Today's Bible reading is the 10th chapter of the Book of Acts. You can read it here at Bible Gateway: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+10&version=NASB

In chapter 9, we read where God had declared that the converted Saul would bear His name before the Gentiles. In today's chapter we find God teaching Peter that the powerful gospel message of Christ was for the Gentiles as well as the Jews. A lot of good teachers will utilize good visual aids in their teaching. The greatest Teacher of all would give Peter quite a visual aid to help him understand the lesson He was teaching him. The text tells us that Peter had gone up on the housetop to pray. While there he became hungry and while food preparations were underway he fell into a trance. This was clearly a God inspired trance. While in this trance Peter then sees the sky open up "and an object like a great sheet coming down, lowered by four corners to the ground, and there were in it all kinds of four footed animals and crawling creatures of the earth and birds of the air." He then head a voice from heaven telling him to get up, kill and eat. Peter responds as unto the Lord, telling the Lord that he cannot do so as he has "never eaten anything unholy or unclean". Although the "sheet" may have contained animals considered to be both clean and unclean, any clean animal would have been consider unclean as it had come into contact with those which were unclean. The voice he had first responded to then speaks to him again saying, "what God has cleansed, no longer consider unholy". While Peter had been having his vision, another man, Cornelius, a Roman centurion, was having a vision of his own. Simply put, his vision was for him to send men to Joppa, where Peter was, and to ask him to come to Cornelius's house and  share a message with him. When the men arrived, Peter had experienced his lesson via God's "visual aid" and did not hesitate to go with them to the home of Cornelius. After meeting and conversing with Cornelius, Peter is recorded as having said, "I most certainly understand now that God is not one to show partiality, but in every nation the man who fears Him and does what is right is welcome to Him." As a "gentile", I certainly rejoice in the truth taught in today's chapter. By God's grace and mercy, I have been counted, along with Cornelius, and though previously "excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world", God "broke down the barrier of the dividing wall" and made Jew and Gentile one in Christ.