God Is No Respecter Of Persons

The word was faithfulness.

She said it the way her mother says it, which is the way it is said where she is from, and it came out into the middle of a circle of nine people with their eyes closed. And a woman opposite opened hers and said, sorry?

So she said it again.

And the woman said, sorry, once more, love? And a man at the end of the row leaned forward and said, kindly, helpfully, wanting only to move things along: faithfulness. She means faithfulness. And there was a soft ah around the circle, and somebody said amen, and the praying carried on to the next person, and the next person prayed for eight minutes about a job interview.

She was twenty-three that night. She is fifty-one now. She has not prayed out loud in a room since.

Nothing cruel happened. That is the part she has never been able to explain to anybody, because there is no story in it. Nobody was rude. A man helped. If you wrote it down it would look like nothing at all, and that is precisely why it has lasted twenty-eight years, because there is no incident to point at and therefore nothing to put down.

You know that circle. And you know the arithmetic you have been doing ever since in every religious room you enter: the sentence you decided not to say, the joke you understood four seconds late, the reference everybody nodded at, the third of it you follow and the two thirds you smile through. You are not slow. You are running a translation service in your own head while everybody else is just sitting there listening.

The sentence Peter never got to finish

There is a house in Acts 10 that Peter had been raised his whole life never to walk into.

It belongs to a Roman officer, a foreigner, a man of the occupying army, a household with the wrong food in the pantry and the wrong customs at the door. And God has to give Peter the same vision three times before he will go, and even after three times he goes puzzled, and when he arrives he says out loud that this is not something a man like him does.

Then he stands in the middle of that front room, looks around at a house full of people who are wrong in every category he has ever been taught to measure by, and says this.

Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.Acts 10:34-35

The phrase behind respecter of persons is a blunt one. It means a face-taker, somebody who receives you on the basis of what shows, and decides accordingly. Peter is saying that God does not take the face. Not the accent, not the origin, not the passport, not the manner, not the vocabulary, not the speed at which you follow a room.

But do not stop on the negative, because Peter does not. He names the actual ground in the next breath: in every nation, the one who fears Him and works righteousness is accepted with Him. That is the whole list. Fear of God and righteousness lived out. In every nation, which means the nation was expected to still be there.

You are accepted on the exact ground God names for Himself, and your accent is not one of the criteria. Acts 10:35 says in every nation, in writing, with nothing underneath it about pronunciation, and the Holy Spirit fell on that whole house before Peter had even finished the sermon.

That last detail deserves a moment. He never got to the end. The Spirit came down partway through, on a room full of people who had not adjusted a single thing about themselves, and the men who came with Peter stood there astonished, because the evidence had arrived before the paperwork did.

The room is what moves

Now hold that beside another day, earlier in the same book.

At Pentecost there were people in Jerusalem from everywhere, a list of regions half a paragraph long, and God had a choice about how to make Himself understood. He could have given every listener one language. It would have been tidy. Instead every man heard them speak in his own tongue, and the astonishment in the crowd was exactly that: how is it that we hear, every one of us, in the language we were born into.

Notice the direction that miracle travels. It goes toward the listener. Heaven closed the distance. Nobody in that crowd was asked to become a Galilean first.

And look where the whole thing lands at the far end of Scripture. The great multitude before the throne is out of every nation and kindred and people and tongue, and tongue is plural there and stays plural. The languages do not get folded up and put away when the story finishes. They arrive with their owners and they are still there at the end.

You are at home in a room you only ever half follow, and the belonging never ran through the language. Revelation 7:9 keeps the tongues plural right to the last page, and the Spirit of God has never asked anybody to borrow somebody else's mouth before He would fill them.

I want to be plain about what I am not saying. I am not saying you should get over it, and I am not offering you a technique for being less noticeable. Your accent is not an obstacle in this article. It is not a thing to be got past on the way to acceptance, and any teaching that quietly treats it that way has already lost the plot of Acts 10, which is a story about a room learning to open, not about a foreigner learning to blend.

You have never once been a guest here. Acts 10:34 rules the face-taking out in God's own name, and His Spirit came down on a household that changed nothing about itself, not the language, not the customs, not the cooking.