Acts 3:11-26
Please remain standing and turn
in your copy of the scriptures to Acts chapter three. Our reading will be chapter three,
verses 11 through 26. As you make your way there, I remind
you of the pattern we see in the book of Acts. There’s an
event like the lame man being healed. There’s an explanation
of the event. That’s our passage today. Peter’s sermon. Then there’s a response from
the pagan community. Peter and John will be hauled
in before the religious leaders. And then we see a community response. You’ll see later in chapter four,
the believers pray to God for boldness and their witness. So
today we look at Peter’s explanation of the healing of this man. Let’s
ask for God’s blessing now. Pray with me. Father, we Have
eyes but do not see unless you open them to the glories that
are in the scripture. So open our eyes, give us sight.
Our ears are cluttered up with the noise and the clamor of the
world. So help us to tune out now all
the world, all the flesh, all the devil, and hear the clear
voice of Christ. Lord, our hearts are restless.
We’re already thinking about Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday
of next week. And so calm our hearts that we
might put away the grocery list or the to-do list and think on
these heavenly things that are good for our souls. Help us now
we ask and pray in the name of Christ. Amen. Chapter three,
verse 11, the book of Acts. Speaking of the man healed while
he clung to Peter and John. All the people ran together to
them in the portico called Solomon’s, astounded. And when Peter saw
it, he addressed the people, men of Israel, why do you wonder
at this? Or why do you stare at us? As
though by our own power or piety, we have made him walk. The God
of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God
of our fathers, glorified his servant, Jesus, whom you delivered
over and denied in the presence of Pilate when he had decided
to release him. But you denied the Holy One,
the Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted
to you. And you killed the author of
life whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses. And his name, by faith in his
name, has made this man strong, whom you see and whom you know. And the faith that is through
Jesus has given this man this perfect health in the presence
of you all. And now, brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance,
as did also your rulers. But what God foretold by the
mouth of the prophets, that as Christ would suffer, he thus
fulfilled. Repent, therefore, and turn again,
that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing
may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send
the Christ appointed for you, Jesus. whom heaven must receive
until the time for restoring all the things about which God
spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago. Moses said,
the Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among
your brothers. You shall listen to him in whatever
he tells you. And it shall be that every soul
who does not listen to the prophet shall be destroyed from the people.
And all the prophets who have spoken from Samuel and those
who came after him also proclaim these days. You are the sons
of the prophets and of the covenant that God made with your father
saying to Abraham and in your offspring, shall all the families
of the earth be blessed. God, having raised up his servant,
sent him to you first to bless you by turning every one of you
from your wickedness. Amen, you may be seated. In our Sunday school hour, we
had our little town hall gathering, reminding ourselves of why we
exist as a church, what we value and what we hope to accomplish. A couple of the values which
we mentioned are dear to us are worship, preaching, teaching,
spiritual growth, care for one another, but also an outreach
or a witness to the world. In our American church culture,
we have, of course, overbuilt and oversupersized things, right? You can’t evangelize these days
unless you, well, you’ve got to hold a 10,000 seat arena captive. That’s evangelism, right? You
can’t do anything unless you do it big. What’s the saying?
Go big or go home. One of the things we often forget
about God’s economy and the way God works is he very often and
most of all works in the day-to-day quiet service of his servants. We do not have to fill a stadium
to see souls one for Christ. We do not have to own and operate
and run a soup kitchen to be a church of mercy. Those things
may happen in the course of human events and God may see fit to
use them. But one of the things we overlook
very often is our day to day witness. First in our own homes
with our family and our children. Maybe you have an influence over
your grandchildren. You walk the neighborhood. You
take out your puppy dog and stop and chat with the neighbors.
You go in the doctor’s office. You’re a regular in the grocery
store. Some of you I know are regulars
at restaurants. They see you. They know you by
name. They have your food ready before
you hit the seat because they know who you are and what you
like. You think about just this room today. If I don’t know,
there are 50, 60 of us, who knows? And we all go 10 places this
week. That’s 600 opportunities to live
before the watching world, a life of Christ likeness. It’s a half
a thousand or better opportunities to give an account of the hope
that is within us. There was an old saying. It used
to go like this, or it still goes like this. Preach the gospel
if necessary, use words. And that’s an interesting statement.
Preach the gospel if necessary, use words. Well, you can’t preach
the gospel unless you use words. So it is necessary to use words.
But what’s the well intention meaning behind that statement?
