The Cross Cultural Conversation
February 2, 2025 / Faith Alliance ChurchThe Cross Cultural Conversation
John
Conversations / Acts 10:1–43
The church has a mandate to care about, pray about, talk about and go to people who are not like us.
That is our mandate in the Scriptures and throughout church history, that has been one marker in the church that has kept it different than every other organization. We would love our enemy, we would go to the outcast, the lost, the lonely, the refugee.
It is because, for 2000 year, men and women have crossed boundaries. Have left what’s comfortable, have left who is comfortable and have crossed boundaries.
Central to the Bible is the reality that God has crossed every boundary imaginable to come to us. He left glory. He came to the earth to seek and save us. In Christ God
The Need
Acts 10:1–8 ESV
At Caesarea there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion of what was known as the Italian Cohort, a devout man who feared God with all his household, gave alms generously to the people, and prayed continually to God. About the ninth hour of the day he saw clearly in a vision an angel of God come in and say to him, “Cornelius.” And he stared at him in terror and said, “What is it, Lord?” And he said to him, “Your prayers and your alms have ascended as a memorial before God. And now send men to Joppa and bring one Simon who is called Peter. He is lodging with one Simon, a tanner, whose house is by the sea.” When the angel who spoke to him had departed, he called two of his servants and a devout soldier from among those who attended him, and having related everything to them, he sent them to Joppa.
When we think about the people God has called us to serve: one another and our neighbor, we are entering into a conversation already started.
Peter is where this conversation is started but the the only way to understand what
God begins the conversation.
We are always catching up.
With God
Acts 10:9–16 ESV
The next day, as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the housetop about the sixth hour to pray. And he became hungry and wanted something to eat, but while they were preparing it, he fell into a trance and saw the heavens opened and something like a great sheet descending, being let down by its four corners upon the earth. In it were all kinds of animals and reptiles and birds of the air. And there came a voice to him: “Rise, Peter; kill and eat.” But Peter said, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.” And the voice came to him again a second time, “What God has made clean, do not call common.” This happened three times, and the thing was taken up at once to heaven.
Acts 10:28–29 ESV
And he said to them, “You yourselves know how unlawful it is for a Jew to associate with or to visit anyone of another nation, but God has shown me that I should not call any person common or unclean. So when I was sent for, I came without objection. I ask then why you sent for me.”
The world Peter knew on the other side of the threshold is entirely different than on the one he found himself on with Cornelius. But God moved him into that room.
He set everything up.
This is where we see freedom. Because the Gospel is never bound. And Peter is no longer bound by his own ethnocentrism and Cornelius is no longer, in Christ, bound in his sin.
Acts 10:34–35 ESV
So Peter opened his mouth and said: “Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.
Ephesians 2:14–16 ESV
For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.
Jesus destroyed the dividing wall of hostility. Called so because when we create boundaries that keep people apart it creates automatic hostility on those people who aren’t like us. The cross obliterated our option to keep people apart and separated.
Acts 10:38–41 ESV
how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. And we are witnesses of all that he did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him on the third day and made him to appear, not to all the people but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.
We go to people unlike us. Who is the person most unlike you that you are on a collision course with? You may look at that person, whoever God has collided you with and you see frustration and anger.