Dennis Tuuri

# Acts 11:1-18

Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Acts 11:1-18.

And the apostles and brethren that were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also received the word of God. And when Peter was come up to Jerusalem, they were of the circumcision contended with him, saying, Thou wentest into men uncircumcised, and did eat with them. But Peter rehearsed the matter from the beginning and expounded it by order unto them, saying, I was in the city of Joppa, praying.

Then, in a trance, I saw a vision. A certain vessel descended as it had been a great sheet, let down from heaven by four corners, and it came even to me. Unto the which, when I had fastened my eyes, I considered, and saw four-footed beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. And I heard a voice saying unto me, “Arise, Peter, slay and eat.” But I said, “Not so, Lord, for nothing common or unclean hath at any time entered into my mouth.

But the voice answered me again from heaven, what God hath cleansed, thou call not thou uncommon. And this was done three times. And all were drawn up again unto heaven. And behold, immediately there were three men already come unto the house where I was, sent from Caesarea unto me, and the Spirit made me go with them, nothing doubting. Moreover, these six brethren accompanied me, and we entered into the man’s house.

And he showed us how he had seen an angel in his house, which stood and said unto him, “Send men to Joppa, call for Simon, whose surname is Peter, who shall tell thee words, whereby thou and all thy house shall be saved.” And as they began to speak, the Holy Ghost fell on them as on us at the beginning. Then remembered I the word of the Lord, how that he said, John indeed baptized with water, but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost.

For as much then as God gave them the like gift as he did unto us who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, what was I that I could withstand God? When they heard these things, they held their peace and glorified God, saying, “Then hath God also to the Gentiles granted repentance unto life.”

—

Let’s pray.

Contention, arguments, division, strife. We live in a world filled with such things. In the political world today, there is great controversy over the Whitewater incident involving President Clinton and his wife’s activities. We have great polarization occurring in the context of our civil government. Every week seems to bring increased polarization and contention and division between Democrats and Republicans. We see contention and controversy between liberals and conservatives. We see increasingly in our country for the last decade tremendous conflict between blacks and whites, between the rich and the poor in spite of wars on poverty and wars on discrimination.

We see tremendous controversy and division in the context of our culture. We see controversy and division and dissent between those who would favor an environmental approach and those who favor business. Last night, I heard on the radio an ad for a book called Trashing the Economy or Trashing Business, an anti-environmentalist book, which was interestingly advertised in the context of a show that was probably very pro-environment.

So we have that kind of controversy. We have controversy between people who want the ability to buy and use whatever guns they see fit and those who want to get rid of all guns in our culture. So we have controversy in terms of how we go about defending ourselves as citizens in a free land. We have controversy between labor and management. I heard an ad a week or so ago about a company that one of our men works for—actually an ad by labor that took management to task for their running of the company.

We have controversy and antagonism between labor and management in most businesses today in America. It seems we have controversy between old science and new science, traditional science and what some might call a third wave of scientific endeavors. Now I heard again in a radio show last night discussions of free energy—very things that a man named Tesla worked on many years ago, 100 years ago or so.

And there are increasingly new perspectives on how to go about doing science. There is controversy. There are actual groups that have formed, including Carl Sagan for instance, specifically to debunk some of the attempted theories and musings of the new scientists. We have controversy between traditional medicine and naturopathic or holistic medicine as it’s been called. Even how we go about getting healed when we have a broken arm or a cold or a viral infection or whatever, there’s no commonality of opinion anymore in our culture. We have great division and controversy.

We have controversy even reaching down from the political realm and the business realm that I’ve talked about and the cultural level I’ve spoken to—controversy now eats its way down into our very households. We have men and women pitted against each other in the context of our culture certainly, and don’t be mistaken that the cultural battle between men and women that rages in the context of our culture today politically certainly finds its way into family life as well.

And you must know that there are probably on any given day hundreds of thousands of very severe arguments between men and women in the context of homes—between husbands and wives divided over the proper role and the proper management and running of households now that women have come into the workplace in a very large way. Leonard Cohen, who I quoted a couple weeks ago, in one of his songs talking about democracy coming to the USA talks about it coming in the homicidal complaining that occurs in the kitchen to decide who will serve and who will eat. He’s talking about the controversies and arguments that arise in the context of families between husbands and wives.

And we’ve even seen, of course, and we’ve probably had a heightened sense of awareness of it in this congregation, the controversy and division and schism between adults and children as well—between parents and children. And so we have children’s rights movements and the children’s defense league, going certainly far beyond simply taking care of children who are truly abused in their families or culture to advocating complete children’s rights, ability of children to divorce their parents, etc.