It’s this. If Jesus Christ has made you
new, If you have been born again and you’ve come to Christ by
faith, Paul says in Corinthians, you’re a new creation. The old
is gone, the new has come. And so as we live our Christian
lives day by day, week by week, year by year, and it accumulates
from each and every one of us going out in the world and really
doing our daily living as Christ calls us to be faithful, people
will see the effects of the gospel in our lives. And if we get asked,
who are you? Why are you full of joy? How
do you know your sins are forgiven? How do you come to a saving knowledge
of Jesus? Or on and on, you can say, because
you’re trained in the scriptures, I came to a place in my life
where I knew that I was a sinner. I was in need of God’s grace
and his mercy. And Jesus freely offered himself. And so I put my faith, my hope,
my trust in his life, his obedience, and most of all, his death and
suffering in my place for sins. And so we evangelize. We tell the good news of the
gospel. We get the opportunity by living and setting a hope
before people. but we finish that opportunity
when we speak the words of the gospel of Jesus. Now, the man
in our passage today was a man born lame. Over 40 years, he
lived. And the community knew him. He
was a fixture at the beautiful gate in Jerusalem. Remember last
week as Peter and John were entering the temple for the afternoon
prayers, they saw this man who was begging for alms and they
said to him, we have no silver or gold, but what we do have,
we offer to you in the name of Jesus Christ, rise up and walk. And so this man clung to Peter
and John, went into the temple with them and The people saw
him, the man they knew to be born without the ability to walk,
made strong. He was walking and he was leaping
and he was praising God before them all. And so Peter goes to
explain the gospel, to explain the reason behind this man’s
miraculous healing. And so we have Peter’s second
sermon. There are, I think in the book
of Acts, About a dozen or more sermons, maybe 14 is the correct
number. But this is sermon number two
in the book of Acts. And Peter is explaining to the
Jewish audience in the temple why this man was able to be made
healthy, to be made strong. Why was it that he was able to
walk and leap and even praise God? And he begins with answering
the first question of our passage. How was this done? The people
came to them. Remember when the Holy Spirit
came as a mighty rushing wind into the upper room where the
disciples were and the sound was so great, a crowd came and
gathered at that place. And so Peter had to explain Pentecost. Now he has to explain another
supernatural phenomenon, the miraculous, unexplainable healing
of a man for over 40 years, unable to walk. How was this done? Well,
he puts it to rest very quickly, not by our power, not by our
piety, but it was through this man’s faith in the name of Jesus
Christ. And by the way, this is the same
Jesus that you delivered over to Pilate. This is the same Jesus
you denied when Pilate was willing to release him for his innocence. You denied his release and received
back a murderer, a known murderer, and you killed the author of
life. You killed the holy one. You
put to death the righteous one. But the God of Abraham, the God
of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of our fathers glorified
him in his life and ministry, but he raised him up in his death,
which you are responsible for. Peter knows his audience. He’s
laying it on thick. He’s laying it on heavy. He says
to this Jewish audience, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,
the God of Jacob, the God of all our forefathers. This God
glorified Jesus, his son, his servant, in his life and teachings
and his ministry, but you denied him, you delivered him over,
and you put him to death, and now he has raised him up. And
it is in the name of Jesus Christ that this man was able to rise
up and to walk. So how was this done? It was
done through the divine power of Almighty God, the same God
who could speak And as we said earlier in our Westminster Creed,
by the word of his power, he made the world and everything
in it in the space of six days and all very good. That same
word can call Lazarus out of his tomb. That same word can
call you by name and bring you out of death and sin and darkness
and chains. and give you new life in the
name of the Lord Jesus Christ. And it is in the name of Jesus
that this man’s faith makes him well, but it’s in this divine
power in this supernatural power that we as a church today, preach
and proclaim Christ. Can I convince and convert centers?
