Acts 5:17-42
you may be seated. Turn in your
copy of God’s word to the book of Acts. Our reading will be
Acts chapter five, verses 17 through 42. As you’re making
your way there, I want to point out something that I think maybe
some of you have noticed along the way, but I hope you’ll pick
up on this today. As we read through this passage,
Remember that the disciples, the apostles of Jesus have been
filled with the Holy Spirit. And they’ve been filled with
the Holy Spirit to preach the name of Jesus, to extend the
church from Jerusalem to Judea, to Samaria and to the ends of
the earth. And as they are filled with the Holy Spirit to do this,
we see in the account of the works of the apostles, that God
is blessing them. They heal people, people get
saved to everlasting life and other many wonderful things.
Now contrast that with the filling of those not serving God. Ananias
and Sapphira were filled with, well, they were filled with greed.
And as they were filled with greed, they stole from God, they
lied to God, they lied to the church. Today, we’re gonna see
that the Jewish authorities are, they’re filled with jealousy.
And I want you to see that contrast, filled with the Holy Spirit to
do good or filled with something contrary to the truth of God’s
word. and it does great harm even to
the church of Jesus Christ. Before we read God’s word, let’s
pray and ask for his help and blessing. Lord, we come to you
because we lack wisdom. Your word says that if we do
not have it to ask and to ask in faith and you will give generously. So now your word is before us. Let it impart wisdom to us so
that we will know how to live for you in this world for your
glory, our neighbor’s good. And to the praise of Jesus Christ,
this we ask in his name, amen. Hear the word of the living God
from verse 17 of chapter five of the book of Acts. But the
high priest rose up and all who were with him, that is the party
of the Sadducees, and filled with jealousy, they arrested
the apostles and put them in the public prison. But during
the night, an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors and brought
them out and said, go stand in the temple and speak to the people
all the words of this life. And when they heard this, they
entered the temple at daybreak and began to teach. Now when
the high priest came and those who were with him, they called
together the council and all the Senate of Israel. And they
sent to the prison to have them brought. But when the officers
came, they did not find them in the prison. So they returned
and reported, we found the prison securely locked and the guards
standing at the doors. But when we opened them, we found
no one inside. Now when the captain of the temple
and the chief priest heard these words, they were greatly perplexed
about them. wondering what this would come
to. And someone came and told them, look, the men whom you
put in prison are standing in the temple and teaching the people. Then the captain with the officers
went and brought them, but not by force, for they were afraid
of being stoned by the people. And when they had brought them,
they set them before the council and the high priest questioned
them saying, we strictly charged you not to teach in this name. Yet here you have filled Jerusalem
with your teaching and you intend to bring this man’s blood upon
us. But Peter and the apostles answered, we must obey God rather
than men. The God of our fathers raised
Jesus whom you killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him
in his right hand and as leader and savior to give repentance
to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnessing to
these things. And so is the Holy Spirit whom
God has given to those who obey him. When they heard this, they
were enraged and wanted to kill them. But a Pharisee in the council
named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law held in honor by all
the people, stood up and gave orders to put the men outside
for a little while. And he said to them, men of Israel,
take care what you are about to do with these men. For before
these days, Thutis rose up, claiming to be somebody and the number
of men, about 400 joined him. He was killed and all who followed
him were dispersed and came to nothing. After him, Judas the
Galilean rose up in the days of the census and drew away some
of the people after him. He too perished and all who followed
him were scattered. So in the present case, I tell
you, keep away from these men and let them alone. For if this
plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail. But if it
is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might
even be found opposing God. So they took his advice and when
they had called in the apostles, they beat them and charged them
not to speak in the name of Jesus and let them go. Then they left
the presence of the council rejoicing that they were counted worthy
to suffer dishonor for the name. And every day in the temple and
from house to house, they did not cease teaching and preaching
Jesus as the Christ. Amen. The word of our living
God for us. There’s a statement that must
be made and it is a true statement. And it is this God’s word cannot
be stopped. God’s word cannot be stopped.
It does not matter who makes the attempt. It does not matter
if it’s a politician, a King, a Prince, it does not matter
if it is Satan or his evil ones who work alongside him. God’s
word cannot be stopped. No opposition can put the brakes
on God’s powerful and supernatural program of redemption. Now that’s a rather bold statement
to make and we all know that it’s true, but don’t we wring
our hands. We read the headlines and we
say, what a dark world, what an evil society, what a rotting
culture, And then we say, oh, my children, my grandchildren,
do we even want to bring them into a world such as this? But God’s word cannot be stopped. No opposition of any sort can
put the brakes on God’s powerful and supernatural program of redemption. And brothers and sisters of Jesus
Christ, persecution, opposition can come and it can be the worst
of the worst, but God will still have his way. God’s redemption
will continue to unfold through the preaching and the proclamation
of Christ as Savior and as risen from the dead. God will have
his way and he will be glorified. We, his people who believe in
his promises, who stand on his word, should never give too much
to the headlines or too much to people and powers. Maybe you’ve read biographies
of Christians throughout the centuries who’ve bumped into
opposition. Persecution has come their way. And they’ve kept on for Christ.
even if it meant death and darkness and separation and all sorts
of hardships. I hope you are a reader of Christian
biography. It’s good to read our Bibles.
