Acts 2:37-41

So grateful to be worshiping the Lord with all of you. A warm welcome to all the guests that are here for the first time. So thankful for God’s continued favor upon all of our lives, in which whatever trials and tribulations and valleys, mountain-top experiences we go through, as we sang, we have a love that never changes, a love that continues to guide us. And so wonderful to be able to worship God with all of you and experience the presence of His power in our midst.

John Wesley, it is said, used to ask young men who were studying under him on how to preach, and when they were on probation, he would ask them two questions as he would send them out to preach. The one was this: has anyone been converted, or did anyone get mad? Has anyone been converted, or did anyone get mad? If the answer was no, he would tell them that he did not think the Lord had called them to preach the gospel and send them about their business. See, when the Holy Spirit convicts of sin, people are either converted or they don’t like it and they get very mad. It is very difficult to stay neutral to the message of the Gospel.

Having heard the first sermon that was ever preached in the history of the church, as we went through Acts 2,:14-36 last week, we turn our Bibles this afternoon to Acts 2. I’ll read for you from verses 37 through 41.

“When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other Apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?'”

Verse 38, Peter replied, “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. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, for all whom the Lord our God will call.”

Verse 40, with many other words, he warned them and he pleaded with them, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation. Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about 3,000 were added to their number that day.”

We heard the powerful message last week on Peter’s sermon, and we went through it and talked about how systematically, very, very organized, Luke records to us the main points of sermon of Peter. If you were to just read through the sermon that Peter gave, if you’re a slow reader, it will take you about five minutes. But if you’re a fast reader like me, it will take you about two and a half minutes to about three minutes to read through Peter’s sermon. So don’t sit here this afternoon saying, “Well, every sermon should be just three minutes long or at the most five minutes long,” because I’ll show you towards the end of this passage, there are many other things that Peter said on that day, but the Holy Spirit only records a summary of Peter’s sermons to us in verses 14-36. For example, verse 41 says, “With many other words he convinced them.” The other words are not given to us. Probably Peter’s sermon lasted for maybe two, three hours long. We don’t know how long it was. He would preach for a long time. But the gist of the main points of it are given to us in the passage that we looked at last week. He told them that the fact that what they are seeing, the power of the Holy Spirit coming, was not an accident. It was prophesied by the prophet Joel. Then, one, starting with the life of the Lord Jesus Christ, his miracles and wonders, his death, his resurrection, his ascension, in verse 36, told us without any kind of doubt, he proved to them that Jesus whom they had crucified was now both Lord and Christ.

And having heard this message, look at the response in verse 37, Acts 2:37: “When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other Apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?'” They had just heard the total opposite of what they were expecting to hear. They also heard something that is going to take everything and shake the foundations of what they had believed all their life apart. There are a lot of reasons why this response was the right response. I want to take this verse apart. Verse 37, the first thing that the Bible tells us is this: they were cut to the heart. The literal translation is that they were pierced in their heart with a sharp instrument or a knife. It was literally like stabbing someone. It was literally like Peter’s sermon is given the analogy of a knife being plunged into their heart. And the idea here is also that it happened all of a sudden, immediately. Immediately, they were cut to the heart by what they heard. There were many reasons for that. I don’t have time to go into great detail.

First of all, they were probably afraid. At this time, Peter’s sermon ended with this one great profound statement, “He is Lord, until he makes all of these enemies to be his footstool.” Now, they are finding out those people who very much thought they were on the side of God. The law was on their side, the temple was on their side, religion of the old was on their side. They were God’s chosen people. They just heard from Peter that actually, they were enemies of God and that they had become, by crucifying the Lord, enemies of what God wanted to do. This is truly something opposite to what they had thought all their life.

Secondly, they just found out that the one that they crucified was the one they’ve been waiting for all their life. Imagine this for a second. For the last thousands of years, your prophets had been talking about him, starting all the way in the Garden of Eden. You’ve been waiting for him, generation after generation. Your focus was when is the Messiah coming? Is he the Messiah? Is he the Messiah? And he finally comes, and what do you do with him? You kill him. Can you imagine this kind of response? I mean, this is exactly what they didn’t want to see happen. The very one they were waiting for, they had just hung upon a cross.

