Relentless | When God Changes The Messenger | Senior Pastor Keith Stewart

RELENTLESS
When God Changes The Messenger
Senior Pastor Keith Stewart 
August 16, 2026
 
What if the greatest obstacle to God’s mission isn’t the people we’re trying to reach—but the parts of us God must change before we can reach them? 

In Acts 10, God sends Peter to a Gentile Roman officer named Cornelius. But before God changes Cornelius’ life, He begins changing Peter—challenging lifelong assumptions, dismantling old prejudices, and expanding his understanding of just how far God’s grace reaches.
 
Nineveh wasn’t God’s only project. Jonah was.
Cornelius wasn’t God’s only project. Peter was.
And the people God wants us to love aren’t His only project. We are.


DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 

1. The message distinguishes between a technical challenge (“What do I need to do?”) and an adaptive challenge (“Who do I need to become?”). Where have you experienced God asking you not simply to do something differently, but to become different?
 
2. Peter had beliefs and practices he sincerely thought represented faithfulness to God, yet God challenged some of those categories. Why is it particularly difficult to change when we believe our existing position is faithful to God?
 
3. Before Peter ever arrived at Cornelius' house, God was already at work in Cornelius' life. How might it change the way we relate to people if we approached them believing God may already be doing something in their lives that we cannot see?
 
4. Peter eventually crossed a literal threshold and entered the home of someone he once would have considered an outsider. What kinds of “thresholds” still separate Christians from people today? Which ones might Jesus be asking us to cross?
 
5. Both Jonah and Peter were sent toward people they had been conditioned to regard as enemies or outsiders. Jonah resisted God's heart; Peter eventually allowed God to change his. Where do you see yourself in these two stories?
 
6. The message says, “Sometimes the greatest obstacle to God's mission isn't the people we're trying to reach. It's the parts of us that God must change before we can reach them.” What might God need to change in us—fear, prejudice, assumptions, discomfort, judgment, resentment—in order to love people more like Jesus does?
 
7. The Museum of Tolerance illustration assumes that none of us is completely free from prejudice. What are some subtle ways we pre-judge people based on appearance, politics, lifestyle, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, age, religion, or other differences?
 
8. The message concludes, “Nineveh wasn't God's only project. Jonah was. Cornelius wasn't God's only project. Peter was. And the people God wants us to love aren't His only project. We are.” What do you sense God may currently be trying to change, enlarge, or heal in you?
 
Closing prayer: Ask each person to quietly identify one person or group they find difficult to understand or love. Then pray the prayer from the message together: “God, heal my heart. Expand my vision. Help me to see people the way You see them, so I can love them the way You love them.”

