Pastor David Jang offers a deep exploration of Acts 10—Cornelius and Peter’s vision—highlighting the turning point toward Gentile mission, the relationship between Law and Gospel, the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and the widening horizon of world mission.
Acts 10 is a passage in
which the “grammar of mission” appears with striking clarity, showing how the
Holy Spirit breaks open boundaries whenever the church becomes trapped inside
its own language and norms. Pastor David Jang (founder of Olivet University)
has read this chapter not as a mere historical anecdote, but as a revelatory
scene that discloses “how the Gospel expands itself.” The reason he returns to
Acts 10 again and again is that the decisive transition—from a Jewish-centered
faith toward Gentile mission—takes place here. As the proclamation of the
Gospel that began in Jerusalem moves past Samaria toward the ends of the earth,
the event involving Cornelius proves that “the ends of the earth” is no longer
an abstract ideal; it becomes an act of stepping over an actual threshold in
real history. Known also as Pastor David Jang, he emphasizes that the church in
every age must examine, under the guidance of the Spirit, the recurring
temptation of a chosen-people mentality and the habit of exclusive piety.
The weight of the passage
begins with the contrast between two figures. Cornelius, a Roman military
centurion, might appear to symbolize imperial order and power, yet Acts 10
portrays him as a man who fears God. Pastor David Jang interprets this reverence
as the beginning and heart of faith. To fear God is not anxiety or terror, but
an inner posture that does not take God lightly—an austere respect that places
one’s entire life before Him. Cornelius’s devotion is not a one-time emotion;
it shows itself in the rhythm of habitual prayer and almsgiving. His prayers
are not a private list of desires, but prayers that rise before God as a
memorial; his almsgiving is not self-display, but a channel of grace that
sustains neighbors. Pastor David Jang points out that although Cornelius was a
Gentile—someone who could not fully enter the temple space due to his social
and religious status—he nevertheless embodied in life the very core toward
which the Law aims. This aligns with Jang’s emphasis that the Law is not merely
a tool for drawing boundary lines, but a mirror that invites human beings
toward holiness and love.
Yet the tension of Acts 10
is not created by Cornelius’s devotion alone. Even more decisive is Peter’s
vision. While praying, Peter sees something like a great sheet descending from
heaven, containing unclean animals, and hears a command: “Kill and eat.” In
Jewish tradition, unclean foods were not simply a matter of diet; they were a
marker of identity and a symbol guarding the boundaries of the community.
Peter’s refusal looks like faithfulness to the Law, but it also reveals a
religious habit of keeping distance from the other. Then comes the word: “What
God has made clean, you must not call common.” Pastor David Jang reads this
declaration as a theological sentence of mission. The Gospel topples human-made
charts of purity and contamination, opening the order of a new creation
declared by God. And the fact that the vision is repeated three times shows
that the Spirit’s guidance often presses the same truth into our hearts again
and again until stubbornness and fear collapse and the truth seeps into the deepest
layers of the soul.
At this point, Pastor
David Jang brings the relationship between Law and Gospel to the center of the
text. The Law shuts human beings up under sin so that they relinquish
self-righteousness; the Gospel builds grace upon that surrender. The question
Paul raises in Romans 2 and 3—can Gentiles be saved if they do not know the
Law?—is resolved in Acts 10 through a concrete event. Cornelius stood outside
the center of the circumcision controversy, yet his God-fearing life and deeds
of righteousness were remembered. Pastor David Jang explains this as a sign of
the circumcision of the heart, and he argues that the inside-and-outside world
once organized by institutional markers under the Law is rearranged within the
Gospel. As Galatians declares, in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor
uncircumcision counts for anything—this is not permission for disorder, but the
restoration of order: the criterion of salvation is not a human marker but the
cross and resurrection of Christ.
