Live Free with Josh Howerton - The Jerusalem Council // Acts 15:1-21

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

What happens when religious traditions clash with the gospel of grace? Today, Pastor Breaux unpacks Acts 15, where the early church faced a pivotal moment. Some Jewish believers wanted to impose old rituals on Gentile converts, but Peter, Paul, and James affirmed that salvation is through faith in Jesus alone—Jesus plus nothing else. This decision brought great joy to the church and set the foundation for how we approach faith today.   ➡️ For more information, visit lakepointe.church/dailydrive

Thanks for tuning in to today's Daily Drive with Lake Point Church, a daily dose of God's Word for your morning drive. When the word, not the world, becomes the majority of your week, your life will start to change. For that reason, our prayer is that God will speak to you through today's devotional. For more digital content to feed your faith, visit lakepoint.comit. Church slash daily drive. And now let's dive in to today's devotional. Hey, welcome to the Daily Drive. My name is Bro. We've been walking through a book in the New Testament called The Book of Acts.

It's all about the history of the early church and how those first century followers live with such courage and faith so that the good news would eventually someday make it all the way to you and me. And I don't know about y'all, but this journey has made my heart swell with gratitude for these sold-out men and women, just so thankful for them. And today we come to Chapter 15, which is referred to as the Jerusalem Council. Now this good news about Jesus is spreading like wildfire now. I mean, the flame that the Holy Spirit had originally lit in them

was traveling to places beyond their imagination, and an amazing, awesome, and confusing thing was happening. The Gentiles, the outsiders, the non-Jewish people were now putting their faith in Jesus too. Now, this was God's plan all along, but since the good news came to the Jews first, and Jesus was technically their Messiah from their bloodline, some of them don't know what to think about all this.

And some of the believers who had come from the strict sect known as the Pharisees, they start saying, hey, listen, we're glad that they're coming to Christ. But they also need to follow our Jewish rituals and traditions. We need to tell the men there that it's not enough to be baptized. They need to be circumcised as well. Not only do they need to come to Jesus, they need to come over to us. So the leaders of the church in Jerusalem, they call a meeting to discuss all this. Now, as a pastor for many years, I've been to a lot of these kind of meetings.

Some of those meetings I walked away disappointed in some of the people in the room, and many times I walked away disappointed in me. Some of the meetings I've been to has been as inconsequential as what kind of lawnmower we're going to buy for the church grounds. Through other meetings where we talked about allowing men and women to serve alongside of each other as co-hears with the same gifts from the same Holy Spirit. I've been in contentious meetings where people were very, very resistant to change, whether it was the music, the dress code, or we've never done it like that, kind of arguments, and I've also been in meetings where we humbled ourselves and we cried out to God and it felt like that room shook. And it's during this meeting that Peter, the one who had had vision back in chapter 10 about God's acceptance of all races, nations, and people, and then he meets that Roman officer named Cornelius and his Gentile family and he witnesses their conversion. He stands up

in the middle of this meeting after a lot of discussion and he says this, brothers, you all know that God chose me from among you some time ago to preach to the Gentiles so that they could hear the good news and believe. God knows people's hearts and he confirmed that he accepts Gentiles by giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us. He made no distinction between us and them, for he cleansed their hearts through faith. So why are you now challenging God by burdening the Gentile believers with a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors were able to bear? We believe that we are all saved the same way, by the undeserved grace of the Lord Jesus. He's saying, why are we talking about telling them to do this and do that

because that's the way it's always been done? We all now know that the old way was a yoke. It was a burden, a way that only served to show how desperately we all needed a savior. God's plan is Jesus. It's a Jesus plus nothing else plan. We are saved by the undeserved grace of Jesus through faith in Him. Nothing more, nothing less. And then Paul and Barnabas chime in with the,

Peter and tell all the people about the amazing things that God was doing among the Gentiles. They tell story after story of miracles that they had witnessed. And then James, who was the brother of Jesus, used to be a skeptic, now turned believer, and now one of the leaders of the early church. He stands up, and he quotes some Old Testament prophecy about the Savior of the world, being for the whole world. And he says this, and so my judgment is that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God.

And with that, they draft a letter to send out to the Gentile converts up in Antioch saying, there's no additional requirements to coming to faith in Jesus. And then they tell them that because of the pagan God culture that they're all living in, they ought to refrain from eating meat that's offered to idols, but all the Jewish ritualistic requirements that some are trying to put on them are obsolete. It's a Jesus plus nothing else planned. And it says this in verse 31. And there was great joy throughout the church that day,

as they read this encouraging message. Now the pressure to conform to religious requirements would not go away easily. Paul would have to confront it almost everywhere he went. The same kind of people that killed Jesus would follow and threaten his ministry for the rest of his days. And you can read about how Paul pushes back in letters like Galatians and Colossians and Romans and others. And I love how he kind of consolidates it all. By talking about his own personal faith journey in Philippians chapter 3. He goes through this impressive religious rule-keeping resume of his,

and then he says this, and I'm going to read it from the message, The very credentials these people are waving around as something special, I'm tearing up and throwing out with the trash, along with everything else I used to take credit for. And why? Because of Christ? Yes, all the things I once thought were so important are gone from my life. Compared to the high privilege of knowing Christ Jesus as my master, firsthand, everything I once thought I had going for me is insignificant like dog dung.

I've dumped it all in the trash so that I could embrace Christ and be embraced by him. I didn't want some petty inferior brand of righteousness that comes from keeping a list of rules when I could get the robust kind that comes from trusting Christ, God's righteousness. I gave up all that inferior stuff so that I could know Christ personally, experience his resurrection power, be a partner in his suffering, and go all the the way with him the death itself. If there's any way to get on the resurrection from the dead, I just want it to do it. Paul saying it's a Jesus plus nothing else plan.

Just rely on his amazing undeserved grace. And let's not make it difficult for others to find that grace too. And I hope you have a great day. I'll see you back here tomorrow. Thanks for tuning in today. For more biblical teaching and worship, join us for our church online live week and services on Saturdays and Sundays. For more information about all the digital ministries of Lake Point, visit lakepoint.compt. Church slash daily drive. Also, if this podcast was helpful to you,

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