Cornelius, a devout Gentile centurion, received a vision from an angel directing him to send for Peter. Simultaneously, Peter, a Jewish apostle, received a vision from God involving a sheet of animals, signifying that God accepts people of all nations. Despite his initial apprehension due to Jewish customs, Peter obeyed God's command and went to Cornelius's home, where he preached the gospel of Jesus Christ. Cornelius and his household believed and were saved, demonstrating that salvation comes through hearing and believing God's Word, not through miraculous experiences or angelic visitations. The sermon emphasizes that God uses ordinary people to share His message and that true faith rests on God's promises, not on subjective experiences.
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Acts chapter ten. All weekend I've been preaching from my regular preaching Bible, which is a King James Version tonight because I want to deal with a good bit of story content here. I'm using a new international version which reads rather smoothly in the tenth chapter of Acts. And you might enjoy the scripture reading if you don't try to follow me in your Bible. Keep your Bible open and you'll have to An occasion I'll make reference to a verse, not so much to have you look at it, but so that if you want to check out a point or detail or something, you can very easily look at it. And listen, though, to the reading of Scripture.
I find that my mind wanders sometimes when preachers read the Scripture, and if they read from a different version and I'm looking at them, they get interested in comparing the two versions and don't follow the story that well. Sometimes because we look, we don't listen very well. It's a very fascinating story here in Acts ten. Listen to it and enjoy it. I don't usually give a title to a message I preach, but I'm going to give a title to this one tonight. It's called Cornelius and the Angel. Cornelius and the Angel. So while we read, in the passages that I read, listen for references to an angel. I'm going to read about three sections, three or four sections, and there's a reference to an angel in each one of them.
At Caesarea, there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion in what was known as the Italian Regiment. He and all of his family were devout and God-fearing. He gave generously to those in need and prayed to God regularly. One day, at about three in the afternoon, he had a vision. He distinctly saw an angel of God who came to him and said, Cornelius, Carnelia stared at him in fear. What is it, Lord? He said. The angel answered, Your prayers and gifts to the poor have come up as a remembrance before God.
Now send men to Joppa to bring back a man named Simon, who was called Peter. He is staying with Simon the Tanner, whose house is by the sea. When the angel who spoke to him had gone, Cornelia called two of his servants. and one of his military aides, who was a devout man, he told them everything that had happened and sent them to Joppa. We'll stop the reading at that point. Cornelius was not a Christian. He knew little or nothing about Jesus Christ, but he was religious in the best sense of the word. He prayed, he gave to the poor, not with hypocrisy, not for show like the Jewish Pharisees did.
This Gentile military commander cared about God. And because he cared about God, he cared about people. That follows, doesn't it? Nevertheless, he was not saved. He was God-fearing, but not yet in the family of God. He needed to hear the message of salvation. There are a lot of people like that. Maybe some of you are like that. Religious, moral, God-fearing. and people who want to have more than they have. They want something more. You may be here tonight, not a Christian yet, not born again, but very open to the truth, deprived of it perhaps.
God wants you as much as you want him. It's the role of the gospel messenger to bring you and God together. Of course, there's another kind of person, and that's the kind of person that doesn't want God. that doesn't care about God, a person who wants to go on in sin, who's indifferent. That type of person sometimes needs to be almost threatened, to be warned that hell and judgment lie ahead, who need to be brought under conviction, who need to hear a call to repentance. Not everybody needs to be warned about hell, because, as I say, some people are ready to be saved, want to be saved, just want to know the truth like Cornelius did, want to be right with God, but have not yet come to a decision for Jesus Christ.
I'm not ordering these sound effects to punctuate the message. But if the Spirit of God is pleased to use the thunder and lightning and hellfire and brimstone to search your heart, why, that's all right. John the Baptist warned people to flee from the wrath to come, and I suppose he'd probably call down a few bolts of thunder to punctuate his message. The Apostle Paul preached on Mars Hill in Athens that God overlooked some things in time past But now in this new dispensation He commands all men everywhere to repent. That's not funny.
If I'd prayed for this, I couldn't have had it happen. Let's give back to Cornelius. Or let's go instead to the coastal city of Joppa. Down by the docks. is the home of a man named Simon. He's in the leather business. He operates a tannery, a place where animal hides are dressed and cured to produce leather. He is a Christian, and he has with him on this particular day another man named Simon, better known to us as Simon Peter, the Apostle. Simon the tannery is probably gone to the tannery for the day's business.