That said, Pastor David
Jang does not discard the value of the Law. Following the logic of Romans 3:31,
he stresses that faith does not overthrow the Law; rather, it establishes the
Law. The heart of the Law is an ethical substance—holiness and love, reverence
before God and responsibility toward one’s neighbor—and the Gospel makes that
substance possible by the power of the new covenant. Ritual devices such as
food regulations and festival observances may complete their historical role,
but the orientation toward holiness does not disappear. Here Pastor David Jang
warns against two extremes into which the modern church easily falls: a
legalistic exclusivism and a boundaryless permissiveness. The Gospel erases
walls, but it has never erased holiness; grace is not the destruction of norms
but an ethical creation that arises from the renewal of the heart.
The newness Acts 10
displays is not merely an ideological shift; it becomes concrete in real
meeting and table fellowship. Peter receives Cornelius’s messengers, travels
down to Caesarea, and enters a Gentile’s house. Considering that the sphere
where the boundary between Jew and Gentile operated most tightly was the act of
eating together, this scene is more than a theological debate—it is a shock.
Pastor David Jang focuses on Peter’s posture when he says, “I too am a man.”
Mission is not charity descending from above to below; it begins where we honor
the other as the same human being. The proclamation of the Gospel has
persuasive force not only because of logical precision, but because the Gospel
reveals its truth in the way it treats people as people. Therefore, he argues,
we should read mission not only as the demolition of fences but as the
reconstruction of relationships. A wall does not simply fall and end; on the
ground where it falls, a new table and a new community must be built.
Then comes the experience
of the Holy Spirit. As Peter proclaims the death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ and the grace of forgiveness of sins, the Spirit falls upon the
Gentiles. Speaking in tongues and magnifying God appears, on the surface, as a
supernatural event; Pastor David Jang interprets its essence as God’s seal on
the universality of salvation. The Spirit is not the church’s gatekeeper but
the subject who fulfills God’s mission, coming in a way that surpasses human
qualification tests. The circumcised believers were astonished because they had
unconsciously assumed that the Spirit’s work belonged inside their fence. The
shock of Acts 10 is not merely the information that Gentiles also receive the
Spirit, but the event in which the declaration—God has already made them
clean—is confirmed in lived reality. That is why Peter says, “Can anyone
withhold water for baptizing these people?” This confession—humans cannot
withhold it—acknowledges with humility that the initiative of mission belongs
not to the church but to God.
When Pastor David Jang
applies this passage to the church today, he does not reduce the Spirit’s
guidance to abstract inspiration or private experience. Rather, the Spirit’s
guidance is the power that pushes the church into a wider world, the ability
that dismantles our prejudices so we can approach unfamiliar others. Thus, as
Cornelius’s prayers and alms rose before God as a memorial, he emphasizes that
the starting point of mission is not a grand project but everyday devotion and
love for one’s neighbor. Prayer is a key that opens heaven; almsgiving is a
hand that touches the pain of the earth. If prayer exists without almsgiving,
faith tilts toward self-absorbed mysticism; if almsgiving exists without
prayer, faith flattens into philanthropy without transcendence. The two pillars
Cornelius held are a balance the church must never lose in any age.
Pastor David Jang also
interprets the crossing of time between Peter and Cornelius as God’s timing.
Human planning gathers people; the Spirit connects people. Cornelius sees a
vision at three in the afternoon; Peter, around noon, receives his vision while
praying—and the two events interlock with precision to create a meeting. This
providential linkage calls for trust that mission is not merely the product of
strategy, but that God opens a way toward souls He has already prepared. Pastor
David Jang warns that when this trust grows thin, the church may become
obsessed with numbers and results and fall into the error of objectifying the
other. By contrast, a church that trusts the Spirit’s guidance views the other
not as a statistic but as a soul, turning encounters from domination into a
relationship of service.
The impact of Acts 10 does
not end within that chapter. Historically, the Jerusalem Council is often
mentioned as the communal fruit of this transition. In the council commonly
dated around A.D. 49–50, the early church addressed whether circumcision should
be imposed upon Gentile believers, and it ultimately moved toward not requiring
circumcision as an essential condition. Pastor David Jang helps readers
understand this in a flow: the Cornelius event did not remain a private
inspiration but led into the church’s public discernment. The Spirit’s work
always takes root in history through communal discernment. When visions and
tongues do not stop at personal excitement but flow into renewing the church’s
structure, culture, tradition, and norms, the experience of the Spirit becomes,
at last, the concrete reality of mission.
