Clough Acts Lesson 28

Legalism vs. Licentiousness – Acts 11:1-18

We continue out study in Acts 11. We’re going to be looking at some 18 verses in Acts 11, and these are 18 verses that describe the subjective experience of sanctification. Maybe this is sort of new to be speaking in these terms as we’ve been very careful to tend to downgrade the subjective, over against the objective, but in Acts 11 we have Peter and with him the entire local Christian church, going through a process of sanctification. Now what is sanctification?

Sanctification is a plan that is a term that is applied by teachers of Christian doctrine to what we would call spiritual growth; that’s another term for it but basically sanctification is the proper word and if you are to be an intelligently informed Christian, capable of discussing Scripture with other Christians, capable of reading halfway intelligent Christian material, you ought to know this word, what it means; it’s simply the word for Christian spiritual growth. But we ought to use this word and not just spiritual growth because this is the proper word to use. And we might get a pitch in for those of you who are in school, if you want to take some courses that will be worthwhile, instead of basket weaving or whatever is offered, take Latin and possibly Greek for the reason that at least in studying Latin you are given the tools to recognize vocabulary.

I learned more English and more vocabulary in my Latin class than I did in all my English classes combined. This is one good example of how you can take Latin and break something down, the word sanctification. Usually when you have “tion” on the end of a word in the English language it’s the act of doing something. “Sanctus” is holy, and “fica” oftentimes is an [can’t understand word] in a word that refers to cause to be. And so we have the act of causing to be holy. You can guess at the word without even ever having gone to a dictionary or ever having seen it before in your life. That’s one of the tools the Latin gives; much better than taking some of the contemporary languages, though they’re fine, but you’ll have a lot more Biblical benefit from taking some basic ancient language that is the root of modern language.

In the text sanctification, used all the way back in the Biblical times has as its goal or its aim loyalty to God. Loyalty, it’s a quality of character, it’s something that you acquire. No one is every born with a sanctified character. You have a very simple proof for that. Do you know how you can prove to somebody that sanctification is not given at birth? You only have to remember two men, the first Adam and the second Adam. The first Adam was born supernaturally, instantaneously in the Garden of Eden, and when Adam was born or created sanctified. He had to become sanctified, and the same thing is true with Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ had no sin, He was absolutely morally perfect in that sense of the word. But, Jesus Christ was not sanctified.

Now you think of that; Christ was sinless but not sanctified. All you have to do is back that around a little bit and you suddenly realize that sanctification cannot have too much to do with sin, contrary to what most people think. Sanctification must have something else than to do with sin because Christ had no sin to cope with. And therefore His process of sanctification didn’t involve sin at any point. It involved something else; what is the something else? How does one get sanctified? How does one arrive at loyalty to God? And the answer is only through the series of volitional choices through history; there is no other way of becoming sanctified apart from you freely choosing at point after point after point after point in your life under pressure, under adversity, choosing divine viewpoint over human viewpoint, the Word of God over the word of man, and this must be true over a period of time; it takes time to build character. So sanctification takes time. And the product of sanctification is righteousness. Yes, there will be increasing victory over sin but the emphasis is not getting rid of sin; that’s the byproduct. The emphasis is upon acquiring a positive powerful righteousness.

Now all down through our lives we go through various versions of sanctification and various things conspire to make us sanctified, and in these 18 verses in Acts 11 we’re going to watch one man and a local church be sanctified. We’re going to watch them not acquiring perfect sanctification but we’re going to watch them move along the line of sanctification. We’re going to watch them become spiritually stronger as a result of certain things, and as we go through the details so we won’t lose the forest for the trees, as we go through these 18 verses think to yourself, what does this show me about my soul because there’s a parallel between how the Church as a group is sanctified and how we as an individual are sanctified, both of us going through a parallel process, involving parallel factors and this passage depicts those factors.

It starts out in Acts 11:1 and I’ll read through the 18 verses to get the perspective of the story then we’ll come back and look at the details of what happened. You might also label these 18 verses as a picture of what divine guidance looks like, so you have to be careful, there are factors here that are not true after the closing of the canon.

1 And the apostles and brethren that were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also received the word of God. [2] And when Peter was come up to Jerusalem, they that were of the circumcision were contending with him, [3] Saying, You went in to men uncircumcised, and did eat with them. [4] But Peter rehearsed the matter from the beginning, and expounded it by order unto them, saying, [5] I was in the city of Joppa praying: and in a trance I saw a vision, A certain vessel descend, as it had been a great sheet, let down from heaven by four corners; and it came even to me; [6] Upon the which when I had fastened mine eyes, I considered, and saw four-footed beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. [7] And I heard a voice saying unto me, Arise, Peter; slay and eat. [8] But I said, Not so, Lord: for nothing common or unclean hath at any time entered into my mouth. [9] But the voice answered me again from heaven, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.”

[10] “And this was done three times: and all were drawn up again into heaven. [11] And, behold, immediately there were three men already come unto the house where I was, sent from Caesarea unto me. [12] And the spirit bade me go with them, nothing doubting. Moreover these six brethren accompanied me, and we entered into the man’s house: [13] And he showed us how he had seen an angel in his house, which stood and said unto him, Send men to Joppa, and call for Simon, whose surname is Peter; [14] Who shall tell thee words, whereby thou and all thy house shall be saved. [15] And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell on them, as on us at the beginning. [16] Then remembered I the word of the Lord, how that he said, John indeed baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit. [17] Forasmuch then as God gave them the like gift as He did unto us, who believed on the Lord Jesus Christ; what was I, that I could withstand God? [18] When they heard these things, they held their peace, and glorified God, saying, Then hath God also to the Gentiles granted repentance unto life.

