He Can Save Those People

Acts 2021  •  Sermon  •  Submitted   •  Presented   •  40:30
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Sometimes we feel like some people are beyond saving. See how God taught Peter that anyone can be saved as we look through Acts 10.

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I have been praying for both me and you this week as I have wrestled with what God says in this passage.
I believe that the account of God’s work in Acts 10, which is where we will be this morning, has the potential to challenge each of us on a very deep level.
It is no secret that our nation seems deeply divided, although it may not be as deep as it seems.
Over the last few years, lines have been drawn sharply between liberals and conservatives so there seems to be less and less middle ground to stand on. The rhetoric and ideologies on both ends have seemed to grow more and more extreme.
We have been confronted with questions about racism that cause us to wrestle with firmly rooted prejudices in our own hearts, and even created division over whether there are prejudices there or not!
We have even found ourselves taking sides over vaccines, masks, and lockdowns.
It is likely, then, that at some level in your heart, there is a group of people who, in your worst moments, you might refer to as “those people.”
Those people who have everything wrong. Those people who you can’t stand, who must be fools to believe what they do.
Maybe it isn’t about the social issues of the day for you. You have struggled financially, so you can’t stand the wealthy.
Maybe you have fought hard to get where you are, so you can’t stand the poor because you think they must all be lazy.
Perhaps it is even more personal as you think about a co-worker who treats you wrong, a classmate who seems out to get you, or a family member who has wounded you in deep ways.
If we are honest and let the Spirit of God shine his light into the darkest corners of our heart, most of us would have to acknowledge that there are “those people” in our lives.
What if I told you that God can save even those people?
Hear me clearly: I am not saying this morning that every viewpoint is valid and that we shouldn’t seek for God to help us see what is true and real in our world. I am not saying that we shouldn’t stand up for what the Bible teaches is right and fight against what is wrong.
I am saying that, as we do, we need to remember that God can save even those who we never think he could.
The apostle Peter found that out here in Acts 10.
We are going to cover this entire chapter today, so you are going to have to stay with me.
Let’s look through the passage, and then we are going to go back through and try to see how this shows us that God can save “those people”.
We are going to come back and look at what is going on behind the scenes, so if the imagery or words seems strange, just know that we are going to come back and explain it.
Read verses 1-20...
Peter has the men stay overnight with them, then he goes to Cornelius’ house, where he finds Cornelius has assembled his family and friends.
Peter still isn’t sure why God sent him to the house of a Gentile, though, so he asks Cornelius what is going on.
Cornelius tells Peter about the vision he had four days ago, and then let’s pick back up in verse 34-36.
Peter goes into greater detail about Jesus and the apostles, but let’s jump down to verse 42-43.
Hold onto the last part of verse 43, because that truth is what we are going to focus on this morning.
Before we go any further and get to the really good part, let’s try to go back and make sense of what we have seen so far.
Let’s establish this:

1) He can save “those” people.

