Procure

Grace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. It continues to be a great privilege to steward the pulpit for the edification of the saints at Durbin Memorial Baptist Church and the glory of God above.

When I was a youth director, for a couple of years I led a youth choir. We would teach the students Christian music and then spend their Spring Break touring around the country, usually throughout the Southeast, singing at churches and other places, and sharing the gospel. When I was a student, I even came here to Durbin Memorial Baptist Church, as a member of that same choir that I would lead years later. I have a lot of fond memories tied to being in the group, going on the trips, and then coordinating everything as the director. But I can also tell you it was exhausting!

When you try to take a group of tweens and teens around the country for a week, there are bound to be issues! I had to deal with bumps, bruises, cuts, and drama. One time when we went to the Audubon Zoo in Louisiana, the director at the time accidentally left a kid asleep on the bus!

The kids were always far from perfect, but it was a joy to be apart of the group. The group was as much a ministry to the places we visited as it was to the kids within the group. We required the group members to follow some standards of conduct, but we didn’t make it a requirement for every student to profess faith in Jesus Christ. The intent was that through the exposure to songs about the gospel each student would come to know Christ in their own time.

During the final performance of the year in April 2016, I had presented the gospel to the gathered congregation and extended the invitation, as I did each time the group performed. I waited up at the front of the room, as I did each time the group performed. But then something happened that had not occurred before. No one cam rushing down the aisle, but instead I was tapped on the shoulder from behind. I turned around and one of the students who had been in the group for three or four years was ready to stop just singing and start believing what they were singing!

That student confessed their sins and professed Jesus as their Savior and Lord. On May 1, 2016 he was baptized and publically proclaimed to everyone that Jesus is his Savior.

It is truly a grace that God would allow me to witness that, allow me to be a part of that. It is a big deal when someone comes to understand their own inadequacy and Christ’s sufficiency. It is something to celebrate!

I’m reminded of this verse from Luke:

Luke 15:10 ESV

Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

There is a party in heaven over the repentance of a sinner! Why is there a party? Well the Evangelist Billy Graham wrote, “Why do they rejoice? Not because they're surprised, but because a great victory has been won! Someone has been snatched from the jaws of Satan and death and hell, so why wouldn't all heaven rejoice?”

One of the sweetest things in my life at this moment is that my almost 2 year old son is serenaded to sleep and soothed by what he calls Mimi’s song, but what we know of as Victory in Jesus. This is a hymn you may be well familiar with, but we must not let familiarity and sweet tones at bedtime diminish from the message. Listen to these words:

I heard an old, old story How a Savior came from glory How He gave His life on Calvary To save a wretch like me I heard about His groaning Of His precious blood's atoning Then I repented of my sins And won the victory, yeah

Oh, victory in Jesus, my Savior forever He sought me and bought me with His redeeming blood He loved me 'ere I knew Him and all my love is due Him He plunged me to victory beneath the cleansing flood

We could go on here, but the point of this introduction this morning is that we would grow in our affection for the Lord, seeing the great victory He secured for us, praising Him forward, and desiring to share that victory with others!

There is nothing in this life with a bigger, longer lasting impact than showing someone their need of a Savior and pointing them to the only one who can fill that need. Earthly kingdoms come and go but Christ’s kingdom lasts forever.

It is with this understanding and with great joy that we now turn to Acts 2. Go there with me now if you have not already.

Today we are going to be walking through verses 37-42 and we will be witnessing the glorious conversion of 3000 souls converting from life and death. The application of this sermon will be two-fold, we will be first gain a better understanding of conversion, that is what it looks like for someone to be saved, and at the same time we will be rejoicing and celebrating the expansion of God’s kingdom.

A few weeks ago I mentioned in passing about the angels in heaven rejoicing over the sinner who repents and said if the angels rejoice, why don’t we?! After that sermon one of our members said that he suggested years ago that we have a celebration every time someone publically professes their faith through baptism. I’m glad that that suggestion has stuck. i’m glad to gather and celebrate each time over the last few years I’ve been here and someone has publically professed their faith through baptism. I am looking forward to many more celebrations in the coming years! As we reach our communities and share the grace of God in truth, I am hopeful that God will continue to work through us to reach others. So today as we look back at what happened on the day of Pentecost we celebrate and look forward to more celebration coming in the future.

With that in mind lets begin in verse 37

Acts 2:37 ESV

Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”

Our section of Scripture this morning begins with “Now when THEY heard THIS.”

Before we go much deeper, we have to remind ourselves who THEY are and what THIS is.

They are the Jews who have gathered together for the celebration of the feast of Pentecost. They came from all around the known world to enjoy this feast celebrating God’s provision. They were caught off guard while on their way to the temple they heard the sound like a mighty rushing wind, saw fiery tongues rest on the disciples, and heard each disciple speaking in the languages of where the people were from, speaking the mighty works of God. So the THEY in our verse this morning refers to the Jewish spectators.