And they also are thinking, it’s too late for us. What can we do? We already rejected the Messiah. He walked among us, he talked among us, he lived among us. We failed to recognize him, and more importantly, we crucified him. It is right that they’re asking this question, “Brothers, what shall we do?” This question, “Brothers,” is not coming from a purpose of Christian brotherhood. It is coming because they are talking among Jews, and this is the way they would address them, “Brothers, what shall we do?” But this is no accident.

Every time we stand before you and preach God’s word, every time the gospel message is preached, this is what is happening by the power of God. Men and women are cut to their hearts like a knife being cut into the dagger. You know, we are living in a world today where I cannot even convince anyone of anything. I cannot even convince a person that I’m standing here and preaching. They will find some other explanation for it. If I tell you something is white, there’ll be somebody else that says it is black. We are living in a world where we cannot agree on anything at all.

But what makes the gospel message so powerful that when the simple message of Jesus coming, living, dying, rising again, and coming for us again is preached, people would turn their backs to their families, people would turn their backs on their culture, people would turn their backs on the belief they had for thousands of years, they would leave everything behind and they still follow him. Millions and millions of people in the Middle East are coming to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ through visions and dreams. And they hear the message of the gospel, and suddenly they leave everything behind and they follow after him. What is it that the message of the Cross is so convincing? See, look what happened in the beginning of Acts 2. We read about the Holy Spirit coming upon the people that were assembled there. The Holy Spirit did not only come upon the people that were coming there. The Holy Spirit had come into this world to be with the church forever.

See, when the message of the Gospel is being preached, we don’t preach empty words. What we preach is accompanied by the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the hearers. That’s why they were cut to the heart. It is not the convincing arguments of Peter that convince them; it is because his message was now for the first time accompanied by the power of the Spirit of God. How does the Holy Spirit do that?

John 16, 8-9, our Lord told us he would do that when he comes. The Holy Spirit comes; he will prove the world to be in the wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment. They think they’re in the right in everything; the Holy Spirit will come and tell them, “You are wrong. You are wrong.” How many of you like to hear someone come and tell you you’re wrong? Nobody wants to hear you’re wrong. But when the Holy Spirit comes and says, “You’re wrong,” no one can deny that because that is the power of God that is coming and saying, “You are wrong about sin, you are wrong about righteousness, you are wrong about judgment.” And you know what the greatest sin in the world is? Next sentence, “About sin, because people do not believe in me.”

You know what the greatest sin in the world is? It’s not adultery; it is not murder. The greatest sin for which the world will be judged one day is not believing in the One that was sent by the Father. And the Holy Spirit does the conviction in correcting people of the greatest sin, the sin of rejecting the Son of God. And that’s what the Holy Spirit does. He comes into the heart, and he cuts them, or he makes them, he makes the field so ripe for the harvest right then and there. “What shall we do?”

I remember the words of the Apostle Paul who would ask the same question of Ananias, “What shall I do, O Lord?” he would ask on the way to Damascus. Or the jailer, the Philippian Jailer who was now seeing the miraculous thing happen in jail, would ask the same question, “What shall I do?” This is the cry of a man, of a group of people who do not know what to do, having been caught in the wrong end of history and caught in the wrong end of God’s plan. They have a question, “What shall we do?” And the field is so ripe.

It was Spurgeon who once said, “It is an idle thing, it is a wasteful thing to attempt to heal those who are not wounded, to attempt to clothe those who have never been stripped, and to make those rich who have never realized their poverty.” What we are seeing in God’s Word is the steps that a man and a woman have to take before they realize their need for the Lord. See, a lot of times, I think one of the greatest dangers in Christianity today is that way too many people have been born into Christianity and into families. See, they have never been in this desperate state where they say, “What shall I do to be saved?” Because you have been brought up in the church and grew up in the church, and because of that, all of this preaching about salvation and what you’re saved from does not touch the heart like it does to a Muslim or a Hindu because he knows what he was saved from, whereas many Christians don’t even know what they are saved from because you were never on the wrong side of God’s plan.