Peter and the other apostles definitely had a group of people in mind who were “those people”.
In fact, pretty much every person of Jewish decent did.
To put it bluntly, “those people” were anybody who wasn’t Jewish.
The term the Bible uses for those who weren’t physical descendants of Abraham is the term, “Gentile”.
Let’s go back and try to make sense of all this. All the way back in the book of Genesis, God called a man named Abraham.
God told Abraham that he would be the father of a great nation, and that this nation would be a unique group of people. They were God’s chosen nation, and he would treat them differently, show himself to them differently, and set them apart for himself in a unique way.
We find that in Genesis 12:1-3:
Genesis 12:1–3 CSB
The Lord said to Abram: Go from your land, your relatives, and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, I will bless you, I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, I will curse anyone who treats you with contempt, and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.
Did you notice that last phrase? This is foreshadowing that God was going to do something special through Abraham’s descendants that would bless the entire world.
Abraham’s descendants grow into the nation of Israel, the Jews.
As you read through the Old Testament, you see how God cared for them, showed himself to them, and disciplined them when they got off track.
He didn’t do that for any of the other nations of the world, the Gentiles, although it was possible for individuals from those other nations to come into a relationship with the one true God.
We see that happen with people like Rahab and Ruth. Both of these women were Gentiles but converted to Judaism.
Throughout the Old Testament, it becomes increasingly clear that God was going to bless the nations by sending a special servant and king into the world.
He is referred to as the Messiah, or the Anointed One. In Greek, he is called the Christ.
The fact that God was going to save the world through the Jewish Messiah only deepened the divide.
According to J. Julius Scott’s book Jewish Backgrounds of the New Testament, there was a strong divide between Jews and Gentiles. The Jews thought they were better, and the Gentiles resented that idea.[1]
Finally, the day comes when Jesus arrives on the earth. As he ministers, Peter and the others realize that Jesus is the Messiah, the one God had promised.
In fact, Peter was the first recorded person to acknowledge that:
Matthew 16:15–16 CSB
“But you,” he asked them, “who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus fulfills the first part of his ministry on earth through his death, burial, and resurrection, and then he goes back to heaven until the time comes for him to return again.
That leaves Peter and the other apostles on the earth trying to figure out what all this means.
The Holy Spirit is empowering and guiding them to be the witnesses they are supposed to be, but up to this point, they still haven’t figured out that Jesus really came to save everyone in the world who will believe on him.
In fact, Bible commentator Warren Weirsbe says that the events of Acts 10 happen 10 years after the day of Pentecost[2], which is when the church really got started.
Thus far, they have been almost exclusively working with Jews. We have seen a passing encounter with a God-fearing Gentile from Ethiopia, and we have seen the apostles working with Samaritans, but they were partly Jewish.
We haven’t seen them taking the gospel outside those who have a claim as descendants of Abraham, though.
Why?
Perhaps Peter and the others had adopted the dominant ideas in that day.
Again, Scott says that when Jews in that day thought of Gentiles in the Kingdom of God, they thought they would be the enemies of God and allies of evil. They didn’t think God would be interested in saving them, so there was no reason to share Jesus with them. In fact, they thought they were so lost that they wouldn’t even repent if they were given the chance.
Many believed that, at best, Gentiles might be admitted as servants of Israel in the kingdom of God, but few believed they would really partake in the full salvation of the kingdom. [3]
Are you getting the picture here? It seems that Peter would have thought he was better than the Gentiles, that they had no real part in what God was doing in his kingdom.
Yet, suddenly we have an angel appearing to a Gentile, a Roman soldier and telling him to send for Peter.
Then, right about the time they get to where he was staying, Peter has a vision where God tells him that all the things he thought made him ceremonially unclean have been declared clean.
He ends up going to a Gentile’s house, which a good Jew would never have done. The food would be defiled, the Gentiles themselves were defiled, and just going to their house would make you ceremonially unclean.
As God starts rolling back the curtain, Peter starts preaching the gospel to this group of people who he would never have thought would get saved.
He gets interrupted in the middle of his message, and the last words Luke records him saying are there in verse 43: “…everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins.”
What happens next? Read verses 44-48.
Cornelius and all the family and friends who hear the gospel get gloriously saved and receive forgiveness of their sins.
They begin speaking in languages they didn’t know, which is the exact same thing that happened when the Holy Spirit came on the church 10 years earlier at Pentecost.
This isn’t what we would normally expect when someone gets saved. God used this miracle of speaking in tongues to show Peter and the others with him that the Gentiles were included in that “everyone” who could receive complete forgiveness of sins by placing their trust in Christ.
When he told the other Jewish believers about it in Acts 11, they were stunned into silence:
Acts 11:17–18 CSB
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.”
Did you catch that? God gave repentance resulting in life even to the Gentiles!
You mean “those people” got saved? The ones that would never have an interest in following the one true God and wouldn’t repent if you offered it to them?
You mean a whole household of them got saved, just like us?
Listen again to verse 43...”everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins.”
That means everyone who will stop trusting in themselves and their ideology and surrender to Christ’s leadership over their life can be saved.
God can save the progressive who pushes CRT and other human-centered solutions to the problem of the world.
He can also save the conservative who has devoted himself to following whatever QAnon conspiracy is hot this week.
He can save those who struggle with same sex attraction and gender identity issues.
He can save those who struggle with greed, mistrust, and a desire for power.
He can save those whose lives seem to you to be controlled by fear of COVID, as well as those who you think are calloused and cruel for not masking up or getting the vaccine.
He can save people who look different than you, who have a different political affiliation or sin than you do.
Make it even more personal this morning: He can save the family member who hurt you more deeply than anyone knows. He can save your roommate who drives you crazy. He can save the person at work you cannot stand or the neighbor you have been feuding with for years.
Who have you written off? Who have you stopped praying for because they are too far gone?
Everyone who comes to Christ, surrendering themselves to his lordship, can be saved.
You know what the best part of that is?

2) He can even save you.

Don’t miss this fact.
We have focused a lot on “those people”, but let’s bring it back home. Every single one of us is one of “those people”.
As far as I know, no one in here can trace their pure Jewish bloodline back and prove they are a physical descendant of Abraham.
We are a room full of Gentiles who would have no part in the people of God except for this fact: Jesus came to save even you.
Don’t let your focus on all the other people who need Jesus make you lose sight of your own desperate need for Christ.
Even if you were a devout Jew with a perfect pedigree, that wouldn’t be enough to save you.
It wasn’t Peter’s Jewish heritage or obedience to the Law that saved him; it was Jesus who called him to himself.
Never lose sight of what God has told us in his word about who we are apart from Christ:
Romans 5:6–8 CSB
For while we were still helpless, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. For rarely will someone die for a just person—though for a good person perhaps someone might even dare to die. But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
We were helpless and still sinners, yet he showed his love by dying for us.
Christian, never forget what Christ has done.
There is one other group I want to speak to today: those here who have not yet come to know Jesus as their own Savior and Lord.
As we have talked about different groups of people, you may be sitting there saying, “See? Christians are all about being judgmental and dividing people between being in and out.”
I am sorry if that is what you have heard. That is the exact opposite of what we are intending to communicate.
You see, in Christ, every division we come up with has been removed. We are all sinners, we have all fallen short of who God made us to be, and not a single one of us is good enough to fix that on our own.
That means white, black, poor, rich, masked, unmasked—any division you and I can come up with—gets removed by Christ as we all stand just as much in need of him and only able to be saved by him.
You might even feel like Cornelius today. You have been trying to do good things to honor God, but you aren’t there yet.
You may also have come in this morning, and you know what you did last night or last week. You know what your plans are, and you feel like there is absolutely no way you could ever be right with God.
On one hand, you’re right! None of us could be. Like we just said, though, God died for us while we were sinners. He died for you while you were still messed up, and he is extending the offer to you today to find forgiveness of sins.
Will you take him up on it? You have to surrender, say, “God, I can’t do this. I need you to forgive me and make me new. I know you died on the cross for me, and you raised from the dead so I could live a new life. Save me, and then teach me how to live out the new life you have given me.”
Will you do that today?
Endnotes:
[1] Scott, J. Julius, Jr, Jewish Backgrounds of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1995), 339.
[2]Warren W. Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1996), 444.
[3] Scott, 351-352.
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