Happy Birthday Church
Tom Shrader works through Acts 2, setting the scene of Pentecost with a Jerusalem swollen to over a million Jewish pilgrims before unpacking Peter's three-point sermon: explaining the miracle of tongues through Joel's prophecy, proclaiming Jesus as the attested, crucified, and risen Messiah, and calling the crowd to repent and believe. Peter's declaration that Jesus whom they crucified is Lord and Christ pierced his hearers to the heart, resulting in three thousand conversions. Shrader applies the passage directly, pressing listeners to move past denial, guilt, or moral self-improvement and to turn in faith to Christ as the only solution to sin.
“If he rose from the dead, then you better listen to everything else that he said.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Acts
Recorded: 2017 at East Valley Bible Church
Duration: 43 min
Themes: repentance, salvation, evangelism, Holy Spirit, Pentecost, faith, forgiveness, the church, seeking salvation, struggling with guilt, new believer, skeptic, spiritually curious, young adult, raised in church but uncommitted, dealing with sin
Scripture: Acts 1:8, Acts 2:2-4, Acts 2:11, Acts 2:14-41, Acts 2:17-21, Acts 2:22-23, Acts 2:25-28, Acts 2:29-36, Acts 2:37-38, Acts 2:39, Acts 2:41, Acts 2:42-47, Joel 2:28-32, Psalm 16, Psalm 110:1, Ephesians 2:3, 1 Corinthians 15:2-5, John 3:16
Theological Themes: pneumatology, soteriology, conversion, biblical prophecy, Joel's prophecy fulfilled, Messianic proclamation, resurrection, kerygma
Full Transcript
Well, good morning. Great to see you this morning. Open your Bible, if you would, please, to the Book of Acts. If you've been with us, you know we're working our way through the Book of Acts — it's probably about a year's study. If you look at the title page of chapter one, verse one, it'll say the Acts of the Apostles. This is an important book. It's the transitional book. We have the Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, John — and then we pick up in the Book of Romans, getting primarily Paul's writing. The Book of Acts gives us a continuation of what the apostles were doing.
John Stott suggests a more appropriate title for the book, and when I read it to you, you'll see why this title didn't catch on: "The Continuing Works and Deeds of Jesus by His Spirit through the Apostles." It makes you appreciate the Book of Acts even more when you read it, but that's exactly what it is. Whenever I teach a book, I enjoy doing the background in week one, and when I drop in somewhere in the middle of a series — whether here or at Scottsdale Bible Church or other campuses — I like to make sure we remember what we're studying and why.
Two Ways of Writing History
William Barclay writes this: "There are two ways of writing history. There's a way which attempts to trace the course of events from week to week, day to day. And there's a way which, as it were, opens a series of windows and gives us vivid glimpses of great moments and personalities of the period. The second way is the Book of Acts."
In my library there's a four-volume set on the Civil War that falls into that first category. If you've been intrigued by the Civil War — and you should be, it's one of the most fascinating studies outside of Scripture you'll find — there's a single volume called *Battle Cry of Freedom* by James McPherson. It's around 750 pages, so it's a work, but it's really good. Then I have four or five short histories of the Civil War, and those fall into that second category. That's the Book of Acts.
Remember, we said this could essentially be Luke volume two, the Gospel being volume one. Luke is writing, dropping in and recording these episodes, these vignettes. It's not a detailed history. It's there to capture our imagination and to fill in, to some extent, the gaps. Barclay writes again: "In one sense, Acts is the most important book of the New Testament. It is the simple truth that if we did not possess Acts, we would have, apart from what we could deduce from the letters of Paul, no information whatever about the early church." This is a key book.
A Pivotal Chapter in a Critical Book
Within the 28 chapters, chapter two is considered especially important. One author writes this simple sentence: "The second chapter of the Book of Acts is one of the pivotal portions." Pivotal is one of those words we use all the time, and I love to go back and ask what a word actually means. The dictionary says: very important, vitally important — synonyms: critical, key, crucial. So get this: here's a critical book, and here's a pivotal chapter within that critical book. What Tim taught last week and what we're covering this week is really critical. You're here at an important time as we study.