And that’s why Spurgeon wrote this in 1892, and I think it’s so profound, and it’s so true even today. “Sometimes,” he says, “we are inclined to think that a very great portion of modern revivalism has been a more of a curse than a blessing because it has led thousands to a kind of peace before they have known their misery. Restoring The Prodigal to the Father’s house and never making him say, ‘Father, I have sinned.’ ‘Father, I have sinned.'” See, the first step in receiving Jesus is recognizing that you are a sinner. That you need help. It is impossible to help people that do not want to be helped, nor who they understand that they need a Savior.

You’ve heard me preach this before; you know the hardest person to convince of the grace of God and the need for the Gospel is a self-righteous one because he thinks he has it all. He does not see the need for the Savior. He thinks he’s the good person. That is really difficult. Oftentimes, you’re able to communicate the Gospel very powerfully to a murderer or an idolater or one who’s clearly living in sin, but the religious one that goes to the temple four times a day, that worships his Allah five times and does all the different pillars of faith of Islam, it is difficult to convince them. Why? Because they do not see the need for a Savior to save them from anything. “How can I be healed, he said, who is not sick? Or be satisfied with the bread of life who is not hungry? The old-fashioned sense of sin is despised, and consequently, religion is run up before the foundations are dug out.” Listen to that. A religion is dug up before the foundations are dug out. Everything in this age is shallow, he wrote this in 1892. Can you imagine what he would say about 2023 Christianity? He says, “Everything in this age is shallow. The consequence is that men leap into religion and then leap out again. Unhumbled, they come to the church. Unhumbled, they remain in it, and unhumbled, they go from it.” Unhumbled, they come to the church. Unhumbled, they remain in the church. Unhumbled, they go from it.

The first step in coming to the Savior is realizing what a wretched sinner I was. I was lost. You were lost. You were blind. I was blind. I was dead. You were dead. Yes, I was born in a good Pentecostal family, but I was lost. I was blind. I was dead. Unless and until the Holy Spirit came and made me alive again. Memorizing scriptures did not save me. Going to Sunday school did not save me. Going to church with my parents did not save me. Memorizing good Christian songs did not save me. What saved me is understanding that I need a Savior and coming to the foot of the cross and the only One who can make me alive again. Unless and until I do that, I am lost, a sinner sitting in the pews of the church.

“What shall I do to be saved?” should be the cry of every human being, whether you are in the church or not. They do that, and Peter replied, Acts 2:38. If there is one controversial scripture, not controversial in my mind, but upon which some denominations have been built, it is this verse. Peter replied, “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.” You know, denominations have been built upon this idea based on this verse that you have to be baptized in order to be saved. That’s not what Peter is talking about here, and we’ll talk about that in a second.

Let me take this verse also apart. Acts 2:38. The first word, first word response to God, understanding your need for a Savior. “What shall I do?” First thing is that we are to do, what is it? Repent. The word, metanoeo, it is a beautiful word in Greek. It is talking about someone who is walking along a path, thinking that he’s going the right direction. In this case, in the people of the world, they’re thinking they’re doing the right things by their own religion or the self-righteousness or even their unbelief in God. And they’re walking along the path. The Holy Spirit comes and stops them and tells them, “You are going the wrong way.” Remember, he convinced them of sin. Your path that you’re going is the wrong one. And then, you know what we’re supposed to do? You are supposed to stop because you’re going in the wrong direction, and you’re supposed to turn around and walk in the other direction that you came from because you’re walking in the wrong direction. At least some of you at one point another here have driven down the wrong side of the road because we thought it was a one-way street or a two-way street, and we ended up on the wrong side. All of us have done that one point or the other. What do we do? Immediately, we realize we see that “Do Not Enter” sign. You keep driving. You’re all thinking the time you did it right. We stop; we turn around and we go in the opposite direction.