So in this section we have a story of a problem; we have believers discussing, thrashing out an issue and when they’re all through discussing and arguing and thrashing it out, they’ve attained truth and they’ve attained a certain improved degree of sanctification. In other words, what you’re watching here is spiritual growth take place and in a very unusual way. I doubt there are very many Christians who would ever think that arguing is a means of sanctification. Who would ever think that discussing something, in fact, bickering between different believers is a way that God wants us to operate in order to move along the line of sanctification.

See, it’s kind of like this. The Church is made up of different people, different backgrounds. Let’s take a person who has a scientific background; let’s take a person who has, what we’ll call a common sense background. Let’s take another person with a historical background. And let these three people come to the text of the Word of God and the Christian life and let’s see what they see in the text of the Word of God. And obviously these three people when they come to the Word of God are going to see three different things; this man will see some things out of the word, the man with common sense will see other things out of the Word, the man with the historical point will see other things out of the Word of God and at first it will seem like they’re all three in contradiction and it will seem like, therefore, they ought to argue and they’re going to say no, I think this is the case; no I think this is the case, no I think this is the case. And there’ll be discussion, but if the discussion is conducted in the way the discussion is conducted in Acts 11 the result of it all will be growth of the Church. The Church grows by discussing issues.

Now unfortunately in our circles, it’s somehow considered unspiritual to argue, argue graciously that is. Oh, if we are really filled with the Spirit the believers won’t argue. Now really, is that so? Is that really Scriptural that believers filled with the Holy Spirit will not argue. I don’t think so because if believers are filled with the Spirit and they don’t argue it would imply that the Spirit gives them infallible insight and that would be perfectionism and that can’t be. So it is possible for believers to be filled with the Spirit and discuss, as long as it’s done in a gracious spirit, always with the idea in mind of getting closer to the Biblical truth, not just arguing for arguing sake.

And so we have these three men say, with different backgrounds, coming and as a result the church is sanctified because the person with the historical background has brought into the discussion things that the others didn’t see, this man has and so on down the line. So discussing and argumentation, as long as it’s done graciously and as long as it’s done with and end to getting at Scriptural truth is growth, it’s edifying and it’s sanctifying. Let’s watch the process in action and see how we can apply it.

“And the apostles and brethren that were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also received the word of God.” Notice they were in Judea. This means that word traveled quite fast; it means that not only in the city of Jerusalem did they hear, but in all the area of Judea they heard this. This was even before the days of the telephone so it shows you how much gossip can travel even without Alexander Graham Bell. So they had heard this, and then in verse 2, “And when Peter was come up to Jerusalem, they that were of the circumcision,” imperfect tense, “began to habitually contend” or argue “with him,” so he immediately got himself into an extended argument. It’s an imperfect tense, the argument went on and it went on and it went on and went on and on. And so we’re about to watch how the Holy Spirit used arguments to sanctify. But notice that those who are arguing with Peter, it says those were the men who were “of the circumcision.” If you’re not careful you’ll read verse 2 as saying well, they’re just Jews. No, that’s not so because all the Christians were Jews at this point, so “those who were of the circumcision” must be those who were a particular party of Jews, and indeed they were, they were of the Pharisees. And the Pharisees were legalists. So we want to look at how these legalists operated, and because I’ve noticed among even our own people here the word “legalist” carries various connotations to different people, let me once again show what legalism is and what it is not. Some children get the idea because their parents lay down rules that their parents, therefore, have become legalists. That is not legalism for parents to lay down rules. It shows where a little doctrine is a dangerous thing.

So let’s look at legalists versus, say the licentious crowd. There are two factors, two means to sanctification that always must be present for growth to occur. You’ve got to have food and you’ve got to have air and you’ve got water to grow physically and you’ve got to have these two factors to grow spiritually. You cannot grow without these factors. One is the Law, that is the Word of God, the content of God’s will. No one can ever grow without taking in the Word of God, no how many prayer meetings you go to, no matter how many testimonial meetings you attend, that will not sanctify you. The only thing that will sanctify you is when you take in the Word of God, period. And I’ll defend that proposition to any audience, any place, at any time. The Word of God is the means of sanctification.

But there’s something else that’s also necessary and that is God’s grace; God has got to enable you to attain the standards of the Law or the standards of His Word, whether it’s the Old Testament standards, the law of Moses or the New Testament standards, the law of Christ, it doesn’t make any difference, grace is still needed. So two elements are continually needed: one the standard and two the gasoline to power you to get to the standard. Those are always the components of sanctification. Now there are fringe benefits, there’s happiness, there’s joy and there’s peace and there’s the fruit of the Spirit that accompany this, but we’re looking now at the mechanisms involved, grace and law.