It’s good to know what is right and true and scriptural, but
it’s good to see other Christians who have kept the faith and maybe
have been through things that our generation and the generations
to come in our country will face sooner rather than later. These
biographies tell us how bad it can be, but how glorious is the
vindication of almighty God. Well, in our passage today, we
have a glorious account, I think, a humorous account in some ways
of how opposition and persecution comes to the early church and
how the prevailing power of almighty God helps these apostles overcome
what is in front of them. I want to think about the enemies
of God’s church in this passage, the enemies of God’s church.
And who are the enemies? Well, it’s the, the, the leaders,
it’s the leaders of the old Jewish regime, the old leftovers of,
of, of Israel. It’s, It’s the Sanhedrin. It’s the Pharisees. It’s the
whole council of Israel. And our passage tells us they
are jealous. They are jealous of the apostles
teaching. Remember what we have seen and
heard thus far in the book of Acts is Jesus ascended on high
and went to his throne of glory to receive a kingdom that he
had earned through the ministry of the cross. He first trained
his apostles. trained them for 40 days and
then he rose up into heaven and then 10 days in Pentecost, the
coming of the spirit, but he trained them to continue his
ministry on earth. And they’ve been filled full
of knowledge and what to say and what to preach and what to
do in order to build the church from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria
and to the ends of the earth all the way to our day as we
sit in a congregation of Jesus Christ. And these enemies are
jealous because the apostles are filling the city with the
teaching of life in Jesus Christ. They’re filling the hearts of
the people, the people they think are supposed to adhere to their
rules and their ways. They’re filling them with the
good news of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus. They
can relax and get rid of the rules and the ways of the Pharisees
and the old ways of the law and simply rest in Jesus alone for
their salvation. And these enemies of the church
are jealous. They’re losing their position.
Their pride is injured. Their power is ebbing away from
them. Their influence is moving from
their academic teaching and their pious teaching to the ministry
of these fishermen from Galilee. It’s an insult to them and they
are absolutely jealous and afraid they will lose their privileges.
Now, something to think about. If you’re ever mad about something
in the life of the church and so mad about it that your anger
builds up, you might question, are you on the right side of
issues? Now, I’m not saying we should be angry when doctrine
is under attack. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be
angry when we attack the creeds and the confessions and the historic
doctrines handed down to us from the scriptures and through the
history of the church. Those are things we should fight for,
right? We’re Protestants and what do Protestants do? We protest
when necessary. No, I’m saying when we get angry
about the color of the carpet. We get angry about the walls
getting painted blue instead of purple. We get angry because
the coffee is not our type. You know what I’m talking about,
church squabbles. These enemies of the church are
an example. If we’re angry, if we’re angry
at church, is our anger for the purity of the gospel? Well, these
enemies are jealous, they’re angry, they’re losing everything
in their mind. And so what do they do? Well,
they intimidate. They go right into the public
square of the temple, right into Solomon’s porch, and they have
these men arrested. Could you imagine if I was up
here shucking corn like I do, and somebody just came and grabbed
me and took me out of here. That’s kind of disrupted their
service. It disrupted their teaching.
No, nobody could hear the word of God. They, they, they publicly
and shamefully arrested them. And what does it say? They put
them in the public prison. Okay. This is the prison without
TV. Right? This is the prison with
a hard concrete bed. Uh, this is a prison where you’re
in there and yes, you’re in there with everybody. And when we say
everybody, it’s not the everybody you want to be with, right? This
isn’t Martha Stewart prison, right? Uh, where you get to keep
making your crafts and watch cable, uh, and come out richer,
right? This is not the white collar
crimes prison. They’re in the public prison.
They mean to do great harm to these apostles because of their
jealousy. and their hatred. And so they
intimidate them by doing this. They also, they also have this
desire to finish them off. I don’t know how long it’s been.
My, my, my understanding of the chronology of acts gets a little
fuzzy here, but it’s been not too long since Jesus was hanged
on a cross. It’s not been too long, maybe,
maybe months. It could be a year or two, but
my guess is it’s months. And the city of Jerusalem remembers
the darkness, the earthquakes. They remember the death and they
remember all of the horror, whether they believe in Jesus or not,
they remember all the horror of Calvary and the cross. And
these pious Jewish leaders, they’ve had enough of his disciples.
