Swallow No Camels

August 9, 2026 – Controversy, Part 1— Acts #50

Acts. 15:1-5

It seems we are living in a time of much controversy among the organized churches.   The United Methodist Church has had a long-lasting controversy over the issue of sexual sins.  The same issues currently face the Presbyterian Church USA.  The Southern Baptist Convention and the Assembly of God denomination have faced controversy recently on their handling of sexual abuse cases.  The SBC is now also facing controversy over the issue of women in leadership roles. Our study in Acts brings us to a controversy in the early church.  So it is very timely for us to take a look at this controversy over the next several weeks to understand how it arose and how it was handled at the time.

Acts 15:1-5   But some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.” And after Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question. So, being sent on their way by the church, they passed through both Phoenicia and Samaria, describing in detail the conversion of the Gentiles, and brought great joy to all the brothers. When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church, the apostles, and the elders, and they declared all that God had done with them. But some believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees rose up and said, “It is necessary to circumcise them and to order them to keep the law of Moses.”

In this passage, there arises a difference of opinion in the church.  And Luke describes it as “no small dissension and debate.”  So how big of a controversy was this?  Luke uses this phrase, “no small…” or “no little…”, several times in this book.   Let’s look at another time Luke uses this phrase and see if we can better understand what he means.

 It is back in Acts 12.  Remember Herod had imprisoned Peter and had him chained to two guards.  But the people prayed, and an angel brought Peter out of prison.  And when the soldiers discovered Peter had escaped from prison under their watch, Luke says:

Acts 12:18   Now when day came, there was no little disturbance among the soldiers over what had become of Peter.

“No little disturbance.” If a guard in those days let a prisoner escape, they were punished by receiving the sentence the prisoner would have received.   And Peter was to be killed the next day.  Some soldier is going to die for letting Peter escape, so “no little disturbance”  is Luke’s way of saying this is a huge deal, a life-or-death matter.  

So in our passage this morning, “no small dissension and debate” means there was a major disagreement in the church.  This is a very serious problem.  So let’s understand the problem.

For the past year or more, Paul and Barnabas have been in Antioch and then on a missionary journey to Crete and Galatia, taking the message of the gospel of Jesus to Jews and Gentiles.  And these Jews and Gentiles have been worshipping together in synagogues and elsewhere.  And then some “men from Judea” come to Antioch and are teaching the Gentiles that if they really want to be true followers of the Jewish Messiah Jesus, they must become Jewish.

 Can you imagine what happened?  Some very religious people from the center of Christianity come and say,  “Well, it is so good that you decided to follow Jesus.  Of course, if you really want eternal life, if you really want to be saved, then you guys need to undergo a surgical procedure (without anesthesia), oh, and all of you need to stop eating bacon and shrimp. You also need to follow all the Old Testament laws and rituals.  Then you will be saved.   Again, as Luke says, this is a really big deal.

But remember, Peter had encountered the gentile Centurion who accepted Jesus, and Peter did not require him to be circumcised.   Paul and Barnabas did not require any of the Gentiles they led to Christ to be circumcised.  Are Paul and Barnabas going to have to go back to all the places they went on their last journey and say, “Well, I know you accepted Jesus as your lord and king, but there is one more little thing you must do if you really want to be saved.”

What is required for Jesus to save you?

This dissension is all about what is required for salvation.  So what I want to do this morning is to go back through the Bible and see the pattern of how God works with people.   Today we are stepping back to get the big-picture look at the Bible. And as we look through the Bible, we will see that God has a consistent pattern for dealing with people.  We see this pattern over and over when it comes to requirements for salvation and requirements for deliverance.

In the beginning, God created a world where he and his creation, humanity, could live together on God’s land, in God’s kingdom.  God put them in His special garden.  Let me ask you a question: What did Adam and Eve do to earn the right to live in the garden with God?  They didn’t do anything to earn the right to live there with God.  He chose them and allowed them to live with HIm in the garden out of his grace.    So it all begins with grace.