Now the legalist and the licentious person have grace and law out of balance, they always do something with them. Let’s take the legalist. The legalist do, or try to, without grace. For example there are still parts, particularly in the New England area where it is considered an act of great spirituality for women to go without makeup. And this is somehow a great sign of sanctification of the female species, but in the Scripture what do we find. What is the law? What is the law of Christ or the standard of the woman’s sanctification. Well, one of the standards is 1 Peter 3, a meek and quiet spirit. So you’ve got this very high, high, lofty standard. Now it’s naturally impossible for any woman to have a meek and quiet spirit, it’s just impossible. But God’s Spirit says that that is the standard of her sanctification. So this places every woman in this dilemma of having this great high standard given to her by God but she can’t ever attain that in the energy of the flesh. That’s where grace comes in; grace enables the Christian woman to move toward that Scriptural idea, and that’s now a “weak and quiet spirit,” it’s a “meek and quiet spirit.”

But there’s that lofty standard of a “meek and quiet spirit” of 1 Peter 3; now along comes Mr. legalist and what does Mr. legalist do? Mr. legalist has a vested interest in destroying grace so once he destroys grace he’s cut the cord, he’s cut the power of any woman attaining 1 Peter 3. So what else, therefore, does the legalist have to do, once he’s severed the grace link? He’s got to lower the standard, so then the legalist comes in and replaces 1 Peter 3 which was originally that high and lofty standard of a meek and quiet spirit, he replaces that high Biblical standard with a low man-made standard, namely, don’t wear lipstick, don’t wear cosmetics, the whole bag. And that becomes something attainable in the energy of the flesh. So the legalist lowers the law and eliminates grace; that’s always what he does, you can always test for legalism this way. It may take you a little while to check it out but if you come across this kind of behavior pattern being imposed upon a Christian group some place, ask yourself, is this a Scriptural standard or is this less than a Scriptural standard.

Then the licentious person, what does the licentious person try to do? He catches on to the word grace and he wants to eliminate the requirements of God’s will from his life and so he talks about grace, grace, grace, grace, grace, but it means nothing because grace is like love, it’s a contentless term. I can use the word “love” in about six different ways and you have to pretty well examine the context of what I’m talking for you to derive what I mean by the word love. It’s the same thing with grace; these words have no content unless you supply them with content from outside. And the only way grace is supplied with content is from the New Testament law, the New Testament content. You have to know what it is God wants you to do before you talk about grace; the licentious person is all fouled up.

We’ll leave the licentious person alone for a moment because it’s the legalist that we’re interested in and in Acts 11:3-4 we have these legalists as they begin to argue with Peter. They say, “You went in to men uncircumcised, and you ate with them.” Now to them the physical act of circumcision is the big issue, like in the New England area the issue of women’s cosmetics becomes a major point. But also like that this represents a lowering of the divine standard. See, God in the Old Testament was using physical circumcision only as a picture of what was happening inwardly spiritually. There was a spiritual circumcision; Deuteronomy 10 for example. Other passages: Deuteronomy 30. There was always a spiritual reality behind the physical picture and it was the spiritual circumcision, just like 1 Peter 3 and that lofty standard of the meek and quiet spirit, that’s what God wanted. He didn’t want all this other stuff to be used to replace that with, but that’s what this circumcision party was doing; they weren’t concentrating on the state of the soul, they were concentrating on the state of the body. And thus they were legalists and thus they attacked Peter.

Peter, of course, had gone into Cornelius, Cornelius had been born again and spiritually circumcised in front of Peter’s face. So Cornelius was clean and Cornelius met the high lofty standards of Scripture. But that didn’t concern them because the trivial standards were the end-all of everything. Let’s look and see what happens. Verse 4 we find Peter responding to this kind of situation and in so responding gives us a model for arguing Scripturally. Some people like to argue, some people hate to argue. The people who love to argue, we find people here at Lubbock Bible Church who get a little bit of doctrine, then they go out and they’re going to change the world. And they walk up to a professor or somebody and drop this load on this poor guy, he doesn’t even know what the question was leave alone what the doctrine is. Or they walk up to somebody else on the street cold and drop all these pearls. Well, they may be great and they may be right but you did it in the wrong spirit and the wrong attitude, and you created a bad name for Bible doctrine while you did it. So we have those kind and those are not arguing scripturally, they’re just arguing for the hell of it.

But then we also have those who don’t argue at all and these are just as bad and I hope by the time we finish you’ll be convinced that not to argue a point of truth is also unspiritual, because we have people who in many Christian circles put on the (quote) “happy face,” (end quote) and stare in sort of a zombaic gaze at each other, while one person does his thing and another person does that thing and never discuss what is truth, what is right, what does the Holy Spirit want. Notice when Peter starts in verse 4, it says he “rehearsed the matter from the beginning,” imperfect tense, he spent some time “expounded it by order,” that word “by order is Luke’s history term, it’s used back in Luke 1 where he says, “Most excellent Theophilus, I want to set out in order the things that happened.” It’s a historian’s term to get objective data, get it laid out, factually presented so people can discuss something on the basis of fact and not on the basis of what I think, that kind of thing.

