Daily Bible Reading Plans to help you read and understand God’s Word

Scripture Reading: Acts 10:1-48, Isaiah 52:7-10, Galatians 3:27-28

Whenever I find myself walking the halls of a high school, I always gravitate toward the trophy case. I’m drawn in by the brass cups and tarnished medals, surrounded by snapshots of smiling faces taken at someone’s moment of success.

I nod my head in understanding...

Hard work gets rewarded.
Pedigree propels us forward.
Elbow grease and effort come with ribbons and cheering crowds.

Since we were big enough to earn a gold star, this is what we’ve been taught. It’s why, in part, God’s gift of grace can feel so slippery inside our hearts. A system where salvation is earned through sacrifice and good choices makes sense to our task-minded brains. The idea that heaven is a club with membership requirements seems reasonable, especially since our sinful hearts can convince us that we have the spiritual résumé to be charter members.

But the right-side-up-way of Jesus is that no one deserves to be reconciled to God; still all are welcome who put their faith in Christ (Romans 3:23–24). This is the miracle that God has baked into human history and told in His Word since the days of Abraham.

Sure, there was a chosen people. God hand selected a tiny nation to live set apart for Him, but the point of their existence wasn’t to highlight their specialness. It was to display that the gospel is for the rest of us too—those who have neither the spiritual pedigree nor the perfect record required to live in unbroken fellowship with the God of the universe.

This “good news” must have been disorienting to Peter. When the Spirit gave Peter a vision of animals he’d always been forbidden to consume and commanded him, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat” (Acts 10:13), Peter responded with (self)righteous indignation. “‘No, Lord!’ Peter said. ‘For I have never eaten anything impure and ritually unclean’” (v.14).

But through the revelation of the Holy Spirit, it didn’t take Peter long to understand this wasn’t about food, animals, or keeping the rules. We hear this truth move the eighteen inches from Peter’s head to his heart, in the sermon he preached to a room full of Gentiles.

Now I truly understand that God doesn’t show favoritism, but in every nation the person who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.
—Acts 10:34-35

Through his obedience to the Spirit, Peter pulled the pin on a grenade that exploded grace on the whole world, not a select few. All of us who are in Christ, in every era and pocket of the world, remain in the blast zone today. May we never get over the awe of it. May we respond like the Jews in the room did the day Peter preached his first sermon to a room full of “others” who weren’t chosen people but still chosen.

The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were amazed because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles.
—Acts 10:45

Jesus, thank you that we are all trophies of your grace.

Written by Erin Davis