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I want to invite you to take out your Bibles and turn to the second chapter of the book of Acts. Last week, we began an overview of the missionary work which we see in the book of Acts. We have entitled this series, Beyond Our Borders.
The goal that we have set our sights upon for this year, starting out in 2015, is to see us as a church go beyond our borders in every area. To go beyond our personal borders in individual evangelism.
To go beyond our congregational borders in community outreach. And to see us go beyond our national borders in world missions. And I pray, and have been praying and thinking about this series, I pray that you will catch the zeal that influenced the early church.
But I understand and know also that the zeal which influenced the early church was the power of the Holy Spirit. He is ultimately the one that will drive us towards missions. He is the one that will influence us towards outreach.
He is the one that will encourage us in evangelism. He is the one who will do it. We will simply be used of Him. So, what we're doing in this series is we're looking at a church, the first generation of Christians who were used by the Holy Spirit of God to change the world.
There's a phrase that's used later in the book of Acts, that the apostles had turned the world upside down with their message. And that's what we want to do. We want to make a change in this world. We want to see people come to Christ.
We want to see the gospel flourish where it has never flourished before, and in hearts where it has never flourished before. We want to see God be glorified in the proclamation of His message. So, we're going to read today, earlier in the service, and this won't be on the recording, but earlier in the service we read Peter's sermon from Acts chapter 2, which goes from verse 14 all the way down to verse 36.
Well, now for our message, we're going to read the response. How did the people that Peter preached to respond to what he had said in his message? Let's stand and read it. It's Acts 2, 37 -39. Now when they heard this, that is the sermon of Peter, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, brothers, what shall we do?
And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, for the promise is for you, and for your children, and for all who are far off, every one whom the Lord our God calls to Himself.
Father, I thank You for Your Word. I thank You that You have called me to preach Your Word. I pray that I would lay aside all pride, that I would come to You humbly, and that You would keep me from error in teaching.
I pray also, Lord, that You would set aside the pride of the congregation, help them to humbly receive the message, and Lord God, use this message to influence us all in our efforts of reaching the lost.
In Jesus' name we pray, Amen. I stated from the outset last week that I do not intend to give an exposition of Acts verse by verse, because my focus is to really key in on the passages which are going to influence us evangelistically, and in regard to missions and outreach.
But I want you to know how hard this is for me, to not preach verse by verse, because I'm jumping over so much to get to certain passages. This is really tough. So, if you'll humor me for a moment, I want to tell you how we got to where we are.
I'm not going to preach it all, but I'll at least give you an outline of why I'm stopping where I'm stopping. In verse 8 of chapter 1, Christ gives the church a mission and a promise. He says, I'm going to give you the Holy Spirit, and you're going to be my witnesses to the end of the earth.
You're going to go from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria to the end of the earth, and that's the promise and the mission. And then He ascends into heaven, and the angels appear, and they give a promise.
They say, this Jesus who was taking up out of your sight, He will return again. Don't stand here looking up at the sky, but get to work, and know that when He returns, that's it. So you need to get to work now, because you know not when He will return.
The disciples then went to the upper room, they devoted themselves to prayer, they devoted themselves to study, they devoted themselves to working through what was needed to be done. If you remember, Judas had showed himself a traitor.
Judas was now dead, and so the apostles had to choose a replacement for him. And so they went through the first church business meeting, and decided on who would replace him. And then, on Pentecost, which this year I hope to celebrate in this church.
Which we haven't celebrated in years. But it was a special, important day in the life of the church, because it was on that day that there was this miraculous change that overcame the apostles and everyone in that upper room.
The Holy Spirit came down, and He lit upon their heads His tongues of fire, and they began to, indwelt with the Holy Spirit, speak in languages that they had never learned. By the way, that is a temporary reversal of the curse of the Tower of Babel.
If you remember the Tower of Babel, everyone spoke the same language, but God came down and cursed the division. He cursed them to divide apart with languages. Now that curse is momentarily lifted. There's a momentary uplifting of that curse, and now everyone can understand everyone, and there's no more division in languages.