Peter, in verse 4, doesn’t say well boys, now you believe your way and I believe my way and let’s just leave it that way, you go your way and God bless you and I’ll go my way and God will bless me. That represents an animosity to the Word; strange that that kind of attitude… you wouldn’t think that, you’d think well, I thought the Word of God says that we should be at peace with one another; yes, but at peace with one another doesn’t mean that we totally agree with each other. If we totally agree with one another we’d better examine ourselves. No one totally agrees; you have differences not only in background among Christians, you have differences in growth rates; here’s a new Christian, all right, they know those kind of things. Here’s a mature Christian, they know those kind of things. It would be very rude and anti-grace for an older Christian to come down and dump all of his load all over some new Christian. You let the Holy Spirit work with that person. Yes, if an issue does come up over here and the mature looks at the issue and the baby Christian looks at the issue, they are going to differ on that issue.

All right, the fact that the issue has come up in their experience tells you one thing; 1 Corinthians 10:13, it tells you God the Holy Spirit allowed that thing to happen and you’d better take advantage of because right now we’ve got a situation between the baby Christian and the mature Christian, they differ, the situation has come up, all right, let’s discuss it. And what will come out of this discussion? The baby believer will advance in his understanding, and maybe the mature believer will also advance in his understanding because in discussing it with the immature baby Christian he’ll see gosh, you know, you can’t teach it this way, you’ve got to teach it that way. Or he might learn something else about communicating the Word of God. So as a result of a discussion, instead of sitting there with happy faces and doing nothing, the result of actually verbally discussing an issue out to a conclusion would mature them and you’d have as a result the local church will be mature. The local church would be matured by discussions and arguments if they are done toward a Scriptural end and done graciously.

Notice something else about verse 4; Peter is an apostle, but he doesn’t turn off the discussion by saying well, I’m an apostle, you take it from me bud! That’s not the way he responds to the situation; I said it, kiss my ring! Is that how he handles the situation? What he says is I’ll prove it to you from Scripture; let’s go back and discuss it on the basis of Scripture. He honors these people, he does not set himself up as an infallible authority, there’s only one infallible authority in this argument and discussion, it’s the Word of God. And so he says let’s examine it in light of the Word of God, and let’s conduct our discussion using two things, actually three: a gracious attitude, Scriptural norms and standards and the facts at hand. And then the discussion begins to proceed.

Acts 11:5, he begins to narrate what happened. Verses 5-6 deal with those food laws that we mentioned back in Acts 10, and you remember that those food laws, the circumcision party and Peter earlier thought were for them always, and there were certain assumptions that had to be challenged. The one assumption was that men, particularly this circumcision party, men could be saved by keeping that Old Testament detail law code; that assumption was that you weren’t quite as depraved as the Scriptures say you are. That’s always the assumption theologically behind legalists. Legalists are people who do not believe in full depravity.

If you’ve ever had a chance to discuss, by the way, water baptism as a means of salvation with a certain group of people, if you’ve ever had a chance to discuss that issue I am sure if you started discussing not water baptism but what is sin, you would be amazed to discover, shifting gears in the conversation and moving it over to sin, you’d be amazed to discover they don’t believe in a sin nature. And you would be quickly appalled to see what a low view of the fall of man they have. And then it would begin to dawn on you as you began to talk to them further, why of course they believe that baptism can save; of course they are legalistic in this are because they don’t start where we start. They start with a very shallow view of man’s sin, it’s just kind of something that gone on our skin like you stain yourself with some paint so all you need is turpentine to wash it off. Whereas if you believe in total depravity you believe that sin has penetrated all the way to the heart, and washing isn’t going to wash it off at all, it’s got to take a spiritual work.

So you see, a basic assumption leads you astray and these people, the circumcision party, the legalist party, in verses 5-6 obsessed as they are with food laws, have a very low view of depravity. Thus, they have a very low view of grace. They also believe that these dietary laws were enacted for all time, that God had enacted them and from now… you know the saying, it is now and ever shall be, world without end, all right, that’s what they believe, the food laws. Some Christians have that attitude, we always did it and always do it, world without end. You’re not immutable and eternal, God is. And that’s what that’s talking about so don’t apply it to Christian activities. So these people had applied this to an almighty eternal ritual, so Peter begins to challenge it.

Acts 11:7, he introduces the concept that God is still revealing Himself in history. “And I heard a voice saying unto me,” he adds to the canon; now we don’t have this particular part of the experience in our day because the canon has been closed, but Peter did at this point because the canon was still open, that is, the New Testament was still being written. He said, “Arise, Peter; slay and eat. [8] But I said, Not so, Lord,” and we covered this last time in Acts 10 and they have the dialogue. Verse 9, God insists, and He says “What God hath cleansed, don’t you call common.” It’s the word cleanse—what was the topic? Clean and unclean; and what does it say, that God has cleansed them. How did He cleanse them? Did He wash them with physical water? No. He cleansed them by regenerating them; while they were talking there what happened? Cornelius and his household were spiritually cleansed, the reality of the whole thing dawned.

So Peter goes on and then he begins to add details in verses 11-12 because remember he’s arguing graciously, he’s discussing an issue, he’s talking about facts. It’s always ironic that two of the topics that you’re never supposed to discuss in polite company are religion and politics. It always amazes me that those are the two areas that are most critical. Politics, if you’re not straight on politics you lose your freedom, and if you’re not straight on religion you lose your soul. So I dare say those are pretty two good reasons for discussing religion and politics, whether company is polite or not; those are very critical areas to discuss, but because we frankly don’t care about truth any more nobody bothers.