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Amen. Please have a singing. It's a great song to sing, but you know, it is a gutsy prayer to pray. When we're asking the Spirit to rest on us, to make his presence known, we're not just asking for the experience of the Holy Spirit. We're welcoming his work in our heart. I mean, if you understand anything about the New Testament at all, you understand it. The Holy Spirit is the agent that God uses in the transformation of our life. He takes what Christ did on the cross and he applies it individually to us. He's the one bringing about the kind of heart change, attitude change, and increasing our capacity and our abilities to be able to be effective tools in his hands. So it's a very appropriate prayer to pray, especially in light of the fact that we're looking at the book of Acts today, where the Holy Spirit is on the move. We often call it the Acts of the Apostle. You'll see that as a name of the book of Acts, but it's probably more properly called the Acts of the Holy Spirit, because this is the Holy Spirit at work in many ways, and as we're going to see today, at work in the life of the Apostle Peter. This message in particular is a follow-up to our series. We just finished up on the book of Jonah that we called Relentless. I hope you got a lot out of that series. This is the New Testament equivalent of that story in the life of Peter. And I made allusions to it last week in the message. I just wanted to go through it today because it's got its own unique challenge to it that I think will speak to us all. So as we look at the message when God changes the messenger, I'd like you to bow your heads. Let's pray together. Want to welcome our online audience to join with us in prayer at this time. Father, thank you so much for who you are. Thank you that as you rest on us, it's not just for the experience of your presence, but it is so that we can experience transformation. So, God, have the freedom to make us into the kind of people you mean for us to be, especially effective tools in your hands in being agents of transformation in a world that's desperate to know you. I pray it all in Jesus' name. Amen. So there's this Harvard educator, his name is Ronald Heifetz, and he's kind of a guru on leadership. And he writes a lot about the distinctions between what he calls technical challenges and adaptive challenges. So, as an example, technical challenges are problems where you already know what the solution will be. You have the necessary know-how already, you just need to do it. So, with a technical challenge, it just requires implementation, if that makes sense. What Haifa says is this the single biggest mistake people make when trying to exercise leadership is treating an adaptive challenge as if it's a technical problem. So let me explain. Adaptive challenges are different. When you face an adaptive challenge, standard operating procedure is not going to get you where you need to be. You need to think in new ways. You have to become kind of a new person. In other words, adaptive challenges require more than implementation, they require transformation. Which means you have to change yourself. You have to change personally in order to meet an adaptive challenge. So to illustrate the difference, uh let's say uh just so that you understand the difference between uh something that is a um a technical challenge and an adaptive challenge. A technical challenge like uh if your workplace was moving from PCs to Mac computers, which I think we can all agree would be a very good thing, especially since I'm such a Mac fan. Uh and so is that a technical challenge or is that an adaptive challenge? Well, that's a technical challenge because you already know that Macs are superior to PCs, so you know what you need to know, you just need to do it. That's a technical challenge. How about this scenario? You have a child at home, and one day the hormone fairies come to visit, and that child passes from childhood into adolescence. Is that a technical challenge or an adaptive challenge? That's an adaptive challenge because it's going to require a whole new way of doing things. It's like your loving little puppy dog has transformed overnight into an obstinate cat. I mean, that's the difference. So you have to grow and you have to change and you have to adapt to new ways of thinking and doing things in order to help parent that adolescent. That's the difference between technical and adaptive challenges. So it shouldn't surprise any of us to learn that the God who works in counterintuitive ways, the God who likes to turn things upside down, a God who specializes in paradox would require a lot of adaptive challenges out of us. And that's true about today's message. So I want to begin by looking at the book of Acts, which is the hinge point of the New Testament. The book of Acts is largely about adaptive challenges, uh, the things that the church was facing. These were unavoidable and they were unprecedented. The church is divided over what's right and what's the best way forward, and they don't have any specific Bible verse to guide them in what to do. So the Holy Spirit is working, he's doing new things, the disciples are scrambling, trying to keep up. The followers of Jesus are being continuously challenged and stretched and sometimes even offended by what the Holy Spirit is doing. There's a number of what we call boundary crossing events that happen in the book of Acts. Like for one, by chapter 8 in the book of Acts, there's a Samaritan revival. If you remember, Samaritans are the next uh kin, if you will, to the Jewish family. So there's a Samaritan revival that happens, but they are considered almost the enemy of the Jews, so that's really different. Today's message, we're going to talk about the beginning of the Gentile church with Cornelius, a Roman officer who comes to know Christ. And then we find in the next chapter, or in chapter 11 of