Acts 15:1, 6-11, 22-29
One of the best writers on modern American spirituality is Tara Isabella Burton. I quote her frequently, because she’s so helpful. In 2020, she wrote a book called Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World.
She says even though more and more people are rejecting traditional, institutional religion, that doesn’t mean people no longer believe in God or have spiritual longings. She says many people are not rejecting religion, they’re remixing it. It’s the difference between what she calls institutional religion and intuitional religion.
That’s a helpful way of framing our contemporary spiritual landscape. Institutional religion vs. intuitional religion. People aren’t rejecting religion, they’re remixing it. Listen to how she describes it. “Today’s Remixed reject authority, institution, creed, and moral universalism. They value intuition, personal feeling, and experiences.
They want to choose the spiritual path that feels more authentic, more meaningful, to them. They prioritize intuitional spirituality over institutional religion.”
Do you know people who are spiritually curious but turned off by things like authority, creeds, and institutions? Maybe you’re turned off by those things. Tara Isabella Burton would say, “You’re in good company.” This is one of the most common attitudes toward religion, especially Christianity.
And yet, we also live in a world where more and more people struggle to find meaning, purpose, and hope. More and more people suffer from mental illness, anxiety, depression, loneliness, addiction, suicide, especially young people. And what’s especially ironic, more and more people are still looking for some kind of authoritative voice to help them find their way in a world where it’s so easy to feel lost. Instead of looking for that authority in the Bible, they’re looking to YouTubers or Instagram.
Here’s the question: What if everything we’re looking for is in the very thing we’ve rejected? In other words, what if the life of true authenticity, meaning, purpose, freedom, and love is in the gospel of Jesus and nowhere else?
We’re in a series on the book of Acts, which tells the story of the early church. This passage is all about the first theological debate. And for many people, that’s one of the problems about Christianity. Christians are always bloviating about theology, creeds, and dogma, all the stuff we reject.
And yet we’re always looking for a story to make sense of our life. Friends, that’s what theology is. Whatever story you believe about the world always shapes the way you live in the world. And whatever your story about the world is, that’s your theology. Which means everybody has a theology, because everybody has a story that shapes the way you live in the world.
This theological debate is all about the gospel. What is the gospel? What is the heartbeat of Christianity? How does it shape our lives? Let’s see three things the gospel offers us. Spiritual renewal. Cultural freedom. Sacrificial love.
Spiritual renewal. What’s this theological debate about? It says, “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.” Here’s what this means.
Circumcision was a way of talking about the whole Mosaic law. All the first Christians were Jewish, and they had been raised to observe Mosaic law. For Jewish people, observing the law was the way you connected to God. You had to perform these rituals, obey these laws, do these things. And if you did all that stuff, then and only then could you be welcomed into God’s presence and know that he loves you and accepts you. And isn’t that what we all long for more than anything else: to be welcomed, loved, and accepted by ultimate reality?
We all long for that. Because all of us feel lost and cut off in this world. We all experience this feeling of being alienated from our true home. This is a universal human experience.
For instance, Thich Nhat Hanh was a Buddhist monk who’s widely recognized as the father of mindfulness. In his book Going Home, he says this: “Sometimes we have a feeling of alienation. We feel cut off from everything. We have been a wanderer and have tried hard but have never been able to reach our true home.”
Or, Eva Hoffman is a Jewish intellectual, although I don’t think she’a a religious person. She says, “Is there anyone who does not, in some way, feel like an exile? We feel ejected from our first homes. An ideal sense of belonging eludes us.”
This is a universal human experience. Don’t you ever feel it? And not just a longing for home, but a longing for personal transformation? Not only that you would be welcomed home, but that you would also be the kind of person who fits or belongs in that home? When people follow YouTube or Instagram influencers, that’s what they’re looking for. They’re saying, “Somebody please show me how I can be transformed.” We’re all looking for home and transformation.