So in verses 11-12 he adds details of arguing graciously and in fact he adds details that we didn’t see before in Acts 10. Here he says, “Behold, immediately there were three men already come unto the house” and he narrates the series of things that happened to him. He counts the number of men in verse 11, how many, where were they, what were they doing, when did they show, what did they say. Verse 13, “And the spirit bade me go with them, nothing doubting.” And, “six brethren accompanied me,” there’s a new piece of data, in Acts 10 we didn’t know how many people went with Peter, here he says I took six, and if you’ll notice just before the word “six” in verse 12 is another word, the demonstrative plural pronoun, “these six men went with me.” What’s the significance of that? The significance is this: as they were conducting this discussion Peter would hold his hand and say see, these six guys, John, Paul, Mike, Joe, whatever their names were, these guys; you doubt me, you doubt what I say, ask them; six witnesses. So he introduces witnesses, evidence, data, fact. He doesn’t say well, brethren, I just felt it in my heart; my beautiful depraved black deceitful heart cranked out all this new truth. Rather he says here’s the objective facts, here’s the Scriptural principles, let’s discuss those.

Verse 13 he adds to his data, he says when I went up to Cornelius, I checked it out, the first you know, what does Cornelius tell me, he tells me a story that “fits to a T” what we found. So again he piles data upon top of data. Verse 14 he tells us something very valuable about salvation. He says that Cornelius, though he was positive to the Word of God and though he had done many good works was not saved. So next time you think about how far a person can go in (quote) “loving the Lord,” and being attracted even to the Word of God, and never be saved, you think of Cornelius; that shows you how positive you can be without being saved. It shows you how far man can come to the truth without having once trusted in Jesus Christ. I find frankly verse 14 quite sobering, because it communicates to me very loudly and very clearly that we can be often times fooled by people who appear to be positive and yet really have never truly been born again. I think this explains why some people are attracted to the Word of God and then they peel out and you never see them again. Well, they never trusted in Christ to start with, that’s why.

Then he goes on and describes, verse 15, and adds another detail that we never noticed in Acts 10. He says, “As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell on them,” now if you turn back to Acts 10:34 you’ll see when Peter went to witness to Cornelius, what did he do? In Acts 10:34-43 just look just look at that long passage; we said that was in itself a summary. Do you know what Peter says here? He says that was just the beginning; just the beginning of what I was going to tell these people. Now compare how Peter evangelized in his day with what goes on today. Now in the city of Lubbock we are about to have a fall campaign of evangelism for which we ought to pray and there are many good things associated with this. But one of the problems, as always, is that this kind of activity attracts what I call the hypodermic evangelist; they believe that you can take 1cc of doctrine, squirt it into somebody and they become a Christian in two seconds. This is not how Biblical evangelism proceeds. Every Biblical example we’ve got of someone explaining the gospel, he takes time, more time, to go carefully into all the basic facts and only after that does he say now do you believe? God does not want you to believe because of some persuasive personality that sold you a bag of hot message or something in three minutes with some canned approach. God wants you to trust in His Word because it’s true and you cannot do that until you’re ready to do it and you’ve been exposed to it. So warning: watch out for this hot shot quick start, quick stop type of evangelism. You’ve got to hang in there and sometimes months, sometimes years, talking with people.

Peter had started and he’d gotten through the basic life of Christ with Cornelius, and yet in verse 11:15 he insists that all of that was just but a beginning of his evangelistic presentation… just a beginning. See how far we’ve come down from those days of the great evangelism that went on. Also notice in verse 15 another little phrase, often overlooked, “as on us at the beginning.” Now we have a group of people, the charismatics, that insist that it’s the norm of your true salvation, whether you go blata blata blata blata blata and so on in gibberish, and if you haven’t done that, you’d better watch, you haven’t been by the Holy Ghost, they say. And what proof do they have of this? The book of Acts, of course. And where in the book of Acts do we have evidence that this went on all the time? Acts 2, where else? Acts 8, where else? Acts 10, but does that show that it went on all the time? And I insist on the basis of verse 15 it did not go on all the time. Peter comes back to that Jerusalem church and he says look guys, the same spectacular fireworks happened to Cornelius and his house that happened to us “at the beginning,” with the obvious inference it hasn’t happened since Pentecost. So there’s been a gap; tongues has not gone on since Acts 2 with one exception of Acts 8. That’s why Peter makes this statement at the end of verse 15, “as on us at the beginning.” The word “beginning” refers to Pentecost, Acts 2.

Acts 11:16, “Then remembered I the word of the Lord, how that he said,” now beginning in verse 16 we come to the point that I used to introduce this passage with, and that is: is there a test, subjective test, that you personally can tell when the Holy Spirit works in your heart. There are a lot of fake tests that are given, oh, I had this feeling in my heart; you might have indigestion. Or I have something else; I just kind of feel… you know, like this today. Well, maybe you didn’t have eight hours sleep last night. Maybe you took a tranquilizer or something; how do you know that that uhhmmm feeling is really the Holy Spirit or not. You can’t, because I don’t see where it says uhhmmm in any part of the text of the New Testament. But there are places in the New Testament that do give you tests and here’s one of them. Here is a simple little test that can be used by any Christian and the result of applying that test will tell you whether, in fact, in the last few moments so to speak, the Holy Spirit has done a work. Now don’t look for this thing as a continual experience; what this shows you is that from time to time in your Christian life the Holy Spirit will teach you something, and we’re going to examine the characteristics of how you know when the Holy Spirit taught you something. And when you see this happening in your soul, that is one extra thing you can give God thanks for and it should encourage you that the God of the universe thinks enough of little old you to teach you something and to give evidence of His work.