At this point, Pastor
David Jang does not use the language of world mission as mere geographic
expansion. He argues that the 21st-century church, living amid globalization,
must reflect on the shadow of imperialistic mission in the past and seek a new
missionary paradigm. If the term “mission field” carries the risk of
objectifying the other, the church must return to the perspective of Missio
Dei—God’s mission. God goes first; the church follows as a coworker who walks
in His footsteps. Connecting this perspective to Acts 10, Pastor David Jang
diagnoses that the moment the church remains in its own safety zone, mission
can be distorted into an expansion of institutional power, and the Gospel can
be reduced to a tool of cultural superiority. Conversely, when the church
crosses another’s threshold as Peter entered Cornelius’s house, the Gospel
recovers its original radiance.
At the same time, he
repeatedly insists that we must not blur the core of the Gospel. When cultural
adaptation mutates into relativizing the Gospel, mission loses its identity. In
Acts 10, Peter’s sermon is clear: the cross of Jesus Christ, the resurrection,
and the grace of forgiveness of sins given to those who believe in His name are
central. Pastor David Jang cautions that when this core wavers, the church may
not cross walls but instead borrow the language outside the wall and empty its
own message. Therefore, he emphasizes a missionary principle: hold the essence
firmly, and renew the methods with humility. This is the same when we
understand the relation between Law and Gospel. The essence is salvation
accomplished by God; the method is the way the Spirit opens within each era and
culture.
Today’s world builds
psychological borders that are often stronger than physical ones. Race and
culture, economic power and education, generation and gender, ideology and
taste divide people—and that fragmentation seeps into religious communities as
well. Pastor David Jang reminds us that the “Gentile” in Acts 10 is not only
the non-Jew in antiquity, but can become the name of every “other” the church
finds unfamiliar today. The Gentile is not merely someone outside us; it is the
people we cannot define by our familiar norms, the world we cannot hold with
our comfortable language. The moment the church calls them “common,” we deny
God’s act of making clean. Thus he calls the church to spiritual
self-examination of its own walls. Often, the walls we build—under the pretext
of protecting doctrine or preserving tradition—are in fact strengthened by fear
and superiority. The Spirit speaks, at times, in ways that shake our religious
common sense in order to tear those walls down.
Here Pastor David Jang
concretizes mission as a table community. Who is allowed to sit at the church’s
table? Who can participate in the community’s decisions? Who stands at the
center of the story? These are not mere matters of administration; they are the
politics of the Gospel. The record that Peter stayed and shared fellowship in
Cornelius’s house shows that mission is not a one-time visit but the sharing of
time lived together. Pastor David Jang urges the modern church to move beyond
short-term events and program-centered evangelism toward relational care and
sustained discipleship. The moment we count a soul as a number, we repeat the
error of seeing Cornelius only as “a centurion,” a label. But Cornelius was the
head of a household and a sincere seeker who gathered relatives and close
friends to hear the Word. The language that reaches such a seeker is not the
language of statistics but the language of personal encounter.
When prayers and
almsgiving go together, mission embraces both heaven and earth. The union of
devotion and charity in Cornelius suggests that the Gospel’s entry can be
prepared by spiritual soil already opened. The world reads the church’s posture
before it reads the church’s words. If the church ignores suffering neighbors
and then speaks the Gospel, that speech becomes a hollow echo. But when the
church creates a space of trust through acts of love, the Gospel becomes not a
logic forced in, but a light that naturally permeates. Pastor David Jang
captures this light with the word grace. Grace is not cheap tolerance; it is
God’s new reality given at the cost of the cross—and that reality demands both
love and holiness.
The Spirit’s guidance also
frees the church from being ruled by fear of failure. Peter too had fear.