There's no more division between the people. They can speak, and it says, and everyone heard in his own language. A miracle has occurred. And it's not like the modern things that happen in a lot of churches that claim to speak in tongues.
We don't see this happening there. What we see is, we see ecstatic utterances. We don't see people talking in languages that they never learned, or talking that are discernible languages that make a change in people's life, because they're hearing the gospel in a language that they never spoke.
That's what we see here in Acts 2. And it's a picture. It's a picture from God to the world to say, here is the gospel which was once held among one people, one race, one language, will now go out to all peoples, all races, all languages.
It's a picture of the expanse of the gospel. It's no longer going to be bound only by the Jews, but now will be available to all. And the language miracle causes some to mock. Chapter 2 verses 12 and 13, it says, some people thought they were drunk, because here they are, they're just speaking in all these different languages, and they're doing this miraculous thing, and some people thought they were drunk, and other people thought, well, I don't know what to think.
It says, some of them pondered in their mind what in the world is going on. There was no indifference on that day. There was no one who just stood by not caring what was going on. Everyone had an opinion.
Some people thought they were drunk and mocked them. Some people didn't know what was going on, and they wondered about them. But everybody had an opinion. They wanted to know what was going on. And thus the apostle Peter, the great mouthpiece of the apostles, often time had a foot in that mouth, but he was the mouthpiece.
He stood up in front of all these people, and he gave an exposition of Scripture. Amazing, isn't it? That the first sermon preached under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, under the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, is not some five ways to make your marriage better, or ten ways to get a better job.
He got up and he read Scripture, and he expounded Scripture. And he says, this is what Joel talked about, and this is what David talked about. He was talking about Jesus, and he was talking about this time.
This is the fulfillment of that prophecy. It's right here in your face. This is what that Scripture said, and this is what it meant. He gave an explanation of Scripture, an exposition of Scripture. Now, verse 40 tells us that we don't have a complete manuscript.
If you look down at verse 40, it says, and with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them. So, if you read his sermon which we read earlier, you'll notice it's only about two and a half to three minutes long.
And I know some of you might be excited about a two and a half to three minute sermon, especially one that sees three thousand people get saved. That would be nice, wouldn't it? But we have to understand that his sermon went on much longer than what we have written.
This is simply a correlation of what he has said, giving us a snapshot view of his message. We don't have a record of the whole sermon, but we do have a record of what happened. It says in verse 41, So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.
Three thousand people come to faith on the very first day of the preaching of the Gospel at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit came and indwelt the preacher, and the preacher exposited the Word of God, and he taught the Word of God, and the people were changed.
So now, understanding the context, and that was my purpose in kind of giving you a very quick run through of what got us to here, I want to now look at verses 37 to 39, because I believe that these verses really speak to where we are and what we need to be thinking about as a congregation and as a church.
Because what we see in verses 37 to 39 is we see the response of the people that are hearing the sermon. And I've given you two points today, if you want to call them points. There are two major headings to the sermon.
Number one is we need to bring a heart-rending message to the world. And number two, to do that, we have to have a heart which is rent for the world. So that's the two-part of the message today. And I want to look first at number one.
We need to bring a heart-rending message to the world. Look at verse 37. When Peter concluded the men were convicted of their sins, and it says here in verse 37, it says, now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart.
Now, what is it that they heard? Well, they heard Peter's message. They heard his message. But what was the message about? I think verse 36 really kind of sums everything up. Because verse 36 is the last part of the sermon we see.
Verse 36 says, let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made Him, speaking of Jesus, both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified. Now, you got to think. You know, I was told in seminary, never point at people.
I was told that. It was one of the things. It says if you ever got one finger pointed out, there's three pointed back at you, so don't ever point your finger out. Use your thumb. And I always felt like that looked like Bill Clinton, so I don't want to use my thumb.
So I try to use all four, you know. But I was always told, don't point, because you don't want any one person in the congregation to think you're pointing directly at them. You know. But I got to imagine that there was a finger stuck out of Peter's hand.
You crucified Him. This Jesus whom you crucified. He was not letting them off the hook. Peter laid out the case for the Messiahship of Jesus based on the Old Testament. And now he has laid the death of the Messiah at their doorstep.