It says, “I remembered the word of the Lord, how that he said John baptized with water; but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” Now beginning with the word “John” and ending with the word “Holy Spirit,” in verse 16, that is a quotation, word for word from Acts 1:5. You’ll notice that first of all in Acts 16 that quotation is treated as Scripture. The words of Jesus are being considered in the early Christians as equal in authority with the Torah or the Old Testament Scriptures. The first thing that we notice about this subjective experience that Peter had is that he knew Scripture. But he says something, he says “I remembered” what the Lord said. Now we have to watch it, the word “remember” does not mean what it means to us. The word “remember,” just as oh, I remembered that today is Sunday, you know, everybody’s going to church so it must be, that’s the trivial idea of remember. Turn to John 2 and we’ll see how the New Testament uses the word “remember.”

In John 2:16 you have the famous incident of the cleansing of the temple, the gentle Jesus, meek and mild, who took out a whip and hit men with it; that wasn’t a nice thing to do. He did, and He beat up people. You never find that in Sunday School art for some reason. Verse 16, He told them “that sold the doves, Get these things out of here!” The King James is very gentle, “Get them out of here!” that’s the way it reads in the Greek, “don’t you make My Father’s house a house of a bazaar,” and what He’s talking about there is the illegal mafia style work that was being done, the moneychangers and Caiaphas and Annas, they had a whole little family, they had their Cosa Nostra deal going, and it involved the temple priesthood, they had a deal so that when you came to Jerusalem to worship, they’d got in cahoots with the priests and if you brought your own sacrifice up, the sacrifice had to meet their standards. The guy that was the meat inspector was in links with the hood and so when he saw that you didn’t buy their sacrificial animals he’d fail your animal. So your sacrifice wouldn’t meet the standards. There you were in Jerusalem with this ox that you brought in to sacrifice, now you couldn’t use it for the sacrifice and there you were, stuck; not only were you stuck with an ox that you couldn’t use but you were stuck with the wrong kind of change because they had a deal worked out, you couldn’t get inside the temple precinct without their currency. So by the time you sold your ox to buy one of theirs at a convenient ratio of trade, then you had to go in and get all of your currency changed, and every time you made one of these deals you got ripped off. And somebody once estimated that Caiaphas and his father-in-law took in some three to four million dollars in gold a year from this rip-off scheme.

So this is how Jesus Christ treated crime, He didn’t tolerate 5^th amendment pleading, he didn’t say we’re going to rehabilitate you, He just went in there and physically threw them out, and that’s the way you get rid of crime. But then in John 2:17, after this went on, this episode, John, the elder apostle, writes decades after it happened, and he says, “And his disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house has eaten me up.” That’s a quotation from the Psalms. Now it’s not that they suddenly said oh, I remember a verse. It’s not that kind of memory; they remembered that verse all along; what they’re remembering is hey, do you see what that verse meant. So the word “remember” here means to remember in perspective; they remember, suddenly it clicks with you, the whole thing hangs together like it never did before. Continuing in John 2, notice verse 22 and the use of the verb “remember.” “When, therefore, He was risen from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this unto them; and they believed the Scripture,” now that doesn’t mean that they had forgotten it; it just means that all of a… hey, yeah, that’s what He was talking about, all this business that He was going to rise from the dead, He really meant it, He was going to rise from the dead, how about that. That insight or illumination is what that word “remember” means. It doesn’t mean just remember something.

On the way back to Acts stop off at John 14:26, here’s the Holy Spirit, we don’t have to read a Christian devotional to read this, we don’t have to guess what the Holy Spirit is doing in our life, the Holy Spirit Himself has told us what He’s doing. Just look at this carefully, “The Comforter, who is the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatever I have said unto you.” Now attach to the word “remember” in verse 26 the extra meaning of remember and put it together. And there you’ve got one of your tests for whether the Holy Spirit is working in your life or not. One of the interior subjective evidences that you can have in the privacy of your soul that the Holy Spirit, in fact, is working in 1976 in your life is that as a result of experience of making decision after decision and the result of taking in doctrine, the two synthesize, harmonize perfectly in your mind, all of a sudden you get a flash insight into a passage of Scripture that you never saw before. Sometimes it will happen as you actually learn the Scripture; other times you’ll sit and you’ll take in Scripture, or you’ll read Scripture in your home and you kind of put it away in some back file in your memory and then you go out and have some crisis or some experience and in the middle of that crisis and experience the same thing will happen to you that happened to Peter. It’ll gel, I remember now the Scripture.