No, but can God, by the ministry of his word and through the power
of his spirit, convince and convert centers? Absolutely. Can God
comfort and build up his saints through the word most assuredly? And so the same divine power
and human instrument that we see in the ministry of Peter
and John is at work today in the life of the church. It is
through the name of Jesus that we pray and that we minister
and we bless the world. So how is this done? In the name
of the risen and glorified Christ. There’s a second question that
this passage asks, why was this done? And the question is really
not why was this man healed, but why was Jesus put to death? So that in his name, in his name,
through his name, by his name, salvation might come to the ends
of the earth. But here in this story to this
man born lame and unable to walk these four and a half decades,
why was this done? Well, Peter’s entering dangerous
waters here. Remember about 50 some days ago,
these are the church leaders who had been watching Jesus in
the temple. They had been trying to trick him and trap him and
ensnare him in some way, shape or form so that the Romans would
put him to death and that they could condemn him by their own
Jewish law. And so Peter here is entering
into dangerous territory, but he boldly goes where, well, only
one man has gone before and it didn’t go so well for him. Ended
in the death of Christ. Why was this done? He says to
them very clearly, you acted in ignorance. Now stop and think
for just a moment. We have grown up, most of us,
in Christian homes. And if we haven’t grown up in
Christian homes, we’ve grown up in America, which by and large
has been a Christian nation for some time. That’s slipping quickly. And if we didn’t realize some
of those privileges of living in a Judeo-Christian society,
We’ve been around the Bible. We’ve been around the church.
It’s been there for us. And that’s in a sense what Peter
is saying to them. You Jewish unbelievers in the
Messiah, it’s you who’ve had the prophets. It’s you who’ve
had Moses. It’s you who have had David,
your forefather. It is you who have had Moses
and the scriptures. You’ve had all the privileges
and the blessings of the covenant. And when the last prophet comes,
the great prophet, the son Jesus Christ comes, you deny him. You deliver him over to be killed
and he is put to death on the cross. This was done This is
done in ignorance by you. It gives them a little room.
You didn’t know. You were ignorant of the scriptures.
You were ignorant of the blessings of the covenant that were yours. But God and his wisdom, God and
his providence, God and his sovereignty, he ordained this to take place.
The prophet said it would occur. And what has happened in the
life of Jesus. is now fulfilled. And in a sense,
he’s giving the Joseph speech from the end of Genesis. Remember
his brothers sold him into slavery. He was picked up by the caravan
of traders. They took him to Egypt where
he became the prince of Egypt and he became the steward of
Egypt. And when Israel was in the promised land under famine,
they came to Egypt and their brother, unknown to them, provided
them with food. And at the end, when the brothers
are reuniting, and they weep and they apologize. He says,
what you meant for evil, God meant for good. And that’s in
a sense what Peter is saying here, this you did in ignorance,
but it fulfills the prophecy and the promises of God in the
name of Jesus, who was delivered and denied and killed, but by
God glorified and raised, this man is healed. And he’s saying
to them, the prophets told you this, David told you this, Moses
told you this, And Moses even said a prophet greater than he
would come, and you should listen to him. And there’s a challenge
here, isn’t it? You didn’t listen to him. In
fact, you put him to death. But here’s your second chance.
Here’s your second chance. And so we see a third wonderful
thing take place in this passage. How was this done? It was done
by the risen Christ. Why did you kill him to fulfill
prophecy? What are the blessings that come
through the tragedy of the cross and the glory of Jesus being
raised up? What are the blessings of Christ
that come? Well, there’s there’s three R’s.
There’s repentance, there’s refreshing and there’s restoring. And you
can quickly pass over these words in chapter three of Acts and
miss out on three significant redemptive words that are important
in the life of the Christian. the blessings of Christ. First,
he says, repent of your sins, repent of your sins, and God
will blot out your sins from you. Some of you may be old enough,
I don’t know, but to the time where you, you, you worked with
ink and a blotter and the ink had to, had to dry. But until,
until it dried, you could blot out what you had written. The
ink had not permanently set into the paper. And that’s what Peter
has in mind as he uses this phrase, repent and your sins will be
blotted out. Your list of sins could be written
on the papyrus of God’s book. And in the person, in the work,
the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus, he can
take that cloth and he can blot out your sins and wipe away the
ink before it is set on your record. And so that’s one of
the first blessings we see in this passage. You acted in ignorance. You’ve ignored your covenant
blessings of prophets and prophecy and scripture. And to be in line
of King David and others, Moses. But God has given you the chance
to repent and have your sins blotted out. And then he says,
and there will be times or seasons of refreshing. We like to speak
of salvation as, well, having two time aspects. There’s the
already. There’s the now. In Christ Jesus,
our sins are forgiven. In Christ Jesus, we have the
Holy Spirit. In Christ Jesus, we are seated
with Christ in the heavenly places and all the spiritual blessings.
