Intro:
Last Sunday we began our look at the second section of the book of Acts. The first section, chapters 1-2, told the story of the ascension of Jesus and then the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, filling the believers with the power and indwelling presence of God, and now the next two chapters tell the story of the power of God at work through His people. I’m going to read all of chapter 3 to start, and then we’ll focus in on Peter’s sermon in verses 12-26.
Acts 3:1-26 (NLT):
Peter and John went to the Temple one afternoon to take part in the three o’clock prayer service. 2 As they approached the Temple, a man lame from birth was being carried in. Each day he was put beside the Temple gate, the one called the Beautiful Gate, so he could beg from the people going into the Temple. 3 When he saw Peter and John about to enter, he asked them for some money.
4 Peter and John looked at him intently, and Peter said, “Look at us!” 5 The lame man looked at them eagerly, expecting some money. 6 But Peter said, “I don’t have any silver or gold for you. But I’ll give you what I have. In the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, get up and walk!”
7 Then Peter took the lame man by the right hand and helped him up. And as he did, the man’s feet and ankles were instantly healed and strengthened. 8 He jumped up, stood on his feet, and began to walk! Then, walking, leaping, and praising God, he went into the Temple with them.
9 All the people saw him walking and heard him praising God. 10 When they realized he was the lame beggar they had seen so often at the Beautiful Gate, they were absolutely astounded! 11 They all rushed out in amazement to Solomon’s Colonnade, where the man was holding tightly to Peter and John.
12 Peter saw his opportunity and addressed the crowd. “People of Israel,” he said, “what is so surprising about this? And why stare at us as though we had made this man walk by our own power or godliness? 13 For it is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the God of all our ancestors—who has brought glory to his servant Jesus by doing this. This is the same Jesus whom you handed over and rejected before Pilate, despite Pilate’s decision to release him. 14 You rejected this holy, righteous one and instead demanded the release of a murderer. 15 You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. And we are witnesses of this fact!
16 “Through faith in the name of Jesus, this man was healed—and you know how crippled he was before. Faith in Jesus’ name has healed him before your very eyes.
17 “Friends, I realize that what you and your leaders did to Jesus was done in ignorance. 18 But God was fulfilling what all the prophets had foretold about the Messiah—that he must suffer these things. 19 Now repent of your sins and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped away. 20 Then times of refreshment will come from the presence of the Lord, and he will again send you Jesus, your appointed Messiah. 21 For he must remain in heaven until the time for the final restoration of all things, as God promised long ago through his holy prophets. 22 Moses said, ‘The Lord your God will raise up for you a Prophet like me from among your own people. Listen carefully to everything he tells you.’ 23 Then Moses said, ‘Anyone who will not listen to that Prophet will be completely cut off from God’s people.’
24 “Starting with Samuel, every prophet spoke about what is happening today. 25 You are the children of those prophets, and you are included in the covenant God promised to your ancestors. For God said to Abraham, ‘Through your descendants all the families on earth will be blessed.’ 26 When God raised up his servant, Jesus, he sent him first to you people of Israel, to bless you by turning each of you back from your sinful ways.”
The Miraculous Opportunity:
Last week we heard the story of the healing, and God was speaking to us about making changes in those areas of our lives where we are like the lame man, sitting outside begging for something that will just sort of keep us going (“silver and gold”) rather than believing that God can actually heal and restore us to full health (“stand up and walk”). I don’t think we really spent a lot of time imagining and understanding how transformed this man’s life really was by this healing… I mean, what would it be like to have never walked, but to have had to pull yourself around on the ground with your hands, to rely on others for so much, to always be at knee level to people, to be forced to sit outside a temple gate hoping that people’s generosity would be enough that you could eat that day. Life would be a constant, daily struggle – it probably is today, even in the day of electric wheelchairs and elevators and sidewalks that have easements to the roads and busses that kneel and buttons that open doors. etc. but 2000 years ago in Jerusalem, a man who had known all the hardship and struggle of life with none of that, was suddenly and miraculously healed in the Name of Jesus. What would his life be like from that moment on? His relationships… his ability to work… his capacity to care for himself with dignity, and even probably his ability to influence others because of all that God has done for him. Imagine that…
And imagine that also in your life today. One of the things that traps us in our places of emotional and spiritual and relational lameness is that we get to a point where we cannot really imagine life different. We get stuck in trying to cope. But imagine what it would be like to be free, to be healed, to have your life transformed like this man’s life was transformed, simply by the way God touched His life. Imagine that, desire that, long for it, believe it, and then act on it. Which leads to the next obvious question: how? What can you or I do about it?? Peter answers that in his sermon.
I love how Peter seizes the opportunity, and I love the irony in his question, “what is so surprising about this?” (vs. 12). It’s kind of funny to me – “ummm, Peter, that guy has never walked… now he is leaping and yelling and causing a major ruckus… this kind of thing doesn’t happen every day…”; but to Peter this is not surprising, because for Peter he knows this God, this Jesus, who can and does and loves to transform lives just like He just did. So for Peter, why should anyone be surprised that God does something fantastic that sets a lame man free from the root causes of his affliction – Peter believed that God could do it. Now, do you? Do you believe that God could do that still, and that God could even do it in your life?
It’s Not About Me:
Peter’s next question is really important, because it demonstrates how clear Peter is that this healing is not about him. There is potential for this to go in the opposite direction – for Peter to believe that he now has the power that Jesus had, and that he even had the responsibility to take over now (after all, Jesus said He would build His church on Peter!). He could have stepped into it, made it about him, but he didn’t – he pointed straight to God. This is really important, because as we see in the whole big picture of the story this healing miracle was not just for the lame man but for all the people, the entire nation of Israel, and we see in it a repetition once again of God’s message from the beginning of choosing His people: this is not about you. The blessings, the goodness, the miracles, they are about God’s love and they are about God’s people living these for others. That is most clear at the end, vs. 25, where God’s people are blessed so that all people can be blessed through them.