That’s what this debate was about. Because Paul and his ministry partners were telling the non-Jewish Gentiles, “Hey, you don’t have to obey the Mosaic law to connect to God.” Do you see why this is so important? This is the biggest question in the world: “How do you connect to God?”
Remember what we said. Whatever story you believe about the world always shapes the way you live in the world. What story do you believe about how you connect to God? That’s what’s at stake here.
Here’s what’s so amazing about the gospel. At the heart of the gospel is a question of spiritual renewal. We talk a lot about that here at CWE Church. But what does that mean: spiritual renewal? Well, look at Peter’s speech here.
He stands up and says, “God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith.”
Notice two big things here. First, the gospel is about something that’s going on in your heart. Peter says “God, who knows the heart.” Literally, this says, “God, the heart-knower.” At the end he says God “purified their hearts.” Whatever the gospel is, it’s about something that’s going on in your heart. What is God doing in people’s hearts?
Well, second, notice Peter says, God “purified their hearts.” And he did it “by giving the Holy Spirit.” Here’s what Peter is saying. The word “purified” is a word that means to cleanse. Peter is probably touching on a famous passage from the prophet Ezekiel, where God tells Israel, “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and I will cleanse you. I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit. I will put my Spirit within you.” God is saying, “One day I’m going to cleanse you with my Holy Spirit. And when that happens, the result will be a new heart.” You put all of this together and here’s what this means.
The gospel is not primarily a series of rules you do in the world. It’s a spiritual renewal God does in your heart.
That’s why Peter ends by saying, “We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved.” This is amazing, because it’s the exact opposite of what so many people think Christianity is. In fact, as far as I’ve ever been able to discover, every other religion, spiritual path, or way of life - including secularism - says that the way you connect to God, or align with the universe, or become an authentic self, or make the world a better place - whatever the vision of salvation is - every other way says it’s ultimately something you must do.
Do you know what that does? That puts an incredible burden on your shoulders. Because whatever your vision of salvation is, you have to work really hard to save yourself. You have to achieve enough, or meditate enough, or be authentic enough, or please your parents enough, or be politically active enough, you have to work really hard to save yourself. That puts an incredible burden on your shoulders. Do you ever feel the burden?
Only the gospel takes the burden off your shoulders. Peter says, “Why do you test God by putting on the Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear?” Every other religion or spiritual path puts burdens on your shoulders. Only the gospel takes them off. Only the gospel says, “You can’t save yourself. Only God can save you, rescue you, transform you, renew you, and welcome you home.” The gospel is not primarily a series of rules you do in the world. It’s a spiritual renewal God does in your heart. That leads to our second point.
Cultural freedom. Remember what this debate was about. Some Jewish Christians were telling Gentile Christians they needed to obey the whole Mosaic law in order to be saved and connect with God. But by the end of the debate, they said this law that had basically defined Israel’s whole identity for a thousand years was no longer necessary. Why?
Well, think about the basic function of the law. The Mosaic law was divided into three categories or three buckets. The first bucket was moral laws: don’t murder, lie, steal, or commit adultery.
The second bucket was clean laws. The clean laws were various rituals and washings pointing to the spiritual reality that God is holy and pure, and to come into his presence you need to be holy and pure.
The third bucket was sacrificial laws. The sacrificial laws were pointing to the spiritual reality that we need a sacrifice, or a substitute, something to take the burden of sin off our shoulders.
Now this debate was about the clean laws and the sacrificial laws. They weren’t rejecting the moral law. Far from it. They were saying the clean laws and the sacrificial laws were no longer necessary. Why? Because those laws were symbols or pictures pointing to a spiritual reality: that our lives are touched by sin and death, and that in order to come into the presence of God we needed to be cleansed from sin and rescued from death.
Here’s the challenge. We talked about this last week. In our culture, people don’t think like that. We don’t see ourselves as sinners who are guilty and need cleansing. That kind of talk freaks us out. It gives us the collywobbles. But, remember what we talked about in the first point. We do feel like we’re cut off from our true home. And we do feel that we are in need - often in desperate need - of transformation.