So there’s no area of our life or thought that isn’t filled with controversy and division. And the text before us reads of a controversy, a contention that occurred in the context of the church. This is important for us because in chapter 10, we stressed how we see God getting rid of the division—the great division that he had placed until the time that Messiah came—between Jews and Gentiles. In the context of the Christian church, we see the great division in the Christian church, within the context of the believing household of faith being broken down now. The middle wall of partition being broken down. And so God creating a unified church in a full sense now that Jesus Christ has come and made reconciliation between man and God. God demonstrates that through the reconciliation between Jew and Gentile, bringing them together. And so he gives us a picture of a unified church.

And I’m convinced that until the church itself becomes more unified, we will not see unity in the context of the culture round about us. As long as we turn over things such as race relations and domestic relations to the civil government—that is not to exercise the priestly function—it will not work. It simply will not work because we have a personal God who will not allow that to occur. And so the unity that was pictured for us in chapter 10 as the Gentiles are brought in—not as Jews, not as circumcised men, but as uncircumcised into the household of faith and received into the household of faith by Peter representing the apostles in the church and his six companions, a seven-fold witness, a full scriptural witness to their inclusion.

This unity is the basis for all unity in society. And until we see that develop, controversy and schism will occur. Now, there will be no bridging between two sets of people in the world. The two sets of people that there will be perpetual antagonism between are those who are called to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and those who are not. The elect and the non-elect. That’s the great division that will not be healed somehow until men are brought into the faith, and of course with the evangelization of the world, even that will finally be healed, but not with those very people.

But we see here in Acts chapter 11 controversy—not in the context of the church in the world, but controversy in the context of the visible household of faith. We see men at the beginning of what will become a tremendous controversy in the context of the church as we’ll see it played out in the book of Acts, and that provides the background for an understanding of the epistles and the controversy and divisions and schisms that occur there.

We see controversy not where it is supposed to be, but where it isn’t supposed to be—in the unified household of faith—is beginning to occur. Now, the scriptures tell us that there are seven things that God hates. Six things and a seventh thing that God hates. And we find that in Proverbs, and God lists six things and he adds the seventh on. And that’s the penultimate thing, you might say—that is, the ultimate. That’s the seventh thing that God hates.

And I think there’s a sense in which that’s the fullness of the things that God despises. And that seventh thing is the man that sows discord among brethren. God takes controversy in the context of the church very seriously, and he warns us over and over again in the Old Testament, the New Testament about our speech and how our speech can sow discord in the context of the community. And that is a thing that he absolutely despises and hates.

The church is to be a picture of the community of faith that is found in heaven in the Trinity. And that community of faith is to be found in the church as well. And when that is broken up, it’s a denial of everything that we are as Christians. And so John tells us that it is that very sense of unity, that demonstration of unity in the context of the church that provides power to our evangelism as people see the love that we have for one another.

And conversely, to the extent that there is no love or no unity or there is controversy, to that extent evangelism is hindered. Having said that God hates controversy, it is certainly true as well that God in his providence brings these controversies to pass. We are not Armenians, after all. We don’t think this is outside of God’s control. God in his providence has brought the controversy we see beginning in Acts 11, the controversy that we’ll continue to see in the church.

He brings it to pass. In 1 Corinthians 11:19, in the context of that epistle to the Corinthians that talked to a church that was divided and schismatic—you remember the instruction about the table, how the rich and the poor were divided and how there was schism in the church, some of Paul, some of Apollos. There were these divisions and breakaparts. He wrote to a church that was splintered. And yet in 1 Corinthians 11:19, Paul said that indeed heresies or schisms—it’s the same word—divisions, heresies, divisions must occur so that you can see who is approved by God.

The ones that are approved in the providence of God, controversies such as we find in Acts 11 and in the churches today in America and in our culture, they’re provided so that we might see, we might learn God’s judgment and evaluation of men’s hearts. As we sang last week in “The Church’s One Foundation,” “Within [it] we always have false sons, false daughters, and we have sinning people as well. People who are in error and this is part of God’s way of maturing us as Christians when he brings controversies into the church.

So don’t think of the church somehow as some great haven from controversy. It isn’t. We’ll see that. As again, anybody who reads the New Testament, you get the picture the church is not some sort of nice safe haven where problems never occurred. No, it’s a community, and it’s a community with controversy. God brings the heresies to pass so that men might see their divisions, actual divisions of their heart might be made manifest.

