The Box Breaker

Acts 10:11-15

He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”

“Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”

The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”

Children can get boxed in by their parents’ view of them. One boxed in child was Adam Clarke, who was born in the eighteenth century in Ireland. When Adam was a schoolboy, his father told the teacher that Adam wouldn't do well.

The teacher said, "He looks bright."

That statement changed his life--let him out of the box his father had put him in. He lived to be seventy-two, and he became a great scholar, an English Methodist preacher and an author of commentaries and a book called Christian Theology. When Adam Clarke preached, it was said, people listened.

Adam Clarke was freed from the box of limitations his father had put him in. We often do the same thing to God. We know what God “can and cannot” do. We hamstring God by our puny views of him and his power.

Peter initially told God, “No!” I can’t eat the unclean things, I never have, and I never will. That was Peter’s box, but God came to break that box apart. God told Peter, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” Peter, your box just got busted up! As a result, the Gospel broke out among the Gentiles, then the whole world.

What box of limitations have you put on God? What does God want to do in your life that you just assume, or have been told, that you cannot do? Let God out of the box you have put him in! There are people out there who need what God has given you, if you will just break the box!

Today’s Readings: Exodus 35,36 ; Acts 10

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