Sermon Tone Analysis

Launch:

Summit Like a Sherpa

Jeff Jones, Senior Pastor

November 2~/4, 2007

Acts 10:1-46; Acts 11:2-3, 18

 

Everest Bumper Introduction

 

Today we continue our series on the book of Acts called /Launch/, how God helped that church take off and how we too both as a church and as believers fly the mission God has for us.

Each week, we’ll start with a different kind of launch, today the launch of an Everest expedition.

If you have ever seen /Into Thin Air/, or have seen other films about Everest, you know how challenging such expeditions are.

Everyone on the team has to give everything they have to make it.

The reason climbing that summit is so difficult is because the mountain is so inhospitable.

The reason it takes so much planning, technology, and teamwork is because the environment up there is so hostile.

The temperatures can dip to -76 degrees, and often combine with hurricane force winds.

At those temperatures, any part of the body will become frostbitten almost instantly.

Even more severe is the lack of oxygen at those heights.

The altitude is the same as international flights fly at, and there is 1~/3 less oxygen up there than down here.

Because the oxygen loss is gradual as people climb, they gradually begin to lose the ability to think clearly and often make huge mistakes.

For most people, Everest is not a hospitable place.

As exciting as it might be to reach the peak, for most people it is never going to happen.

Yet, for the people who live there, the Sherpa people, Everest is really quite different.

They live in the mountains, and their bodies have adapted to the lack of oxygen and extreme cold.

For the Sherpas, Everest is their backyard.

It takes people like us years to prepare and incredible technology to even make it possible, but for the Sherpas, it is really no big deal.

They can climb the summit in a day.

They are hired not only as guides, but they carry all the stuff Westerners bring along in order to be able to climb.

For people like us, Everest is not a hospitable place.

To the Sherpas, it is home.

Now, let’s talk about the environment of church as people try to climb the summit to connect with God.

We think of it is a very hospitable environment, because we are used to it.

Environments like this are like home to us.

Yet, what we tend to forget is how foreign of an environment church can be, and how foreign Christianity can seem.

We can easily forget, once we’ve been a Christian for a while, how hard it can be for people to come to God, or come back to God.

We forget that people can’t imagine or grasp the heart of God as a loving Father who is waiting for them to come home.

They expect condemnation.

They can’t imagine a God who is waiting to forgive.

We can easily forget, as Christian Sherpas, how hard it can be for people to show up at a place like this, because this is our backyard.

Yet, most people don’t consider places like this hospitable environments, or desirable places.

They expect to find in places like this a spirit of hypocrisy and judgment, or a group of people that just want to recruit them for their money or time.

They come into churches and it feels like a different country, with a different language and customs.

We forget once we’ve been around a while that churches are not automatically hospitable environments.

And we can easily forget, as Christians, the real heart of the Father, who like the father in Jesus’ story of the prodigal son, is always on the lookout for his lost children to come home.

He isn’t passive, he is out looking on the horizon, waiting to throw his arms around them.

We forget that what he calls us to do is to be on the lookout with our arms wide open.

Often we don’t even realize that we are so busy being Christians that we have our backs turned to a world of people he wants to reach.

We don’t even realize all the ways we communicate this (gesture) when God’s heart is this (gesture).

We saw last week how we’ve been given the mission to bridge people to a growing life in Christ, and this week is critical as we look at how to build bridges and not walls.

In the early church, it took a while for them to really grasp this.

For those believers in Acts, the earliest Christians, God had to do some big work to widen their welcome and force their arms to open up.

It took them a while to understand what it means to create a hospitable environment, to help people get to the summit.

I believe that we like those believers 2000 years ago really don’t grasp how much work God has to do to make our hearts like his.

We all feel like we have wide-open arms and a welcoming spirit.

I’m not sure we really understand how much work God might have to do in our lives and hearts to begin to match his.

I’m not sure we understand how we naturally create inhospitable environments and how much work it really takes to be good Sherpas.

