Out of our bondage and sorrow and night, Jesus, we come, Jesus, we come. Into Thy freedom gladness and light, Jesus, we come to thee. Out of our sickness into Thy health, out of our wanting and into Thy wealth, out of our sin and into Thy self, Jesus, we come to thee. We come and we ask You to speak. Give us ears to hear, hearts to understand, wills to obey. We pray that You would speak and we would be listening. Jesus, come, we pray. Amen.

How do you know who’s a part of your family? Well, it depends on your family, I suppose. For some, they may say that you look just like your mom, just like your dad. Perhaps you have a familial relationship which is obvious to others. And your family, you’re sitting with them now, and maybe you go and you’ll drive home and you’ll go to your house or your apartment and that will be your family. Your children, by birth, by adoption, by fostering, your children, your family. That’s what we usually think of. That’s, that’s my family. Others of you will be able to tell of kids and grandkids scattered around, or you’ll talk of family that’s already in heaven.

Some speak of a corporate sort of family. You find this language more and more often. You know, the Novant family, or I don’t know, you can tell me later, do they speak of the Bank of America family? The Chick-fil-A family? The BoJangles family? I’m thinking of chicken, I guess. [laughter] The Clemson, the Alabama, the Chapel Hill family. Your, you’re current students, you’re alumnus. Or maybe it’s a particular nation, ethnicity, or tribe and you think of that, that’s our family. You’re Scottish, you’re Latino, you’re Dutch, you ain’t much, whatever it might be.

Most often we think of belonging to a family by virtue of blood, maybe employment, common affiliation. That’s our family.

But what about the most important family in the world?

If we had time to look at what Jesus says about the family, we’d see pretty quickly that as important as mother, father, children are, Jesus relativizes that family. He says “Who are My mother and brothers and sisters? It’s those who do the will of My Father in heaven. They’re My mother and brothers and that’s my family.” Jesus relativizes. There is no doubt that what we call the nuclear family is absolutely essential, it is the building block in any civilization, and yet at the same time it is not the most important family. It is not, but definition, eternal, transcendent.

There’s a difference between orthodox evangelical Christianity and Mormonism.

No, what is the most important family? It is not the family that you have by blood, it is not the family that you may drive home with later this afternoon. It is the family of God. It is the family that has God as their heavenly Father, Jesus Christ the Son as their elder brother, and the Holy Spirit bringing us together in community. That is the most important family, and if you belong to Christ this morning, no matter how far away your family is, how estranged you may be, how tenuous it may seem right now, you belong to the most important family, the eternal family of God.

So how do we define this family? How can you tell who belongs in the family? You can’t just say, well, they have a certain skin or a certain hair or they dress a certain way. What do you have to do to get into this family? And who is welcome to join?

That’s what our text this morning is about. If you turn in your Bibles to Acts chapter 11. Last week we looked at Acts chapter 10, the long story repeated several times of Peter and Cornelius and the vision, that what has been unclean is now clean, and we looked at that story from the individual level. What did this mean for Cornelius and who was he and what happened?...