The Psalms, you must read the Psalms. We read the Psalms. We go to the Psalms regularly in this church, responsive readings. We sing the Psalms a lot, and they are just filled. What’s the biggest thing you find in the Psalms? You find a man in the context of controversy and trouble, and not in the context of the Gentiles or the Canaanites or whoever, but in the context of the visible covenant community. That’s what the Psalter is all about—is working out controversy and division in the context of the visible covenant community.

And those psalms always ask for God’s judgment. They always look forward to God’s revealing as a controversy works its way out. Who’s right and who’s wrong? Who is to be matured and who is to be cast out? And you see, of course, again in 1 Corinthians, in chapter 3, when Paul tells us about these controversies, he says that there are two ways to build upon the foundation of Jesus Christ: with wood, hay, and stubble, or with gold, silver, and precious stones.

And one commentator has said, and I think he’s right, that God places wood, hay, and stubble in the context of the church because it will catch fire when controversies, when hard times, and difficult times come to pass. Wood, hay, and stubble in the context of the church catches fire and it burns up. And the works of those people are evaluated and found wanting. But the works of the people that build with gold, silver, and precious stones—who are gold, silver, and precious stones in the temple of God—those people are purified by that heat.

The controversy does not ruin their faith. It strengthens their faith. It matures them as Christian men and women. It makes them glow the brighter. It makes them more honorable, more pure as it drives up the dross, the sin of their own lives as well, through the controversies and contentions and divisions in the context of the church. I thought of that old song last night: “War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.”

Well, it’s not quite true according to the scriptures. The war that God builds into the context of our world is for the purpose of maturing his people, that he might train our hands to war. And much of that training is by the elimination, the discovery and elimination of sin in our own hearts, and also as a byproduct, the discovery of some who simply are not really of the faith of Jesus Christ and then are cast out.

So controversies such as this are common in our lives, certainly not just in the church, in our homes, in our culture, in our political action, in our businesses, etc. And this text gives us such a controversy, and it also, I think, gives us some very appropriate principles to apply to controversy and contention that we might then not be burned up as wood and stubble when hard times come, when controversies occur.

Rather, that we might be found to be gold, silver, and precious stones building upon the work of Jesus Christ.

—

So, let’s review the text again. Very simply put, in verses 1 to 3, there was a contention raised. You know, I don’t know if I should use this example or not, but I won’t actually. Let’s just say it was a very difficult thing. We said last week it’s understandable how men who had been taught by a false church—essentially by a church that was in great error at the time of our Savior—whose claim to fame, whose claim to God’s privilege was on the basis of natural privilege and on the basis of being circumcised, on the basis of them being Jews—having been converted into the faith of Jesus Christ—it was certainly, you know, conversion doesn’t make us change everything that we are before we come to the faith. And so it’s to be expected that these people, this controversy, this belief in natural privileges opposed to the Gentiles would find itself arising in the context of the church.

And that’s what we find as soon as we read the account in Acts chapter 10 of the Gentiles being grafted in. We immediately have controversy with those who identified themselves particularly with the circumcision to contend with Peter over his admission of the Gentiles into the household of faith. And so we have a contention raised in verses 1 through 3.

Peter responds to that contention in the context of verses 4 through 17. And Peter, in verse 4, we read that he rehearsed the matter from the beginning, he expounded it by order unto them, and then giving the account of his factual account of what occurred. This language, as we said, seems to imply strongly this is some sort of congregational meeting—the apostles and brethren are gathered together to hear this controversy, to think about it, to consider it. And so Peter kind of gives testimony, in a sense. He does a logical presentation. He responds to the controversy not by emotionally getting all upset but by giving a simple explanation of facts, and then moving to the conclusion of his deliberation by saying essentially, you know, if God has done these things, who am I to withstand God?

Again, we talked last week about Paul Simon—”Who am I to blow against the wind?”—and that’s what Peter says. He says it wasn’t my decision. God’s decision. He made this manifest. This thing that occurred was in relationship to what our Savior said in terms of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. And so if God brings these people into the church and into full fellowship, who am I to withdraw from them and to not give them the waters of baptism?

And so in the context of this controversy, Peter lays out his case. And the end result of Peter doing this, of him saying that indeed these people who we’re talking about here have also believed in the Lord Jesus Christ as us—the end result is the people hear that, the people that were contending with him, and they’re persuaded that is correct. And they say, “Great, good thing. Let’s glorify God that God has given faith to the Gentiles.”

So in the context of this explanation, we can see, and we began to talk last week and we’ll finish this week with some basic principles that we should relate to our lives in terms of contention or controversies that we find ourselves in. This relating of biblical history gives us a set of principles whereby we can also in a context of our church immediately have proper governance of the church.