The THIS is what they heard in Peter’s explanation of what was happening. Some in the crowd accused the disciples of being out of their mind and drunk. Peter explains that what the crowd is witnessing is the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. But that is not the totality of Peter’s message. He explains that with the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, God is ushering in the last days. He explains that promised Messiah, the Lord, the Christ, that the Jews had been looking for was Jesus! That Jesus lived, and died, and rose again. That everyone who believes in Jesus as Lord would be saved. He proclaimed that Jesus sits exalted at the right hand of the Father, and is the One with the Authority to now send His Helper, the Holy Spirit.

What an incredible message! But this is still not the totality. Throughout the message Peter also explains to the Jews their guilt. While everything happened in accordance with the plan and foreknowledge of God, the Jewish leaders and people actively and volitionally worked against Him. They sought to have Jesus strung up on a cross and succeeded in their endeavors. God’s people had acted against God’s Son. Peter pulled no punches in explaining this.

So if we take this knowledge back to verse 37, we see two pieces of the picture of salvation. our text this morning says that when they heard this, they were CUT TO THE HEAR, and said to Peter and the rest, WHAT SHALL WE DO?

In other words, after hearing the gospel there was conviction and response!

First we see conviction, they were cut to the heart. Other translations say pricked or pierced to the heart. This means that what they heard touched all the way to the core of their being. The Jewish people whom had physically pierced the hands and the sides of Christ were now spiritually pierced to their very hearts. They now see what they did not see then, that this Jesus is the Son of God, the God Man, the Christ, and it was their sin that drove Him to the cross. They are convicted that they themselves were convicted as complicit in this greatest of crimes against God! Peter explained in verses 34 and 35 that Christ is the victor whom’s enemies are His footstool. They now realize they are those very enemies! To tie it back to Last Sunday Evening, they realized they are nothing more than sinners in the hands of an angry God with a crumbling ground beneath their very feet!

Salvation includes conviction because we must come to realize that we have something to be saved from! God’s word tells us that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. God’s Word tells us that the wages of our sin is death. Why would anyone ever believe they need to hear the gospel or believe the gospel unless they understood their need for the gospel? No one is good, and no one keeps the Ten Commandments perfectly. God is holy, and every single human being who has ever lived does not perfectly live up to God’s standard. Whether you’ve sinned once, or are serving a life sentence in prison for murder, whoever fails to keep the whole law in one point is accountable for all of it according to God’s standard.

In being pierced to the heart the Jewish people in attendance that day recognized their sin, their need of a Savior, and the sufficiency of Christ to be that Savior.

The feel conviction in hearts and know they must do something with this new realization so they reach out to Peter and ask, Brother! What shall we do?!

And if this were the end of the story it would be a loathsome story indeed. If we were simply to go on in life with the knowledge that we are sinners and opposed to the Chris, opposed to God, what a contemptuous existence that would be!

But by the grace of God through the power of the Holy Spirit, there is a response for us to make! Look at the words of the Apostle Peter to the convicted Jewish people:

Acts 2:38 ESV

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.

We’re going to have to park it right here for a moment as there is a lot of discussion around the meaning of this verse.

Peter gives his hearers two action words here that make the proper response to being pierced to the heart and convinced that Jesus Christ is Lord. The first of which is agreed upon completely by the evangelical world. The second is debated upon not so much in practice but in meaning. We will come back to that in a minute.

First lets look at the action of repentance. To repent is to turn away from something while turning to something else. In the context of conversion, repentance is turning from sin and to Christ. Repentance is more than an intellectual decision. It requires action.

Have you ever been on a roadtrip and missed your turn on the interstate? When AR was just six months old, Cassidy and I took him with us on a trip to the Land between the Lakes. I’m not super familiar with Western Kentucky so as we were traveling I missed a turn off of I65. At the same time AR woke up from his nap and was just letting us have it! It’s safe to say I was stressed! After a moment, my GPS rerouted and told me to go a few more miles down the road, turn around and go back the other direction. This time I was fully paying attention, I took the right exit, and got back on I 65 the other direction.

But what if when the reroute came, I heard it, but I just kept on going south on I65! I could acknowledge that I’m going the wrong direction, but if I didn’t do anything about it, next thing you know, I’d be inTennessee! And there’s not much worse than being in Tennessee! Kidding, of course. But seriously, if I just made mental assent to acknowledge I was on the wrong course but didn’t do anything about it, if I just kept going in the wrong direction, I’d never get where I was hoping to go!