the book of Acts, we find Antioch, where Gentiles and Jewish people are together in the same church. These are all adaptive challenges. Now, typically, if you're reading the New Testament, you think of Paul as being the apostle to the Gentiles, and he was that. But it's ironic that Peter is the one who's first called on to go bring the message to the Gentiles. So he's the first one to do it, and he's the one that kind of validates the mission to the Gentiles. So get this. When the book of Acts begins, we get a glimpse into the first century church. It's a vibrant community. Everybody's following Jesus. But fundamental to the story is it's a Jewish community. They're still all eating kosher food. They're reciting Jewish prayers. They're still going to the temple three times a day to pray. This is what the book of Acts is documenting. They study and observe Torah. So these are Jewish people following the Jewish Messiah, living a Jewish lifestyle in a very Jewish nation. That's who they were. And it never occurred to them to be anything other than that. But then strange things begin to happen. And God begins to mess with their categories and especially their idea of purity. So I want to talk to you about something I mentioned last week, and that is the Jewish purity code. One of the ways that you can think about sin is sin is trying to join together what God has separated and trying to separate what God has joined together. That's the nature of the first sin. The serpent comes to Eve and says to Eve, Go ahead and eat from the forbidden tree, cross that boundary. Because when you do that, your eyes are going to be opened and you'll be like God. That's the thinking that created the moral mess that we're in today. So God tells Israel, I want you to come out and be separate. I want you to be holy. So at its core, what the word holy means is to be separate. So God tells those first families, I want you to leave your land, I want you to leave your culture, I want you to leave your families gods. I'll teach you the right way to live. You'll be separate from the people that surround you, but eventually you'll be reconnected to the whole human race, and all the peoples of the earth will be blessed because of you. So hear what God is saying. I want you to be separate, not so much from everybody as for everybody, so that one day the whole world will be united in my presence. That's really the point of the Abrahamic covenant. So if you read the Old Testament, what you discover is there's a lot of rules about separateness. Sometimes we're confused by this. Touch this, don't touch that. You can eat this, but don't ever eat that. And how certain situations or conditions could render you unclean. But over the years, Israel tended to lose the big picture of what God was trying to do through that. Religious people began to think of holiness as being exclusive, that if I'm holy, I exclude certain people. So as a result, they would shut certain people out. A woman who was having her time of the month, who was menstruating, she was considered unclean, a tax collector, lepers, gentiles, all unclean. They wouldn't associate with anybody who didn't follow their same dietary restrictions. In those days, it was thought to enter the house of a Gentile made a Jewish person unclean before God. And get this: if a Jewish person married a Gentile, the Jewish community would have a funeral for that Jew. Consider them dead, dead to them for the rest of their life. And not just that, they were so despised that there was a rabbinic teaching that said that if you came across a woman in distress, trying, about to have a baby, don't help, because it would just mean one more Gentile being brought into the world. This is the way they thought. But you just need to know, Jesus never read the law in that way, nor did he ever suggest that external things could lead to defilement. Instead, this is what Jesus taught. Are you so dull? He asked. Don't you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? So, for some religious leaders, maintaining holiness became identified with maintaining distance from the people that they regarded as unclean. So, in their minds, to be faithful to God meant to exclude other people. This prejudice is so strong that Jewish people would have nothing to do with Gentiles. They'd never be a guest in their home, and they'd never have them as a guest in their own home. In fact, even walking through a Gentile country, once you left, as you entered the borders of Israel, you would knock the dust off your shoes of that Gentile community so you wouldn't bring that contaminant onto Jewish soil. That's how strongly they thought about defilement. Of course, this has nothing to do with God forbidding contact with Gentiles in the Old Testament, because it doesn't. The Jews of the New Testament had gone overboard in their zeal to have nothing to do with Gentiles. Think of it like this Jesus was the holiest man to ever live. Amen? He knew God better than anybody ever knew God. He embodied a love and purity that nobody had ever seen before in their entire lives. And at the same time, he's the most inclusive, approachable person who's ever existed. Jesus touched lepers. He ignored man-made traditions around the Sabbath law. He touched a woman who was menstruating. He befriended Gentiles. He handled a corpse. Now this rocked the religious world and it messed with all their internal wiring. Jesus was modeling holiness as God intended it to be, not this distorted, isolated, judgmental approach that it had become. So after the resurrection, the Holy Spirit begins to usher in a new era. Now the doors of the Jesus community, they're being swung wide, and everybody is welcome. And the disciples have no idea how much this is going to mess with their categories. So Jesus turns the purity system on its head. The new community would be characterized by compassion for everyone, not external compliance to a purity