The key verse of the book is found in chapter one, verse eight. Jesus is speaking and He says, "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you'll be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, to the remotest parts of the earth." I want you to Photoshop yourself into verse eight. Jesus is speaking to the disciples in context, but this is for all believers of all time. Those of you who just took communion — you have a power. Tim talked about it last week: *dunamis*, dynamite. The only problem with the dynamite image is that we think of dynamite as blowing things apart. You have a power not to blow things apart, but to bring things together. It is supernatural power.
You Are a Witness Wherever You Go
God gave every believer the Holy Spirit for this reason: you are a witness. Your life is to be a testimony everywhere you go — your Jerusalem is the house, your Judea is the neighborhood, Samaria is the city. Sometimes when I hear "I'm to be a witness," I'm afraid we picture needing to get shots and pills and a visa and a passport and go somewhere far away. That's not the image. The image is: as you are going.
I've seen so many illustrations of this over the years, some in my own life and some in others, and this is one of the best. I was doing a memorial service one day in the other building, and it was for a man I didn't really know. We'll call him Bob — here's why we're going to call him Bob: that's his name. We were doing the go-around-the-room-and-share portion, which can be a risky time but can also be a sweet time. A woman stood up and said, "Bob was such a terrific man. Bob was such a sweet man. Bob was so instrumental in my life. God used Bob to bring me to faith in Christ." I was curious what had happened, but she didn't say — she just sat down.
Witnessing as You Go
Bob would always be so nice — there was something different about him. One day he was coming through the checkout line, and it happened to be a day the checker was having a serious problem. He saw that and asked, "Are you okay?" She said, "Not really." He said, "Is there anything I can do to help?" She told him she was on break in a few minutes and suggested they talk.
She had never spoken to him beyond the ordinary exchanges — "Thank you," "Are those the plums you want?" — that kind of thing. But she sat down, shared her life, and Bob shared Christ with her. It was a moment of salvation. That is witnessing. It is simply something that happens as you go, and you have that power.
The Coming of the Holy Spirit
Jesus had already told the apostles this was going to happen — that they would receive this power. We saw it in chapter two, verse two last week, as Tim taught it: there came from heaven a sound like a violent wind, there appeared tongues of fire, and they were, verse four, filled with the Holy Spirit.
Now the city was filled with Jews who were there on a pilgrimage. They had come from different regions and spoke different languages. They heard the apostles speak in their own native tongue — not an utterance that needed interpretation, but their native language. It would be like if you were here today from Germany and I began to speak German — not trained, with no knowledge of it — and you heard it.
The message, as we pick it up in verse eleven, was not gibberish. They heard them speaking of the mighty deeds of God — here is who God is. The result was that they were amazed and greatly perplexed. Eugene Peterson, in his paraphrase The Message, says their heads were spinning; they couldn't make heads or tails of any of it. They were flopping around wondering what was going on.
Two Reactions
Out of this, you get two reactions — and these are often the same two reactions you get in a spiritual setting like that even today. One group of people was saying, "What's going on? What does it mean?" Another group quickly wanted to turn away from it and said, "They're drunk." I love to speculate — though I acknowledge it is speculation — about what they saw that made that a plausible explanation. I don't know. But in the middle of this, Peter, led by and filled with the Holy Spirit, took action.
Verse fourteen tells us that Peter took his stand with the eleven and raised his voice. The word translated "declared" means to boldly proclaim with a sense of urgency — he is declaring something as fact. We live in, and I am expressing my own frustration here, a very troubling time for a variety of reasons. The umbrella reason, for me, is this: the Oxford Dictionary word of the year for 2016 was "post-truth." What that means is that people are now moved more by emotion than by fact.