One of the titles that I originally considered for this sermon before I called it “Joshua 22 Revisited?” was “The Exercise of the Keys of the Kingdom,” because in a very real sense the entrance of the Gentiles into the kingdom of Christ, into the visible covenant community, the exercise of those keys, opening the door to the Gentiles is exercised not simply by Peter and his six companions, but now it is verified. It is a second witness to the appropriateness of this, given by the apostles and brethren at the mother church in Jerusalem. So we are talking here about the governance of the church first of all. And so all my points that I make in terms of application here relate to the governance of the church. The church is a government, and the government exercises itself here in the context of Acts chapter 10 and 11.

It exercises the keys of the kingdom. It brings the Gentiles in, and the end result of that is that it gives us principles for the governance of our church as well, particularly as it relates to contention. Now I’m going to change the order around just a little bit, and we talked last week about the dangers of pride, the dangers of professional jealousy, envy, and slander to the governance of the church.

Just to recall again to your mind, that you might remember that in Galatians 6, we read that if you’re to restore somebody who is caught in a sin, be very careful how you do it. And the context of that in Galatians 6 seems to be the application of the principle that pride is what will cause you to stumble. In Galatians 5:26, we read, “Let us not be desirous of vain glory, provoking one another, envying one another.”

And then in verse 1 of chapter 6, the very next verse: “Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such in one, and the spirit of meekness, considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.” Now, Galatians is important to our discussion because that’s where much of this controversy between the circumcised and the uncircumcised really reaches fever pitch, sort of, in the church at Galatia.

And Paul writes this epistle to the Galatians essentially to address just this issue. And he tells us then in the context of restoring those who are wrong—you say you have to be circumcised, for instance, in order to be a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ or accepted by him finally—that in terms of restoring this everybody involved in the controversy there must be very careful that the way they go about resolving this is not through the application of their own trying to achieve the goal of their own pride.

“Do not be desirous of vain glory. If you want your own will done, exercised in the context of a controversy, you will then indeed, as Paul said, provoke one another and envy one another.” And he also said that they were biting and devouring each other. And so if pride is allowed to take a stronghold in the heart of people involved in controversy, the end result is going to be a failure to try to correct problems biblically.

And the end result of that is going to be an envying, a slandering, a biting, and devouring of one another in the context of the visible church. And so when you see men biting and devouring each other in the context of the church, the root sin involved, according to Galatians 5:26, is the sin of pride. And so pride is the great enemy to the proper governance of the church, and the great one of the great problems that occurs that prevents the proper resolution of contexts and controversies in the context of the governance of the church.

Secondly, we said professional jealousy, envy and slander are also a great problem to the government of the church. These people thought they had a position of privilege. Those of the circumcision party didn’t like that position of authority and preeminence being challenged by these newcomers into the field, so to speak, who got paid the same wages of salvation, worked for far fewer hours, and didn’t even have the union card of being circumcised in the flesh.

They had a vested interest, the circumcision party did, to hold away the Gentiles from entrance, full entrance into the church of Jesus Christ. The same way that a union member has a vested interest in keeping out non-union members from the workplace. The same way that Carl Sagan and the traditional scientists have a vested interest. They don’t want to see their hold, their authority, their power structure challenged by people that would propose free energy machines, for instance, or new approaches towards scientific knowledge.

Again, we’ve talked about this before, but if you look at the progress of science, it has gone through these kinds of controversies repeatedly. Because what happens is people have a vested interest in the particular technology of the day, and in their pride and in their desire to protect their position, they don’t want further developments in scientific knowledge to challenge their own presuppositions. And as a result, there’s always a drag influence as you move from one wave of scientific technology to the next.

It’s accomplished with much difficulty because vested interests don’t want to lose control, and so they have a mindset that will not be open to other ways of thinking other than the way in which they think. I don’t know that we’re on some verge of some great scientific revolution or not. I think that it’s certainly very possible. Apparently, according to the show I listened to last night, Toshiba is putting two million dollars in development and investigation of so-called free energy machines.

By that, what it’s talking about are science machines that can essentially take the energy that’s resonant in our environment—that exists between all particles—and somehow use that to power devices. And so you get perpetual motion machines, etc. Those of you who are familiar with Franklin Sanders down in Tennessee know that he has investigated some of these sorts of things. There’s some credibility to them, etc. He’s a good Reformed Christian man. I don’t know that’s what we’re going to look at in the next 10, 15, 20, 25 years, but I do know that the vested political interests and security interests of the establishment scientific community will resist whatever next wave of scientific knowledge will occur.

