Recently my wife and I were driving past a construction zone where a new middle school was being built near our home. We were amazed at how fast the structure was going up and the degree of expertise it would require to pull off such a feat. The foundation was huge and the steel beams rose to intersect in ways that boggled my mind. Inwardly, I was wondering if I could ever figure out how to do that kind of work if I wasn’t pastoring a church. I concluded it was…well…doubtful.
When I look at construction sites I see so many little details that all come together to form a wonderfully completed project. It is similar to what I discovered in Acts 10. All throughout this chapter there are multiple details, big and small, that are interwoven to form a beautiful end result. The end of Acts 10 describes the culmination of the Holy Spirit falling upon the Gentiles.
Gentiles.
This was a big deal because up to this point the Gospel had been focused upon the Jewish people and folks had very little interest in taking it beyond that particular group. But God was the architect of a massive and masterful plan: His Church was being built and it would include male, female, slave, free, Jew AND Gentile.
How was this huge project going to happen?
In Acts 10 we have two General Contractors, Cornelius and Peter. One may think that having TWO general contractors would be chaotic, divided and ultimately unproductive, unless both of them did the two important things that Cornelius and Peter did.
They prayed.
And they listened.
Both of these men were instrumental in the newly-opened door to the Gentiles, because both of these men knew how to pray and listen.
In verse 4, Cornelius prayed, and the Lord, in a vision, told this Gentile man to summon a Jew named Peter.
In verse 10, Peter was in prayer when he had a vision in which the Lord said some very specific, and noteably, difficult things.
Pray. Listen.
It’s these small details that bring massive and masterful plans of the Lord into fruition.