code. But one residual that they were really having trouble getting past, that we see documented in the book of Acts, is the rite of circumcision. So, like I say, this is well documented in the book of Acts, Gentiles begin responding in droves to the good news of Jesus. Gentiles want to be a part of this new community. But like I said earlier, the Jewish church, the church was largely Jewish believers, practicing their Jewish faith with a Jewish Messiah in the Jewish nation. Most Gentiles who'd ever been a part of their community in the past had converted and underwent circumcision. Now these new converts are coming to Christ, they're not circumcised, they don't eat kosher food, they don't observe the Jewish purity laws. The question is, are Gentiles who want in, are they supposed to become Jews first? And what would that look like? Would you come to somebody and say, you know, we're saved by grace through faith? But there's this minor surgical procedure we need to talk to you about. I mean, how do you break the news to these new Gentile converts that they have to be circumcised? Well, here's the complicating factor. Jesus didn't tell them in advance how to handle any of this, it just happens. And that's what the book of Acts is telling us. The Jesus movement is spreading, the Gentiles are flooding in, it's never happened before in the history of the people of God. Circumcision has marked the Jewish covenant identity for generations. The idea that Gentiles might not have to undergo that same rite was a frightening thought to them. So in the book of Acts, the church finally decides Jesus is enough. What will distinguish the people of God from this point on, what will mark this new community, is going to be knowing Jesus, following Jesus, doing what Jesus says. We're going to replace our traditions, which were not bad things. They serve their purpose in their time, but that purpose has been met in Christ, and now that time is past. So we're going to replace our traditions with following Jesus because Jesus is enough. This is an adaptive challenge. It required a whole new way of thinking and a whole new way of being. And the book of Acts helps to document the struggle that the church went through to arrive at this conclusion. So the adaptive challenges went beyond purity laws and circumcision. There's also a paradigm shift. So what makes a person unclean? Lines are being crossed in the book of Acts. Old beliefs are being challenged, and we see this really clear in the life of Peter in Acts chapters 9 and 10. So the first sign that this is happening is the raising of Tabitha. In Greek, her name is Dorcas. Listen to this verse from Acts 9, 36 to 38. Now there was at Joppa a disciple named Tabitha, which means Dorcas or Gazelle. She was full of good works and acts of charity. In those days she fell sick and died, and when they had washed her, they laid her in an upper room. Since Lydda was near Joppa, the disciples, hearing that Peter was there, sent two men to entreat him, entreating him, please come to us without delay. So you get this. Tabitha is ministering to others out of selfless love. She's helped a lot of folks. Evidently she's the founder of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Association. And so suddenly and unexpectedly, her service is interrupted because she gets sick and dies. But then something unexpected happens. They send for Peter. When Peter arrives, here's what the Bible says. But Peter put them all outside and knelt down and prayed. Then turning to the body, he said, Tabitha, arise. She opened her eyes, and when she saw Peter, she sat up. Now this is an amazing miracle, right? I mean, a resurrection from the dead, just like what Jesus did. And there's also a secondary meaning going on here, though. Peter has entered into a room where a corpse is lying exposed. He does what Jesus does for sure, but he's crossing a boundary that he's never crossed before. So get this. In ancient biblical law, in the Torah, a human corpse is the most severe source of racial or ritual impurity, rendering anyone unclean who touched it, carried it, or shared a closed space with it. That's what Peter's just done. He's entered a room with a dead body, so now he's impure. Of course, Peter has seen Jesus do this on three separate occasions, right? With Jairus' daughter, daughter, the widow of Nain's son, and with Lazarus. But Peter himself has never done that. So he's venturing into new territory, a new experience for him, imitating Jesus, doing what Jesus did, but willingly questioning and violating the old purity code. But that's not all. There's an escalation that comes on the heels of this. Notice this, staying with Simon. Here's the verse. This is verse 43 of Acts 9. But Peter stayed in Joppa for some time with a tanner named Simon. This doesn't impact us like it would impact a Jewish person. We don't read scripture with Jewish eyes. A Jewish person who heard this verse read, they would go, they would be shocked. They'd be surprised. Peter went to stay with a man named Simon who's a tanner. Peter staying with a tanner is scandalous. Let me explain. There's this guy, his scholar, his name is R.J. Forbes, and he wrote a fascinating series of books called Studies in Ancient Technology, including a section on tanning in the ancient Semitic world. Listen to what he said. The tanner was despised because of the stench of his tanning ingredients and his handling of dead bodies. And the Babylonian Talmud, it says, woe to him whose occupation is that of a tanner. So why is that? Well, basically you're taxiderming animals, right? You're taking the skins of animals and you're making them into clothes and shoes and all kinds of things like that. But you're around dead animal carcasses 24-7. You literally live in that. You live in a state of perpetual uncleanness, and Peter goes to stay with this man. So first he's challenged around the purity code, around going and being with a