One of the most heart-wrenching pictures of this is from a tv show called Fleabag. It’s about a young woman who’s overwhelmed with grief and tortured by guilt. But no matter what she does, she can’t get rid of it. She can’t change it. She can’t fix it. She can’t cleanse it. The only thing she can do is numb herself to it through drinking too much, talking too loudly, pretending she’s fine, and having lots and lots of sex.
In the first episode, she goes to her father’s house late at night and knocks on the door. She just wants her dad to welcome her and to love her. She’s standing there about to burst into tears. But her dad is so oblivious he just stares at her and says, “You know it’s nearly 2 o’clock in the morning.”
She tries to pretend, “Oh, everything’s fine,” and starts to walk away. But then in a moment of searing honesty she says, “Ah, screw it,” turns around, faces her father and says,
“I have a horrible feeling that I am a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist.”
For just a moment, off comes the mask. She faces the reality that she longs for transformation. She longs for cleansing. The Mosaic law was a picture of the spiritual reality that in order to come home, we need to be transformed.
In this passage, the church is saying the law is no longer necessary, because the reality has come in Jesus. Jesus is the one who purifies us and cleanses us. Or, if you don’t like that language, Jesus is the one who transforms us and welcomes us home into the presence of God.
Here’s what this means for us today in the 21st century. For Jewish people, these laws had become a way of defining their identity. Remember, the laws were a symbol or a picture pointing to a deeper reality. Now please understand. For hundreds of years they were living under oppression from various foreign empires. Those cultural identity markers - like circumcision, food laws, clean laws, sacrificial laws - those were an incredibly important way for them to hold on to the truth about God and to avoid assimilation into the broader culture.
But once Jesus came, the need for those cultural identity markers fell away, because now we have the reality in Jesus. So becoming a Christian does not mean becoming culturally Jewish. The gospel is for all nations, all ethnicities, all cultures.
We keep seeing this throughout the book of Acts, but let me repeat it again. The gospel displaces your cultural identity, but never erases your cultural identity. Your primary identity gets recentered on Jesus. That’s what spiritual renewal is.
But you still keep your cultural identity. You’re a Christian. But you’re still a Chinese Christian, or a Korean Christian, or an African-American Christian, or an Indian Christian, or whatever your cultural background is. The gospel displaces your cultural identity, but it never erases your cultural identity.
Here’s why this is so important. We live in an increasingly divided, polarized society. And almost all of that division is cultural. Modern, Western society is obsessed with identity. There’s nothing wrong with identity. Identity is where you get a sense of self and a sense of significance. Jesus died on the cross to give you the ultimate sense of self and significance.
But in our culture, we root our identities in things like our political identity, national identity, sexual identity, gender identity, racial identity, and on and on. To put this in theological terms, we find our righteousness in it. We can even do this with our religious identity. In other words, if our primary identity is rooted in who we are and what we do, instead of who Jesus is and what he has done for us, then we will inevitably need to bolster that identity by looking down on others, feeling superior to them, attacking them, fighting them, despising them.
The gospel should make us the most tolerant, loving, welcoming, and compassionate people in the world, because if my primary identity is rooted in the God of the universe dying on a cross for me, if I needed rescue and transformation that desperately, then how could I possibly look down on anyone else?
The gospel gives us spiritual renewal. But it also gives us cultural freedom, freedom from being defined by my culture, but also freedom from despising other cultures. But lastly, the gospel offers us…
Sacrificial love. Specifically, the gospel transforms us into people who offer sacrificial love to others. How?
One of the confusing things about this passage for us modern people is this letter they send to the Gentile Christians. They’re saying that Gentiles don’t need to obey the Mosaic law. But at the end they say, “You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality.” What is this about?
