"Stop Objecting!"

Scripture Passage

Acts 10-12:5

Scripture Focus

When the others heard this, they stopped objecting and began praising God. (Acts 11:18 NLT)

Observation

What openness to the Holy Spirit and to things new and changing!

Today’s reading opens with Cornelius, a God-fearing Gentile and Roman army officer, whose “prayers and gifts to the poor” (Acts 10:4 NLT) have been honored with God's response. In a vision, an angel of God directs Cornelius to send for “a man named Simon Peter…[who] is staying with Simon, a tanner who lives near the seashore [in Joppa].” (Acts 10:5-6 NLT)

The next day, while the men sent by Cornelius are nearing Joppa, God speaks to Peter. In a prayer-induced trance, Peter sees a vision of a sheet full of all sorts of animals and hears a voice giving clear instructions: “Get up, Peter; kill and eat them.” (Acts 10:13 NLT) Peter protests because to obey would violate the dietary restrictions of Israel’s covenant with God, and—though certainly saved by the grace of God—Peter’s never done that. He’s continued to observe all the practices of an orthodox Jew. But the voice speaks again—“Do not call something unclean if God has made it clean.” (Acts 10:15 NLT)

God’s timing is always perfect, and at that moment the men from Cornelius’ house arrive. Peter returns to Caesarea with them, bears witness to Christ before a Gentile audience, and they are all—even as Peter is still speaking—saved and filled with the Holy Spirit just as Peter and his fellow Jews were on the day of Pentecost!

Wow! It’s hard to imagine how this must have rocked Peter’s world. In spite of numerous Biblical prophecies regarding a Messiah who would bless all the nations of the world, it appears to have never occurred to these Jewish believers that God would redeem and fill Gentiles with the Holy Spirit just as He had done for them.

Still, to their credit, when what had happened was reported to the leaders at Jerusalem, “they stopped objecting and began praising God.” (Acts 11:18 NLT) That’s really what I love today. They stopped objecting and began praising God.

I have a friend who’s both a father to a young son and a sheriff’s deputy. Tongue-in-cheek and as only an officer of the law can, he’ll sometimes correct his child’s slow obedience by declaring, “Stop resisting!” I think I hear the Lord’s loving challenge in a similar way to me today—“Stop objecting (to whatever God’s doing that doesn’t fit your paradigm, Kent) and (instead) begin praising God!”

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