dead body, Tabbit, who he raises from the dead, and now he goes and stays in the home of a man who lives in a state of perpetual uncleanness. Here's what you need to understand. Not only is this an adaptive challenge, but sometimes following Jesus requires transformations in areas where we sincerely believe we're following God faithfully. Now, what's really amazing, in the home of this man who handled dead animal carcasses, Peter gets a vision that escalates it further of unclean animals. That's my next point, a vision that is radical inclusivity of God's family. So get this God wants to bring together two men who are 30 miles apart. Cornelius, who's a Roman captain, and Peter, who's an apostle of Jesus. The two men have to be brought together because God is planning something huge through this experience. So let's look at it a little at a time. Number one, the vision. The Bible says that Peter became hungry and went uh and wanted something to eat. And while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw heaven open and something like a large sheep being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-footed animals as well as reptiles and birds. Then a voice told him, Get up, Peter, kill and eat. Surely not, Lord. In the Greek, no Lord. That's why he said, No, Lord. I've never eaten anything impure or unclean. Then the voice spoke to him a second time, Do not call anything impure that God has made clean. So here's how the story unfolds. It's lunchtime. Peter's hungry. He goes into kind of a dream, a trance, a sleep, and he sees all these animals, these unclean animals, these animals that God says you can't eat as a Jewish person, let down on this big sheep. And then he hears God say, Rise up, Peter, kill and eat. As a Jew, Peter has never eaten anything deemed unclean by the old covenant. So he's never experienced the goodness of an old-fashioned BLT. He's never had that experience. But here the Lord is abrogating, he's repealing, he's actually doing away with that law. Why? Because the shadows of the Mosaic covenant are fulfilled in Jesus. The whole point of God keeping Israel separate was to preserve the seed. The seed was Jesus Christ. Now that the seed has arrived, God has now turned his promise outward to bless the nations of the earth. So now it's time for the blessing to be turned out, which is the promise of the Abrahamic covenant. So when God shows Peter the unclean animals and tells him to rise up and eat, Peter says, No, Lord. The combination of no and Lord is an oxymoron. Because if you say no, then he's not your Lord. And if he's your Lord, then you don't say no, right? But he says to God, no. So in this dream, God says to Peter, you've been thinking about separation. You've been thinking about the purity laws. You've been thinking about animals being clean and unclean. And you've been thinking about what people are clean and unclean. But those old ceremonial food laws, they've been lifted. And the barrier to the Gentile world is totally and completely removed. So Peter's vision has two points. First, the food laws are fulfilled and ended in Jesus. And second, the people that they kept you separate from, the nations, the Gentiles, are not to be considered uncommon, unclean, not the way God sees them. Why is that? Because the blood of Jesus accomplishes full and final cleansing. Those ritual distinctions no longer determine access to God. In Christ, no person is beyond the reach of God's grace. So right after this vision, men sent by Cornelius arrive at Peter's home in Joppa, where Peter is staying. And this is when Peter learns that a Gentile, worse yet, a Roman captain in the oppressing army, the people they hate, an enemy, wants to speak to Peter about the gospel. Peter's never been given a task like this before, so what's he going to do? Well, first he invites the men in and puts them up for the night. This is another powerful indication that Peter's heart is changing. Because you would not invite a Gentile into your house as a Jewish person. Normally a Jew would have said, Hey, it's nice to meet you. Let's just stay out here in the street where we can talk a little bit. Or if they were being really courteous, they might say, You know, there's an inn right down the street that'll accept your type. But they would not invite that person into their home. They would not sit down at table with them. They would not eat with them. They'd never have fellowship with them. By inviting these people in, Peter's saying, You and I are connected. There's room in my heart for you. By the way, this is the same behavior that got Jesus into so much trouble. He's always eating with the wrong kind of people, right? Then we meet the captain. So at Caesarea, there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion. In what was known as the Italian regiment. He and all of his family were devout and God-fearing. He gave generously to those in need and prayed to God regularly. So Cornelius is an officer in the Roman army with the rank of what we would call captain. Any patriotic Jew would have disliked him and likely hated him because he represents the oppressing, the oppressors of Israel. But I hope you notice Cornelius is described as God-fearing. That's a technical term in the book of Acts. The God-fearers are a certain class of Gentile. So there were some Gentiles who were drawn to the Jewish faith. They liked what they heard about the God of the Hebrews. They kind of followed from a distance, but they stopped short of becoming full converts. They didn't convert to Judaism, and they didn't undergo circumcision. So the Godfearers were respected. They liked them. They were friends to Israel, but they were still Gentiles. They were Gentiles through and through. So Cornelius is a good man, no doubt, a good man who still needs God. He's a religious man, but he needs much God as much as the tax collectors do, as much as the prostitute does. Even though Jewish people