That is a great picture of repentance. Repentance is the person realizing in his heart the path that I’m going is the wrong one, but it is not enough for me to stop what I’m doing. I also need to start doing the right thing in my life. Repentance is very, very important. But for us to be repentant, the first thing is that we have to realize that we are doing the wrong thing. A lot of times, people don’t want to admit that they’re wrong or they’re sinners.

There’s a powerful story that Lloyd Stefan wrote in the Christian Century about how King Frederick II, he was an 18th-century King of Persia, was visiting a prison in Berlin. The inmates all try to prove to him how they had been unjustly imprisoned, all except one. That one quietly sat in a corner while all of the other prisoners protested their innocence to the king. Seeing him sitting there oblivious to the commotion, the king asked him what he was there for, and the man said, “Armed robbery, your honor.” The king asked, “Were you guilty?” “Yes, sir,” he answered, “I entirely deserve my punishment.” The king then gave an order to the guard, “Release this guilty man. I don’t want him corrupting all of these innocent people.”

But see, in order to repent, is understanding that the path that I’m taking, the road that I’m traveling is the wrong one. I need to turn around. Repentance is not a very popular word. You will not hear a lot of preaching upon repentance within the Christian church. But I think more than ever, we need to preach repentance. In fact, this afternoon, I am preaching to myself other things in my life I need to repent of. Are there things in your life that you need to repent of? The message of repentance is not only for the first-century Jewish people who did not know the Lord Jesus Christ, and crucified him, but it’s for every person listening to me even this afternoon. Do you need to repent? You need to stop traveling the road that you’re traveling in, turn around, and turn back to God. If God is beckoning you to turn around, it is an act of the grace of God. But it is the grace of God that is convicting you and saying the path that you’re going is the wrong one. It is because of his love that is beckoning you, “Turn around and walk in the other direction.” See, when you’re convicted of your sin, don’t resist the Holy Spirit. It is the love of God that is coming to you and telling you, “Stop what you’re doing.” Don’t argue with him. Don’t resist him. Don’t be proud and say, “I have nothing has happened to me so far. I will keep on doing what I’m doing.” No. Stop. Turn and go back. 

See, the repentance, as Billy Graham famously said, does not limit the grace of God, but repentance makes way for the grace of God. Let me repeat that again: repentance does not limit the grace of God. Repentance does something more beautiful; it opens the way for the grace of God. Turn around, repent, he told them. Then he told them, “Be baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

On a kind of superficial reading of this passage, it is very easy to come up with the theology that says, “Repent and be baptized, and you will receive the forgiveness of your sins.” It almost seems as if baptism is made to be a requirement for the forgiveness of your sins. As a church, as a group of people, you should be very careful that you never make a theology based upon one verse. You always have to interpret scripture with scripture, understand the context.

I want you to imagine this context of when Peter is talking. He’s talking to people, thousands of them, who have followed the Jewish religion. They come from different countries of the world, and they’re all in Jerusalem. He’s preached the gospel to them, and he’s told them. They all come and said, maybe many of them, “What shall we do?” He told them what to do: repent. And then he told them something else, “baptize.” Not just baptized, but in the name of Jesus Christ.

Do you know that this is the first time ever that baptism was about to take place in the name of Jesus Christ? Because before, their baptism, you know, you hear a lot of people talking about Jesus going to be baptized under the hand of John the Baptist. Sometimes people will preach that during baptism sermons. I think it’s kind of a little bit stretching it because John’s baptism is not the same baptism. John’s baptism is a baptism of repentance only. It is not in the name of Jesus Christ. Baptism in the name of Jesus Christ only becomes part of the church after the death and the resurrection and the ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Baptism of John is not in the name of Jesus Christ because Jesus has not yet become our Savior. It is only a baptism of repentance. If you’re a soldier, you need to turn away from doing what you’re doing and repent. And this is something they did all the time, ceremonial washing. If a Gentile wanted to become a Jew, they had to do two different things: one, circumcision; secondly, they had to get baptized before they could be part of the Jewish religion. That’s why Peter makes it very clear, it is not enough that you do a ceremonial washing today. You need to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ because it is He that is able to give you the forgiveness of your sins.

