Teaching Outline

GPNaz Teaching Outline – May 5, 2024
 Excavate: Acts 15

Often, growing pains are related to tensions surrounding changes in our lives.
It is the tension we receive when we experience:

• Our beliefs or belief systems.
• Challenges to our customs or traditions.
• The movement into the arena of the new and the unknown.

• The Word of the Lord: 

Acts 15:1, “Certain people came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the believers: “Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.”

What the church was saying: Jesus isn't enough...

Hebrews 8:7-8, 13
For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another.  But God found fault with the people and said, The days are coming, declares the Lord when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah.
 
13 By calling this covenant “new,” he has made the first one obsolete, and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear.”

Acts 15:2, “This brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them. So, Paul and Barnabas were appointed, along with some other believers, to go up to Jerusalem to see the apostles and elders about this question.”

Acts 15:5, “The Gentile must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses.”

He reminds them of three truths in Acts 15.
 

• God saved Cornelius and his family and gave them the gift of the holy spirit.
• God's very presence resided in an uncircumcised Roman Gentile just as he had resided in the Jewish believers.
• The Jewish people could never live up to the written or oral law of the old covenant, so why are we putting it on the Gentiles?

Acts 15:10, “Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of the disciples a yoke that neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear?”
 
We must remember that in the pains of growth, whether individually or corporately,
 God is doing something New for His blessing and Our glory.

Acts 15:12, “The whole assembly became silent as they listened to Barnabas and Paul talking about the signs and wonders God had done among the Gentiles through them.”

Acts 15:28, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.”