By Austin B. Tucker
While
Peter was still puzzling over the vision and what God might be saying to him,
the Holy Spirit spoke to his heart. God told him to get up and go downstairs.
He was not to hesitate to go with the strangers (vss. 19-20).
Though
I grew up in a culture steeped in racial prejudice, I saw my own father challenge
that culture. He refused to follow conventions that dictated that he call black
peo-ple by their first name while they always used the title “mister”
for him. As a plumbing contractor, he defied union rules that forbad him to hire
a black man for anything more than ditch digging. The person who thinks reflectively
is a growing soul, especially if his thoughts grow out of his private prayer life.
The unthinking person is static and stale.
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Peter
went down at the Lord’s word and welcomed the delegation from Gentile Cornelius.
He even invited them to share his hospitality in the home of Simon the Tanner.
The next day he went with them to Caesarea. Would Peter have done any of this
before his encounter with the Lord in prayer? Surely not!
In
Caesarea, Peter confessed his heritage of blind prejudice, but he could give testimony
now to God’s grace to deliver. “I now realize how true it is that God
does not show favoritism” (vs. 34). Peter perceived three things particularly.
One, that he was just a man like all other men (vs. 26). Second, that God does
not discriminate as we do (vs. 34). And third, that God did not want him to call
any man impure or unclean (vss. 27-28).
That
day God used Peter to open the door of salvation to the non-Jewish nations of
the world. What use will he make of us when we are delivered from our blind and
sense-less prejudice?
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Sermon
brief provided by: Austin Tucker, a writer and adjunct professor
in Shreveport, LA