Now why did he include baptism there? These people could immediately easily come and say, “We believe in Jesus,” and walk away and go back to their life, and no one will ever know. This public confession of baptism means they will be kicked out of their families, they’ll be kicked out of their community, they’ll be kicked out as strangers. They can no longer enter into the temple. Everything that they ever lived for will come to an end. Peter was looking for genuine conversion on that day, and that’s why he said, “Baptize in the name of Jesus Christ,” because he did not want lip service; he wanted a public display of what had happened in their heart.

I imagine there were many people who wanted to follow Jesus on that day, but some did not want to be baptized because they did not want to get kicked out of society. They did not get baptized. But thank God, 3,000 people came forward from all over the world and said no to the world, no to the Jewish religion, no to the temple, no to the law, but to the Lord Jesus Christ they said yes on that day because of the importance of public declaration. That’s why he said, “Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.”

Baptism does not take away anyone’s sins. Baptism does not wash away your sins. The only thing that washes your sins away is the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ that was shed for you on the cross of Calvary. By grace, you have been saved and not by works. No one can enter the kingdom of God and walk in there and say, “I got baptized; I deserve a right to come into the kingdom of God.” No, by works no one is saved.

We read that portion again this morning. How do you get saved? Romans 10:9-10. This is all you have to do, this is all you have to do in order to be saved: if you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. This is it. After that, go and get baptized? No, you will be saved. “For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.” So what is salvation? Believing in your heart, confessing with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, that He died for my sins, that I am a sinner needing the forgiveness of God. At that moment of belief, it might seem so simple to you, something supernatural happens in the heart of every man who makes that profession. The Holy Spirit comes and makes him a living being again. The dead comes back to life. Your eternity changes, hell becomes heaven, and you become on the path with God, and you become a child of God. What wondrous work is the born-again experience!

In a few weeks, by God’s grace, we will baptize a few of our children. When we immerse them in this baptismal pool water, we are not taking their sins away. That is a public confession of what has already happened in their heart when Jesus came and washed their sins away. He wanted to make sure that what he was doing on that day was exactly what they did. So, repentance, not only repentance but also faith that we read about in Romans 10:9-10, are the essential ingredients towards salvation.

“Repentance and faith must go together to complete each other.For repentance is the door which shuts out sin.” When you come and say, “Lord, I’m sorry. I’m a sinner. With Your help, I will no longer walk in the way I walked. I will walk in the newness of life.” That’s repentance that shuts out sin. But faith is the post on which its hinges are fixed. So imagine a door with its hinges, the hinges are the faith, the door is repentance. Now you all know these things better than I do. You cannot have a door without its hinges. The hinges by itself doesn’t do any good either. That’s what he says in the next sentence. “A door without a doorpost to hang on is not a door at all, while a doorpost without the door hanging on it is of no value whatever. What God has joined together, let no man put asunder. These two he has made inseparable – repentance and faith.”

But he is just kind of playing with words here. God has joined repentance and faith together to bring about our salvation. It is not baptism that saves us, but baptism is important. Baptism is the commandment of God. Every believer should follow believers’ baptism; that is all important. But don’t take Scriptures out of context and make theology, denominations out of it. That is the error that we run into, and that’s not what God is asking us to do.

And look what happened, verses 40-41. “With many other words,” yes, Peter preached for a long time. Probably he warned them and he pleaded with them. “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” In fact, those who would not turn to the Lord, by the time you come to AD 70, in this generation alone, it is estimated that 1.1 million of these Jewish people were killed by the Roman Empire just in one year, 1.1 million Jews were killed by Titus in AD 70. When he is pleading with them, the Holy Spirit is pleading with them, “Turn to the living God before it’s too late.”