All of these were things that were a regular part of worship in ancient pagan temples. They would have been deeply offensive to Jewish people. So even though the gospel gives us cultural freedom, and these Gentile Christians technically would have been perfectly free to eat food sacrificed to idols, the church was saying, “Out of love for your neighbors, out of a desire not to offend their conscience, even though you have freedom to do these things, don’t.” It’s a way of sacrificing your freedom out of love for someone else. Because that’s what love is: giving yourself away for the sake of others.
I talk to people frequently about spirituality. But often, when the subject of grace comes up - this idea that you’re not saved by your virtue, or by being a really good person - often people will reply: “It’s too easy. If God forgives you no matter what you do, then why would we ever bother trying to change our life? There’s no incentive.”
That’s an understandable question. And one of the problems is you really do see a lot of Christians whose lives are untransformed. There was a great Christian writer named Dallas Willard. He called this barcode Christianity. If you’re at the checkout at the grocery store, it doesn’t matter what’s inside the can. If you scan the barcode, and the barcode says it’s a can of peaches, then it doesn’t matter if the can really has dog manure inside. If the barcode says it’s peaches, it’s peaches.
Many Christians feel like if the barcode says forgiven, then it doesn’t matter if my life is untransformed. Now at a certain level, that’s true. We’re not saved by what we do, but what Jesus did. But at a deeper level, if the grace of God doesn’t lead you to a transformed life, then you haven’t really experienced grace.
Once you see, and I mean really see, what Jesus has done for you; the more you realize what he’s rescued you from, you can never go back. It changes everything. It changes you.
There’s a famous story about a man who was riding his horse in a snowstorm. His goal was to get to a town on the edge of a lake where he could catch a ferry, cross the lake, and get to the other side. So he’s riding all night, trying to get to this town. It’s a blinding snowstorm, so he can’t even see where he’s going. He keeps riding, and riding, and riding, until finally he sees some lights in the distance, and reaches a little town.
When he gets there, he asks a woman, “How much farther to the lake and the ferry?” The woman looks at him and with terror in her eyes she says, “What are you talking about? The lake is behind you covered with ice. You just rode your horse across it.” When the man hears that and realizes what he’s just survived, he’s so overwhelmed he faints on the spot.
Friends, does grace make you faint? What is the grace of God? It’s easy to say the word, but what does it mean? Think about what circumcision is. Circumcision is a sign of covenant. A covenant is like a contract you make with someone. But in the ancient world, the way they made contracts was very vivid. For instance, they would cut an animal in half and walk between the pieces. It was a way of acting out the penalty of disobedience. They were saying, “If I fail to live up to my part in this relationship, may I be like this animal.”
Circumcision was a painfully vivid way of saying, “If I fail to live up to my part, may I be cut off.” What is grace? The law says, “If I fail to live up, may I be cut off.” But on the cross, Jesus pours out grace and says, “You have failed to live up, but instead of cutting you off, I will be cut off.” And he was.
We feel cut off in this world. We long for transformation and welcome back in. We also know intuitively that something is broken in us and in our relationship with God. Anytime we root our identity in something other than God, it breaks our relationship, it cuts us off from God. But on the cross, Jesus was broken. Jesus was truly cut off so we could be welcomed back in.
He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” so we could cry out, “Amazing love! How can it be that thou my God should die for me!” Grace should make us faint. Grace should transform us into people of sacrificial love. Love means sacrificing your freedom and giving yourself away for the sake of others, because that’s what Jesus did for you.
The way you become a person of sacrificial love is to take the cross ever more deeply into your life. Your life of sacrificial love is not a way of getting God’s love in your life. That’s traditional religion. That’s law. Law says you have to live a really good life to get God’s love. But the gospel says your life of sacrificial love is not a way of getting God’s love. It’s your response to the love he’s already given you on the cross.
Bring the cross every more deeply into your life. Let it renew you spiritually. Let it free you culturally. And let it transform you more and more into a person of sacrificial love. Let’s pray.