There, people develop a mindset in which they engage in a holding action because they don’t want to be challenged by new ideas and new structures. Vested interests are always a problem. And so in the context of the church as well, vested interests in the context of the circumcision party provide a problem to resolving this contention correctly.

But having talked about the two areas that are really critical in terms of avoiding, in terms of the settling of controversy, the scriptures give us in this particular instance many very important principles to apply. And I’ve picked several of them here. We’ll review the first three or four and then we’ll move on to the three or four we didn’t get to last week.

And the first thing we said, in a positive sense now, instead of warning against the dangers of pride and jealousy and envy and slander, in terms of the positive application of the lessons from this text, we see in Acts 11 the importance of men in the governance of the church. We talked about that last week. I thought I would read to you something I just recently wrote. And I don’t know if this will end up being in the final version or not. We haven’t really discussed this between Richard and Roy and Dave and myself yet, but I was working on the section for our church constitution on the section on discipline, judicial discipline. And I wrote this.

And let me just say first of all that I originally had set up—I had taken essentially what another church had done in terms of a book of discipline, the section on censures. How do you go about censuring somebody who’s found to be in a sinful condition and doesn’t repent? And I’ve taken and cut and pasted that into our document where it listed four censures. And it kind of made me somewhat uncomfortable to say there are four degrees of biblical censure. And so I thought it was important to make this statement at the beginning of this section on judicial discipline on the imposition of censures. And this is what I wrote.

“God has not given us a handbook of discipline. God has not given us a handbook of discipline with numbered steps, with systematized gradations of censures, with detailed trial procedures, etc. He gives us his word in scripture. That word reveals his way, his walk for us as his people. He gives us his church in which he provides men called, gifted, and empowered for special office. And he gives us his Spirit, that he might write his way upon our hearts in the context of the church.

We’re developing a church constitution. We think it is good and proper for many reasons. It’s good to codify what we’ve learned, what God has taught us. But we don’t forget it. It’s good as we look over the constitution, as we examine different ways we handle—for instance, the conducting of our heads of households meetings—to be thinking about it in the context of the whole church, that we might be a reformed church, all is reforming, that we might come to more maturity in terms of the way we conduct, for instance, our head of households meetings, in terms of the way we do judicial discipline in the context of the church, in terms of what the elders’ function and the deacons’ function are.

Delineate those things. Think it through. Put it down. So a constitution is a good thing. It’s good to remind the officers of what the responsibilities are. Good for the congregation to see what’s going on. It’s good for everybody to think it through and come up with a common opinion. It’s good for educating people new to the church—for instance, ‘and this is the part of the way, the walk of this church.’ It’s not the whole thing, of course. So it’s got a lot of good things to it, but it’s never—it should never be seen as some sort of system, some sort of inspired way by which all problems will cease to occur.

The church is not going to be run primarily by that constitution. The scriptures give us a form of government that I would call a very strict Presbyterianism—in that it says the governance of the church is turned over to presbyters. It’s not book of church orderism. It’s Presbyterianism. It’s not government by constitution. It’s government by men. And so in the context of the book of Acts, what we see here is Peter doesn’t say, ‘Well, the rule book says this.’ Peter interacts with other men, and through that interaction of men, the contention and controversy is dealt with.”

Now it’s important, as I said—I’m not trying to despise written documents. They’re very important for us. But they also provide a great temptation to us to sin by thinking somehow that’s what we should do: just write out a big long case book of everything that might happen, and then we don’t have to rely upon men at all to make decisions. We just, you know, like a computer diagram, follow the logical circuitry down here—we’ll get the right answer. No, that isn’t the way it’s going to be done, because that’s not the way God’s word gives it to us.

God gives us a word that is not written primarily as a law book. It’s written, as Jim B. Jordan has said, more as a sermon. A portion of the scriptures reads more like a sermon from God as opposed to reading like a law book. And it’s a sermon because it tries to picture not a series of detailed steps in terms of church discipline, but a way of life in the context of the Holy Spirit working in the context of men’s lives.

So men are important in the governance of the church. I think it’s a great thing, you know, that some of us use spanking charts. The Foresters have done a lot of very good work in a lot of areas in terms of running one’s household. But you know, the imposition of discipline as well is not an automatic thing, and I don’t see in the scriptures where the judges are automatically—they have to—if you pull this lever then this result comes out. Some of the great contention that’s going on in the context of judicial law in our country right now is various means whereby judges are essentially taken out of the process of deciding if a man spends his life in prison or if he’s executed or if he gets paroled.

