Friday's Devo - Evangelists and Prophets - We need them both.

Read Acts 11
Reading this chapter lets me see how far the Jews had come from the laws of God. Peter and John are rebuked by the apostles for eating with uncircumcised men. I looked in the law for any hint of warning against eating with the uncircumcised and all I could find was where the priests were not suppose to share the holy food with the uncircumcised. There were plenty of laws about being kind to strangers, because they were once strangers in Egypt. In Deu. 10:19 it even says to love the stranger. All throughout the Old Testament you read of non-Jews who God singled out to save: Rahab, Ruth, Naman. God's plan from the beginning was to save the world; He just used the Jewish people to display how God deals with His children. But the Jewish people became proud and arrogant and exclusive when it came to God. Cornelius was a good example of a non-Jew who loved God. It reminds me of us in the church. Sometimes we forget that we are saved by grace, not because we earned it. We are no better than the worse sinner.
The good news is that when the apostles heard the whole story they didn't harden their hearts, they softened them and were accepting of the Gentiles. Others that had only preached to the Jews started preaching to the Grecians also. A great number of them came to the Lord. Barnabus was sent to Antioch which is in Syria. He took Saul with him. Here, in this non-Jewish land is where they first used the term "Christians".
God rose up the prophetic voice that had been silent for so long and restored prophets to the church. One particular prophet prophecied that there would be a famine throughout the world and the church mobilized to be ready to help.
David Wilkerson is a modern-day prophet who has a church in New York City. God told him to be ready for something big was going to happen in NYC at the World Trade Center on 9-11. He had his church stay up all night the night before making peanut butter sandwiches and they were at ground zero the morning of 9-11 ready to help. That is the power and the necessity of prophecy. Nothing should take us by surprise because God promised that he would never do anything that he didn't first tell his prophets.
Lord, expand our territories and help us to reach out to people we unconsciously call "uncircucised" and may the church welcome the voice of the prophet.