This just happened in our congregation, a couple had been taking in doctrine for several years, all of a sudden their child appears to be very violently ill, seriously ill and the husband remarked to me afterwards, he said it’s interesting, all the men at the office where I work were very, very concerned and more upset about my baby than I was, and they began to interpret the fact that I didn’t love my baby, but that wasn’t the point; the point was that I had taken in the Word of God and now I could look and face my child’s death with peace, and I surprised myself because I didn’t know that’s what the Word of God was doing in my life and I wouldn’t have known it had the Lord not this week allowed my child almost to die and when I was placed in this new experience then I discovered, hey, look at what’s happening to me, there has been a change, all these months of taking in the Word of God and it didn’t appear to be doing a thing was secretly doing something very powerful, so powerful that when a crisis arose I approached it in a totally revolutionary way.

Let’s go further in the text, Ephesians 3, this is why all this happens. One of the signs of sanctification and the sign that the Holy Spirit is working in your life will be a perception of the ways and workings of God from Scripture. In other words, you’ll be able to relate and see God in your experience because of your insight into the ways of God from Scripture. Notice in Ephesians 3;16, Paul prays for you, he prays for me, he prays for every Christian, “that God would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man.” Now look at this: strengthened with what? Strengthened with might! Where? In the inner man, that’s in your heart, inside, subjective, inside you are strengthened. How? Well, it says that Christ, [17] “For the purpose that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, [18] May be able to comprehend, with all saints, what is the breadth, length, depth, and height, [19] And to know the love of Christ, which passes knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” You notice the order of those verbs; verse 19, what is necessary first, before you can be filled with the fullness of God? That you know something. And what do you need to know? You need to comprehend verse 18, “with all saints, what is the breadth, height, length and depth.”

Now let me chip away at a human viewpoint attitude that many have; many of you who come to Lubbock Bible have this, and if you don’t recognize you’ve got it it’ll tube you out before you know it, because many of you have come up through school and into life and you’ve got the idea that it’s not meant for you to know, it’s not meant for you to understand, you sat through days of the classroom teacher explaining something and it wasn’t clear to you, and you maybe were too shy or two proud to ask a question; say hey, I don’t know this but I want to know it, now what do you mean by this, and have the person go over it and over it and over it until you do understand it. But no, rather than do that you just quietly made it through the exam, made it through the semester and dropped that and now as an adult maybe you read the paper, well I don’t understand what he’s talking about, that’s all right, I’ll just go on, I can’t understand that. So finally what’s happened? You’ve gradually acquired a mental attitude that says it’s not my right to know; it’s that simple. You have taught yourself, hypnotized yourself into thinking it’s not your privilege to know, poor dumb me, I’m just some poor stupid individual and I’ll never know that, or that doesn’t count, that’s not important. And that curiosity you had when you were a child, the curiosity to always ask questions, momma, what’s that, momma, momma, momma, what’s that, what’s that for, what’s that? Every child has this because that’s how God wants us to approach things; He gives the child the curiosity and so as we get older we turn it off. You’re curious about something but good night, there’s a three syllable word that describes that, I can’t worry about, let’s put that back and go on. So this habit eats away at our soul until finally you become a Christian, and now all of a sudden the truth of God faces you and all of a sudden you start picking up the Bible but no sooner do you get started in the word of truth but then this pattern begins to work against you spiritually, because you’ve trained yourself, maybe for 20 years never to understand something, never to see something through until the end when you can say I understand it. It’s always half understood or partially understood but never persisting until I understand it.

Now there are a lots of truths in the Scripture for which we’ll never have complete understanding, but God wants us to have some understanding or He wouldn’t have given us the Scripture. Notice in verse 18, “that you may be able to comprehend, with all saints,” a-l-l means you, it doesn’t mean that you’re a special class, it’s not meant for you to understand these “deep things” of Scripture. Look, first and second graders in family training are learning the attributes of God and how to explain them and yet I have run into adults, oh that’s just too deep for me, just too deep. Too deep? What’s too deep about it, God told you this; you’re insulting God when you say it’s too deep. No God, don’t talk to me, I don’t understand. Is that the way you treat God? But that’s the mental attitude many, many people in our generation have. I don’t know where it got started; I think it got started in the school system years ago; maybe with false pride, but somewhere it’s there and it eats away and eats away and finally it eats into the Christian life and makes the Christian life less than what it should be.

God intends for you to relish His truth; He wouldn’t do this of revealing the Scriptures to us, giving us pastor-teachers through the ages who have made this contribution, that contribution, this contribution, if He didn’t want us to know it. Do you know what the end product is? Notice verse 19; the end product of comprehending with all the saints is “to know the love of Christ.” See, you can’t perceive all of Christ’s love that He wants you to perceive if you don’t persevere in seeing something through to the final understanding, that you are going to understand it, the Scriptures are made for you to understand it, and if you have to take 65 years to understand it you are going to understand it. That’s the attitude you want to get. The Scriptures and their truths are not beyond anyone understanding. You ought to go and watch those guys teach the mentally retarded, so-called. I submit to you if those kids can perceive the attributes of God and the plan of salvation, better by the way, than most people their own age in (quote) “Christian churches,” if the mentally retarded can do that, can’t you? You have paralyzed yourself, turned yourself off by your own choice. Many, many Christians suffer from this malady.

