SCRIPTURE 17And since God gave these Gentiles the same gift he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to stand in God’s way?” 18When the others heard this, they stopped objecting and began praising God. They said, “We can see that God has also given the Gentiles the privilege of repenting of their sins and receiving eternal life.” Acts 11:17-18
OBSERVATION The most amazing thing had just happened! The Holy Spirit had been poured out on the Gentiles just as on the Jews! This had never happened before and was the beginning of the Church as we know it today. Peter had a front-row seat to the epicenter of this earth-shaking moment and couldn’t wait to share it with the fellow believers back in Jerusalem. Instead of a joyous celebration, he encountered jaded criticism. They couldn’t believe that Peter had thrown hundreds of years of tradition right out the window and had even eaten with them! This was downright blasphemous to the Jewish purity codes. Peter understood. It wasn’t too many days earlier that he had been thinking the same way. When he had greeted Cornelius and his house full of Gentiles he stated quite clearly 28…“You know it is against our laws for a Jewish man to enter a Gentile home like this or to associate with you. But God has shown me that I should no longer think of anyone as impure or unclean. 29So I came without objection as soon as I was sent for. Now tell me why you sent for me.” (Acts 10:28-29). Peter had received a revelation from God that caused his heart to be open, but his fellow believers had no such encounter. Peter had a few choices in the face of his critics. He could argue, debate and criticize them for being so close-minded. He could storm off and simply refuse to associate with them and label them a bunch of legalists stuck in their old ways. Instead, he chose to use the power of the story, “Then Peter told them exactly what had happened”(vs.4). He didn’t sum it up, he didn’t give them highlights, no Peter gave his friends a play-by-play on exactly what God had been up to in his life. He painted the picture, he put them on the roof when he received the vision and put them in the room when the Holy Spirit fell upon the Gentiles. The narrative was compelling and convincing. So much so that “they stopped objecting and began praising God”. The power of the story is so evident that Peter was able to accomplish the same level of conviction through his story that a vision from God repeated three times accomplished in Peter. They said, “We can see that God has also given the Gentiles the privilege of repenting of their sins and receiving eternal life.”
APPLICATION Sometimes, God will use visions and dreams to turn the hearts of people. Sometimes, God will use the power of a personal story, the truth of a transformed life, the sincerity of a sinner saved by grace, the testimony of a personal triumph through Christ to soften even the hardest of hearts to the new thing that God wants to do! People love stories and they use stories to make sense of the world. A great example of this is the Significant Objects Project. The project took a bunch of junk from thrift stores, had writers create a fictional story about the object, and then posted the object, along with its new fictional story, to eBay. The result? They sold $128.74 worth of thrift-store junk for $3,612.51. The story is powerful. How many of us remember Jared from Subway a few years back? Most of us do because that was the major turning point in the Subway brand! We remember how he was overweight, which most of us can relate with, and only ate Subway sandwiches and lost weight. Connecting a sandwich shop to a story resulted in a business boom for Subway who is now the biggest fast-food chain in the world. Story matters. Our story matters even more. The Book of Revelation reveals how The Story of life itself ends. It ends with God's Story and our story ending the devil's story for all of history. “And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death.” (Revelation 12:11) One of the most inspiring moments in Japan last year was an early morning meeting during the Ohana Retreat. During my message the night before I had spontaneously invited anyone who wanted to join me at six the next morning to learn about how to learn about Life Journaling and how to start a Life Group in their churches back home. I had shared a simple story of how the discipline of Life Journaling revolutionized my walk with the Lord. Everyone had been up pretty late the night before so, out of a conference of 300 people, I was hoping for twenty or so to show up. Instead, over 100 people got up early the next morning to learn about the S.O.A.P. (Scripture, Observation, Application, Prayer) method of reading through the Bible. I wondered what would have happened had I never shared that story and how many more stories would be birthed from this one all while returning to the greatest story of all in Scripture.
PRAYER I’m so thankful You use the story to get our attention. Instead of facts and figures, You share Your heart with us through colors, descriptions, reflections, and stories of redemption. You have captured my heart and I pray that I can represent You in the same way. We live in a culture of conflict and age of age. People can argue with theology but they can’t argue with the story and You always had a way of teaching theology through the story. Help me to do the same. Help me to not get pulled into defending myself and my position. Help me to hear out the stories of those around me before I share my stories with them.
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