But all kingdoms have rules, and the rule for the garden in Eden was to let God decide what is good and what is evil.  Don’t take and eat from the tree that represents who gets to decide what is good and what is evil.  That is not for us; that is God’s prerogative.  But they decided to take it anyway, because they wanted to make their own decisions about right and wrong.  And when they decided not to follow the rules of the kingdom, they were not allowed to live in the kingdom.

God chose Abraham.  What did Abraham do to earn the right to be chosen by God? Nothing; it is God’s grace.  And God’s rule for Abraham was to follow Him.  Go to a land that I will show you.  Follow me, and I will make you the father of many nations. Of course, Abraham didn’t always follow, but God kept giving grace and kept his promise to Abraham.   Same pattern.  Grace, then instructions again.  And from Abraham comes the nation of Israel. 

Israel was to be God’s special people.  But they ended up as slaves in Egypt for 400 years.  And in a display of 10 great miracles in Egypt, God rescued them from slavery.  What did the slaves in Egypt do to earn the right for God to save them from slavery in Egypt? God chose to save or deliver Israel from slavery out of his grace.  It was nothing they did.

And He gave them instruction at the foot of Mt Sinai to teach them how to live His way.   All kings have laws and ordinances.  If you want to live in the Kingdom, you have to follow the laws.  There were certain expectations for how they were supposed to act.  Like “don’t kill other people,”  “don’t steal,” “honor your mother and father.”  But the most important one was to know that there was only one God and no others, and to worship the true God rather than idols of their own making.   These rules were the rules of the kingdom.  This is what God expected of them if they were going to live in his kingdom.

But notice the order of events is always the same:  God gives grace and delivers them from Egypt first, then he tells them how they are to live.  God didn’t say, “Hey, if you follow my rules, then I will deliver you from Egypt.”  They didn’t earn the right to be delivered from Egypt.  Why did God deliver them?  It was grace, God’s unmerited favor towards them, that led to their deliverance.  They were delivered even before they had the list of rules to follow.

And He teaches them about sin and about the requirement for atonement.  Whoever sins is responsible for paying the price for atonement.  There was no remission of sin without the shedding of blood.   But did they live by God’s rules?  No.  Along the way, Israel wandered off of the path.  

And God sent a king to them to show them how to live and to lead them to follow God.  But this king also failed to follow God.   And God told them one day he would send a Messiah to teach them how to live. They turned aside from God and worshipped idols, so God sent prophets to admonish them and to put them back on track.  But they wouldn’t listen, so God had to choose another nation to serve as a means of discipline for them.

 And so Assyria came and conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel, scattering its people.  And the Babylonians later conquered the Southern Kingdom, and then the Greeks, and then the Romans.  But still they did not follow His ways.   And all these times, after breaking God’s rules for how to live, how does God react?   Does He wipe them off the face of the earth?  No, a remnant survives.  That is grace. The pattern persists.

And then God shows his greatest outpouring of grace as he sends his only Son to bestow the greatest grace and to give the ultimate deliverance from sin. When Jesus was born, the angels came and announced the birth to the shepherds.  Now you know this passage from Luke 2 well, but there is something we need to see there.

Luke 2:8-14   And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.
Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,  “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

Peace on earth.  That is the Hebrew word Shalom, which refers foremost to Peace with God.  You don’t have to have a broken relationship with God anymore.  God is making a way for all sins to be forgiven and the relationship to be unbroken. But who gets this peace with God?

“To those on whom his favor rests.”  To those on whom his grace rests.  And who are the people on whom God’s grace rests?   Who gets this peace? The angels have already told us this. They had “good news that will cause great joy for all the people.”   God’s grace is given freely to all people.  All they have to do is accept the gift.

Again, God is bringing deliverance. And the prerequisite to receive God’s deliverance through Jesus is only … Grace.  Humanity did nothing to deserve Jesus.  In fact, mankind did everything that should have disqualified us from receiving Jesus.  But God said, there are no qualifications.  It is all Grace.  I give this gift freely to all who will accept it. 