I think that one of the things that gets in the way of our healing is that we want it for ourselves, and not so that we can bless others with it. It becomes about us, not about how God can use it through us for others. I think that is the same thing that gets in the way of our ability to really minister in power to others as well, it becomes about us and our ability to do miracles and be significant and change others rather than about the depth of God’s love for them and how much God wants their lives to be different. I love how Peter refuses to get in the way, by pointing the crowd straight to Jesus: “it is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the God of all our ancestors—who has brought glory to his servant Jesus by doing this.” (vs. 13).
The Remedy:
The next couple verses simply connect the dots for the listeners – from the miracle, to God, to Jesus, to several Old Testament titles for God (and thus a very interesting early “Christology”, which we don’t have time to explore), and then to the necessity of faith. In it there is a strong condemnation – “you killed him!” and from there Peter turns to address the age-old question, “so what does this have to do with me?” Having just indicted them as murderers of the Holy Messiah, Peter once again delivers a message of hope like he did at Pentecost, softening the blow by recognizing that the crucifixion “was done in ignorance”, and that God was in the middle of it anyways (vs. 18). That verse deserves a brief pause: even in the midst of a heinous crime of murder of an innocent person who was fully God while also fully human, God was not standing helpless on the sidelines; God was not handcuffed; God was not looking away or sleeping or pre-occupied with something else. Even through sin, “God was fulfilling…”.
But what are we to do? This is what vs. 19-20 talk about, and I warn you ahead of time: there is nothing new here, which you haven’t already heard… “Now repent of your sins and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped away. 20 Then times of refreshment will come from the presence of the Lord, and he will again send you Jesus, your appointed Messiah.”
Turn away from sin; Turn to God. Repent and Return. Make a change. Stop the wrong things you are doing. Stop not doing the right things. This is Peter’s message. Sally Kennedy wrote a “little parable” that illustrates the point:
Once upon a time a man clad only in the dirtiest of rags lived in the streets. One day a person from the palace approached him. There was going to be a banquet at the palace, and people from the highways and byways were being invited. "Would he like to come?" The man was indeed interested, however, he could not attend dressed in rags. The palace representative assured him that his rags would he exchanged for some suitable finery.
All was in order. The men arrived at the palace and went directly to the King’s dressing chambers. Servants bundled the filthy rags and scrubbed the man clean. He was then allowed to choose robes from the King’s closets. Whatever he chose he could keep, so the man carefully examined the many garments and garbed himself in the finest silk and satin. He was ready for the banquet!
As they left the dressing quarters, the man grabbed his old rags. He insisted on taking the filthy bundle; he felt more secure holding on to it. The man, resplendent in his fine attire, joined the banquet and yet still clung to the dirty bundle. So distracted by clinging to his bag, the man never ate and he left the banquet hungry. The evening ended. Everyone was stuffed-everyone except the man clinging to his rag bundle.
(from http://www.sermonillustrator.org/illustrator/sermon13/rags_at_the_banquet.htm)
The Result:
The command is to repent, and then God takes over. Peter preaches two results of repentance: first “so that your sins may be wiped away”. Not so you can walk around with a bag full of filthy rages. I looked up the word Peter uses for “wiped away”, it means to obliterate, erase, wipe out, blot out. In other words, our sin is gone. We don’t talk enough about that – what it is like when our sins are wiped away. What it is really like when God forgives us. A big part of it is pictured in the second result of repentance which Peter preaches: “Then times of refreshment will come from the presence of the Lord.”
Hear those words, “times of refreshing will come”… They follow repentance, and are part of what happens when our sins are wiped away. Times of refreshing… It is like the change from riding your bike uphill, into the wind, to riding downhill with the wind at your back. It is like the change from having some huge backpack with more than a hundred pounds on your back walking through dense bush in 40 degree heat to stripping it all away and stepping into a cool shower. It is like the change from being trapped, chained, confined in darkness and silence, unable to move and barely able to breathe, to being free to run and jump in the sunshine. It is the change from depression to joy. Helplessness to power. Guilt to acceptance. Apathy to love. And it comes, Peter says, from repentance. From our decision to change direction, and live differently as we respond in faith to Jesus. Who wants to cling to filthy rags and miss out on the banquet?
I noticed a little difference when I was reading our passage in several different translations, which I think turned out to be significant. I read the NLT, which says “times of refreshment will come from the presence of the Lord”, while the NIV simply says “times of refreshing may come from the Lord”. So I dug a little, and discovered that there is another word not translated by the NIV, which the NLT includes as “presence”, and the word literally means “face”. And some pieces clicked for me – the refreshing that comes after repentance comes because then we can be face to face with God. We don’t have to hide, we don’t have stuff in the way, God’s face is there. I see delight, like a father ecstatic to see His kids. I see compassion, as He reaches to touch the bleeding wounds. I see purpose, as He longs to bring us in and sit us down and show us all He is doing in our world and how we can be part of it. I see laughter. Food that strengthens and brings health. I see sorrow as He sees others around us in pain that He wants to touch through us. And always, at the root of all of those, I see love.
When we repent, our sins are “wiped away” and we see God’s face, and are refreshed. And all this so we can re-engage: Peter’s words at the end bring us back to this spot: “You are the children of those prophets, and you are included in the covenant God promised to your ancestors. For God said to Abraham, ‘Through your descendants all the families on earth will be blessed.” It is not primarily for us.
Conclusion:
I conclude this morning with these simple words: repent. Let your sins be wiped away. Be refreshed by the face of God. Then go and let everyone around you see it and experience it also.
