I think what we are going to immerse ourselves in today is the beginning of probably the most exciting part of human history, certainly for Christians. The Church of Jesus Christ is probably one of if not the longest lasting institutions in the history of mankind, and over the next few weeks we get to be a part of the beginning of it, and hopefully can find a way to bring that kind of excitement and power into the church today.
We heard the bulk of Peter’s sermon last week that set up what we will witness this week as he continues the first sermon of the church. We begin in verse 36 of chapter 2
where we really start to see the beginning of an new eternal era in human history. The statement Peter makes is a proclamation to Israel, God’s people, that indeed this man they crucified was the awaited Messiah and this has inaugurated the Messianic age, an age that will never end.
The clincher in verse 40 at the end of Peter’s sermon, are the words “save yourself from this crooked generation”. He is talking about the crooked religious generation that was going to be destroyed when Jerusalem fell. That whole worship system fell and never has been revived. And again that word generation can also be translated as age or time. All of that is referring to the misguided religious worship system that was about to be destroyed forever. And if you hadn’t pulled out of that and called on the name of Jesus, become part of the new covenant, and received the Holy Spirit, you would go down with Jerusalem.
And in fact the Christians prior to the attack on Jerusalem, saw the signs that Jesus gave in Matthew 24, and when the Romans came to destroy the city in 70 AD, the Christians had already fled Jerusalem to a place called Pella on the Jordan river. And so they did not get killed or captured by the Romans. While the Judaic sacrificial worship system was destroyed forever, Christianity survived and continued to thrive, eventually becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Why again is this important for us? Because in the book of Revelation there is a warning to all God’s people, and I think this refers to then and now. Revelation 18:4 says come out of her my people (referring to the system called the great prostitute or Babylon), do not take part in her sins or you will be punished with her.
The previous chapter in Revelation says that the people who belong to the world, whose names are not written in the book of life will be amazed by this Babylon and will go to destruction with her. The same warning the Jews in Jerusalem received, is the warning that continues for us. And the common denominator for those who got saved back then, and those who get saved now and in the future, is the presence of the Holy Spirit in us.
Back to verse 37 now we see exactly what true repentance should look like. They believed Peter’s words about their sin and that they were guilty of this great sin, they were cut to the heart, and they asked what shall we do because of it.
Now this whole section is a masterpiece of presenting the true Gospel. Peter has just convicted all these people of their sin, they want to be right with God, they believe what Peter has told them, and they simply ask what shall we do. When a person is in a true state of repentance they are willing to do anything it takes.
Now I don’t know if any of you have ever gotten to this point presenting the gospel with someone, but it is usually here where we have people agreeing with the Gospel and their need for Jesus, that we will get them to say a prayer. Now just hold onto that for a minute, and let’s look at what Peter says.
Very simply he says, repent of your sins, turn to God, and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. All of that is for the forgiveness of your sins, not just the baptism, and not just the repenting. I think it’s important to really look at what Peter is saying there.
The word repent in the Greek could be understood this way in that culture – reconsider or change your mind about Jesus. This is how we are to understand this. Yes it is a little about feeling bad about what you thought before. But primarily what it means is that initially when you killed Jesus, you thought he was just a man, just a teacher who was teaching falsely against our established religion.
But from verse 36 we see that Peter is telling them to change their mind about that and realize that He is Lord and Messiah. The whole speech prior to this is telling them that Jesus is God. So repentance is not just about changing your mind about your sinful behaviours, it is changing your mind about who you believe Jesus to be. Included in this is deciding to change your ways from what you think is right and wrong, to what God says is right and wrong. That’s a big deal, and it’s also why we need to keep repenting, not just the one time when come to believe.
Now the baptised part is also more than we tend to think. It does indeed refer to the ritual of getting dunked in the water, but it’s more than that, and that’s why Peter includes it in the formula for being saved. If we take the word literally it means to be washed by and immersed in Jesus Christ. It implies surrender, allowing somebody to put you to death and bring you back to life, to cleanse you from the sin that you carry.
