And so Peter is about to unlock that last door, and that’s going to be a tough key for Peter to turn, because he has been raised a whole lifetime engrained with Jewish traditions, engrained with legalism, and super-nationalism. And it’s an almost intolerant kind of engraining, so that there isn’t any room for Samaritans, and there isn’t any room for Gentiles, who were considered to be unclean.

GOD CHOOSE TO SHOW THE WORLD THAT EVEN THE LEAST, THE LITTLEST, THE LOWEST OF STATUS IS VALUABLE TO HIM.

So Paul’s whole worldview collapsed in Damascus. And was rebuilt with the great, unshakable, stone pillars of truth about Jesus.

Jesus said the Holy Spirit would convict men “concerning sin, because they do not believe in Me” (John 16:9). The crime of all crimes for which men will be eternally damned is to refuse to love and follow the Lord Jesus Christ.

Out hope is that God, the everlasting and eternal God, has not turned His back on this world of ours, but that, on the contrary, He is very concerned about it and has a plan for its redemption, its delivery, its restoration to the condition in which He originally made it.

It is clearly possible for us to think we are Christians without being Christians at all. It is possible for us to delude ourselves and to imagine that we are Christians when we are not.

The persecution, Satan’s attempt to stamp out the church’s fire merely scattered the embers and started new fires around the world. In the words of the early church Father Tertullian, the blood of the martyrs became the seed of the church.

When God becomes a man, man ceases to be the measure of all things, and this man becomes the measure of all things. This is simply intolerable to the rebellious heart of men and women.

The meaning of Christmas is that what is good and precious in your life need never be lost, and what is evil and undesirable in your life can be changed.