Sermon Tone Analysis

Some of you know that I used to be something of a hippie, even if I was a hippie without a lot of hair.

I have been to my share of Grateful Dead shows and more than my share of Phish shows.

I have camped with as many as 70,000 other music fans at music festivals in Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, and New York.

Annette and I once waited in traffic for literally 36 hours on an interstate in Vermont trying to get to a festival where the site was so muddy that cars were having to be towed INTO the camping area.

We never did get into that festival.

I was thinking about those days the other afternoon.

I was listening via satellite radio to the replay of a set of music from a festival this week at a resort in Mexico, and I thought about old friends that I knew were probably there.

The music was very good, and I still love to listen to it from time to time.

But something the DJ said reminded me of the real reason I and so many others were willing to commit so much time and effort, so much of our money and so many of our vacation days to following these bands around and joining them for three-day festivals on farms and at rural airports all over the country.

This DJ was remembering the last Phish show he had attended, back in December 2019, before the pandemic.

And he spoke hopefully of the day that he would be able to rejoin that community of like-minded individuals.

They are people who share the same love of music, but it goes much deeper than that.

There is a sense of camaraderie — a sense of shared purpose — among members of these music communities.

In fact, it’s common for them to refer to one another as family, even when there is no blood relationship.

They are normally generous and kind to one another, sharing with one another and helping one another out.

Sometimes, that means showing the folks who are camping beside you how to set up the tent they bought on the way to the festival.

Sometimes it means giving your spare ticket to somebody standing outside the venue who wasn’t able to get his or her own ticket to tonight’s sold-out show.

And as I describe this scene to you, it occurs to me just how much it all sounds like this community — this family — we know as the church.

Actually, the parking lot at a Grateful Dead show or the campground at a hippie music festival should be at best a poor imitation of the community of believers united in Christ by the Holy Spirit.

Sadly, though, my observation through the years has been that the church (and I’m not speaking specifically about Liberty Spring here, but rather the Church as a whole) often is really pretty terrible about doing community.

And I think one of the big reasons we have been so terrible about it is because we have forgotten why it exists.

I think we tend to approach the church with the mindset that we have chosen it, rather than the mindset that God has chosen US for it and that He has chosen IT for us.

We tend to think of it as an organization that we’ve voluntarily joined up with in order to study Jesus.

But I would suggest to you that the way the New Testament describes this community is a lot more like the community of Deadheads who would follow the Grateful Dead from town to town.

Deadheads fell in love with the music, and they wanted to be wherever that music was being made.

They wanted to join with others who were also in love with the music.

They wanted to create a loving and supportive community that reflected the values of the music and became something greater than the sum of its parts.

In the same way, the church should be a community of people so in love with Jesus that they want to be around others who are just as in love with Him.

They should want to reflect His values in their community and in its interactions with the world.

And they should expect that their interactions will be a powerful reflection not of themselves but of the Holy Spirit who lives within them and who binds them together in love and unity.

Let me ask you to be honest with me today.

Does that description sound like the capital-C church today?

Or do you agree with me that we’re all-too-often characterized by the same divisions and distrust that we see in the world at large?

It was not always this way.

And today, I want to take you back to the dawn of the Church Age to show you how the Church was always supposed to look.

There was a brief period of time when this Spirit-infused community was just as Jesus had prayed it would be in John, chapter 17.

We’ll see in future messages within this series I’m calling “The Church — Revealed” that it didn’t take long for sin to be uncovered within the Church and for divisions to follow.

But for this brief period of time we will study from Acts, chapter 2, we will see a community that was radically different from all that had preceded it.

We will see a true community such as had never been seen in history, a radical act of re-culturing by the Holy Spirit.

If you haven’t done so already, please turn to Acts, chapter 2. We’re going to pick up in a moment in verse 37, but let me give you the context of the situation Luke describes in this passage.

This was the day of Pentecost, 50 days after Jesus’ resurrection after His death on the cross at Calvary.

Before He ascended to heaven 40 days after the resurrection, Jesus had given His apostles their marching orders.