So allow me to rephrase what Peter says in a way that might be said today with our common language and understanding. It would go something like this: Change your mind about who you think you are and who you think Jesus is, deciding that you need to change your ways and follow Him. And immerse yourself in Jesus and his words, and allow yourself to be cleansed by Him for the forgiveness of your sins.
Or in an even smaller nutshell, God is God, you are not, and you can only be saved by submitting to Him as your Saviour and Lord.
Now what is the outcome? Clearly your sins are forgiven and you get a gift, the Holy Spirit, who will empower you to live for Jesus and witness about Him. Peter says this promise is for everyone including the Gentiles, anyone who is called by God.
What does that mean “called”? Well it’s simply an invitation, and this invitation was through Jesus own words, and the preaching of the Gospel after he left. Everyone who hears these words about Jesus and the invitation he gives, has the opportunity to respond with repentance and baptism, and receive the Holy Spirit.
Now can a one time recited prayer accomplish all this? Yes and no. If I am just reciting that I repent and accept Jesus cleansing so I can stay out of hell, that is not in itself enough. First the heart has to be in it, you really have to believe that you are a sinner in need of salvation, that Jesus died and rose from the dead, and you have to get baptised at least in the sense of submitting to his cleansing and lordship. If those things are honestly done in that prayer, then I think its good, but there has to be follow up and I think this is where James words come in about faith always having works. If nothing changes after this prayer, you gotta wonder.
Those things we just talked about have to continue after that prayer is recited, or they’re meaningless. Has the person immersed themselves in Jesus, the Word, and the life of a church, which is Jesus body? Has the person changed those sinful behaviours that they were doing, or were they just saying sorry so that they could get Jesus’ pardon. You see what I’m getting at? That prayer means very little to me unless you see a continued and ongoing commitment to what they just prayed. The prayer is optional, but the other parts aren’t. Sometimes I think we have it backwards. They say the prayer and we go whew it’s done.
So it says Peter continued preaching about something for a long time, strongly urging people to save themselves from this evil generation. We already touched on that. And about 3000 people were baptized and added to the church that day, just from Peter’s Spirit powered words.
Then comes the verse that God showed me in my sleep one night soon after I became a believer, and I didn’t even know it was in the Bible. All the believers (not just the keeners) devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching, fellowship, eating together, and praying. Now that word devoted is very powerful and means to be constantly diligent toward something. The idea was that that was basically all they did. How did they pull that off? It tells us in the following verses 43-47…
There was so much awe that everyday people were being saved and began completely devoting their lives to this church thing. And don’t miss that in verse 47, they were praising God and were joyful. This sacrifice they were making made them feel great.
Now what happens next? Let’s watch…
They still went to the Temple to pray, and we see the power of the Holy Spirit as Peter heals this lame man. But it wasn’t just for the sake of healing the man. Remember the Spirit is all about glorifying and witnessing about Jesus. The point of this healing was to get people’s attention, so that Peter could launch into another Gospel presentation, and this time some of the religious leaders were in earshot.
Peter’s message is basically the same, but goes into a little more detail and again uses some Old Testament Scripture to back up his points. He is really pushing the fulfillment of prophecy angle, which all these people and especially the religious ones would know like the back of their hand.
You can see again verse in 24 like last week, that he’s explaining what’s going on using Scripture. None of this should be a surprise to you, he’s saying. And the only reason you are seeing these miracles now is because of Jesus. You saw him do them and you attributed it to demons, now you see us do it and you still won’t attribute it to Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and that is blaspheming the Spirit.
What you all did when you killed the author of life was out of ignorance, now you have a second chance if you repent and turn to God and believe in His Son. If you refuse now, you will be set for destruction and be completely cut off from God’s people.
Now some of you might be saying, is that really realistic for us to do what they did back then? And it’s obvious that it didn’t continue this way, certainly not after Jerusalem was destroyed. The believers were scattered all over the place.
