The first "Christians"
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Last week we talked about the visions that God sent to Cornelius the Roman Centurion and to Peter the apostle. This was the beginning of phase 3 of the mission that Christ left to the church when he ascended back into heaven. This week we’ll look a little at the reaction of the Jewish believers in Jerusalem when they heard about what had happened with Cornelius. Then we’ll dive in a little deeper to the mission to the Gentiles. But let’s start reading with the beginning of chapter 11.
1 The apostles and the brothers and sisters who were throughout Judea heard that the Gentiles had also received the word of God. 2 When Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcision party criticized him, 3 saying, “You went to uncircumcised men and ate with them.”
4 Peter began to explain to them step by step: 5 “I was in the town of Joppa praying, and I saw, in a trance, an object that resembled a large sheet coming down, being lowered by its four corners from heaven, and it came to me. 6 When I looked closely and considered it, I saw the four-footed animals of the earth, the wild beasts, the reptiles, and the birds of the sky. 7 I also heard a voice telling me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’
8 “ ‘No, Lord!’ I said. ‘For nothing impure or ritually unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ 9 But a voice answered from heaven a second time, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call impure.’
10 “Now this happened three times, and everything was drawn up again into heaven. 11 At that very moment, three men who had been sent to me from Caesarea arrived at the house where we were. 12 The Spirit told me to accompany them with no doubts at all. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we went into the man’s house. 13 He reported to us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, ‘Send to Joppa, and call for Simon, who is also named Peter. 14 He will speak a message to you by which you and all your household will be saved.’
15 “As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit came down on them, just as on us at the beginning. 16 I remembered the word of the Lord, how he said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ 17 If, then, God gave them the same gift that he also gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, how could I possibly hinder God?”
18 When they heard this they became silent. And they glorified God, saying, “So then, God has given repentance resulting in life even to the Gentiles.”
1 The apostles and the brothers and sisters who were throughout Judea heard that the Gentiles had also received the word of God. 2 When Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcision party criticized him, 3 saying, “You went to uncircumcised men and ate with them.”
4 Peter began to explain to them step by step: 5 “I was in the town of Joppa praying, and I saw, in a trance, an object that resembled a large sheet coming down, being lowered by its four corners from heaven, and it came to me. 6 When I looked closely and considered it, I saw the four-footed animals of the earth, the wild beasts, the reptiles, and the birds of the sky. 7 I also heard a voice telling me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’
8 “ ‘No, Lord!’ I said. ‘For nothing impure or ritually unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ 9 But a voice answered from heaven a second time, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call impure.’
10 “Now this happened three times, and everything was drawn up again into heaven. 11 At that very moment, three men who had been sent to me from Caesarea arrived at the house where we were. 12 The Spirit told me to accompany them with no doubts at all. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we went into the man’s house. 13 He reported to us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, ‘Send to Joppa, and call for Simon, who is also named Peter. 14 He will speak a message to you by which you and all your household will be saved.’
15 “As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit came down on them, just as on us at the beginning. 16 I remembered the word of the Lord, how he said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ 17 If, then, God gave them the same gift that he also gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, how could I possibly hinder God?”
18 When they heard this they became silent. And they glorified God, saying, “So then, God has given repentance resulting in life even to the Gentiles.”
So as we talked about last week, Peter shares the gospel with these Roman citizens, these Gentiles, and they accept the message and they are saved and filled with the Holy Spirit. Things look like they are going great. The gospel is starting to spread farther and wider than ever before. The mission that Christ gave to the church is being fulfilled. But then Peter heads home to Jerusalem and look what happens. He’s confronted by this group of believers known as the circumcision party. These are people who think that believers should still adhere to every aspect of the Jewish Law. They’ve kind of missed the whole point of the Law, and the whole point of Christ coming to earth in the first place. You see the point of the Law was to show us that we could never be good enough. The only way to salvation under the Law was to keep every point of it perfectly throughout your entire life and that was impossible for fallible, imperfect mankind. So God sent Christ who did keep the Law, and then took our place in death to pay the penalty for our sins. But the circumcision party didn’t quite get that. So they confront Peter, and they basically say, “How dare you associate with those foreigners?” They wanted everything to stay just like it was before Christ came. Sure they accepted him as the Messiah, but that didn’t need to affect anything else.
How often do we see this in the modern church? And about things far more trivial than the Law. How often do we criticize the style of music, or the color of the carpet, or something else equally trivial when the important question is, “Is the gospel being preached?” And that’s what Peter explains to the circumcision party here. He walks them through the events that happened, both his vision and Cornelius’s vision and then what happened when he shared the gospel with the members of Cornelius’s household. He refocuses them on the gospel, and then we read in verses 17-18, “If, then, God gave them the same gift that he also gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, how could I possibly hinder God? When they heard this they became silent. And they glorified God, saying, “So then, God has given repentance resulting in life even to the Gentiles.””
I wish more Christians in our times would react like these members of the circumcision party did in this story. When faced with the logic of the truth they couldn’t keep arguing, so they glorified God. But today we have people claiming that if you don’t preach and read from the King James bible then you are not proclaiming the true gospel, even when presented with the facts that many more modern translations are based on older, more accurate manuscripts. Or we hear people say that if you don’t sing the songs from the authorized hymnal then you can’t truly worship God. How dare we put God in a box like that? How dare we limit the gospel? If we believe in God as the creator and sustainer of the universe, and we should, because He is, then why can’t we believe that He can make use of new methods and new technologies for sharing the gospel? There’s nothing in existence that is outside the power of God, so He can use anything for his purposes.