He's laid the responsibility of the death of the Lord of Glory on their responsibility. And one might argue, well, these people weren't personally responsible for the death of Jesus Christ. Well, we don't know for sure at what level they were responsible.
Could it be that some of them were in the same crowd that was shouting crucify Him, crucify Him? Certainly it's possible that some of them were in that crowd. But isn't it even more important for us to realize that when Peter pointed his finger and he said, you've crucified the Lord of Glory, that every one of us falls into that category?
Because the reality is, as the Bible says, that it was our sin that held Him there. Our sin was nailed to the tree. And so Christ went to the tree for all of us. So isn't this indictment that Peter is making to the people under his voice, doesn't this indictment affect us all?
Isn't this, as was written in the great hymn, it is well with my soul, my sin, oh the bliss of this glorious thought, my sin not in part, but in the whole, is nailed to the cross. Remember that? And I bear it no more.
You know, we know that song, we sing that song, and that's what we know. It was my sin that held Him there. It was my sin that was nailed to the cross. So in that sense, this finger of Peter's could be pointed at any one of us.
But there is also a third reason why Peter could very confidently point his finger at this group. Not only could it be that some of them were shouting crucify Him, not only could it be that, in a sense, all of us are guilty for putting on the cross, but it's also true that he's speaking specifically to the Jewish nation at this point.
He says, let all the house of Israel therefore know. He's talking to them specifically. His listeners are Jewish listeners. And it was the Jews who had rejected the Messiah that had been prophesied and promised to them.
It was the Jews who had demanded that He be placed on the cross. And when they heard of this sin, they were convinced of their guilt. They were stabbed in the heart, the text says. It says cut to the heart.
The word there means to pierce or to prick violently or to stab, to run through. They were stabbed in the heart by the guilt of their spiritual treason. God had sent His Son. God had sent the Messiah, the hoped for one, the one that they had waited on, the one that they knew was coming, the one that the Old Testament prophets told them were coming.
And they saw Him, they rejected Him, they killed Him, and now His death is laid at their feet. The Messiah has been murdered, and they are guilty. They knew it, and so they shuddered. They shuddered. They stood back.
What can we do? And that's what we see in verse 37. Their conviction led them to beg for their own salvation. Verse 37, And they said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, Brothers, what shall we do?
Okay, we've killed Him. We're guilty for killing Him. His blood is on our heads. What can we do? We see a similar reaction from the jailer in Acts 16, and we'll get there eventually in this series, when Paul and Silas are in the jail, and there's the earthquake, and the jailer comes in, and he's going to commit suicide.
And they come out, and they say, No, we have an escape. Don't kill yourself. And he looks at them in the face, and he says, What do I do to be saved? John MacArthur says, If conversion is to be genuine, it is always the offspring of conviction.
If somebody is truly converted, it's because they've been convicted first. They understand who they are. They understand their need for Christ. They understand their desperate condition outside of Him.
And they cry out, What must I do? People ask me, Do you have an altar call at your church? And not to get in a semantical argument, there is no altar in this church. So we don't have an altar call first.
An altar is a place where sacrifices are performed. And since we don't do sacrifices anymore, no. So I'll get into a semantic argument later. We'll talk about a chancel versus a stage and all that. We won't talk about that.
But what they mean is, Do we have this moment in our service where we call people up to the front to pray Jesus into their heart? People say, Do you have an altar call at the end of your sermon? And the answer is, I don't think we do, not in the sense that most churches would think of.
Because most churches think of an altar call is a time when you dim the lights. And you have the piano played just so. And you play 150 verses of Just As I Am. And you force somebody forward because we've got to get to lunch at some point.
Somebody better rededicate this morning because we've got to go to lunch. Here's the situation. I believe that God the Holy Spirit is the one who brings conviction on a heart. And I also believe this.
When a man is stabbed in his heart on the guilt of his own sin, he don't need me to beg him to run forward. And I'm not going to have to sit up here and beg and plead and coax. When God comes on a man's heart, He will come.
