Acts 11:1-18 The Holy Spirit changes the church's paradigm

Acts 11:1-18 Peter recounts the events recorded in Acts 10 to the church in Jerusalem. It would be perfectly appropriate for the church leadership to look into reports of questionable activities. Given the then-current cultural captivity of the early church to their Jewish tradition, the questions that are asked of Peter are natural and scarcely unexpected. In fact, The Lord was able to use this to begin the process of showing the church leadership that He intended His church to be all-inclusive. Peter's story, ending with the question, "... who was I that I could stand in God’s way?” shows that what was accomplished through these events was able to convince people, even though they may not have understood God's ways.

          There are often events that happen in the context of church life that merit close examination. These could revolve around the actions of church members, or rumors about people (what they used to call tale-bearing or gossip), or disagreements about doctrine. Usually, big church fights are not handled well. If people with strong personalities and opinions come into conflict, the work of the Holy Spirit is drowned out in the personalities. We have in this passage, and a subsequent section on the same general topic (the church council that decided the issue of Gentiles keeping the Jewish law, recorded in Acts 15), an example in which those on all sides were willing to listen to the Holy Spirit and be led of God to a resolution. The personalities were no less strong then. Perhaps it was the temporal proximity of the earthly presence of Jesus that kept them in check, a profound humility on the part of the apostles that for all their great gifts, they were still men who had made and still could make mistakes, and needed to hear from God. Self-righteousness is a trait that dies hard in each of us. The early church spread like wildfire because it was the work of the Holy Spirit and the church knew it. Contemporary churches, of whatever ilk, seem imbued through and through with the self-assuredness born of doctrinal purity. And most likely this accounts to a large extent for the church's lack of power in the modern world. Not the power of politics or money, but the demonstrated power of the Holy Spirit.

          And so the ironic irony is that modern Christians who pursue doctrinal purity and personal holiness, based on logic (in the case of theology) and rules (in the case of holiness) never really achieve either, and also emasculate the very work that God has put us here to do.  Because it is the presence of God that makes these things possible; that is, the presence of God enables us to keep our doctrine straight, to live in a way that honors God and His standards, and that even enables us to know and walk with Him.