They’re trying to take those decisions out of the hand of judges and place them in some kind of big huge law book. If you watched the Tonya Harding confession on TV this last week, I don’t know if you noticed, but one of the lawyers said, “This is a 65-page judge in terms of the sentencing guidelines.” And the judge looks in his book, and the sentencing guidelines tell him exactly what he has to do in terms of that particular thing.

Well, I don’t think that’s a biblical way of dealing with the situation. And now, it’s a response to men in office who shouldn’t be there, but it’s not the correct response. The correct response is not to turn over those decisions to a bunch of bureaucrats who develop things in the context of a system that is almost impossible to understand or work your way into. And I’ve been involved in administrative law hearings. I know that what I’m speaking of here. Administrative law is much more arcane and removed from the population than a judge is.

And so it doesn’t do any good to take the power away from the judge and put it in the hand of a bureaucrat. No, what you should be doing is removing those judges from office. The scriptures place the emphasis upon the selection of the men, their criteria, their qualifications, who they are in terms of who are going to sit as judges in either the civil state or in the church government as well.

And so in the scriptures, in terms of resolution of conflict, in terms of moving to develop a deeper unity of the faith, in terms of having the gold, silver, and precious stones be brightened and polished up, the scriptures place a great importance upon men in terms of the governance of the church. I would say here as well that on your outline I say that we have importance given to us of all men in the governance of the church.

The Holy Spirit works in the context of the church which has officers in it, certainly, but it also has a covenant community. And in our confessional statement, when you become a member you pledge to engage yourself in, to participate in the government of the church. The governance of the church is not simply carried on by the elders or by the deacons. And this again, this picture in Acts 11 of men coming together to consider these things—men who are not in office. And so the governance of the church includes men. It includes church officers. It is an order, not a democracy. But it also includes all men.

And so remember last week I had a mistake on your outline. I had “the importance of me too, the government of the church.” And it was supposed to be “men too.” I left out the N and the space. And so I wanted you to think about that in terms of if you’re sitting here in this congregation listening to this: the importance of you, me too, in the governance of the church—the importance that each of you individually has. And so it’s important, for instance, that as we work through the constitutional matters we work through, you folks look that stuff over real well. You think about it, and when you come together, come to the head of households meetings, let’s discuss this stuff. You have problems before then, talk to us beforehand. But you’re very important in terms of governance of this church.

So the importance of men in the governance of the church, and particularly the importance of all men in the governance of the church.

Secondly, however, you have the importance of persuasion in the governance of the church. What do these men do? Okay, men are important. What do they do? And this passage in Acts chapter 11 tells us what they try to do is persuade each other. Very simply, now we talked before that this is a government. This is an order. It doesn’t mean that all things are that—doesn’t mean the church is a democracy. It doesn’t mean that if men aren’t finally persuaded to agree with the apostles and with the brethren that somehow nothing gets done. It doesn’t mean that. No.

In the context of the family, it’s important to try to persuade your children to understand why you’re doing particular things, but they’re not going to understand it all the time. And that’s the whole point of their maturation in faith—is to get to the place they understand things well enough to have their own household. So I’m not suggesting by this, the importance of persuasion, that somehow you stop ruling in the context of your home with your children, for instance. I’m not suggesting you don’t tell them definitively what to do. But I’m trying to suggest is that in addition to commanding your children, which is proper, that you try to do that in the context of persuasion, in the context of dialogue and reflection.

And so persuasion is an important element to the governance of the church. It’s interesting if you take the basic Greek term for persuasion which means to cause one through argumentation or dialogue to come to a position on something—to convince somebody. This term is used throughout the scriptures. Persuasion is in terms of evangelization, in terms of being persuaded or confirmed in the faith, etc. And so the scriptures tell us indeed that we have the ministry of reconciliation.

We don’t have the ministry of commanding the civil magistrate, for instance, what to do. When we go to the civil magistrate we want to persuade him with biblical truth in terms of what his responsibilities are. Persuasion is an important part of biblical faith, throughout the book of Acts. And we read, for instance, in Acts 17:4, that some of the people that heard the gospel believed. There the very word believed is really a translation of the term that is really, maybe perhaps better, or in other context translated persuaded.