In a similar way, Repentance requires a turning of the ship of your life to go the other direction. Repentance isn’t just seeing that your life is headed in the wrong direction. Repentance isn’t just acknowledging that Jesus Christ is Lord. Repentance is Turning your Eyes Upon Jesus! It is turning from sin and to Him!

Many people say that Jesus is their Lord. Many people say that they love Jesus. But Jesus said “if you Me, do what I have commanded you to do.” Jesus commanded His followers to Love God and love others. He also commanded His followers to Repent and Believe for the kingdom of God is at hand! To Love the Lord IS to Repent. To Love the Lord is to love Him more than sin! Conversion requires a turning from the lusts of the flesh to the Love of the Lord! Repentance is inseparable from belief and conversion because it is the action step of truly believing Christ is better than anything this broken world has to offer!

Church, may we not just hear this message today, but may we believe it! And we show that we believe it, by truly repenting from our sins, sincerely desiring to follow the Lord as the Lord He is, and putting in the Holy Sweat to do so!

The second action Peter gives to those pierced to the heart is more debated. Not so much in process but in what it is accomplishing. Peter says to the people. Be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness (for the remission) of your sins.

All evangelical Christians believe that new converts SHOULD be baptized. There is debate as to what is being accomplished in the ACT of baptism.

The late pastor Stanley Toussaint laid out the three ways this verse is interpreted and how that effects what we believe about baptism and conversion.

The first interpretation of this verse is that both repentance and baptism RESULT in the forgiveness of sin. In this view, baptism is essential for salvation. The problem with this interpretation is that elsewhere in Scripture forgiveness of sins is based on faith alone. Even in Peter’s other sermons in the book of Acts, he tells the hearers to repent, but there is not a stated requirement for baptism. In Acts 3, 5, 10, 13, and 26, Peter and Paul give sermons that tie forgiveness of sins to belief and repentance, two sides of the same coin. Baptism is celebrated and commanded, but it is not tied to regeneration, the forgiveness of sins.

The second interpretation of this verse renders it more like “be baptized upon the remission of your sins.” Or in other words be baptized because your sins have been forgiven. This view is supported by the greek word for “for” being “eis”, which can be used in this way. Its used in that context in Matthew 3:11, 12:41, and Mark 1:4. This is a possible translation, but if we’re being completely transparent, it is not the regular usage of the word. In this context, “eis” typically describes purpose or direction.

The third interpretation takes the view that “be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ” is a parenthetical clause. This would mean that in English we could better understand the verse as a whole as “Repent for the forgiveness of sin and be baptized everyone of you in the name of Jesus Christ.” Thus not tying the forgiveness of sin to baptism. This is the view that I hold to and I believe it is the most convincing given the grammatical structure of the verse. I don’t want to get too lost in the weeds here as I am not an english or language teacher, but if we can all reach back into our middle school english classes, we might remember something called subject verb agreement. Subject-verb agreement means that a subject and its verb must be both singular or both plural: A singular subject takes a singular verb. So to put it succinctly, the verb “repent” is plural and so is the pronoun “your” in the clause “so that your sins may be forgiven”, likewise the imperative “be baptized” is singular, setting it off from the rest of the sentence.

I said at the onset of this message that one of our primary applications from this sermon today will be to better understand Christian Conversion. Conversion is simply another term for being born again. I will lay the matter of the requirements for conversion at the feet of the one who accomplished our salvation, Jesus Christ. When Nicodemus asked how it is possible for a man to be born again, Jesus would go on to quote the most popular verse of all time, John 3:16 ““For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Conversion, being born again, salvation comes through faith. Faith in Christ is real faith when by faith you turn from your sin and turn to Christ. When your mind is changed and you see that the love of God is greater than the lust of your flesh.

Baptism is a wonderful picture of what Christ has done in us. It is also something that all believers should do in obedience to Christ’s commands, but there is no power in the water. The power is in Christ who saves us and leads us.

For the new converts in our text, hearing Peter’s sermon, and responding, baptism was essential, not because it was the vessel through which they receive forgiveness, but because it was a public declaration that they truly were repentant and have come to faith in Christ. In our culture we view baptism almost as a rite of passage. In a lot of ways it has been normalized and we don’t think much of it. But we must remember that the hearers here have not grown up in a Christian culture. This was a group of Jewish people. They viewed baptism as something only for the proselytized gentiles joining the Jewish belief system, or for the dregs of society seeking to be restored to community. So for the hearers on this day, Peter’s command for baptism, “was a traumatic step. Just how traumatic is difficult for us to understand in our mildly Christianized culture, but in Jewish culture baptism was a rite for Gentile converts that symbolized a break with one’s past and the washing away of all defilement.”

The overarching narrative of Peter’s instructions for the Jewish people pierced to the heart is this:

“Change your mind about sin, turn your eyes upon Jesus, publically proclaim Christ, and live in accordance with His Spirit.”