You’ll remember the Great Commission from Matthew, chapter 28, where He said

But Luke records in the first chapter of Acts that Jesus also told them to wait in Jerusalem for the Holy Spirit, the Helper God had promised to send them after Jesus had gone back to heaven.

And so, they had waited.

Verse 14 of chapter 1 tells us that during the next 10 days, they were “continually devoting themselves to prayer.”

And at some point during this time, they drew lots, and Matthias was appointed to take the place of Judas the betrayer among the 12.

And so, in verse 1 of chapter 2, we see that about 120 of the apostles and others who had followed Jesus in faith were “all together in one place.”

The waiting was over.

The promised Helper had come.

The Church had been born in this great baptism of fire by the Holy Spirit.

And now, having been given the gift of languages they did not previously know, the 120 went out into the streets of Jerusalem and began speaking to the people who were gathered there for the Feast of Booths.

This was one of three festivals that required a journey to Jerusalem by the Jewish people, and it celebrated the harvest.

Devout Jews had come there from all over the known world.

Luke says the gathering included Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians, Judeans, Cappadocians, and people from Pontus and Asia and Phrygia and Pamphylia and Egypt and Libya Cyrene and Rome.

And all these visitors to Jerusalem were hearing the people of this new community, the church, speaking in their own language.

Many who were there for this event would have recognized that the fact these apostles and disciples were speaking in tongues was the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy:

The context of that prophecy was a warning to Israel that the day would come when God would turn His attention elsewhere because of Israel’s unbelief.

That’s just what had happened when Israel rejected her King and crucified Him.

Now risen from the dead, He would create a new community called the church.

And as we discussed last week, Jesus’ work will be entirely focused on and through the Church until His return in glory, when He will rule over the earth in His millennial kingdom.

Here in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit had been poured out for all mankind, and in this baptism of the Spirit, the church had been born.

And so, Peter launches into his sermon, and the Jews who were listening began to realize that the man whom they had nailed to a cross just 50 days earlier had been the promised Messiah and king and that He had been God Himself, incarnated in the person of His own Son.

And now, realizing what a terrible act of national sin they had committed by crucifying their very King, we see in verse 17 that “they were pierced to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brethren, what shall we do?’”

What will become of our nation now?

What can we do now as a nation in light of the terrible thing we have done?

Let’s pick up Luke’s account in verse 38.

These folks were primarily concerned with what they could do to save their nation after it had sinned so terribly against God, but Peter tells them here that the problem they have is a personal one.

They needed to repent.

This is the same thing John the Baptist had told them.

This is the same thing Jesus had told them.

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

And this same thing is true today.

Your biggest problem and mine is a personal one — sin.

It’s the thing that destroys marriages.

It’s the thing that destroys lives.

It’s the thing that causes war.

Sin is the reason we have famines and pandemics and death.

Sin brought death into the world, and we know there is still sin, because we can see death all around us.

We were all created in the image of God — made to reflect His perfect and righteous character.

And yet each of us fails to do this in large ways and small ways every day.

Each one of us is guilty at some time or another of being just like Israel during the time of the judges — doing what is right in our own eyes, rather than what’s right in God’s eyes.

Repentance involves a change in perspective — a transformation of your thinking that leads to a transformation in your way of life.

Repentance says that I know I am a sinner and unable to do anything to clean myself up to be presentable to God.

But repentance isn’t the last word here.

Peter says “Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

Now, the first thing to understand is that the word that’s translated as “for” in verse 38 should be understood as “on the basis of” or “because of.”

Think of one of those posters from the Old West.

“Wanted, dead or alive, for robbery and murder.”

They weren’t looking for someone to rob and murder for them.

They were looking for someone BECAUSE that person had committed robbery and murder.

It’s the same idea here.

Peter was calling for those who repented to be baptized on the basis that their sins had been forgiven.

A good way to paraphrase this verse would be like this: “Repent and you will receive the gift of the Spirit.

Be baptized because your sins are forgiven.”

[Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Ac 2:38.]

Right about now, you should be asking yourself, “But what about faith?

Aren’t we saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone?”

YES!

That’s what Peter meant when he said to be baptized “in the name of Jesus Christ.”