Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Dismiss Children

It’s great to see you this morning.

Thank you for coming here to worship Jesus today.

My name is Dustin, I’m the Lead pastor at Liberty and if I haven’t met you yet, Id like to.

At Liberty we exist to reach 10% of our community with the life giving and life changing message of the Gospel by loving God, serving Others, and Making an impact.

If you ever have questions about who we are or how we do what we do, feel free to reach out and ask.

Today we are continuing in our Gospel Story series where we have been going from Genesis to Revelations to see how the gospel has been intertwined throughout scripture.

Here in Acts 10 we are going to examine how the Gospel is one thing to all people and different things to all people.

It is my hope you will be able to identify what the Gospel is to you and how you need to apply it’s life changing truths to your life so that you may glorify God and proclaim the name of Jesus to those around you.

Follow along with me in these first few verses of Acts 10 and let’s hear from the Lord today.

Acts 10:1-8

Exegete:

This passage begins in Caesarea, a town in Israel near the coast.

We meet a man named Cornelius who is a roman soldier.

He is not your normal roman soldier though.

He is a man that feared God.

He was generous to the people, the jews specifically, and was a man of faithful prayer to the Lord.

God has sent an angel to him and lets him know that his prayers have been heard and his alms, or acts of service, his good doing, pleases the Lord.

The angel gives him instructions to go to Peter and let Peter tell him what to do.

Some important things to notice here:

Cornelius was obeying God by faith by performing the religious acts he knew from the teachings of the Old Testament.

God was pleased with what he had been doing.

We have to remember, the message of the gospel hasn’t got to Cornelius yet.

He hasn’t heard about the Messiah.

He was following God as he knew from what he had been taught.

That doesn’t mean it’s ok for us to do these things today.

That’s because we have the truth of the gospel to properly guide which teaches that Jesus fulfilled the law.

Matthew 5:17-18

Romans 10:4

2. I believe we see that it was by faith and not a trite thing to him because of what the angel says to him and his response.

The angel says God had received his worship as a memorial.

God was pleased with what Cornelius had been doing.

Heb 11:6

Cornelius was being obedient by faith not by duty.

Illustrate:

There is a big difference between a person living by faith and a person living by duty.

Think of an employee at a company.

When the employee believes in the mission and vision of the company, that employee will perform their tasks with diligence and without complaint.

They are performing their job because they believe in what they are doing

When an employee doesn’t know, understand, or care about the goals of the company they are late, hard to motivate, and complaining about any work they have to do.

They are performing their job because they have to.

There are people in the world seeking to worship God now in these same ways.

Some believe whole heartedly in the unbiblical religious traditions they have been taught.

Maybe that was you, maybe that is you.

Maybe you grew up under a religious system that made you feel like less of a person because of how you dressed or how often you attended church or how much you gave or how many prayers you prayed or how much volunteer time you put in or how many times you confessed sin to a man.

These are the people like Cornelieus.

Believing in God, having a desire to have a relationship with him and doing what they have been taught is right to achieve only to find that there are no works that get us into a relationship with God.

No amount of alms can fill that God sized hole in your heart.

The other group of Christians are those that put checks in boxes.

They do it because their wife expects them to be at church.

Teenagers, as you all discover your faith this is where you can end up and where i was, doing it because parents made me.

Are you only coming to church because your parents make you?

Everyone in the room, are you just going through the motions.

Floating through life because you don’t want to give yourself over to an all loving God and live for something beside yourself?

Argue:

You may sit there and say

“Pastor, those traditions are what my family always did.

My grandmother, their grandmother, isn’t it ok to keep doing these things?”

Can’t I trust in Jesus and still perform these ritualistic things too?

No.

We worship God in Spirit and truth not in religion and tradition.

The expectation on you from God is not to say so many prayers, give so much money, or volunteer so many hours.

It’s faith.

He asks you to beleive in Him and His word.

Live from the love God has for you and all the dos and don’ts of scripture will be made clear to you.

AND, the specifics of those dos and don’ts might be different from others.

That’s the power of the gospel.

The power of the gospel in your life isn’t about everyone else’s relationship with Jesus.

It’s about your relationship with Jesus.

He died for everyone so that he could have a relationship with you that is real and intimate not trite and forced.

Apply:

Cornelius loved God however he was under the burden of the religious practices of the law.

He believed he could only have a relationship with God through the temple.

that’s the same as someone today beleiving they could only have a relationship with God through a specific church.

No matter what church you’re in you could still be religious without faith.

You could be religious with faith and still be burdened by your religion.

What is the Gospel to the religious?

I. To the Religious, the Gospel is a Release

A release from the burden of having to live up to the expectations of a perfect God.

The law was given so that we could understand our imperfection and know we needed a Savior.

The Gospel releases you from the religious chains that hold you to a system of belief that will never allow you to know the freedom, liberty, grace, and mercy you have as a child of God.

To the religious the Gospel is a release.

Now we encounter someone else in our passage whose life had already been greatly impacted by the gospel and would be again.

Acts 10:9-16

Exegete:

This is the Apostle Peter, the one who preached the gospel at least twice before this where 3,000 and 5,000 were saved.

Now while in prayer the Lord comes to him in a vision.

It would have been a great vision to.

It’s the vision that let’s me say God didn’t make us to be vegans.

For those of you who choose that lifestyle, God bless you, I don’t hate you, but I love steak and Tony’s cooking too much to only eat vegetables.

After being told to go kill and eat Peter tells the Lord “no” I’ve never done that because it’s unclean.

God reminds Peter of His authority by telling him not to call unclean what God has made clean.

This happened three times.

Peter called the items unclean because according to the law, they were.

As we saw earliler though, Jesus had fulfilled the law.

Therefore the meat is no longer unclean and neither are the Gentilles.

The non-jewish people.

When he died on the cross for the world, the temple curtain was torn in to symbolizing the free access mankind had to their creator now.

The Gospel is not just for the jew, it is for ever person on Earth.