Acts 11

do that.

That does remind me like short thing before we jump into acts 11 is like during COVID.

When churches were, it was the first time we'd ever done anything like online at all, camera stuff.

So I started paying attention to what other churches did.

I didn't.

Here we go.

Acts 11.

I am going to tell the story.

Turn with me to the book of Hebrews, chapter 10.

I'm going to read a few verses there, but we're primarily going to study out of a chapter in the book of Acts.

But I want to start there.

And man, the Lord's been working me over with this message for the last couple of weeks.

So allow me to list a few things that no church can do for you.

And you shouldn't expect.

While you're turning to Acts chapter number 11, we're going to study the model church.

The model church.

We're going to dive in and we're going to look at how those around us can help see the Christ in us.

And that's what Acts 11 is about.

But before we dive in, let me pray for us.

God, I thank you.

Amen.

Amen.

If you have a Bible, you could turn to Acts chapter 11.

If you're new or newer with us, we've been going through the entire book of Acts over a year long now.

correct.

which is where in the book of Acts, Acts 11, it says that it was in Antioch that the disciples were for the first time called Christians.

Perfect.

This is a perfect question to ask because both of us had our Bibles open to the same section of the Acts of the Apostles, Acts chapter 11, 26.

So the Melkite Catholic Church, along with a few other apostolic Catholic churches, have, as we can say, one of the blessings of knowing what is a Melkite and why the Eastern Catholic Churches are important, is when we think of the native early Christians, early Christianity, Christianity started in those regions.

And if you look at Acts of the Apostles, of course, we don't have time to, which I would love to do, spend an hour on it.

If you look at the rest of Acts 11, you see all the other cities that are named there that the apostles went from city to city converting all of them.

But now, fast forward, just to not spend too much time on this one answer alone, is that the Melchi Catholic Church is the Catholic Church that follows the Byzantine liturgical family that has as its native area the Middle East.

So on Tuesday, we looked at kind of the first half of this story of this church being planted in a really unreached city, Antioch.

So we looked at Acts 11 and 13 and 14 and drew some stuff out of the story.

Today, we're going to look at the next chapter, so Acts chapter 15.

And we're just going to, because it's all part of the Antioch story and it's a really important part.