And that's what we see throughout Acts. The only altar calls, if you want to call it an altar call, the only altar calls in Acts are given by the hearers, not by the preachers. The hearers say, What do we do?
You've told us we're sinners. What now? Our job is to preach the truth. We let God be God. God brings conviction. God brings conversion. We bring the message. That's all. And that's what Peter does. Peter responds to them, not how you might think he ought to.
In verse 38, very controversial passage, and we'll talk about why in a minute. But in verse 38, he responds in a way that 99 of the preachers I know wouldn't dare say this if somebody asked them how to be saved.
Because if somebody says, How shall I be saved? Well, you've got to go through the ABC's of this. You've got to know this or that. You've got to pray Jesus into your heart. We don't see any of that here.
He doesn't say pray a prayer or sign a card. But what does he say? And Peter said to them, verse 38, Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Notice his focus on repentance. So many people, so many preachers, have given up preaching on repentance. I read a few this week. I was just trying to see what the mindset is among modern preachers. One Christian writer said this.
He says, I quote, I think the time we are living in now is a bit different than in the times of Paul. I am thinking that those things were important in establishing the church then. I think with each generation and each culture you use different tools to effectively, which is the key word, reach people for Christ and I am for anything that works.
End quote. Let me tell you something folks. We are not taught, we are not commanded to preach what works. We are commanded to preach the truth. We are commanded to preach the gospel. And this guy is saying, well, if repentance don't work, this guy ain't doing it.
I will preach something else. Because that might work. That is garbage thinking. Men like John MacArthur are called heretics. Ray Comfort is called a heretic. Why? Because he preaches repentance. Over and over and over and over you look at these guys, you look at websites that say, John MacArthur is a heretic.
Ray Comfort is a heretic. R .C. Sproul is a heretic. And Keith Vosky would be running that list. Not because I am like those men in the way that they are great men of God, but in the same way that we all preach the same gospel of repentance.
We would all be heretics because we are preaching repentance. Peter preached repentance. I have always heard this funny thing. Jesus could have got, most modern preachers could get saved the people that Jesus couldn't.
Let me explain. When that little man ran up to Jesus and he said, good teacher, what must I do to be saved? Jesus said, go sell everything, follow me. Most modern preachers would say, repeat after me, I believe.
You know, they would have started the sinner's prayer right there. Boom, boom, and he would have walked away just as lost as when he came. We don't preach repentance. We don't preach change. We don't preach a God, life changing gospel.
And we wonder why the church looks like the world. Because it is filled with worldly people that haven't been changed by the gospel. Peter says, repent if you want to come to Christ, repent. It is a precious thing that he preaches repentance.
Repentance towards God is always necessary in preaching the gospel. Those who do not preach repentance are not preaching the gospel. They might be preaching something, they are not preaching the gospel.
Now, I want to make a point, and I don't want to spend a ton of time on this. I would be happy to write you an essay on why this is the way it is. But there are a lot of people who get confused about the fact that he adds the phrase, and be baptized.
Because some people have taken that and used that to believe and to teach that baptism is an efficacious act in the process of being saved. That baptism causes the forgiveness of sins. That baptism causes regeneration.
And might I just say, to make it very simple, that teaching is not correct and it's not a right reading what Peter is saying here. We know that baptism is not an act which brings salvation, because we all know people who have been baptized that ain't saved.
I mean, just by experience alone, that's simple enough. But I'll add to that, we also know that baptism is not a work which causes salvation, because the Bible is so adamant that no one is saved by works.
Isn't that simple enough? But baptism, and here is the part that I would be happy to write you an essay on if you need. Baptism is linked to our salvation in that it is the first act of obedience that we undergo in our relationship with Christ.
And thus it is natural that Peter would proclaim, repent, and be baptized. I want to read to you from two confessions of faith, because certainly they are more articulate than I am. The London Baptist Confession of 1689 says this, Baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament ordained by Jesus Christ to be to the person who is baptized a sign of his fellowship with Christ in his death and resurrection, of his being engrafted into Christ, of remission of sins, and of that person's giving up of himself to God through Jesus Christ to live and walk in the newness of life.