Peter has stayed home, and around noon day Peter is up on the roof of the house, on the flat roof of the house. for a time of prayer. He became very hungry. He called down to the household servants or for the hostess or whoever was in charge, asking if he could have some lunch. The message came back up to him that it would be a little while in preparation, so he went on praying. As he prayed, hungry, under that hot Mediterranean sun, he fell into a trance. Verse ten. And Peter had a vision of a great sheet let down from heaven, held by the four corners. In the sheet were all kinds of living creatures, animals, reptiles, snakes and lizards and the like, birds, clean and unclean.
That is according to the Jewish dietary laws. Some animals were clean, they were allowed to eat them, some were called unclean, they weren't permitted to eat them. Pigs, for instance, were unclean animals. And the word comes to Peter in this vision. Rise, Peter, kill and eat. That is, slaughter some of this food and cook it up and satisfy your appetite. And Peter says, Surely, Lord, I have never touched some of those foods in there. I have been a very strict religious Jew and I have never eaten anything unclean. And then the word came in the vision. Don't call anything impure that God has made clean. And this conversation was repeated three times.
And then the whole thing was hoisted back up to heaven by the four corners of the sheet. Peter, out of the trance now, began puzzling as to what this vision meant. Now I go back to the words of the Scripture and reading from verse nineteen. While Peter was still thinking about the vision, the Spirit said to him, Simon, three men are looking for you. So get up and go downstairs. Do not hesitate to go with them, for I have sent them. Peter went down and said to the men, I'm the one you're looking for. Why have you come? The men replied, We have come from Cornelius, the centurion. He is a righteous and God-fearing man who is respected by all the Jewish people.
A holy angel told him to have you come to his house so that he could hear what you have to say. Then Peter invited the men into the house to be his guests. Notice those words. A holy angel told him to have you come. Well, they stayed overnight, and the next day they set out for Caesarea. It was a straight road north along the coast, about thirty-five miles. You can walk about twenty miles a day, maybe twenty-five miles a day. It didn't leave until the morning, so it took a day and a half to get there thereabouts. And while Peter walked, he pondered the meaning of the great vision. The primary meaning was obvious.
God was doing away with the Jewish dietary restrictions. Christians would be allowed to eat any kind of meat after that. But Peter was very apprehensive about going to Cornelius' house, because just like certain foods were unclean, so the Gentiles were unclean to the Jewish mind. And Gentiles were more or less untouchable to the devout Jews. You didn't eat meals with them. You didn't sit down at the table with a Gentile. We're Gentiles, of course, unless you're Jewish descent. Anybody who's not a Jew is a Gentile. And those devout Jews, even those Christian Jews, would have been very unhappy to come into our meals here today and sit with us and eat.
They would have stood up, unclean, can't touch you. They were even touchy about entering into the homes of Gentiles, which they considered to some extent defiling. So here is Peter called to go to a Gentile home, and he's going to have to enter into that home, which is very definitely against his conscience. And he's wondering about the connection of that calling with this mysterious vision of a great sheet let down. And all these animals, and God saying, rise, feed, or kill and eat, don't call anything impure that God has made clean. Could it be that God was trying to tell Peter that from now on men of all nations were clean, men of all nations were to be accepted into Christianity, regardless of race or skin color or language?
The church was open to every one of every race and every color and every language on an equal footing. Could that be the message? Could it be that God was going to have a called-out company from every tribe and tongue and nation to form his church? Well, the Lord Jesus had been telling his disciples that in the Great Commission, go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. And then he'd given them a vivid object lesson of that on the day of Pentecost when they began to speak in all these different foreign languages. Which to me is simply a vivid object lesson in the message of world missions. The gospel was to go out to all the nations. The Lord had told them that in the Great Commission. And then the day of Pentecost came and he illustrated it for them by putting those foreign languages in their mouths.
to show them that he meant business, but the disciples were very slow about doing anything about it. So here some time has gone by and Peter hasn't been evangelizing Gentiles and he's being pushed out into a Gentile home and going very reluctantly. Peter was a racist. All those Jews were racist, strong racist. And God likes to overcome racism when it appears in the human heart. Quite a revolutionary thought was going through Peter's mind that God might want him to go into Cornelius' home. It was three o'clock in the afternoon when Peter and his companions set foot in Cornelius' home. He brought along six fellas, I think. In verse thirty tells us what time it was. Anticipating his arrival, Cornelius had gathered a lot of people, verse twenty four, all his relatives and his close friends.