respected and really kind of appreciated the God fearers, they wouldn't fellowship with them. They wouldn't have him in their home. They wouldn't go into their home because they're still Gentiles. They're not full Jewish converts. But Peter goes to Caesarea, knocks on Cornelius' door. Cornelius says, Come on in. Stop right here. How many times do you think Peter has been invited into the home of a gentile in his life? It's never happened before. This is the first time that Peter's been invited into the home of a Gentile. And he knows once he walks across that threshold, there's no going back. He'll never be the same. Still, he walks through the door. And then he tells Cornelius: here's the good news. A man named Jesus was sent by God. He went around doing good and healing people, but he was crucified on the cross one day. Then three days later he arose. I was there. I saw him. Now he's alive, and forgiveness of sins and newness of life are available to anyone who wants it. We thought it was meant just for us, but now we're beginning to understand it's meant for everybody. And after he told those words to Cornelius, the Holy Spirit enters the room and falls on Cornelius and his friends. The Gentiles now experience what the Jewish people did at Pentecost. There's a British scholar, his name is F. F. Bruce. I love the way he described it. He says, the event, that is this Pentecost event, was not so much a second Pentecost, standing alongside the first, as the participation of Gentile believers in the experience of the first Pentecost. So get what God is doing. God is validating the conversion of the Gentiles. He's saying, what happened to you as Jewish people is now happening with the Gentiles. They're in the family, they're a part of us. This is when Peter has this amazing realization and says, I now realize how true it is that God doesn't show favoritism. Now, a lot of people like to describe this chapter as the conversion of Cornelius, and it's true, it was. But at a deeper level, it's the conversion of Peter. You see, what's really going on in the book of Acts is this God keeps getting to the destination before the apostles do. Peter doesn't bring God to Cornelius. God was already visiting with Cornelius, which is why Cornelius sent word to Peter, come tell me about the gospel. God was already working in his life. You know, sometimes I think we get this idea, hey, we're going to carry the gospel out to the faraway places. Let me tell you something. God is already in the faraway places. He's inviting you and I to come and join him where he's already at work. And sometimes we forget that. And when we forget that, we think it's our job to be the Holy Spirit and convict people of sin. No, what we need to do is pay attention to what God is already doing in people's lives. And then we cooperate with what God is doing and we get these kinds of results that happen here. So sometimes what we call reaching people for God is really God just inviting us to join him where he's already at work. Peter has to first face, though, his own prejudice and exclusivity. He has to, the moment that Peter walks through that door, he finally and fully embraces this adaptive challenge that God placed before him. Now the church is on the move. So God shows no partiality. And this represents a profound change in Peter's thinking. He grew up thinking that Israel had a unique covenant relationship with God. And it does. But what Peter had not yet understood was that in Jesus, Gentiles could now enter God's family on the same basis as Jews. They didn't have to become Jews first. Ethnicity would no longer determine access or status or belonging to God. Now there's something else I want to mention about this message because it's connected to last week's the Joppa connection. The Joppa connection. Two messengers, one challenge. So in the ancient Middle East, there was this road, it's often called the Great Trunk Road. It ran the length of Israel and it connected the superpowers of the day. Sometimes it's also referred to as the Mia, the Via Maris or the Way of the Sea. It ran the full length of the land of Israel, but it starts in this tiny seaport of Joppah. It's Israel's primary seaport for generations. So the last time that Joppa appears in the Bible is 800 years prior in the story of Jonah. We talked about this in the last series. So Jonah's supposed to go to a place called Nineveh. He doesn't want to go because Nineveh is filled with Assyrians. And he hates Assyrians. Assyrians are their enemies. He doesn't want to be a part of any plan that God has to bring any kind of news of God to his enemies. So Jonah doesn't want to do that. And the story of Jonah, as we learn, exposes ethnic hatred and prejudice and religious exclusivity. So Jonah rumps from the assignment. Remember this? And he's swallowed by the great fish. And then he prays, Oh God, get me out of here. Just when you get me out of here, let me go out the same way I came in. Now he didn't actually pray that, but if I was Jonah, I'd be praying that fervently. Let me go out the same way I came in. So what we learn in Jonah's story is that God's prophet never really truly comes to grip with what God is doing. Jonah is running from his responsibility. He's running from grace. And yet God in his grace continues to pursue Jonah, which is the other truth in the story. So God is relentless in his pursuit. May we be relentless in our response. So now here in the book of Acts, God comes to Joppa once more, this time expecting another Jewish man to go and preach a message of hope to the Gentiles, to the enemy of the Jews, to the Romans. That man's name is Peter. So with Jonah at Joppa, God says, go to the Gentile enemy. Now with Peter at Joppa, God says, go to the Gentile enemy. You see, the story's on repeat. It's the same story, just now told in the New Testament. Jonah flees, but Peter crosses the threshold. And both end up discovering that God loves