End quote. And what is the key word? It is a sign of all these things. That's what it is. Now, I also want to look at the Westminster Confession. Now I realize we aren't Presbyterians, but the Westminster Confession has a lot of good things to say.
And on this, I think this is a precious thing that the Westminster divines have stated. In the Westminster Confession it says there is, I want to quote, there is in every sacrament, we would call it an ordinance, I don't have a problem with the language of sacrament, but that's what they call sacraments, we call ordinances, there is in every sacrament a spiritual relation or sacramental union between the sign and the thing signified.
Whence it comes to pass that the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other. Basically, and I have taught this in Dads and Dudes, the sign is never separated from that which it signifies.
The water signifies our having been washed and cleansed and the new birth having taken place. And the Bible never separates the sign from that which it signifies. This is why Jesus can hold up bread and say, this is my body and we know it's not His physical body.
But He doesn't separate the sign from that which it signifies. That's the point. Now I want to add one other thought. Another thing that's very important in regard to this. You have to again consider the audience that Peter is speaking to.
Peter is preaching to Jews in Jerusalem on Pentecost. And to them, to accept baptism is to accept familial and social ostracism. Charles Ryrie said this. I figured Richard liked me quoting old Ryrie. Didn't you go to school with, wasn't he one of your teachers?
Yeah. Charles Ryrie said this. Even today, for a Jew, it is not his profession of Christianity nor his attendance at Christian services nor his acceptance of the New Testament but his submission to water baptism that definitely and finally excludes him from the Jewish community and marks him off as a Christian.
So what is Peter doing to his Jewish audience? Repent and be baptized. Repent and do the one thing that's the most difficult. Count the cost right now. We don't count the cost. We don't have any cost in following Christ.
We look for the programs. We look for the comfort. We get mad if the church is 72 degrees and not 73. Yeah. These people were being told by Peter, give up everything and follow Christ. Wash away your old life and follow after Jesus.
What a command! What a call! This is the same type of call that Jesus gave to that young man who came and said, what must I do? Jesus said, go sell everything and come and follow me. Why? Because that's the thing that's holding you back.
Peter is saying, here, be baptized for the forgiveness of sins because this is what's going to hold you back. If you can't do this, you won't do anything. Peter does not preach cheap grace or easy believism.
He preaches repentance and obedience, two things that have lost their way in the modern church. To teach people that they need to repent and teach people that they need to be obedient is foreign in the modern church.
Obedience is lackable. And he ties it all back to Jesus. Jesus, repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. You know, Jewish people had all kinds of baptism rituals. They had all kinds of cleansing rituals.
So he's tying it to Christ. He's saying, you're going to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Now we know that you're actually baptized in the triune name, in the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit.
That's Matthew 28. We know that's how you're baptized. But the point that Peter is making is that the name of Jesus Christ is why you're going under this water. You are identifying with Christ. You are separating from the world and you're identifying with Christ.
What a thing to say. He didn't give him the ABCs. He didn't say repeat this prayer. He said be obedient and repent. What a different message it is than what often goes out today. Peter did not hold back his message of repentance and obedience, and neither can we.
And that's why I say, what do we need to do? We're the church. We're supposed to be going out into the world. What do we need to be bringing the world? We need to be bringing the world a heart-rending message.
And let me tell you something folks, most of what is going out from the pulpits today is not a heart-rending message. It's a message of comfort. It's a message of prosperity. It's a message of happiness.
It's a message of joy. It's not a message that causes people to say, what must I do? Think about Jonathan Edwards when he preached Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. And he didn't preach like me. He just stood there and read it.
He didn't preach with all this noise that I make. He preached in the monotone reading. And people literally were digging their hands into the pews because they said they felt like the earth was going to open up and swallow them whole because he was preaching to them about hell and God's justice.
And it was what sparked the flame that was the Great Awakening. We need to bring that message to the world. We need to bring a heart-rending message to the world. That's our responsibility. We're not responsible for the results, but we are responsible for the going and the giving of the message.
Now part two, and this is a lot shorter than part one. Praise the Lord. Part two is bringing it all together. So we see we need to bring a heart-rending message to the world. That's what Peter did. That's what the apostles did.