I asked myself, could we today just us in this church, completely devote ourselves to learning the bible, having fellowship with each other, share all our meals and pray. If we all sold everything we had that we didn’t need could we pull this off and for how long?
The first thing that went through my mind is that there is probably not one of us that would want to. That says something right there, but realistically, even if we did that, we probably couldn’t do it for very long in this culture, certainly not without some supernatural intervention and a steady influx of new believers with lots of stuff to get rid of, which they had at the time.
So what application can we take from this if any? Let me offer a few things, these are not exhaustive and I would love to hear what other things you can think of, but here are a few to think about.
1. From the Bible we see that talking about Jesus publicly is the most effective way to get people saved. Now obviously the culture was more suited to open air preaching back then, and they didn’t have any written media or obviously radio or video.
If we aren’t out there publicly preaching, is there a way we could get the message to large numbers of people? Absolutely. Two things struck me off the bat, mass mailing and social media. How many people in our culture, even our town do you think really know the true gospel the way Peter preached it? How many know about who Jesus really is and what he has done?
They know about churches, from the outside anyway. And many people who maybe even attended church at some point in their lives very likely never heard or understood the Gospel message. It’s not preached every Sunday partly because we know there isn’t going to be many new people at church. That was true of me, I didn’t know after attending a church for almost five years.
They all have opinions about Christianity, but do they know the real gospel message. What if we came up with a really good and attractive message of this truth, witnessing about Jesus, had it printed up, and mailed it to 1000 people, 10,000, every household in Canada?
Companies spend millions of dollars each year advertising their products via mail outs. What we have to advertise is far greater than anything else anyone has received in the mail. But what do you do with most of those mail outs? Well you just need to look at the recycle bin at the post office to get an idea. Most of them get thrown away. So why do companies who are interested only in profit, continue this practice? The benefit must be worth the cost. Jesus told us to count the cost as well.
Response rates to direct mail are 3-5%. Estimates suggest that between 10 and 20 % of people who have never heard the true gospel, will respond positively. It would cost us about 1500 dollars to mail out 10,000 post cards and 95% of that could be wasted money. However, 30 – 100 of those people will look at it and respond, and be saved.
What would that be worth even if we didn’t know who and where these people were, and they never set foot in our church? Can you think of a ministry that we support to the tune overall of about 23,000 dollars each year, that has that kind of immediate impact? Let’s face it most of our missions money goes to help the missionaries live, but how many people are actually getting saved. I’m not saying stop doing that, its good, but statistically, if we spent that much on a mass mailing, potentially 450 - 1500 people could be saved each year. Just think about it.
2. When you look at your life, how much time do you spend devoted to meaningless things, that could be spent devoted to even one of the things the early believers devoted themselves to. If you did this, would it really affect your life at all negatively to give up that meaningless thing for a spiritual thing? I’m guessing the average person could find at least 4-6 more hours in a week to devote to these things, without missing a beat.
What if we all met once more in the week for a large meal together that we invited people from the community to, even once a month. And what if we had a little presentation or written material for people who came. What if we did this outside of our immediate community, what if we did it in a different town once a month, even Winnipeg or Brandon?
I want us to think about these things, and especially think about why we would not want to do those kind of things. What kinds of steps of faith are we willing to take to see people repent and come to Jesus as their Lord and Saviour. I admit when I think of it, my mind goes to, it would be more fun and relaxing for me to watch that baseball game on TV, I would rather play monopoly with my daughter. I would rather spend some money on something that benefited me. But that’s not an attitude I think any of us would be proud of. Do we care about people getting saved?
Next week we have an opportunity to put some legs to this and have people come to church with us. I want you to think about bringing someone to church. If they won’t come to the service, would you be willing to bring them to the potluck afterward even if it means picking them up after church? Anybody who comes will hear the Gospel, just read the first 31 verses of Chapter 4 and you will see what I will be talking about.