the very people their religion taught them to hate. It's the Jonah story on repeat. Only this time, the reluctant messenger actually allows God to change his heart. Here's the deal: Jonah and Peter are being taught the same lesson. It was through God, it was through God and what he did at Joppa that the message of hope would go out to the Gentiles, to the nations, to people like you and me. I mean, I'm, for one, very glad that the greatest export from Joppa is the gospel, aren't you? So a technical challenge would ask, what do I need to do? An adaptive challenge is going to ask, who do I need to become? Peter initially thinks that God is giving them an assignment. Go to Cornelius and transform him. But God is actually transforming Peter, the one's going to carry the assignment. Now listen to this because it may be the most important thing I say today. Sometimes the greatest obstacle to God's mission isn't the people we're trying to reach, it's the parts of us that God must change before we can reach them. You know, there's a lot of people out there hungry for the good news. And there's a lot of Christian hate out there too. And sometimes that hate is focused on those very people. And I think, how will you ever win them if you hate them like that? How will you ever show them the love of Jesus is all they see from you is venom? And so God often has to change the messenger so that we begin to see people with God's eyes, and we begin to love people the way God loves people, because apart from that, the world has no hope. You see, Nineveh wasn't God's only project, Jonah was. Cornelius wasn't God's only project, Peter was. And the people God wants us to love are not his only project. We are. And that leads us to this question: examination. Are we like Jonah or are we like Peter? So in Los Angeles, there's this one-of-a-kind museum called the Museum of Tolerance. Have you ever heard of it? It was made, it's by a Jewish man, and it's made to help people kind of face not just intolerance and racial hatred in society, but also in themselves. What's unique about this museum is when you walk in, you're faced with a challenge before you can even see any of the exhibits. You gotta enter through one of two doors. Here's the image. You see above one door says prejudice, and the other door is unprejudiced. Which door would you enter the exhibit through? Let me tell you a little secret. The door marked unprejudiced is always locked. You can't go into the exhibit that way. It's their way of making you face the reality that everybody's prejudiced. And what I mean by that, prejudice is a pre-judgment. It's a judgment we form before we know all the facts. And we do it all the time. Sometimes we just look at people and we make a judgment about them. It may be the color of their skin, it may be how they're dressed, it may be the tattoos on their body, it may be what we perceive to be their social status, whatever it may be, we look at someone and we size them up. We decide in advance what kind of person they are. We prejudge them. That's prejudice. And those preformed opinions, my prejudices get in the way of really seeing people as they are, of knowing people as they really are, and certainly loving them where they are. Christians are not exempt from this. Jonah wasn't exempt from it. Peter wasn't exempt from it. These stories are given to us in the Bible as mirrors for our own souls. So let's get really honest. Even though we see God challenging this thinking in the Old and the New Testament, in Jonah and in Peter, it seems like this is a lesson every generation of believers has to relearn. It's easy to get hung up on externals or things that rub us the wrong way. Sure, maybe you don't agree with certain people with what they believe or what they practice. You don't have to, I'm not saying you have to, but don't ever let a disagreement keep you from loving a person who matters deeply to God. You see, you and I have never looked into the eyes of someone who did not matter to God. And if I can, through my words and my actions, convey to an individual how much they matter to God, then maybe, just maybe, they'll sit around long enough to hear what I have to say about Jesus, too. You see, a long time ago, as a pastor of this church, I made a decision. We're going to go after the people nobody wants. Because if you go after the people nobody wants, you end up with a church everybody wants. Because what we have in this place, walking, breathing, trophies of God's grace. In abundance. We see it all the time. And all kinds of churches would die to just experience a little bit of what we experience week in, week out, as lives are transformed by the love of God in this place. The gospel doesn't merely send us across boundaries, the gospel changes the people who cross them. Now, I believe in the gospel. I believe it's God's power for salvation. I believe it works in the hardest of cases and the toughest of hearts. I know that because of what I've seen him do in my own stubborn heart. I know the hope he's given me. And I can testify to how much my life has changed. And in more than 50 years of walking with him, I know he's at the center of my life and gives everything meaning and balance. I want other people to experience that, don't you? The reality of what you found in Jesus Christ, don't you want them to have that? So if we do, we have to say, God, heal my heart, expand my vision. Help me to see people the way you see them so I can love them the way you love them. I want to tell you about what happens right after this story because it's amazing to me. It's one of my favorite stories in the book of Acts. But to do that, I've got to give you a little bit of context. If you go back to Acts 1.8, it's the Great Commission. The Great Commission is given to us five places in the Bible: Matthew 28, 18 to 20, Mark 16, 15, Luke 24, 46 to 48, John 20, 21, and Acts 1.8. Five times Jesus' last command is our first