Let’s go back to Peter. He and the circumcision party weren’t going to turn anything off; they were going to get the truth and they were going to battle it through and argue and discuss until they find if; it was their right to know, is this right or is it wrong? God didn’t want the Church to be vacillating between yes we do, no we don’t, yes we do, no we don’t, that would have been a fine missionary policy. They had to battle it out so they’d come to a decision, so that’s why in Acts 11:16 at the end he recalls Acts 1:5 and he says now I understand about John baptizing with water and Jesus with the Holy Spirit. Do you know what he’s saying there? He’s saying you know, in Acts 2 and Acts 8 we had the baptism of the Spirit all right, but here in both of those cases what preceded the baptism of the Spirit? Water baptism. All those guys that got the Spirit on Pentecost, they were all baptized before. All those Samaritans got the Spirit in Samaria, were baptized before. And so very subtly there could be injected in the Christian theology the idea that well, yeah, water baptism doesn’t save but it kind of qualifies you for it. Now along comes Acts 10 and blows it right out of the tub because you have the baptism of the Spirit preceding water baptism and that shows that God had totally cleansed those dirty Gentiles.

By the way, do you know one reason the Jews thought the Gentile homes were unclean? They used to circulate stories, and this is in the Mishnah, the Gentiles used to abort and take the fetus that they aborted and drop it down the drain in their houses, and that was why they thought the Gentile home was unclean. So God had worked in this unclean Gentile home and He had baptized them with the Spirit before anybody said anything about water. So we have Peter admitting in verse 16 a product of his own sanctification and true arguments sanctifies the believers around him that it’s the principle of Scripture, the reality is the baptism of the Spirit and the ritual is the water baptism and ritual doesn’t cause reality, reality causes ritual. So he’s finally got it straightened out and that’s why the conclusion of the matter in verse 18, “When they heard these things, they held their peace, and said now God has granted to the Gentiles also this repentance unto life.”

What is the result of the argument? Group sanctification, a consensus is reached that yes, this is right. The consensus in verse 18 doesn’t say well, Peter said it, better believe it. That’s not how verse 18 reads. God said it, so we’d better believe it. The consensus, the result of sanctification and the Spirit’s work will always be a conviction of truth that you can talk about; not experiences that you feel, truth that you can talk about. You say well look, there’s got to be some emotion in here; yes there is, and now we’re ready to see where the emotion comes in.

We’re going to close by looking at just a few verses of Psalm 119. It’s a eulogy, basically, to the Word of God. The Word of God comes to us in the mentality if our soul; we have to perceive the content of the Word of God but underneath your mind you have emotion. Those emotions are, you can call them if you want to, the appreciators of your soul. The emotions are your capacity to appreciate, to like, to respond, to what’s going on in your mind. Something has to go on in your mind for you to appreciate it. This is why the mentally ill get in trouble; they’re not mentally ill; what goes on in their mind is self-pity, rebellion and their emotions begin to respond, oh I like that, I like that, and so the more self-pity goes the more emotions go oh good, good, I like that, and finally you get some sort of a paranoid queer running around because he’s thought wrong, thought wrong, he’s fed his mind all sorts of garbage and he’s trained his emotions to respond to garbage. And then he’s had the (quote) “luck” to run into some guy called a psychiatrist that tells him now it’s not your fault, it’s your mama’s fault, she dropped you on your head when you were a baby, don’t you remember, bang, bang, bang down the stairs so you’re excused, oh I like that too.

It works in the opposite way, when the mentality is straightened out with the Word the emotions train and so when the Holy Spirit teaches your mind there will be an emotional response and to see the correct emotions that accompanies a true teaching of the Spirit we’ll examine a few verses in this Psalm. Notice Psalm 119:5, these are explanatory verses and they show something of the emotion of a sanctified soul, so when you see these emotions in your mind, the emotions aren’t the direct result of the Spirit, they’re the indirect result. The understanding is a direct result, the emotional response is the indirect results. “Oh, that my ways were directed to keep thy statutes.” Notice the guy’s not saying I’m sinless; that’s not it, oh boy, I’m so great. All this is saying is Lord, help me keep Thy statutes. That is a godly emotion. That is a godly mental attitude. That is a signal that the Holy Spirit is at work. By the way, notice in verse 5 the emphasis is not oh, Lord, if you’d give me another experience. That’s not the emphasis; the emphasis is on the Word.

Notice Psalm 119:10, “With my whole heart have I sought Thee; oh, let me not wander from Thy commandments.” Not drift and trip into a new experience but “let me not wander from Thy Word.” Notice in verse 18, “Open Thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy law.” That is the godly attitude, that’s the signal of true spiritual work. Notice verse 33, “Teach me, O LORD, the way of Thy statutes,” the Word, “and I shall keep it unto the end.” It goes on, verse 57, “Thou art my portion, O LORD: I have said that I would keep Thy words.” You could say in verse 81, “My soul faints for thy salvation, but I hope in Thy Word,” notice, not hope in experience, not hope in my emotions but my emotions hope in Thy word. Verse 97, there’s emotion if you want emotion, “Oh, how I love Thy law! It is my meditation all the day.” Those are just but a few of the hundreds of verses in this psalm that show godly emotion.

What have we learned? In those verses of Acts 11 we have watched sanctification occur, believers who sat down and said let’s battle this out to an understanding. Let’s know what God wants us to know and if we have to argue with one another let’s argue with one another but let’s get down to truth and not just coast along in this zombaic daze. See, the God of sanctification is mighty.

Shall we stand and sing