"Some of (the Jewish believers) . . . began to speak to Greeks also,
telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus"
Acts 11:20


A Break in the Dam

The first international look over the self-protective cultural fence behind which the first Christians lived as ethnic Jews is recorded in Acts 11. It happened in Antioch, today a Turkish city close to the border of Syria - just 300 miles north of Jerusalem. Up to this point in time, 99.99% of all Christians were of Jewish descent. What we witness in the above quote from the book of Acts is the spiritual equivalent of the trickle in the wall of a huge dam that is about to break. Jewish Christians for the first time, on their own initiative, shared the Good News of Christ with non-Jews.

Looking back at our Christian brothers and sisters of the distant past, it appears they faced social and spiritual obstacles to sharing their faith that must have felt very much like the fears, discomforts, and awkwardness we can feel 2000 years down the road at the thought of sharing Christ with people outside of our spiritual framework. We understand that the Holy Spirit was the dynamic enabler behind it all, as He is today. But what can we observe in their attitudes and behavior that we can adjust so that the Holy Spirit is free to help us cross similar barriers we face in telling the Good News to people in our lives?

The most obvious explanation we can draw from the account in Acts, is that these Jewish Christians went through a major turn-around in their view of people from different religious and ethnic backgrounds. Two sentences previous to the above quote from Acts 11, it states that God led these early Christian believers to understand that "God has granted even the Gentiles (their term for those of a different ethnic heritage), repentance unto life." (Acts 11:18) When Christians stopped seeing non-Jews, non-Christians only as those who were different, they were able to see others as those to whom God had a gift to give - the gift of forgiveness and eternal life through Christ. They came to realize that the Good News was true and strong and relevant enough to break through the human barriers of ethnicity, race, religion, lifestyle, and philosophy.

The outcome of this change of view speaks for itself in the next sentence, "The Lord's hand was with them, and a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord." (Acts 11:21) I pray we each experience this way of seeing the individuals God has placed in our lives. I believe it is just as inevitable that we will see others coming to faith as it was for the believers in Antioch in the first century. That is what God wants to bring about in our area as surely as He wanted to in Antioch.

--Steve