There is a relationship between persuasion and a person believing and having saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And so it’s important to understand that persuasion is at the heart of the Christian message. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:11 that “Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men. We make argumentation with them—not in a debating sense, but in a sense of trying to lay out the case before men that the Holy Spirit might use those case, based upon the scriptures, to bring men to a saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

In another instance, in back to Galatians 5:7, Paul wrote, “Ye did run well. Who did hinder you that you should not obey the truth?” He’s telling the Galatians, you know, that they were doing good, but then people came along and troubled them, and now they’re not obeying the truth anymore. The word obeying the truth is that same word that’s in other places translated persuade. He says, you’re no longer persuaded, and as a result, you’re not doing what God wants you to do.

And so persuasion is central in the governance of the church and everything else as well. And I put in this particular outline the importance of continued persuasion. I added that word from last week. It’s folly to think that somehow you persuade your children once—that they shouldn’t hit their brothers or sisters or shouldn’t yell at them or should be gracious with their tongue—that’s the end of the matter. They’re not like a computer, and they’ve learned that once and for all. No, that’s not the case. Men are men’s problems are not primarily intellectual. They’re moral. They’re in rebellion against God. And our children are frequently in rebellion against God. They’re sinners. They’re not simply uninformed.

And so persuasion is not simply an intellectual argument. It’s an appeal to their spirit, it’s an appeal to their soul, based upon God’s word. And of course, it tells them the path of destruction or the path of blessing depending on which way they respond to God’s word. The point is that when we persuade our children of the truth of God’s word and its application to their life, we must be prepared to continually persuade them. It’s going to come again and again and again.

And here in Acts 11, Peter persuades those of the circumcision that indeed the uncircumcised are full participants in the household of faith. And they’re persuaded this time. But we know from the history of the rest of the book of Acts that this persuasion has to be brought back again and again and again to this party. Husbands and wives are the same way. If we’re going to persuade each other, in particular matters—wives, you know, there are things you persuaded your husband is correct about, the way he treats you or the way he treats the children or the way he’s running the household, and he may say yes and come to a consent on that particular point in time, and yet the next week he gets back to his old habits.

The same with wives. So when we work with each other in the context of our families and in the church, we must have perseverance. We must focus upon persuasion, but we must recognize that persuasion is ongoing. It’s going to need repeated over and over, just like it was to the party of the circumcision.

Next we see the importance of godly dialogue in the context of the church in the governance of the church. This persuasion occurs in the context of dialogue. Two people talking together, two sets of people. Here we have Peter. Peter does not get upset and jump up and down. He simply dialogues. He speaks with these men. And so dialogue is important in the governance of the church. Our speech is important. It’s important to keep talking one to the other.

Peter didn’t walk away. The circumcised people didn’t walk away. They dialogue together. Husbands and wives, it doesn’t do any good just to cease communication. Sometimes it may, but normally the scriptural model for us, it’s pointed out here in Acts chapter 11, is dialogue in the governance of your household. And so in the context of the church.

But it’s not just speaking together. I mean, there’s no guarantee that if you speak to one another, things are going to get any better. Frequently, things get worse if you’re not regulating your speech—if you’re speaking to one another, why? Because your speech isn’t regulated or governed by the word of God. It’s not enough just to speak as one another. It must be godly speaking to one another to have effective resolution of conflicts and disputes in the context of the church.

And this is where I mentioned last week and this week the relationship of this text to Joshua 22. I’m going to go over the story of Joshua 22 one more time and remind us what we learned there a year or two ago of the four—at least four different examples of biblical speech and how we’re to relate to one another in the context of the church, the context of the family, or the civil structure as well.

Remember Joshua 22: all the land had been conquered. No falling words. Everything that God had promised had come to pass. Position of great blessing. The two and a half tribes who lived on the other side of Jordan were dismissed by Joshua. And he gives them a speech in Joshua 22 to them. And first of all, he commends them for their actions. He says, “You’ve done really well. You did well to do what you’ve done. You’ve hearkened unto the voice of the Lord. You participated in this battle. You did real well.” He honors them.

He gives them weight and glory and value with his speech. And that’s the first kind of speech we should engage ourselves in in terms of dialogue in our homes and in the church. We should honor each other. We should even honor those people outside of the church. Why? Because they’re made in the image of God. They have value and weight which they may toss away, which they may despise, being made in the image of God. Nonetheless, they were created as image bearers of God. And as a result, people should be given weight and consideration.

Now, some people don’t act very weighty. Some people don’t act very honorable, and they’re not going to get a whole lot of honor or glory. But normally, the scriptures tell us this is a very important element of our speech. Now, it’s easy to do this once you know it, once you think about this. It’s very easy. How hard is it to compliment your wife or to compliment your husband or to sit quietly and listen to your wife if she speaks something to you or to sit quietly and hear your husband out in a matter or even to sit quietly and hear your children out?