Entering a Gentile’s house meant choosing a path that could invite religious
criticism. Indeed, in Acts 11 he is questioned and criticized by the Jerusalem
church. Yet Peter does not defend his choice as a private adventure; he bears
witness to what God has done, and through that testimony gains the community’s
understanding. Pastor David Jang argues that mission must be bound to communal
responsibility. “The Spirit told me” must not become a slogan of evasion, but a
humble testimony that persuades the community and invites shared discernment.
Then the experience of the Spirit becomes not a seed of division but a
foundation for unity.
Another theme Pastor David
Jang emphasizes is the universality of the Gospel’s language and the task of
translation. Peter’s sermon in Acts 10 begins with language shaped by Jewish
background, yet it moves quickly toward the declaration that the Gospel is open
to all people. He proclaims Jesus Christ as Lord of all, revealing Him as the
sovereign not only of the Jews’ Messiah hope but of the entire world. Pastor
David Jang says that today’s church bears the same task of translation. The
Gospel does not change, but the language by which we understand it differs
across cultures and generations. Therefore, world mission requires linguistic
and cultural-anthropological sensitivity and presupposes a posture of learning
that honors the other’s life. Just as Peter first visited Cornelius’s house,
listened to his story, and preached the Gospel within the context of his life,
so the church today must recover the humility to listen and learn first.
This principle applies
directly to mission in the digital age. Online spaces lower borders, yet they
also build new walls called algorithms. Even when the church engages in media
ministry, it must not confuse spread and views with success; it must treat depth
of relationship and truthfulness as its metrics. The mission Acts 10 displays
is not viral diffusion but visitation; not scanning but staying. We may use
technology and networks as tools, but if we do not forget that the essence of
mission is trust formed between persons and the Gospel of Jesus Christ
proclaimed upon that trust, then the church can carry the weight of the old
Gospel even in new media. The Spirit’s guidance does not make the church merely
faster, but more truthful; it does not simply spread more widely, but root more
deeply.
Another element easy to
miss in Acts 10 is that God does not work through only one person. Cornelius’s
vision, Peter’s vision, and the obedient messengers moving between them form a
single narrative. Pastor David Jang uses this to stress that mission is not
driven by the will of one charismatic leader; it is completed as ordinary acts
of obedience connect into one work. Cornelius’s obedience in sending his men,
Peter’s obedience in laying down suspicion and traveling with them, the
obedience of family and friends waiting for the Word, and the obedience of
praise as the Spirit falls—all join as a single stream. At that moment the
church learns it is not the protagonist, but a tool God uses. A tool does not
magnify itself; it magnifies the purpose. Mission is the same. When the church
seeks to enlarge its own name, mission becomes distorted; when the name of
Jesus is lifted high, mission becomes pure.
Pastor David Jang also
finds this purity in personal spirituality. He describes Cornelius’s devotion
as a kind of spiritual constitution, and because a constitution does not change
overnight, daily prayer and small acts of giving must accumulate. The dramatic
experience of the Spirit in Acts 10 is not lightning that suddenly fell from
nowhere, but something that occurred within the air of reverence long built up
in Cornelius’s house. Likewise, Peter’s vision came during prayer. Pastor David
Jang interprets this as evidence that mission is outward activity only after it
is inward training in devotion. When the church loses prayer, it loses
discernment; when it loses discernment, mission follows trends; when it follows
trends, it loses the center of the Gospel. Therefore, he urges the church to
become a community trained to be sensitive to the Spirit’s guidance through
prayer, the Word, and the practice of loving the neighbor.
In the end, Acts 10 and
Pastor David Jang’s reading of it ask us a simple question: whom are we calling
“common”? What walls are we building in the name of faith? While claiming to
believe in the God who hears Cornelius’s prayers, are we afraid to meet neighbors
like Cornelius? While speaking of world mission, are we stingy about welcoming
the other at a small table? Pastor David Jang finds the answer not in argument
but in obedience. “Do not call common what I have made clean” is a theological
sentence and, at the same time, an ethical command and an ecclesiological
principle. When the church obeys this word, it grows into a community that is
more inclusive and yet more holy. Inclusion is not the dismantling of standards
but the expansion of grace; holiness is not the exclusion of the other but the
purity of love.
