News of this reached the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch. – Acts 11:22

Today's Scripture Reading (March 7, 2024): Acts 11

Things haven't changed. We still hear about churches where God is moving and wonder if a church is being conducted properly. One Pastor recently noted that we must start accepting what God is doing rather than being jealous that it isn't happening to us. It is a subject about which God has dealt with me. Don't envy what God is doing somewhere else, but figure out what God is doing where you are. Don't ask God to bless your plans; place yourself in the path of what God is already doing.

The church in Antioch was beginning to grow. So, the church in Jerusalem sent a representative to Antioch to see what was happening, and the guy that they chose was Barnabas. I am happy they found the right guy. Barnabas's name means "the son of encouragement," and encouraging seems to be his primary role in the early church. The name wasn't an accident. The name his parents gave him was Joseph, but the apostles began to call him Barnabas because he was an encourager.

Antioch became the place of transformation. But even at this point in church history, Antioch was doing it differently. One of the problems that was coming to a head in Antioch was that they were welcoming Gentiles or non-Jews into the church. Welcoming Gentiles into the Christian Church had never been done on a widespread basis before, and it was a fight that was destined to rage in the early church for years. The question that split the early church was whether or not you had to become a Jew before you became a Christian? In most of the early church, the answer was yes, but in Antioch, the answer was a resounding no.

Barnabas has a choice. He could have killed the movement in Antioch. He could have come in and said, if you don't do things the way that we do them in Jerusalem, we will never accept you. You will never be recognized as a Christian church. But Barnabas chose a different path. He marveled at what God was doing and accepted the movement. And that set the wheels in motion that would climax in the Jerusalem Council, a record of which is found in Acts 15. It set a pattern for what was to come—a new way of doing church.

This became the custom of the early church. They didn't have a specialized language; in fact, the reverse happened; the early church began to borrow language from those around them and accepted the culture of the cities that they lived in. They used the cultural constructs of those around them to describe God. They were violated, and yet they were marked by love.

They became known as a body that accepts. We don't care who you are; we don't care what you might believe. We accept you. Acceptance is important because we have a craving for acceptance that God put there, and yet we also find it hard to accept. We seem to like highlighting why acceptance is difficult and how we differ from each other. 

I think that is only one reason we struggle to accept; the second reason that we struggle to accept is that we are not convinced that we have been accepted. We can't accept others unless we are secure in the idea that we have been accepted. Barnabas was secure in his knowledge that he was accepted. And so, he could accept what was happening in Antioch even though it was being done differently.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Acts 12