Apr 8 - Acts 10:36

You know the message

God sent to the people of Israel,

announcing the good news of peace

through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all.

Acts 10:36

In one of Peter’s sermons, he proclaimed, “You know the message [of] God.”

It was a statement of fact.

I immediately thought, “This must be one of Peter’s sermons to the Jews.” Good Jews should know, indeed, “the message God sent to the people of Israel,” right? (And then he was going to link it to a new revelation: “[a ‘new’] peace through Jesus Christ.”

That’s what I thought. But that wasn’t who Peter was addressing. Paul is the most noted apostle to the Gentiles. But Peter – in a budding friendship with Cornelius, the centurion – addressed the Gentiles a few times too. But he starts with a strange statement: “You know the message God send to the people of Israel.” Do they really know?

Those first Gentile converts probably knew as much about God’s message to the Jews as the average person in our world today really knows about the Gospel. A group of Roman soldiers probably knew that God supposedly had spoken to and delivered Israel in the past. Most Americans are really semi-Christian. They know the basic story. They know that God supposedly spoke to and delivered the world.

Peter does not rest his sermon on what an unbelieving world “knows” or think they “know.” He’s using it as a starting point. He’s saying, “You’ve heard about this, right? Now let me show you how and why it’s true.”

His starting point was,

“38 [You have heard about] how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth [and] how he went about … healing [people]”? (It’s common ground. “Yes, we’ve heard about such things.)

Well then, Peter lays down the hammer:

“39 We are witnesses to all that he did … They put him to death on a tree. [That’s common Roman knowledge; isn’t it, Centurions? You probably know fellow soldiers who were there. 40 But God raised him from the dead!!! … 41 [And we are] witnesses … [We] ate and drank with him after he rose.”

As you tell your story to an unbelieving world, have you eaten with Jesus? No … and yes. As you tell your story, all you have to do is say, “You know the stories about Jesus, right? Well, let me tell you why I know he’s real.”

In Christ’s Love,

a guy who prays that you

know that Jesus is really real

… now you have a story to tell