In particular, within a
multicultural society, the Korean church can no longer define “mission fields”
only as distant countries. Applying Pastor David Jang’s message from Acts 10 to
today’s reality, we realize that Korean alleyways and campuses, workplaces and
online communities can already be Samaria and Caesarea. There, the most
convincing Gospel the church can show is not the posture of classifying people
by the yardstick of the Law, but the gaze that looks at people anew by the
grace of the Gospel. When this gaze takes root, prayer becomes intercession
that embraces neighbors rather than self-centered requests; almsgiving becomes
solidarity rather than condescension; and Gentile mission becomes not a duty
toward unfamiliar others, but the joy of participating in God’s heart.
Within this flow, Pastor
David Jang concludes his preaching on Acts 10 by insisting that the expansion
of mission is, ultimately, obedience to the Spirit’s guidance. He exhorts the
church not to settle into safe internal boundaries, but to persevere in a life
of prayer and giving that rises before God, and to respond to the Spirit’s
voice that shatters prejudice. The church does not exist for self-preservation.
The church is called to be the Spirit’s community that bears witness to Jesus
Christ. The meeting of Cornelius and Peter shows how concrete and actual that
calling is. And the reason that meeting was possible was not because one person
made a great decision, but because God had already prepared a path in
history—and on that path there were people who prayed and people who obeyed.
That expansion is the
expansion of God’s reign in human hearts through the Gospel. Therefore, reading
Acts 10 again is not recalling a past event; it is a calling to meet Cornelius
again and to experience Peter’s vision again here and now. We may think of
Gentiles as distant cultural others, yet in reality there are “Gentiles next to
us”—migrant workers, refugees, unbelieving family members, young adults outside
the church, wounded believers. To bring them the Gospel is not the task of
“fixing” them, but of recognizing and honoring the traces of God already at
work in them, and of sharing together the grace of Jesus Christ. The Spirit’s
guidance does not make the church’s language more aggressive; it makes it more
hospitable. Just as the Law exposes sin, our prejudices are exposed as well;
yet the Gospel does not end with condemnation—it leads us into repentance. In
this way, the expansion of mission is not the church making more people “our
side,” but the process of recognizing more neighbors as those whom God loves
and building, with them, a new community in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In that
process we acknowledge the self-centeredness and exclusivism revealed by the
Law, and we learn, by the freedom given in the Gospel, how to welcome one
another.
And this learning is what
Pastor David Jang repeatedly ties to concrete practice in his preaching on Acts
10: establishing an everyday rhythm so that devotion and almsgiving are not
separated; discerning the Spirit’s guidance through the Word and prayer; and
honestly facing the invisible walls of discrimination still remaining within us
today—walls like those that once divided Jews and Gentiles. Then the church no
longer consumes the word “expansion” as a rhetoric of growth, but understands
it as the direction in which grace expands.
In this process, we come
to redefine the experience of the Holy Spirit. The absence of tongues or
mystical experiences does not mean the Spirit is absent; and the presence of
mystical experiences does not automatically mean one is Spirit-filled. In Acts 10,
the experience of the Spirit was a sign so clear that the church could no
longer withhold baptism—and at the same time it was an ethical power that
enabled the community to receive Gentiles as brothers. The experience of the
Spirit the church must have today must likewise be revealed as the collapse of
relational walls, sitting at one another’s tables, magnifying God together, and
letting the proclamation of the Gospel become the language of daily life. Just
as the circumcision controversy once shook the essence of the church, the
church today is still shaken by the question: who is worthy to belong with us?
But Acts 10’s answer is concise: do not call common the one whom God has made
clean. Before that word, we pray again, we give again, and we step again toward
unfamiliar neighbors. The Gospel of Acts 10 that Pastor David Jang holds fast
continues, in this way, to open the path of world mission even today.
davidjang.org
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