And Jesus came in the spirit of the grace of God, demonstrating God’s grace and deliverance wherever he went.  Look at what Jesus did.  Did the blind man do anything to deserve Jesus’ mercy and the deliverance from blindness?  Did Mary Magdalene do anything to deserve the deliverance from demons?  Did the lame man earn his healing?  Jesus came and healed all who wished to be healed, and he shocked the religious scholars of the day by also declaring that their sins were forgiven.  Wait!   How could he do that? 

Shouldn’t they have to sacrifice something on the altar?  Isn’t there a process to go through?  Aren’t there some requirements for forgiveness or deliverance from sins? Shouldn’t they have to say certain prayers or perform certain tasks?  Jesus demonstrated that it was all grace.  He forgives with reckless abandon.  But the same pattern persists.  After grace and deliverance come instructions.  So after deliverance, Jesus sees the man he healed at the pool of Bethesda again and tells him:

John 5:14   “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”

Do you see the pattern?  First, the man is delivered from his blindness – through grace alone; then he is given instructions. Or the woman caught in the act of adultery that people wanted to stone.  Remember, Jesus tells them, “Whoever is without sin, cast the first stone.”  Then he tells the woman this:

John 8:11   “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

Jesus could have condemned her.  She deserved it.  She was caught in the act.  And Jesus was the only one without sin who could have carried out the listed punishment: stoning.  But he did not.   He gave her grace.   Then he gave her instructions for living. There is the same order. Deliverance based solely on grace, and then instruction on how to live.  This is how God consistently operates.

In Acts 15, the question is,  “What is required to be saved?”   Two people in the gospel of Luke ask Jesus the same question, “What must I do to be saved?  One story is in Luke 18

Luke 18:18-27  A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’”
“All these I have kept since I was a boy,” he said.
When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was very wealthy. Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
Those who heard this asked, “Who then can be saved?”
Jesus replied, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”

The ruler comes to Jesus believing that eternal life can be earned by doing the right things. “What must I do?  I will take care of it, Jesus, just tell me what I need to do. Jesus’ first response is very telling. “No one is good – except God alone.”  You can’t be good enough; only God can be good enough.  

But Jesus can see that the rich ruler doesn’t get it, so Jesus says, “Well, how about the commandments?” And the rich ruler says, “Oh, those, yeah, I keep all of those.”  So this guy sees himself as perfect.  He has kept them all.  But Jesus knows better.   So he challenges him with the commandment that the ruler has to admit he has not kept.  It is the one Jesus listed in with the greatest commandment.  Love your neighbor as yourself.

Okay then, if you have kept all the commandments, then keep this one — treat the poor around you as your neighbor.  Sell all you have to feed them.  And he goes away sad.  

The rich ruler comes to Jesus and asks how to be saved, and Jesus begins by talking about the commandments.  Jesus is not teaching the concept of works-salvation; through this rich ruler, he is showing the impossibility of saving oneself by good works.  No one is good but God.  Even this man, who claimed to follow all the commandments, has to face it.

He is asking the wrong question.  Salvation is not about what I must do.  The right question is:  What must I let God do to save me?

Jesus tells them it is easier to shove a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.  Jesus is telling them that even if you have all the money in the world, salvation is not something you can accomplish on your own. “Who then can be saved?” Jesus’ answer:  being saved is impossible for people to do themselves; only God can do that. Works will never suffice.  Only God’s grace will be sufficient.

Let’s look at another one:

Luke 10:25-29   On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
He answered, “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

A similar question and a similar answer.  Again, “What must I do?”  And Jesus asks about the commandments.  Jesus points him to the commandments just as with the rich ruler, and says, all you have to do is keep them all.  But the lawyer senses a problem.  He knows he hasn’t treated everyone with love.  There are people he has not treated well.   So he seeks to exclude them from the list to say he kept the commandment. 