I have routines on Sunday mornings — they might be called ruts. For thirty years I have watched CBS Sunday Morning when it comes on at seven, and I tape Meet the Press. Soon I will also be taping Sunday Morning with Chris Wallace and Meet the Press, and I will have already taped George Stephanopoulos, and sometime today or tomorrow I will get through all of those and figure out what is going on. Last week, one of the president's representatives was on all of those programs.
I do not want this to be political — if you want to argue politics, feel free to email me, though my email address is actually Tim's. I am not trying to make a political point. I want to make one specific point: they were arguing about something like crowd size at an inauguration, which is relatively measurable, and the president's representative came on and said, "We have alternative facts." Think about what that means. Two plus two is four, but apparently you could say five. That is the world we live in, and it is a very difficult world to live in.
Peter stood up and said: I am not giving you alternative facts. I am giving you the facts.
Peter's Declaration
First, Peter dismisses the accusation immediately. Verse fifteen: these men are not drunk. It is the third hour — nine o'clock in the morning. Even Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett know you have to wait until five o'clock. It is nine in the morning. They are not drunk.
But here is what actually happened, and I think this is so important that I made a slide out of it. Josephus, the Jewish historian who lived at this time, tells us that the city of Jerusalem, which normally had a population of around one hundred and fifty thousand, would often swell to well over a million during pilgrimage seasons. The city was packed. The suburbs were filled out on the hillsides. There were many camps of pilgrims spread across the surrounding area. It is this multitude that this miracle is directed toward.
The Crowd in Context
This becomes very important in how I approach this subject — and frankly, in how you hear it. These were not Gentiles. They were Jews. So let me put this in context. In 2016, the population of Tempe, Arizona was 161,719. The capacity of the revamped Sun Devil Stadium is 56,232. Imagine Sun Devil Stadium filled — which will take some imagination, admittedly, maybe a couple of wins first, but imagine it. Now take that further: imagine Sun Devil Stadium filled —
Peter's Three-Point Sermon
Peter stands up and delivers a three-point sermon. First, he is going to explain what just happened — if they weren't drunk, here is what you saw. Second, he is going to proclaim and declare Jesus. Third, he is going to ask the crowd to respond. When I am teaching, my request of you is to evaluate me this way: What did he say? Is it true? So what? And we could add, if we wanted to, "Now what?" — what am I supposed to do? That is Peter's intention here.
The Quote from Joel
Look at his explanation. He quotes from the book of Joel, Joel chapter 2, verses 28 to 32:
"Now it shall be in the last days, God says, that I will pour forth My Spirit on all mankind; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, your old men will dream dreams; even My bond servants, both men and women, in those days I will pour forth My Spirit and they shall prophesy; and I will grant wonders in the sky."
He is saying there is a day coming — and they know about it. If you have the text in front of you and you look at verses 17 through 21 and verses 25 through 28, you will notice the font is different. The font is different because Peter is quoting Old Testament passages from the book of Joel and from the book of Psalms. I frankly do not have the ability to fill all of that in fully here, but the impact of this moment — for people raised in this tradition — is gigantic.
The Wrath of God in Joel
Peter is trying to explain what happened, and he is going to explain the wrath of God. He quotes from Joel 2. Here is the background: a plague of locusts had hit the land. The locusts had come and eaten everything green. In an agricultural-based economy, that wiped out the entire economy and destroyed the nation.
Joel comes in the middle of this, and he does not come along and say everything is going to be okay. He says, "I have news for you — it is going to get worse, because there is a judgment that is coming." There will be an outpouring of the Holy Spirit, but then there is going to be an enormous judgment. You see it referred to in verses 19, 20, and 21 — blood in the sky, end times — and they would have understood it.
God is patient. You may be here today thinking, "This is new and pretty interesting, and someday I will get to it." Here is my point: you do not know if you have a someday. That is what Joel is saying to these people. The wrath of God is coming.