So that
Now let’s take a look at the next section of this chapter and see how God used the persecution that drove the believers out of Jerusalem to further spread the gospel.
19 Now those who had been scattered as a result of the persecution that started because of Stephen made their way as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, speaking the word to no one except Jews. 20 But there were some of them, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, who came to Antioch and began speaking to the Greeks also, proclaiming the good news about the Lord Jesus. 21 The Lord’s hand was with them, and a large number who believed turned to the Lord. 22 News about them reached the church in Jerusalem, and they sent out Barnabas to travel as far as Antioch. 23 When he arrived and saw the grace of God, he was glad and encouraged all of them to remain true to the Lord with devoted hearts, 24 for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. And large numbers of people were added to the Lord.
25 Then he went to Tarsus to search for Saul, 26 and when he found him he brought him to Antioch. For a whole year they met with the church and taught large numbers. The disciples were first called Christians at Antioch.
Here phase 3 is in full swing. Verse 19 tells us that the believers who fled Jerusalem had made it as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch. Now to really understand this spread I want to show you on a map just how far the gospel has travelled during this time.
The first place mentioned is Phoenicia. Now this wasn’t too far. As you can see on the map here Phoenicia is just north of the Judean province of Galilee which is where Nazareth was located. But then we see that some of the believers had made it to the island of Cyprus which is farther north. And some had gone as far as Antioch here in what was then Syria but is now part of modern day Turkey. And we also know that the gospel has gone at least a little farther because the last time we saw Saul the disciples were sending him off to his home town of Tarsus which is even farther north here in modern day Turkey.
Verse 19 tells us that the believers who fled Jerusalem had made it as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch.
So the believers have been spreading out and sharing the gospel with those they come in contact with, but verse 19 tells us that they only shared with other Jews. But then in verse 20 things change. They start sharing with the Greeks as well as the Jews, and this verse also shows us just how far the gospel had already spread among the Jews. It says that people came to Antioch from the island of Cyprus and from Cyrene. Cyrene was a city on the north coast of Africa where the modern day city of Shahat, Libya now stands. That’s almost 800 miles to the west. 800 miles took a long time to travle in those days, so the gospel has really been travelling. But the point of this section is not the distance it has traveled but who it is being shared with in Antioch. These people from Cyprus and Cyrene aren’t limiting the sharing of the gospel to only the Jews anymore, they are sharing with the Greeks, the Gentiles, also and the Bible tells us that large numbers came to believe in Christ. When word of this gets to Jerusalem they send Barnabus up to Antioch to see what’s going on. Barnabus gets there and sees what’s happening and he encourages them and it says even more people came to believe in Christ after he got there. It seems that the number of people turning to God got to be too much for one person to handle because the next thing we see Barnabus doing is going farther north, up to Tarsus to find his old friend Saul. Remember, when Saul was converted and went to Jerusalem, no one wanted to believe him at first, but Barnabus took him under his wing. So Barnabus goes on to Tarsus and recruits Saul to come back to Antioch with him and they spend a year there discipling people and teaching in this new church.
And then we see this last sentence of verse 26, “The disciples were first called Christians at Antioch.” Now I want to take a few minutes to look at just what this word means. We’ve all heard the definitions, Christian means “follower of Christ” or “Christ-like” or “little Christ” or whatever other ones are out there. But let’s look at the original language. In Greek the word used here is χρηστιανους. It’s derived from the word χρηστος which means “anointed one” and is where we get our word Christ. In Greek the ending -ιανους on a word expresses the idea of belonging or possession. So χρηστιανους, Christian, doesn’t mean “Christ follower” or “little Christ” or any of that. It literally means, “belonging to Christ.” When we become a Christian we are Christ’s possession, we belong to Him. Something happened there in Antioch, something changed in the way that believers in Christ expressed themselves, shared the faith, lived their lives so that the people around them had to coin a new word to describe them. And the word they came up with didn’t have to do with belief or following or anything like that. It had to do with belonging. These people were so sold out to the cause of Christ that the people around them called them, “Christ’s possession.” Christ owned them. Every part of them. Their words, their actions, their thoughts. It all belonged to Christ. Can we say the same thing? Does Christ own every part of your life? Are you a “Christ’s possession?” Are you a Christian? If you can’t say that he owns every part, what do you need to give up to him? What do you need to release control of?
Now I
Now let’s look at the final few verses of this chapter. Here we’ll see what happens when believers get totally sold out to Christ like these folks in Antioch were.
27 In those days some prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch. 28 One of them, named Agabus, stood up and predicted by the Spirit that there would be a severe famine throughout the Roman world. This took place during the reign of Claudius. 29 Each of the disciples, according to his ability, determined to send relief to the brothers and sisters who lived in Judea. 30 They did this, sending it to the elders by means of Barnabas and Saul.
OK, so they sent money to the believers in Jerusalem. So what? Why is that such a big deal? Well look back at verse 28 here. It says that there would be a severe famine throughout the Roman world. Antioch was part of the Roman world at the time which went all the way from western Europe around the Mediterranean and across north Africa to modern day Algeria and Tunisia. So these people decided that they were going to help out the believers in Jerusalem even though they were going to be going through the same conditions, the same famine themselves. That’s being sold out to the cause of Christ. What about us? What can we do to help other believers? What can we do to show those around us that something is different about us—that we don’t just call ourselves Christians but that we truly are Christ’s possession? What can we do to make them see the light of Christ in our lives, in our actions, in our very thoughts?
Would you pray with me?