Today let’s be open to how we might do this (gesture), when God calls us to do this (gesture).

Turn in your Bibles to the book of Acts, this week all the way to Acts 10.

In the earliest days of the church, the key leader was the apostle Peter.

Jesus had told Peter that he was giving him the keys to the kingdom.

What did that mean?

I believe it meant that God was going to use Peter to open up the doors of Christianity to two groups of people, first the Jews, the people of God in the Old Testament, and then the Gentiles, which means all the nations of the earth other than Israel.

In Acts 2 and 3, it is Peter that God uses to give the first sermon, where thousands of Jewish people in Jerusalem choose to become Jesus followers and the church is born.

Those were exciting days, and yet Christianity stayed too long in Jerusalem and too long just among Jewish people.

The mission was to take the good news to the nations, to the Gentiles, but for the first six years of the church, Christianity was exclusively Jewish Christianity.

Peter had the keys, but he wasn’t letting everyone in…not just him, but all the Sherpas, all the new Christians.

God was patient with them, but he had to break something in their lives that kept the Gentiles away.

God was going like this (gesture), but they were clearing do this (gesture).

The mission was a mission to the nations, but the Jewish Christians were not so excited about that, and they didn’t really get it.

They were very Israel focused, which is why last week we saw their big question was, “when are you going to restore the kingdom of God to Israel?”

They weren’t really concerned about the nations, and growing up Jewish under captivity by the nations, they learned to hate them.

Jewish people at the time used the Hebrew word for nations, goyim, as a word of contempt.

Jewish midwives were not even allowed to help gentile women give birth, because it would bring one more gentile into the world.

They had huge prejudices against and disdain toward the gentiles, and they assumed that Christianity was for Jewish people, not for all people.

They considered gentiles “unclean” and not worthy to follow God.

Peter had the keys, but he wasn’t opening the door for the Gentiles, and all his church buddies were very happy with his commitment.

So, in Acts 10, God has to do something in Peter’s life to help him understand the heart of God.

God used a man, a Roman soldier, a gentile, named Cornelius to open up the way for the rest of the gentiles to come to God.

Let’s start reading in

 

Slide: ______________) Acts 10:1-2

 

/At Caesarea, there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion in what was known as the Italian Regiment.

He and all his family were devout and god-fearing; he gave generously to those in need and prayed to God regularly.

/Cornelius was a centurion, which meant he commanded 100 men.

Not only that, but he and his family were god-fearers, which was a particular designation in Judaism.

A god-fearer was a gentile seeker, someone who was interested in God and came to synagogue to learn.

He was not yet a convert though, because a convert was someone who had been circumcised and was fully “in.”

Good Jews were not allowed to socialize with god-fearers because they were not yet circumcised and fully converted.

God-fearers were required to sit in the very back row of the synagogues (back then people wanted to sit in the front).

One thing we have to understand is that the Jewish Christians were okay with gentiles if they converted to Judaism first, then to Christianity.

That’s the way they expected it to work.

They assumed that if Gentiles wanted to become Christians, then they needed to get circumcised if they were male, become good Jews, and then accept Jesus as their Messiah.

They expected Gentiles to adopt a Jewish way of living, which included a kosher diet, and all the traditions.

If a Gentile did all that, they were cool with the Gentiles coming into Christianity…they moved from “unclean” to “clean” and were therefore acceptable to God.

But that is not exactly creating a hospitable environment to the Gentiles.

Circumcision alone was a pretty big hurdle.

Imagine back then inviting someone to church and explaining that before they come to check it out, they really need to get circumcised.

That would be a hurdle!

They would probably pass.

But the Jewish Christians didn’t get what God was doing.

He was opening the door to not only Jewish people but also Gentile people, who didn’t have to become Jews first.

So, let’s move on with the story, picking up again in v. 3:

 

Slide: ______________) Acts 10:3-6

 

/One day at about three in the afternoon he had a vision.