They’ve had enough of their popularity and their ministry and the blind
seeing and the lame walking and the whole city coming after them.
This is our time, our place, our ministry, our place of influence. And so they’re ready to finish
them off once and for all. And as they prepare to have them
brought in from the prison, they gather in their little Sanhedrin
semi-circle. And you can imagine they’ve got
on all their priestly garb, their hats and their staffs and their
whatever you call it. They’ve got their books, their
Roberts rules of order, their pious voices are coming out and
they are ready when Peter and John are brought in from the
prison to kill them. They’re ready to finish them
off. Now notice it’s in private. They’re not going to do this
publicly. They’re afraid of getting stoned. They’re afraid of an uprising
from the people. This is appearance management.
This is leadership paranoia. Have you ever seen that? When
people are so paranoid, they’ll lose what they’ve got. They’re just unglued. Well, these
are the enemies of God’s people. This is the source of the opposition
to the early church of Jesus Christ. Well, if we’re going
to look at the enemies, we might as well look at the victor. the
mighty one, God almighty. And in our passage, we catch
a glimpse of who God is. He’s the one who sent the son
to save the lost sheep of Israel. He’s the one who so loved the
world. He so loved these kind of men in all their pomp and
circumstance that he sent his son, Jesus, to save them from
themselves. And this son whom they killed,
he raised from the dead. He exalted him to his right hand.
And this son, because of his redeeming work of the cross,
his once for all sacrifice for sin, he can forgive those who
repent. We used to sing a song when I
was in church growing up. Maybe some of you sung it as
a camp song. I’ve got a river of life flowing out of me, makes
the lane to walk. And the blind to see opens prison
doors, sets the captives free. I’ve got a river of life flowing
out of me. Now we could argue about the theology of that, but
you get kind of the point behind it. If we serve a mighty God,
We will be able to do mighty things. And what does this mighty
God do for these two apostles? He sends an angel of the Lord
who opens the door. And not only does he open the
door to free them, he opens the door to send them. I sent you
into the world to preach Christ. And remember what we said at
the outset, God’s word cannot be stopped. No opposition can
put the brakes on God’s powerful and supernatural program of redemption.
The angel says, go keep preaching. And they’re right back out there.
It says at the break of dawn, early the first morning, this
was not an 11 a.m. service. This was a 5 a.m. service, a 6 a.m. service. They’re
out there preaching and teaching. And this is while the Sanhedrin,
they’re getting their chairs straight and they’re making sure
everything’s just right. And they’re going to condemn
these men to death. And what does the mighty one
do? He sends an angel. But also our passage tells us
the Holy Spirit comes in power on those who believe, those who
obey. And it gives us the strength
when the world says, don’t, The power of almighty God says
do. Now, I do not want to enter into turbulent political waters
here, but this is a really fine example of what we faced the
last couple of years. A couple of years ago with the
rise of COVID, don’t gather, right? Don’t have worship. You know, there’s, there’s a
lot of don’ts in our world today. We have to think through ethically,
yes, we have the obligation to save lives, right? It’s one of
the 10 commandments, thou shalt not kill. But one of the other
commandments is worship the Lord and him only shall you serve,
right? And so we have this tension in
our lives. What must we do? Must we obey
men and save lives or must we obey God and worship? And it’s
a tight rope we’ve been walking the last few years. And I know
some ministers who’ve said, I must always obey God, bam, bam, bam.
Never do anything that the government says simply because of government.
I think that’s a bad way to look at it. But if we can safely worship
God and protect lives, why should we not worship? And the Lord
has blessed us these last two years. We’ve not had a lick of
trouble. You guys have been smart and careful and wise. You’ve
stayed away when necessary. And we’ve had people get sick,
but they’ve kept it to their own homes. Thank the Lord. But what about when we up the
ante and it’s not just, Don’t have church. What if it’s, you
may not preach Christ. What if it’s, you better not
evangelize even your own children. Friends, that’s coming. You take
away the nuclear family, which have y’all seen the headlines?
The nuclear family is a waste of time. Y’all catch that over
the weekend. So we kill the family, we kill the church, and we only
have individuals in the state. Those are the two entities left.
And so the church is gonna be told, you do not have a prophetic
voice. You may not minister into the
messy lives of people. Did y’all hear in Canada, just
a week or two ago, you better not preach a gospel of salvation
through conversion and repentance from sin. And you can see where
that’s going. If you preach against sinful
lifestyles and coming to faith in Jesus who can make you new,
it’s a hate crime. And so you see the tension here. This is not just about Peter
and John in jail 2000 years ago. This is about Christians facing
the politics and the weighty words that will come our way.