of heaven are ours. In Christ Jesus, we are no longer
poor paupers and prisoners, but we are seated with Christ in
the heaven and the place as a crown put on our head and gifts and
graces given to us. Too often we live like poor paupers
who have nothing, but we have so much in Christ. And so one
aspect of salvation is that it is now, but it’s also not yet. We still live life in this sin-filled
world. We still live under the curses
of sin. We still struggle with our remaining sin and our growth
in grace and all those things. But God has a plan at the end
of the age or at our death. He’ll take us to heaven and glorify
us. And we’ll live with him in perfection
and glory forever. But there’s a now set of blessings
and a not yet. And when he speaks here of times
for refreshing, that’s the now aspect of our salvation. When
we come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, it’s like a cool
wind. You know, yesterday the cold
front came through and if you stayed outside long enough, especially
past sundown, it got right chilly. My morning walk this morning
at seven o’clock was 43 degrees. How different that is from the
summer mornings of 85 degree weather and 85% humidity. Maybe
you’ve, begun your leaf collection process.
So you get out in the yard and the sun and rake some leaves
and you get dry and dusty and hot. And you go in and take a
nice bath, a shower. It’s a time of refreshing. And
we could give a lot of other images, a cooler full of Gatorade
or a big cup of ice water on a hot day. But times of refreshing
are promised to us, not just repentance. and our sins being
blotted out, but God gives us in this life until heaven, seasons
of refreshing. And we find it in, well, the
company of the saints. We find it in our daily Bible
studies with encouragement from the word. We find it in the daily
blessings of God. He gives us daily bread. He gives
us spiritual bread to make it in this life. He gives us so
much blessing and refreshment that people who do not know the
name of Jesus around us do not have. They live a life of futility. They live a life for this world,
but not the next. And so God gives us seasons of
refreshing. But there’s that third R under
these blessings of Christ. Times for restoring. And we remember,
we look for the day, we anticipate and hope for the day. It’s a
sure thing that’s off in the future, but we look for the not
yet, but hopefully soon to come full salvation, full blessing
of God, this time for restoring. God will take this world and
he will redeem it. He will make it new again. We speak of it in the scriptures
as the new heavens and the new earth. It was foretold over and
over in the prophecies of the old covenant. And we see it beginning
to be fulfilled in the life and ministry of Jesus and now his
ongoing ministry through the apostles. In fact, this man being
healed is a little deposit, it’s a little down payment on the
new heavens and the new earth. You and I may not get healed
of our ailments in this life as this man has been, but we
know it’s coming one day. We know that we have weak knees
and hips, but we will dance like deer in the heavenly realm. We know that there is strife
and sorrow and hardship and pain in our relationships. But in
the new heavens and the new earth, the lion will dwell with the
lamb. On my morning walk, I have a
neighbor who has an interesting sense of humor, and in her front
yard, she found a concrete lion and a concrete lamb, and she
has got them sitting in a garden chair. That’s the funniest thing.
But if you’re a Christian, you know what that means. So every
morning I’ll walk by and say, she knows her Bible, she knows
what’s coming, the time for restoring. But dear brothers and sisters,
we have to understand that Peter is not just speaking to the Jewish
audience here. He’s speaking to us. We delivered Jesus to the cross.
We have denied the Lord and the author of life, and we will not
have our sins blotted out unless we repent. We will not experience
these times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord. unless
we come to faith in Jesus and we will not experience the time
of restoration at the end. And so the very last word of
Peter is important here in verse 26. God, having raised up his
servants, sent him to you first to bless you by turning every
one of you from your wickedness. That’s really the purpose of
this miraculous healing. That’s in a sense, the purpose
of your Christian life. It’s to give opportunity to proclaim
the goodness of God in Christ. If you turn, if you repent of
your sins, you can have a joyful time of refreshing life as I
do, or you do as you explain it to a non-Christian. But we
look for even better days, a new heavens and a new earth. But
first we must turn to God. And repent of our sins. And it’s
my prayer that you have done so. And if not, to not let this
day pass until Christ is full in your life. Pray with me. Our
Lord, we thank you and bless you. For the sights and the sounds
and the scenes of the scripture that are clear in our head now
where you are at work in this sin filled, cursed world. We’ll
sing in a few weeks as we come to Christmas. You come to make
your blessings flow as far as the curse is found. And we see
that in this passage and we know it in our own lives. And we pray
that your blessings would flow throughout this cursed world
through our faithful living and our gospel witness to others. Help us. We pray for your grace
in the name of Christ. Amen. We want to respond to God’s
word by singing number 534, fill thou my life, O Lord my God,
and we will stand to sing.