This man meant business about salvation. He was going to find out how to be saved. And so he wasn't just going to find out for himself. He was going to bring all his friends there. He knew Peter was coming, and he wasn't just going to keep that blessing to himself. He gathered and packed the house with people. There's nobody like a new convert to bring you new contacts for the gospel because people who come to the Lord Jesus get enthusiastic and they want all their relatives to know about the blessing that they've experienced. Peter came into the house. Cornelius knelt down before him. And Peter's response was, stand up. After all, I'm a man, just like you are. Now, in the interpretation of some people, devout people, Peter was the first pope.
If that was the case, then you can learn something about the behavior of a pope, because he set the example that a pope should not be kneeled down to, just a man, like anyone else. And that might be helpful to folks that are concerned about theology and about what's right and wrong in the Bible to point out a passage like this. If they hold Peter in high reverence, then Peter ought to be looked at as an example of the way he evaluated himself. And he says in verse twenty-eight, is it? He said to them, no, I'm a little farther down here, verse twenty-five. As Peter entered the house, Cornelius met him and fell at his feet in reverence. Verse twenty-six. But Peter made him get up. Stand up, he said.
I am only a man myself. And he refused to let anyone kneel before him. And that would be a great example to follow for those who believe that Peter was a pope. A good example for all of us to follow. We're only human beings. We shouldn't seek reverence. Preachers like myself shouldn't try to build a following of people to follow us. but rather point people to the Lord Jesus like John the Baptist did. John the Baptist said, I've got to decrease. He's got to increase. And it isn't only in Catholic circles but also in Protestant circles where we see tendency on the part of leaders to gather great followings of people who are intensely devoted to the leader instead of directing the heart to the Lord Jesus.
So let's be careful about things like that. And then Peter apologized to Cornelius in verse twenty eight. He said to him, you are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him. But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean. Can you imagine your reaction if I came into your house and said, you know it's against my religion to associate with a person like you, but God showed me that I should stop calling you unclean. You can just picture how you'd feel about that. Can you imagine how Cornelius must have felt? And you get quite an insight into psychology, especially the psychology of a person with a racist orientation.
And Peter is really apologizing to himself. He's rationalizing for his own benefit and saying, you know, I'm not really supposed to be here. He's saying that not for Cornelius' benefit. He's trying to deal with his own emotions, which are very troublesome to him at this point, to think that God wants to get him into this home. So he says this thing, but God showed me, so here I am. I can't help it. I didn't want to be here, but God made me come. And so when I was sent for, I came without raising any objection. May I ask why you sent for me? It would have been a lot nicer if he just started out that way, wouldn't it? May I ask why you sent for me? Well, Cornelius, you got to respect the fellow. He didn't take offense. He was so intent on finding out what salvation was all about, that he wasn't offended by the rather haughty attitude or the downplaying attitude on the put-down that Peter gave him at this point.
May I ask why you sent for me?" And Cornelius replies, and now I'll read again from verse thirty. Cornelius answered, Four days ago I was in my house, praying at this hour, at three in the afternoon. Suddenly a man in shining clothes stood before me. There's our angel again. A man in shining clothes stood before me and said, Cornelius! God has heard your prayer and remembered your gifts to the poor. Send to Japa for Simon, who is called Peter. He is a guest in the home of Simon the Tanner, who lives by the seed. So I sent for you immediately, and it was good of you to come. Now we are all here in the presence of God to listen to everything that God has commanded you to tell us. And that's...
Then Peter began to speak. I realize now, he says, that God accepts people from every tribe and tongue and nation. That was the meaning of the vision of the great sheep. Now, you know what happened in Judea, he said to Cornelius. You've heard about this Messiah that came about Jesus of Nazareth, how God anointed him with the Holy Spirit, and how he went about doing good and how they killed him, and how God raised him from the dead. And you know that God commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one whom God appointed as judge of the living and the dead. Everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins. And at that point, Cornelius and his friends were saved. At that point, the Spirit of God entered into them.
Because they were just drinking it up. Now, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. You are not saved by asking God to save you. Although many people do ask the Lord to save them. And at the point that they ask him if they really believe, if they really believe, he saves them. You're saved by believing. You're saved by believing the truth. by trusting the Savior. And Cornelius was not needing to be brought under conviction of sin. He'd been through all that. He knew he was lost. He knew he needed forgiveness. He knew he needed something. And so he was just soaking up the truth like a sponge. And as soon as Peter came to the place about forgiveness, about believing and receiving forgiveness of sins, Cornelius believed it, and he received the forgiveness of sins.
And he was saved right then. And there's rather simple to be saved. Once you've gone through the struggle about sin and rebellion, your heart is open to the Lord, you grasp the truth and accept, and God saves you. Now I spent a lot of time on this story, stressing the angel. Verse three, he distinctly saw an angel of God. Verse twenty two, a holy angel told him to have you come. Verse thirty, a man in shining clothes stood before me. Now what more can you ask when it comes to salvation? He saw an angel. Why didn't the angel tell him how to be saved? Why all the urgency about sending for Peter? Surely a shining angel is more reliable and a more credible witness than any impulsive fisherman from Galilee.
