together.

Now this was about to dramatically change and this is the irony of church growth.

You know, we pray for new members, we pray for young families, we pray for all these things and Then they start coming in and you're like, wait a minute.

These people look differently than we do.

You find that sometimes There's a flight that takes place in some demographic congregations even here in North America because these cultures are merging and here you had a homogenous group, a group of people that were 100% for all intents and purposes from Judaism, Jewish, that became Christians and this was about to change because Paul, who was previously Saul the persecutor, had 2 key roles in this ethnic diversity trend that was going to take place.

And praise the Lord that the gospel went to the Gentiles.

You know, if you're Hispanic, you're a Gentile.

Jews make a very fraction of our world population and praise the Lord that the gospel did not just stay in Jerusalem or else we wouldn't be here.

Now when Saul of Tarsus, who became Paul, began persecuting the church, what it did was it drove people out of Jerusalem and they began preaching the gospel everywhere.

And Philip baptized the Ethiopian eunuch.

The first recorded Gentile baptism, and the gospel began to go to the Gentiles.

So Paul, as a persecutor, began to spread the gospel to the Gentile world, but then Paul the apostle was instrumental in this ethnic diversity that was to take place.

This is a map of Paul's first missionary journey, and you can see Jerusalem is way down here.

Paul's missionary journey went up here and he would go out and preach the gospel and set up churches, Gentile churches, churches that were not Jewish, Churches that had no Jewish context at all.

They had to be educated, they had to be taught.

And so began this influx of people that did not look Jewish, didn't smell Jewish, didn't eat Jewish food, and certainly were not circumcised.

This is Paul's second missionary journey.

He goes all over Asia Minor into Greece there, and he begins setting up churches.

And what he does is when he leaves a church and is in another location, he begins writing letters to these churches.

The letter to the church in Colossae, Colossians.

The letter to the church in Ephesus, Ephesians.

The letter to the church in Colossae, Colossians, the letter to the church in Ephesus, Ephesians, the letter to the church in Galatia, Galatians.

And this is where we have this rich resource in the New Testament where Paul, the most prolific writer of the New Testament, wrote these letters to the churches and they were preserved for us today.

And it was a result of Paul being an ambassador for Jesus, an apostle to the Gentiles.

The church was changing from a Jewish population to a Gentile population, and all these people were coming in the church began to experience growing pains and tensions Anytime you have people coming in to a homogenous Cultural group there is going to be some tension And that's what happened all these Gentiles were coming in and the Jewish Christians looked at these Gentile Christians and said, look, they're not Orthodox.

And you see a picture emerging of the tensions that were coming in.

And this is in Acts 15, after the first missionary journey, it's already becoming an issue in Acts chapter 15, certain people came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the believers, unless you are circumcised according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.

I mean, talk about a way to really stifle church growth.

I mean, it's hard enough to get people to join a congregation nowadays in the 21st century and accept the Lord through baptism, but can you imagine you giving Bible studies to someone and saying, by the way we wanted to save this for last because it's a little bit uncomfortable, but you need to go through a surgical procedure, very painful surgical procedure, but you'll get over it, you know, in order to be really accepted in our community of faith.

This issue of circumcision was 1 that could potentially kill the Christian movement.

I believe if it had not been for Paul and his understanding of the gospel, the Christian church very well could have stayed stifled and primarily a Jewish community of faith.

Because there were individuals that were coming into the church, into these Gentile communities from Judea, Jewish Christians, and looking at a brother that had accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior and had been baptized and says, look, you're not a real Christian because you have not been circumcised.

Now, in our series, we'll get to the Jerusalem Council where the church had to discuss this openly about what is Christian and what is culture.

But this is an issue that we still face today.

You say, oh, come on, David, we don't face circumcision.

We don't believe in these ideas and so forth.

But there's this idea that circumcision is a presupposition.

It was something that was culturally held.

Culture is a very powerful thing, by the way.

These ideas that we assume naturally, and we imbibe them, and then we project them onto things in terms of salvation.

Now we all have different cultures and it's easy to be hard on the Jews for thinking circumcision salvation.

But the reality is, we are susceptible to our culture too.

Now there's a saying that goes, if you want to know what water is, don't ask a fish.

The reason is, a fish that has never been out of water has no context in which to measure his own existence.

Back to Menu

Series

Lessons from the Life of Paul

Gospel to the Gentiles

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Practical Truth for Perilous Times

1. Adventist Culture or Adventist Faith

57m

Tablets of Our Hearts

51m

How to Talk to People Who Believe Lies

How to Talk to People Who Believe Lies Part 1

40m

Identity: From Culture to Christ

1h 4m

Sex, Porn, Science and Scripture

37m

Encounters With Jesus

Jesus’ Encounter with the Rich Young Ruler

42m

Seminars

Christ in the Word and Prayer

53m

GYC 2012 Seminar: Power to Change the World - Jesus, Arabic, and Kale

Strategy Vs. Steamrolling: Cross-Cultural Witnessing

1h 14m

The Marvelous Work of the Holy Spirit

57m

Families

The One Thing

1h 9m

Surprised By Love

1h 5m

A Day In Anil’s Life

45m

Sound Doctrine