concern, telling us to go out and share with the world the gospel. In the book of Acts it says, But you will receive power after the Holy Spirit has come upon you. And you will be my witnesses in Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth. I love that verse. Years ago, when I was studying that verse, I realized, oh, this is the outline of the book of Acts. Because the book of Acts unfolds as Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth. And that's just not just a geographical distinction, it's ethnic too. The Jewish people live in Judea, the Samaritans live in Samaria, and the Gentiles in the uttermost parts of the earth. So it's expanded. So this is the way the book of Acts reads. You see this Jewish revival happening, all these Jewish people embracing Christ as the true Messiah in Jerusalem. Amazing. And then, like I said, in Acts 8, there's a Samaritan revival that happens. All these Samaritans are converting, giving their life to Christ. Amazing. Then Acts 9 and 10, Peter goes to Cornelius and you have the beginnings of the Gentile conversion. True, amazing. But here's the thing. Before Acts chapter 11, when you looked at a bunch of converts, you referred to them by their shared ethnicity. You said, Oh, these are converted Jews. And these people over here, they're converted Samaritans. And those are converted Gentiles. You referred to them by that ethnicity. But in Acts chapter 11, something amazing happens. In Acts chapter 11, we go to the city of Antioch. Now Antioch is this ancient Roman city. It was huge, surrounded by this great big wall, but it was ghettoized. You know what I mean by ghettoized? 18 different sects of people, 18 different ethnicities lived in Antioch, and nobody could get along. So even though it was surrounded by a big wall on the outside, the city itself was divided by walls on the inside. It was segregated. All the Jewish people lived over here, all these Gentiles over here. I mean, whatever your race and background, you had your own little section and you didn't venture out into the other. This is the only way the Romans could control Antioch because it was this tinder box, you just had to throw a match in there and it would explode. So it kept everybody separate. But the gospel went to Antioch. And you know what happened in Antioch that never happened before in church history? Jewish people and Gentile people began worshiping together in the same church. Any first-year Bible student, you ask them, where were the disciples first called Christians? And they know the answer. The disciples were first called Christians in Antioch. That's what Acts chapter 11 says. And I always ask them the question, why Antioch? Why is Antioch the place where the term Christian came from? Because for the first time in the history of the church, you couldn't look at a church and refer to it by its common ethnicity. These are Jews and Gentiles together. The first multi-ethnic church is the place, the heritage of our name Christian. We're Christians because it's Jesus Christ that brings us together, not the color of our skin, not our background, not our socio and economic standing. It is Jesus Christ. A Christian is a little Christ. They saw a little Jesus in these people in Antioch because people who are unlike each other were coming together in the same place and worshiping together. If God's church is going to be truly Christian, then we have to look around this place and we have to see the kaleidoscope of beauty, of skin color, and socioeconomic standing and all the differences that make us human. But the one thing that unites us is Jesus Christ, and that's what makes us Christian. It makes us Christian when we see each other the way God intended. So the book of Acts takes us on this journey, this adaptive challenge of the early church being challenged to move out of their small-mindedness and their ideas of purity and their ideas of exclusiveness to say, listen, the gospel's going out and God's already at work. Are you going to embrace, are you going to welcome what God is doing? Because you see, the people who welcome it, they get the right to be called Christians. The other, I don't know what your religion is, but it ain't Christian. Because the little Christ, they don't let those things get in the way. They say these are the things Jesus brings us together. It's Jesus that makes us one. So my hope and my prayer for this place is that we would always be worthy of the name Christian. Let's pray together. Father, thank you so much. Thank you for who you are. Thank you for what you're doing. Thank you for the challenge of the book of Acts. What amazing challenges you placed before your people. These weren't technical challenges, knowing what to do in advance and just implementing it. These were adaptive challenges, brand new things, things Jesus never addressed, things that the Holy Spirit was doing that they had to adapt and figure out how do we move forward. And God, through your church, you you made clear the message was Jesus is enough. Jesus is all we need, and we focus on Jesus. God, may we never lose sight of that message. And God, if there are people in our life that surround us every single day, some people we don't understand. And so maybe we have some preconceived judgments, some judgments we've made in advance that make thinking about people shorter. So God, help us to be challenged in our thinking. Help us, God, to be able to see people the way you see people, so that nothing we ever say or do would get in the way of someone you're moving deeper and deeper into your heart. God, help us to be that bridge builder, not the one who tears and burns down bridges. Help us, God, to be the one who extends your heart of love, not the person who's quick to judge or say something caustic. Help us, God, to be little Christ. Help us to be Christians, not just in name, but in practice. I pray it all in Jesus' name. Amen. God bless you all.