No, it is the plan of God that human beings, not angels, were to be commissioned to tell lost souls how to be saved. It's our job, not theirs. The great commission was given to men, not to angels. But surely not to unreliable, unsteady ordinary men. Maybe to gifted giants of old patron saints long gone. To men like Abraham, Moses, David, and even Peter. But not to a fisherman who never went to high school, much less to seminary. Yes. The gospel is given to ordinary people. Ordinary working people who have never been to theological seminary. Maybe not to high school either. To farmers and fishermen. Shepherds.
shopkeepers and school teachers to secretaries and social workers and postal clerks and salesmen and electricians and carpenters and bricklayers to students and elderly widows and truck drivers and repairmen. And if some of your friends have witnessed to you about the gospel and told you how to be saved, that's God's messenger to you to bring you the gospel. And God holds you responsible to do something about it, because that's the method God has chosen. He's not going to send an angel to give the gospel to you. He's already given it to you. And you have to respond to that gospel. Peter said he commands us to preach and to testify. And hence that thrice repeated emphasis in verse five, send men to Joppa and bring back Peter.
Verse twenty two, a holy angel told him to have you come to his house so he could hear what you have to say. And in verses thirty and thirty three, send to Joppa, said the man in shining clothes, and we're all here to hear everything the Lord has commanded you. Now let's face it, God does not need help. If he wants to save people, he can do it without our help. He's not dependent on us. He has millions of angels. They can appear to everybody. He doesn't even need them. He can save people without the angels or human beings. Agriculture is like that, isn't it? Agriculture is a partnership between God and man. God can grow corn without Iowa farmers. God can grow beans without farmers. He grows lots of weeds without any help from the farmers. And I'm sure he can grow corn and wheat without tractors and without fertilizer and without plowing and tilling and hoeing and spraying.
But God has chosen to make agriculture a cooperative venture between men and God. One man sows another man reef, but God gives the increase. And God has chosen not to grow corn and beans without the farmer, at least not to grow an effective crop without the farmer. And God has also chosen that the farmer can't grow an effective crop without God. Because God gives the increase. And so God has chosen to entrust human beings with his message of salvation. He didn't have to. That's the way he chose to do it. And if you're here and you're not saved, that puts a responsibility on you when you're given the gospel by human beings to respond to it. Cornelius was devout in God-fearing, but he wasn't saved till Peter came to his door. He saw an angel, but he still had to hear a human being.
We still might reason that an angel is a much more reliable witness. He never failed God. He has a lot more power and mobility. But look at Peter. How long was it since he was warming his hands by the high priest's fire and denying even new Jesus? You can expect an unsaved person to believe someone like that, and we're all like that. God expects unsaved people to believe the message from fallible, failing human beings. He holds them responsible for it. And he won't use the angel to do the job. A few years ago, a lot of Christian leaders gathered in a motel near O'Hare Airport in Chicago in a conference that drew up what has been called the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.
They formed the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. It was my privilege to attend that conference. Most of the people who came were theologians, but not all. One of the speakers was W.A. Criswell, longtime pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, largest church in the Southern Baptist Convention with over twenty thousand members. and he addressed a plenary session on the subject, what happens when I preach that the Bible is literally true. He said he presumed that the reason they asked him to speak on that subject, he said, was because for fifty-one years I had been preaching that the Bible is literally true. In the course of the message, he told his own conversion. He said, I was converted when I was ten years old in a little white cracker box of a church house in a little town in far northwest Texas.
He told how he'd been excused from school for a weekday morning service, and he happened to be seated behind his old sainted mother. And when the preacher finished, he said, We stood up to sing, There is a fountain filled with blood. And while we were singing that hymn about the blood atonement, my mother turned around with many tears in her eyes and said to me, Son, today will you take the Lord Jesus as your Savior? I said, Yes, Mother. Today I'll receive the Lord Jesus as my Savior. And I stepped out into the aisle and down to the front, and they could hardly see as the pastor for the tears in my eyes. Then he told how he began preaching when he was seventeen years old.
Out under tabernacles and arborers in the country in Central West Texas. In those days they had what they called camp revivals, and they would have grove prayer meetings. And the women would stay under an arbor, under a tabernacle. The men would gather under a grove of trees. And there they were, the men would testify the grace of God and they'd pray. And Criswell says, I listened to those marvelous testimonies. They were astonishing and miraculous to me. For example, one of the men said, see that spot over there? I had been under the burden of my sins for years and years. And as I stood on that spot, suddenly there came down from heaven a ball of fire and it burst over my head and struck me to the ground.
