When God Calls It Clean | April 19, 2026

Sermon number twenty-eight picked up immediately after Cornelius's obedience, and Pastor Justin walked through Acts 10:9-33 to show Peter's side of the story, a vision that would upend centuries of tradition. While praying on a rooftop, Peter falls into a trance and sees a great sheet descending from heaven filled with animals the Levitical law had always called unclean, along with a voice commanding him to kill and eat. Pastor Justin first grounded the congregation in Leviticus 11:1-8, the actual dietary laws Peter had followed his entire life, laws that functioned both as physical protection and as a daily marker of Israel's holiness and separation from surrounding pagan nations.

The Setup: A Sheet Full of Unclean Animals

When Peter protests that he has never eaten anything common or unclean, the voice replies that what God has made clean, he must not call common, and the vision repeats three times before messengers from Cornelius arrive at the door. Pastor Justin's first point was that we must learn to bow to Scripture even when it corrects our most cherished traditions, and he did not spare his own church's history in making the case. He walked through decades at First Baptist Church of Brunswick, their legacy congregation, from racial segregation in the early 1900s to strict dress codes in the 1950s to bans on movies, music, and dancing in later decades, none of which had any actual basis in God's Word.

He was personal about his own journey here too, admitting he once wore a hat that said I Am Hip-Hop because he wanted people to know his roots, but now stands before the congregation saying I am not hip-hop, I am redeemed. Citing 2 Corinthians 5:17, that anyone in Christ is a new creation and old things have passed away, he argued that a believer's ultimate identity is not their skin color, background, or upbringing, but their relationship with Christ, and everything else has to bow to that.

The second point flowed directly from the first, that we must stop labeling people as unclean or unreachable whom God has already died for. Pastor Justin turned to Mark 1:40-45, where Jesus does not merely speak healing over a leper from a safe distance but reaches out and physically touches the most untouchable person in his society, willingly making himself unclean in the world's eyes to make the unclean man whole. He pressed the congregation to name their own modern-day lepers, whether that is someone struggling with addiction near the C&O Canal, a family with opposite politics, or someone whose lifestyle makes them uncomfortable, and challenged the church that soul-deep renewal never happens from inside a clean, comfortable building.

He closed with two concrete challenges for the week, to learn the name of someone regularly ignored, like a homeless man on a corner or an overlooked cashier, and to intentionally share a table with someone outside the normal circle, noting that sharing a meal was a radical act of acceptance in the ancient world and still is today.

This Week's Application

So this week, is there a group of people you have quietly written off as too far outside your comfort zone, too messy, or too different from you to reach with the gospel? We would love for you to join us this Sunday as we continue walking through Acts together.