How do we raise our children? How do we preach in our churches?
the government or others are saying, no, you cannot. Well, we must remember who our
enemies are and who the mighty one is and what he gives. I want us to think in a third
way about the apostles. The apostles, they’re those saved
by faith in Jesus, equipped by Christ and sent into the world
to give a clear, honest, bold and biblical message of redemption.
That is a message and a duty to be a messenger from on high,
right? Who trumps God Almighty? None,
no one. And that is their calling. That
is our calling as the church, as a saved people sent into the
world. It is our job as God equips us
to be clear, honest, and bold preaching and teaching Jesus
Christ. Preaching and teaching as our
passage says, the life. What did Jesus say about himself?
I am the way. I am the truth. I am the life. No one comes to
the father except through me. Notice how their ministry of
the word enrages their enemies. I’ve made people mad before.
Can you imagine that? I can remember in my first church when I was
an assistant pastor, I’d preach just a couple of times a year
and I preached a sermon one Sunday and I met a Karen before they
were Karens. All right. And I got a tongue lashing at
the back door. It was awful. And being young,
I stood my ground and said, thanks for coming today. But that’s
what the word says. I was compelled to teach it,
compelled to preach it. It was a little old thing. Um, But you can sometimes see the
hatred of the word as you are preaching and as you were teaching.
And that’s what the apostles are facing in their enemies,
but they know bigger and better the mightiness of almighty God
who has sent them. They know who’s in charge. They
know what’s at stake. Now let’s think about persecution
for just a moment. We got nothing to complain about, do we? We’ve
really got it good. I can remember when I was first
in ministry, I was still in seminary, I was an intern at the church,
and I would go to a little Friday morning breakfast, and they begged
me to come, begged me to come, so I started going every Friday
morning to their little men’s breakfast. And what I began to
realize, and I thought it was rather ironic that they invited
me because I’m a preacher’s kid. I was a seminary student, I was
a pastoral intern in their church. What I realized is every, Every
Friday morning, they had smoked pastor for breakfast. And what
I realized after about two years of being part of this group and
seeing what happened later in the church, this was the beginnings
of a church coup, a takeover. And it was a small bit of opposition.
And this went on for, oh, at least five years. And finally
they split off and they left and they got in their little
circular firing squad and they shot each other until they all
fell down. But, That was a little bit of persecution. I was there
as an intern at the beginnings of it. I was there as an associate
pastor and serving with the other pastor during this stretch of
time. And it got pretty rough. They got pretty mean. They got
pretty nasty. And we had to be strong. We had
to go through hardship and maybe a little depression. Maybe we
wanted to quit from time to time. And friends, that was nothing.
And I’ve served two other churches and those two other churches,
yes, including this one, have been through some hard times
where I’ve wanted to quit. I’ve wanted to do something else,
sell insurance or something more fun. But friends, that’s nothing
compared to what others have been through. A colleague of
mine in the ministry, just seven, eight years ago, had to sneak
out of his own country. He had to pay mercenaries in
the night to sneak him out through the desert to a safe country
where he could get safe passage. That was without his family.
We had to pray for two years that his family might be reunited
to him. This man during his imprisonment was locked in a shipping container. for days at a time with 30 and
40 other people. Why? Because he preached the
gospel and the government said, no. So friends, we have not faced
persecution. Oh, you may get told at the water
cooler at work, you’re raising your children with being Bible
thumpers. And you know, your, your politics
are this, and you may be told blah, blah, blah. It’s nothing. We have not experienced persecution
at all. Yes, it may be coming. But what
is our task? Our task is no matter. We are
to honor the Lord. Our task no matter is to bear
up what is lacking in his sufferings, to be strong, to remember no
weapon formed against us shall prosper and to be clear and to
be honest and bold and to keep preaching to the ends of the
earth. Think about this. If persecution has come and it has in church
history, did it stop the word of God? No, because you sit here today.
2,000 years later, people endured hardship to preach, and generations
have known of the gospel, and here you sit. So, will we be
bold and clear, and we put our hope and faith and trust in the
mighty one, even when the enemies get strong, so that yet another
generation and another generation, if the Lord tarries for 2,000
more years, they may hear of the goodness of God in Christ
despite hardships. because we remain strong. May
it be so. Let us pray together. Lord, we are precious in your
sight. We are precious in your sight.
We know that because your son came to die for us. And we know
that if he suffered, we will suffer. And even if we suffer
for what is right, we are blessed. So grant us to persevere under
trial, that we might receive the crown of life in your glorious
kingdom. We do not ask this lightly, but
ask it boldly, knowing that you can give all that we ask, far
more even than we ask or can imagine. We pray this in the
name of Christ, amen. We want to stand together and
sing hymn number 513, a psalm about trusting in the Lord Jesus
through hardship. Jesus, I, my cross have taken. Let’s stand to sing. you