It is here that Jesus tells the story of the good Samaritan.  And the answer is that everyone is your neighbor, so Jesus tells the lawyer to treat your enemy as you would your neighbor, again pointing out that the lawyer has fallen short.

Paul said it this way:

Romans 3:20   Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.
Ephesians 2:8-9   For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves; it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.

And that is exactly what Jesus was showing the two men in these examples.  

Now what may surprise you is that Paul believed these two verses even before he met Jesus.   Paul, the Jewish rabbi, would have no trouble saying this in the synagogue before he met Jesus.  Paul never thought he could be saved by following the law perfectly.  Because he knew he was not perfect. 

He was well aware of all the sacrifices in the Scriptures that accounted for sins he had committed.  But he was also well aware that some sins had no sacrifice.  Any sins committed with forethought, knowing they were a sin but doing it anyway, had no associated sacrifice.  The only hope of forgiveness for these sins was that God would show grace and somehow atone for them.  They didn’t know how God would provide, but they counted on him to do it.

It has always been all about grace.  If someone tries to tell you the Old Testament is all about law and the New Testament about grace, they haven’t read the Old Testament.

And then Paul met Jesus.  And he discovered that Jesus is the way God could atone for all sins, even those for which there was no Old Testament sacrifice.  Jesus was the method of grace.  This grace was just a promise to Abraham and Moses, but it was realized in the time of Jesus.   

But in Jesus’ day, and in the time of Acts, some people believed that God’s grace was not enough to save.  That men had to do certain things, specifically be circumcized, and follow all the Levitical laws.  And that is the controversy.

There is only one God, and there is only one Bible.  God is consistent in how he deals with people.  From the very beginning, he has come to us with grace.  Freely bestowing his gifts on us.  That is the way he has treated everyone from Adam and Eve to Abraham to Moses to today.

In other religions, we see people always trying to do things to appease their God.  The Canaanites would present offerings or perform acts of service to bribe their god into bringing rain for their crops or giving them children.  The Greek gods were always asking for more gifts or sacrifices, or they would withhold rain or punish the people. But the God we worship is different.  He comes to us with love.  We enter into his kingdom out of grace, not a list of requirements.   The blessings of rain fall on the just and the unjust.  The only requirement for deliverance is that we allow Him to deliver us.

The pattern persists. From Adam and Eve to Abraham and throughout the entire Bible,  this pattern persists.  Grace is how we enter the kingdom.  Then, once we are in the kingdom, we are given instructions on how to act as members of the kingdom.   We call this discipleship.    Then, if we break those rules, if we sin, God gives grace again as forgiveness and then gives us further instructions, like he told the adulterous woman in Luke.  Go and sin no more.

The people in Acts 15 thought that the Gentiles had to be circumcised.   Circumcision was a sign of the covenant with God.  Today, our sign of the covenant with God is baptism.  And just as in Paul’s day, some people today say that if you are not baptized, you are not saved.   This is the same attitude of Acts 15.  But the only requirement for salvation is God’s grace through Jesus.  And neither baptism nor church membership nor anything else.  Whenever we add a human requirement as necessary for salvation, we alter the gospel.

Salvation is through grace, through the work of Jesus, not anything we do.  Anytime someone tries to add any requirements to salvation, they have missed the point of the Bible.   But after Grace comes instructions.  How shall we live? Max Lucado said it well:

“God loves you just the way you are, but He refuses to leave you that way. He wants you to be just like Jesus.”¹

We are saved by grace, and then we grow in discipleship.

So the council in Acts 15 will eventually determine that circumcision and following Jewish laws are not required for these Gentiles to be saved.  Those who insisted on circumcision to be saved were wrong.  But this is not the end. After they are saved, should they follow God in obedience as part of their discipleship, be circumcized, and follow all the Levitical rules?   That is the question we will look at next.

1. Lucado, Max. Just Like Jesus, A Heart Like His. Nelson. 2012.