But the first thing we have to do though is we must first possess a heart which is rent for the world. Before we can think about going out and bringing this message to the world, we must first have a heart which is rent for the world.
Why is it that the apostles were empowered to preach on the day of Pentecost, to go out into all the world? And why is it that we see all through the book of Acts this expansion to the whole world? Because God has a heart which is intent on reaching His elect people in every tribe, tongue, and nation.
And if God has a passion for that, then we need to have a passion for that. That was the Nokia Amen. There it goes again. If God has a passion for reaching His elect people from every tribe and every tongue and every nation, we need to have the same passion.
But passion comes from a sense of urgency. And we lack passion because we lack urgency. This past week, we watched in horror as another plane went missing. We know it happened last year. We saw it happen again.
But this time it was different because they relatively quickly found the wreckage and they got an idea of what had happened. And we mourned as we watched television, we watched people knowing that their loved one's dead.
And I want to ask you this. I thought about this this week and I really just... I want you to think in your mind. And I'm asking you to imagine something. Imagine that you could go back a week ago and you knew that was going to happen.
You had all the knowledge of a week's worth of information and you knew what was going to happen. And you were given an audience with that group. You were given an opportunity to speak to the people who were going to get on that plane.
What would you do? I'm serious. What would you do? You know that plane is going to go down and you know that every person on board, every stewardess, every pilot, every mother, father, child that's on that plane is going to die in a watery grave.
And you have the opportunity to talk to them. You have a moment that God gives you for whatever reason. This is all, again, it's all imaginary, but I'm trying to paint a picture in your mind. You're there.
What would you do? Would you not beg them not to get on the plane? Would you not beg them? And you say, well, they'd think I was nuts. Would you care at that moment if they thought you were crazy? Would you care at that moment if they thought you were nuts?
No, because if you could get just one of them not to get on the plane, you'd know it was worth it. And I hope you can see the connection. I don't think that that's a hard analogy. Because here's the analogy, folks.
If you lost it, here's the analogy. Every one of you knows the gospel. You have sat here under the preaching of it long enough. You know the truth of the gospel. You know the message. And you walk by and you see people and you have people in your families, people that you work with, people that you spend time with, that you know are going to hell.
They're on the plane destined for the ocean's bottom. And you have the words of life. You have the message. And you say, well, they won't believe me. Despise the fear of rejection, Ray Comfort says. Despise the fear of rejection, because it reveals that we're more concerned about ourselves than the reality that people are going to hell.
Despise the fear of rejection. There are two reasons why we don't have urgency about the lost. There are two reasons why we don't have urgency. Number one, we don't think people are in as much danger as they are.
We don't really believe people are going to hell. If we did, it would change us. It would. It would absolutely change us. And the second reason is we don't believe our message is really going to change them.
If we just had a glimpse of the truth of those two things, that people are going to hell and that this message can change their hearts, lives, and their direction, and if we really believed that, it would change everything.
In Luke 16, Jesus tells the story of a man who went to hell. You all remember. He says, I want a little water for my tongue. You remember. What was his request from hell? Can somebody go and tell my family?
Can somebody go? Most of us say we believe the gospel. But do we believe it to the point of a broken heart? And do we see those without it and weep for their predicament? Only then, only when we weep, only when our hearts are broken for them, will we fulfill the mission that God has given to us.
Let's pray. Father, Yours and Yours alone is the ability to change hearts. And Yours and Yours alone is the ability to change directions and to rend hearts and open them wide and stab them to the core.
I pray, O Lord, that the message of the morning has gone out to the hearts of Your people, that they have heard it and that they have been convinced of the necessity and urgency of preaching the gospel, still believing, Lord, that You are God and that You will save in accordance with Your sovereign will, but yet we are still responsible to preach the gospel to every creature.
God, may it be that we don't shirk that. May it be that we don't relent from that, that we don't hold back from that, but that we see ourselves in the same way as that first century church was, that we have a message that can rend hearts.
May it first rend ours. In Jesus' name, amen. Stand with us and sing. And if you have a need for prayer, and even if it's just prayer to be a better witness, come, let's pray.