I had been a Christian maybe a year or two, and I was in a small group — the first time I had ever been in that kind of setting. There were maybe ten of us, and we were going to go around the room and pray. The guy leading it said, "We will start over here, go around the room, and Tom, you close." I learned something very important that night: in a prayer circle, you do not want to go last, because all the good prayers are gone. We prayed for the President, for Congress, for cancer, for everything. So I was nervous, thinking all I had left was to say, "God, I only echo what You have heard here tonight."
Then the man to my right prayed this: "Father, thank You for Your infinite patience." I thought, yes, He is a patient God, He is a long-suffering God. But it is not infinite patience. There is a day of judgment. There was for them, and there is for you. Peter is driving home that judgment through that quote from Joel.
The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus
Now he begins the gist of his message, verse 22: "Men of Israel, listen to these words." There are essentially three things he is going to talk about: the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus. That is what this message is all about. If you go back and read through the book of Acts and pull out the sermons preached — whether by Peter, Paul, or Stephen — essentially every one is about the crucifixion and the resurrection, and about Jesus.
That is our message. That is all we have from this pulpit and from our pulpits around campus, wherever we are every day. Our message is Jesus. Whether we are talking about dating, marriage, family, business, raising kids, or whatever it is, it all tracks back to Jesus.
Attested by God
So here he goes — verse 22: "Jesus the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God with miracles and wonders and signs which God performed through Him in your midst, just as you yourself know."
That phrase — "just as you yourself know" — is a killer. Here is what Peter is saying: you know this stuff.
The Predetermined Plan of God
Sandy made an observation while we were talking last night that I think captures this passage well. These people saw Jesus. Many of them may have been there with palm branches, crying "Hosanna, hosanna." They may have witnessed the Via Dolorosa. They may have witnessed the crucifixion. They may have been part of a group that Jesus appeared to after His resurrection. You talk about no excuse. And Peter goes right for it. He says, "You know this. You know this is true."
He is the man, verse 23, delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God. That word "delivered" is the only time it appears in the New Testament. It means to surrender to an enemy or to be betrayed. "Predetermined" means the boundaries are marked out — it is a plan of God. You could humanly sit back, look at the life of Christ, perhaps be one of these people, dismiss the miracles, look at the crucifixion, and say, "Well, the devil won. The plan got usurped." And Peter is saying, no — that was all part of the plan. That whole crucifixion, that whole betrayal, was part of the plan.
He was nailed to the cross by the hands of godless men, and He was put to death. And God raised Him again and put an end to the agony of death. That is the resurrection.
The Resurrection as the Linchpin
I think I preached twenty-one Easters in a row at East Valley Bible Church or Redemption Church. After about ten years, I realized the message on Easter is pretty much the same. If you were around for the last fifteen Easters I preached, I basically said the same thing every time: Jesus rose from the dead. And then I would lay out the facts.
If you Google "facts of the resurrection" — sometime today, not right now — it will pop up ten, fifteen results. To use Josh McDowell's classic term, the evidence demands a verdict, and that verdict is overwhelming. You almost have to suspend logic when you look at the facts of the resurrection. It is the cornerstone of our belief.
If you are here today and antagonistic or hostile toward Christianity, you can blow this thing up. Maybe it is foolish to tell you this, because it is giving away our vulnerability — Bill Belichick is not going to give away the playbook to the Falcons before next week's game — but we will give you the playbook. You can pull us apart if you can disprove the resurrection. It is the linchpin.
God raised Him up again and put an end to the agony of death. It is impossible for the tomb to hold Him. It is the old song: we serve a risen Savior, He's in the world today, we know that He lives, He's alive. He died for your sin, He rose from the dead, He appeared. That is 1 Corinthians 15, verses two through five. Larry used to call it the gospel in a nutshell.
Why the Resurrection Changes Everything
My point every Easter was this: He rose from the dead, and this is a big deal. This is not just a fact of history that is academic and removed. If He rose from the dead, then you had better listen to everything else He said. And everything else He said is really quite simple: you are a sinner.