How long I lay on the ground, I don't know. But when I stood to my feet, and then he described how the burden of sin had rolled away, and how the birds sang, and how the trees were foliated, and how the mules plowed, and all the other glorious and remarkable things that attested to his miraculous conversion. And Criswell said, that's just typical of an endless number of testimonies that I listened to. And I came to the conclusion in those days that I had not been converted. I was not born again. I had never seen a ball of fire. I had never seen an angel from heaven. I had never seen a light from glory. I had no remarkable experience to recount.
And I came to the firm conclusion that I was not saved. I'm giving you Criswell's exact words. I copied them from a cassette. Because I think they're very vivid and very helpful. He says, I cannot describe to you the awful conflict in my heart in those years, not days and months, but years, when on Sundays I would stand up in my little country church and preach the gospel the best I knew how, and then every night kneel down by the side of my bed and cry to God, I haven't been saved. I don't have any marvelous experience to recount. Lord, Lord, show me a light from heaven. Let a ball of fire burst over my head.
Show me an angel of light. He went on to tell how in the course of those days preaching the Bible, he discovered many things in the Bible. He discovered, for instance, a passage in Second Corinthians, Second Corinthians, eleven, fourteen. I'll read the thirteenth verse. For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, masquerading as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising that of his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness.
Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. And then he read in Revelation chapter thirteen, I guess these scriptures were beginning to strike home to his soul. Revelation chapter thirteen, verses thirteen and fourteen, about this great beast that will come out of the earth in the tribulation period. this great satanic figure, and he performed great and marvelous, miraculous signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven to earth in full view of men because of the signs he was given to do on behalf of the first beast.
He deceived the inhabitants of the earth. He learned that Satan not only disguises himself as an angel, but Satan can bring down fire from heaven, and Satan can do miracles, and he can do miracles and does miracles in order to deceive people. And Criswell says, Then as time went by, things began to crystallize in my heart. It came about like this. Someday, when I shall stand in the greatest sighs before the judge of all the earth and the redeemed of God are marching in, and I assay to join their number, and the Lord stops me and says, By what right? And by what prerogative do you enter my beautiful city and walk on my golden streets?
And I say, Lord God, I know I'm saved. I know I'm born again. There came down from heaven a great ball of fire and burst over my head, and I know I'm saved. And Satan stands there and he laughs. Ha, ha, ha. Listen to him. He saw a ball of fire. I sent that ball of fire just to deceive him. And he drags my soul down to hell. Or on that day when I stand in the greatest eyes and the judge of all the earth says, By what right or what prerogative do you enter my beautiful city and walk my golden streets? Then I say, I know I'm a Christian. I saw an angel from heaven.
And Satan laughs, ha, ha, he saw an angel from heaven. I transform myself into that angel just to deceive him and he drags my soul down to hell. What could I say or what could I do? on that greatest size, when I stand before the judge of all the earth, and the redeemed of God are marching in, and I say to join their number, and the Lord God says to me, By what right and what prerogative do you enter my beautiful city, and walk my golden streets, I am going to say, Lord God, when I was ten years of age, in a revival meeting in a little white cracker box of a church in northwest Texas, when the preacher had done his sermon, my mother turned to me and said, Son, will you receive the Lord Jesus as your Savior?
And I receive the Lord Jesus as best a ten-year-old boy could. And blessed Jesus, all I'm doing is just resting upon your word, your promise. For you said in John one twelve, as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believed on his name. And then I dare Satan to laugh, my salvation rests not on some monstrous experience, My salvation rests on the Word and the promise of the Lord." Unquote from the testimony of W.A. Criswell. Your salvation, too, has to rest on the Word of God. Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God.
The Bible says that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish. but have everlasting life. Is it possible that someone's here tonight that's waiting for some dramatic experience, something to happen, some ball of fire to burst over your head? It's not going to happen. If it does happen, it'll be false to deceive you and draw you away. You have the scriptures. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. And that's the only way God's going to save you. And tonight as this meeting continues, you just bow your head where you sit and you say, Lord Jesus, I'm a lost sinner. And like that ten-year-old boy, I come in simple faith, and I say, here I am, Lord Jesus, lost, not pleasing to you, wandering in my sins, and I confess that I'm a sinner, and I acknowledge that Jesus died from my sins, and I trust him and surrender to him tonight, and God will save you.