Experience: S2 - Day 16

July 8th, 2024

The risk of stepping out of your comfort zones

Acts 10: 9 The next day as Cornelius’s messengers were nearing the town, Peter went up on the flat roof to pray. It was about noon, 10 and he was hungry. But while a meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. 11 He saw the sky open, and something like a large sheet was let down by its four corners. 12 In the sheet were all sorts of animals, reptiles, and birds. 13 Then a voice said to him, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat them.”

14 “No, Lord,” Peter declared. “I have never eaten anything that our Jewish laws have declared impure and unclean.”

15 But the voice spoke again: “Do not call something unclean if God has made it clean.” 16 The same vision was repeated three times. Then the sheet was suddenly pulled up to heaven.

17 Peter was very perplexed. What could the vision mean?

I’ll admit it; I love that today’s passage ends where it does. Why? Because in my experience, there are plenty of times when we have to sit with a mystery for a time. Maybe that mystery involved our faith; maybe it was a part of our educational journey, or maybe it was coming to understand a friend or a spouse. Mystery is just a part of life; despite our best efforts, we don’t always have the answers.

It’s also interesting to note the timing of this experience. God was preparing Peter for something that hadn’t happened yet. He was stirring something in his soul so that when the time came, Peter would be more open to what God was trying to teach and do through him. God always knows what we need before we do.

That said, it was a strange experience. The word in v 10 translated “trance” ekstasis, from where we get our word, ecstasy. For Peter, it was like a vision, but something from God that was very confusing and dare I say difficult.

It was a difficult vision to receive because, for Peter’s entire life, there were things you did and things you didn’t do. Eating was perhaps the most basic of those things, yet here, for the first time in his life, he was being told not to worry about it. He was challenged to think differently from what he had always believed, which is hard for us.

Makes me think of two passages. One comes from Isaiah…“For I am about to do something new...” Isaiah 43:19 NLT. God continually meets us where we are, moving us forward to a clearer understanding of Him. Sometimes, those moves are slow and happen over time, in other instances, it’s a jarring shift that unsettles us for a time. The latter is what was happening to Peter in this story.

The other passage was one we studied in our last series, where Paul said to the Philippians, “I once thought these things were valuable, but now I consider them worthless because of what Christ has done.” Philippians 3:7 NLT. Paul once thought, but now he believes something different. In the passage, he once thought the law was the most important thing, then he met Jesus and considered everything worthless compared to knowing Christ. This statement, “I once thought, but now I believe…” should be a familiar one in the life of a disciple. In the faith tradition of the Seventh-day Adventist church, we refer to this as present truth. When we recognize that truth is a person and not a position, then you must accept that truth is on the move as we follow Christ. This can be unsettling. It was for Peter.

But God wasn’t going to leave Peter to figure this all out. He was going to walk him through this new thing, help him see that though he once thought, he can now believe, and even though it would take him out of his comfort zone, it would open the door for more and more people to come to know Jesus as their Lord and Savior.

Questions:

What is something you used to be so convinced you now think differently about?
Can you remember a time, maybe you’re in the middle of it now, when God was trying to teach you something, but for a time, the answers remained unclear?
Do you notice that the older you get, the more comfortable you seem with questions that don’t have answers? Why is that, you think?