When you think about that, you know, yeah, that’s what I should be doing. So it’s relatively easy, but usually we don’t think about it. As I mentioned before, you know, you probably know this, of course, but I, you know, that’s why I carry around this little wooden heart in my pocket—something one of my children made for me. And I wrote glory on one side of it to remind myself to give glory, weight to my children, to be a reminder to me because I’m so forgetful and so prone to error and sin and cut off my children as they’re speaking to me, to try to give me some visible reminder to myself to hear them out, to give them weight, and to commend them when they do a good job.

You know, parents, you know this, but you know, when your children come to you with something they’ve done, that is so basic to how we’re created by God—to want to come to God and be evaluated by him. “Did we do well? Did we not do well?” And to be commended by God for what we do correctly. You know, Nehemiah several times in the context of that book says, “God, remember me for my works that I’ve done.” And some people read that and they think, what is going on there?

Well, that’s how we—God wants us to function in terms of him. He wants us to come to him for evaluation, and he wants—we want—he knows he builds it into us to want to hear him to say “Well done thou good and faithful servant.” And so we should do that in the context of the Christian church, in the context of our families. And it’s so easy to do. It’s not hard to do. And yet so often it doesn’t happen.

So often in the busy affairs of our lives, we forget the importance of men. We forget the importance of people in our homes. We’ve got to get the dollars earned. We’ve got to take care of this activity. We got to fix the house. We got to do this or that or the other thing. We got to watch TV. We got to listen to our music. And we forget the most important thing in the context of our house or the house of God here at the church. And that is the people therein.

So we forget that. But if we remember that, then we remember this first step of godly dialogue in the context of the family, the church, of the state: is to give honor, glory, and weight to each other. You know, I’ve been dealing with trying to assist people, encourage and exhort them in righteousness in terms of marital problems for a number of years now in this church.

And this very first step, this very first step, is where most people fail. And frankly, usually it’s the men who fail here. You know, we men seem to be prone not to love their wives. You know, the scriptures tell men to love your wives. Wives, submit to your husbands. Now, you know, that doesn’t mean that wives don’t have to love their husbands. We’re all under obligation to love each other. In the very text in Ephesians that tell women to submit to their husbands, earlier in the chapter, it says, “Submit one to another.” Talking about husbands and wives.

Men are supposed to submit to their wives. That’s what the scriptures teach. And women are supposed to love their husbands. But it seems like men have a hard time loving their wives. Because in some ways, and I don’t want to get into why, but they’re weaker vessels, and so men can be embittered against them. And that embitterment, that failure to comprehend the glory of the creature that God has given to you as a helpmate, the rejection of something that’s other than yourself—a woman as opposed to a man—this is where it usually finds its place: is in this failure to give glory or weight to the wife as she speaks and as she goes about doing the task in the house that she’s called by God to do in a special sense apart from you.

So godly dialogue begins first, as Joshua did, with commending the activities of those who have done well in the context of the church—giving glory and weight, quietly listening. I’ve used this illustration before, but I think it’s so important I’m going to probably repeat it several times in the next few years. But you know, people don’t want to just be understood. If your wife is trying to explain something to you or if your husband is trying to explain something to you, and you catch on to it and you cut them off, you have intellectually maybe understood their argument. You haven’t given them weight, glory, consideration that God tells us we should give to each other.

People want to be heard. They don’t want to be interrupted. And so it’s very important that we do that godly dialogue. And that’s what Peter does here, right? He listens to them. They sit there and give him weight and glory. At least the way the account is written for us, we see Peter’s whole recitation. Not a lot of interruptions going on, because God wants us to remember that we want to hear each other out. Weight, glory.

Well, then Joshua does another thing to those departing troops as they go back across. He’s mustering them out of the army, and he exhorts them to cleave to God’s word. Godly dialogue includes exhortations to obedience to God’s word. Glory and weight, commendation, yes. But a second level of speech should be exhortations to righteousness. And this is not so easy, is it? It’s easy, if you think about it, to give weight or glory to the other person, to your wife or to your husband. Not so easy for some of us to exhort them or to exhort people in the church to do what’s proper.

We’re not used to living in the context of a culture that does that. We’re used to rugged individuals in America. “Do your own thing.” This church has caught a lot of flack over the years simply because we think it’s important to advise people from the word of God on every area of life and thought, because we take the slogan of the Bible school here in town—”the whole Bible for all of life”—very seriously.

We think the Bible speaks to those areas. We think God has given us officers in the church and other men of the church and women as well to encourage and exhort each other in faithfulness in every area of life and thought. And because of that, people go—