As we seek to have a better understanding conversion, we should now come to see that conversion is accomplished by repentant faith in Christ, expressed through the public declaration of baptism.

One of the most mind boggling but incredible things that I love to see as we walk through Scripture is the intertwinement of Human Responsibility and God’s Sovereignty. We’ve primary focussed on Human Responsibility thus far this morning. In repentance we are changing our minds about sin and turning to God. In Baptism, we are participating in this act of declaration. The last half of verse 38 and all of verse 39, Highlight the Sovereignty of God in conversion.

The last of verse 38 here says “you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” You can only receive something that has been sent to you. And unlike Fedex or Amazon, God never makes a delivery to the wrong address. Look at verse 39:

Acts 2:39 ESV

For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.”

The basic truth that permeates through our text this morning, all of the book of Acts, and all of the Bible for that matter, is that Salvation belongs to God! In direct compliment and unison with human responsibility, God calls the His sheep unto Himself. From Genesis 49:18 to Psalm 3:8 to Jonah 2:9 to John 6:44 to Romans 9:16 to Ephesians 2:9 to Revelation 7:10 and many other places in between, God’s Word reverberates with the constant refrain that salvation belongs to and comes from God! This beautiful truth further reiterates the point that baptism as an act in and of itself does not save us. We aren’t saved by a sprinkle or a dunk, we are saved by the grace of God through the love of God, when the wrath of God owed by all who would believe in Christ was poured on the Son of God. And that salvation is eternally secure because it is sealed by the Spirit of God.

In Scripture we see the divine cohesion of will and election, of personal life stewardship and God’s divine intervention and conviction in our lives. In just this second chapter of Acts from the words of Peter we have been reminded that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved and that everyone whom the Lord our God calls receives the promised Spirit and salvation. Though we can be tempted to try to define exactly how to reconcile these two truths, there is no need and it is not within our human capacity to do so. Spurgeon was once asked how to reconcile human responsibility and divine sovereignty and he responded, “I would not try [to do that]… I never reconcile friends.” These two realities are only at odds when we think ourselves so important that we have to speak for God.

We’ve taken a large portion of the sermon today to gain a better understanding of conversion. I hope that we have clearly seen that conversion is an act of God to convict us of our sins, it requires volitional repentance as we turn from the lusts of the flesh and to the love of God. It elicits obedience to Christ and shows in public proclamation like baptism.

I hope that all of this has caused us to rejoice in God’s grace to save sinners. Let’s continue that rejoicing as we look at the last two verses from this section:

Acts 2:40–41 ESV

And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.” So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.

With many other words Peter continued to explain the gospel and witness about the Jesus being the Christ, Messiah, and Lord.

As a point of practical application, if you have questions about what all of this means. If you don’t quite get what conversion is, if you don’t know that you’ve been born again, ask questions! Talk to me! I can use many words in accordance with the Word of God to show the sufficiency of Christ to cover the deficiency of your sin!

For those of us that know the Lord, we too must be ready to use many Words to share with others what Christ has done. We should have the gospel on repeat in our minds able to recite it at a moment. If you aren’t confident you can recite the gospel, once again, get with me! We can have some one on one discipleship. We can look at resources to sharpen this truth. We cannot forget 2 Corinthians 5, that we are ambassadors for Christ God making His appeal through us. Just like the Holy Spirit used the verses Peter had committed to memory in his sermon we looked at last week. We are to put in the Holy Sweat and be disciplined to know that gospel so that we can share it with others.

In the section we are wrapping out this morning, Peter said to the people, “Save yourselves (or in other translations, be saved) from this crooked generation.” In either rendering, the point is the same: It is a call to come out from the wicked generation that surrounds you. Given specifically to the Jewish people there that day, this is once again Peter showing them that they are guilty for the murder of Christ. They can be saved from the judgment that will come upon that group, how? Hear the call, head the call, and call on the name of the Lord!

The great news for those in attendance that morning and for us today is that there was and is response to this message! On this day of pentecost 3000 souls heard, headed, and called! 3000 souls were baptized as a public proclamation of faith! 3000 simultaneous parties in glory where the angels rejoiced!

Looking back on this day is astounding for me. It seems incredible. And it was! But what is truly incredible is that God is still saving souls with this same message! We have had parties in this building celebrating the public proclamation of faith of new believers. I am hopeful that more will come. May we be the mouthpiece through whom God makes His call. May we know the gospel and hold it tightly.

May we not just hear the Word of God this morning, but may we respond. If you know the gospel, hold it tightly. Learn it intimately. Share it freely.

If you are unconvinced or unsure of what conversion is, come see me today.

Lets pray.