Good Shepherd Lutheran Church

Acts 15:1-18 begins with Jewish believers insisting that in order to be saved one must be circumcised, for thousands of years God's people had circumcised as a mark that God had claimed them as God's own. The gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out on Gentiles, but believers were told their whole lives not to consort with Gentiles. Paul and Barnabas knew that the strength in the new covenant was not in humanity's ability to live faithfully but in God's faithfulness to humanity.