But those who accepted the message and were baptized, three thousand were added to their number on that day. And when you think about the way God works, isn’t it beautiful? These three thousand were not local to Jerusalem. They had come from the north, the south, the east, and the west. We often look at the spreading of the Gospel in the Book of Acts as something that Paul and Peter did, and rightfully so. They played a great part in it. But the spreading of the Gospel happened, you know, after this day. Guess what these people would do when they would go back to their home countries? They would tell about Jesus to their loved ones. See, the Gospel already started spreading. What a way in which God miraculously and beautifully launched the church by assembling people from all the nations into one place, preaching the Gospel to them, converting 3,000 of them, and then sending them out as missionaries to the ends of the earth.

Even as early as Acts 2, when they would go back, when their loved ones would see them, they would see changed lives, repentant lives. You know, before the fall of the Soviet Union, you know what Christians were called? Repenters. Repenters. That was a title the Communist government gave to Christians. Why even in their own agenda, they admitted that Christians were repenters, the people who had changed lives. Will the world look at us and say the same thing, that we are repenters? Or will they say some other words for us: hypocrites, liars, politicians? But what a great title to have, repenters. See, repentance is not a one-time thing. Repentance is not something that we do just to the point of salvation. God wants us to repent daily, weekly, every month, every moment. “Oh Lord, forgive me. Oh God, change me. Oh God, transform me.” No one sitting here, no one preaching here is complete yet. A day is coming when we will be, but until then, it is daily repentance, daily cleansing, daily examination. What a beautiful life.

I’ll end with this: does anyone know who invented dynamite? If I tell you the name of the person, you’ll be very surprised. It was invented in 1867 by a man by the name of Alfred Nobel. Like, wait, wait a minute. I thought it was Nobel Peace Prize. Yeah, listen to the story. See, he was a Swedish chemist who invented a high explosive which he called dynamite. You know why he invented dynamite, he didn’t want to kill people. But he thought, “I would invent something so horrible that after using it one time, man will be so devastated by the devastating effects of dynamite that he would want to stop all wars in the world.”

But you know what happened? Because of the depraved nature of man, man took his invention that was supposed to end wars and made all kinds of great atomic, all kinds of weapons of mass destruction from this dynamite. Instead of ending wars, dynamite made them more devastating and wide-ranging than ever before. One morning, around the turn of the century, he awoke and took the newspaper. To his surprise, his own obituary was in the newspaper. It said, “Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who died yesterday, devised a way for more people to be killed in a war than ever before. He died a very rich man.” That’s what he said about his obituary. What happened is that he hadn’t died; his brother had died. The newspaper thought he died, so they published the obituary in his name, saying that what he had done. Reading this, this man was devastated. “Lord, this is what the world is going to say about me when I leave this world, that I became a rich man by killing people.”

But you know what he did? He spent the rest of his life trying to promote peace and undo the damage that he had done. So, he started a prize called the Nobel Peace Prize that would be given to the man or a woman who would promote peace in this world. Now I know it’s been diluted quite a bit in a few years, but that’s what it was supposed to be given to, at least until a few years ago. That’s repentance. That’s what repentance looks like: understanding that you’re doing something wrong and what you’re doing and the consequence of it, and stopping doing it and doing the exact opposite. The man who invented dynamite became a promoter of peace because of Christ, repentance, faith, repentance, all this repentance for his legacy and for the way he will be remembered long after his death.

I pray that our life would be a life of repentance, that we will always repent, that people will be willing to admit our humility in our humility, the force of our life and the areas that we need to be corrected, but also we’ll be so grateful to the Lord that what saved me is my faith that was a gift from the Lord where the Holy Spirit made me believe in the risen Savior, and that brought me salvation in my life. No flesh will ever be able to boast in the presence of God because no man is saved by works. It is grace and grace alone that saves us, and forever our songs will be “Grace and grace alone.” That’s what saves us.

Heavenly Father, we thank You for Your Word that tells us to repent for the forgiveness of our sins. You will give us the gift of the Holy Spirit to come and live within us. So we thank You that they were cut to the heart, and today, our Lord, we pray that You will also pierce our hearts and make us to respond to the Word of God the right way. Thank you, Lord, for Your grace that continuously beckons and calls us back to Yourself. Be with the rest of the service, especially to remember the table that brought us salvation, remember the Lord Jesus, that we pray. Amen.