Ephesians 2:3 tells us that by nature we are children of wrath. I watched some of the kids walk onto campus this morning — they were so cute in their little dresses. And right now they are over there whacking each other and biting each other and knocking each other around, while we are trying to referee and give them a Bible verse and then pretend they were good so they can get a star at the end of it. You raised these little creatures, and you never taught them to lie or steal or cheat. They already knew how to do that. And that is your story too. You are just a little more sophisticated. You have learned to hide it.
I watch the morning news now, and if you watch just the first ten minutes, it could destroy your day. It is the same every day: a shooting, a fire, a rape, another shooting, a beating. My instinct is to say, "All those people are terrible." But no — that is me. God has simply restrained me and I am a little more sophisticated about it. You would never rob or steal from your business, but you have got paper clips and pens at home. You are Bernie Madoff without the guts. That is who we are. That is the backdrop: I am lost.
Life That Begins Now
Peter quotes from Psalm 16 in verses 25 through 28. In Acts 2:25 we read, "I saw the Lord always in my presence." One writer observes that the key to seeing God is to see Him in the present, to see Him in this moment. "Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue exalted; I will not be abandoned." And verse 28: "You have made known to me the ways of life." He has taught us how to live.
This is not just about escaping the agony of death and escaping hell. It is about life here. "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life." When I hear that, I tend to think of "eternal" as something way out in the future — but eternal life begins now. How I live now. How I respond to Sandy now. How I respond to the world around me now.
The Testimony of Peter
Brethren, Peter says in verse 29, "may I confidently say to you regarding the patriarch David, that he died and he was buried, and his tomb is with us today." Letting your eye fall upon verses 30 through 34, Peter is saying that David was speaking in the future, speaking of a Messiah who would come and rise again — and it was not David himself, because he is dead and buried. Peter then quotes in verse 34 and 35 from Psalm 110, verse 1: "The Lord says to my Lord, sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet." This is the most frequently quoted Old Testament passage in the entire New Testament. The point Peter is making is one of position and authority.
Therefore, he says, let the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Him — Jesus — both Lord and Christ. And then, what a shot at the end of verse 36: the Jesus whom you crucified. That is what Peter is driving home.
John MacArthur writes regarding this passage: ever since God's covenant with Abraham, in which He promised to bless all the nations through Abraham's seed, the Jewish people had longed for messianic times. They believed that when the Messiah came, wrongs would be righted and He would lead them to victory over their enemies. Viewed in the context of Jewish expectation, Peter's announcement that the last days — a name for messianic times — had already come was shocking.
Pierced to the Heart
Look at their response in verse 37: when they heard it, they were pierced to the heart. That word translated "pierced" appears only this one time in the entire New Testament. It is sudden, it is quick, it is thorough.
For a season it seemed as though the phrase on everyone's lips and on every social media post was "jaw-dropping" — jaw-dropping picture, jaw-dropping moment, and then it would be a photo of a cat or a dog or somebody's kids swimming. Here is what was truly jaw-dropping to these people. This should be jaw-dropping for you as well, because you are a sinner — not just them. It is easy to look at them and think, how could they not have seen this? But the honest question is: what do you need to see?
They heard this message, and you should ask the very same question they asked: what do we do? How do we respond?
What Repentance Means
Verse 38 gives the answer: repent and be baptized. Repent means to turn away. In their case, it meant turning away from trusting in the religious effort or the self-constructed life they believed would please God. If you use a hand as an illustration — if the hand repents, it turns from the west wall back to the east wall. Repentance is turning from your own effort, your religion, your self-righteousness, and turning to Christ.
When you hear a message like this, there are essentially four possible reactions. The first is denial. You think it is interesting, perhaps even clever, but conclude it is not for you. Most people, when told they are sinners, push back at first — though sometimes, if they sit with it, they begin to soften.
The second reaction is to be overwhelmed by it. There came a point in life where the weight of sin felt so crushing that the response was simply to give up. The reasoning goes something like this: I believed God had a kind of supercomputer, and if my bad outweighed my good I went to hell, and if my good outweighed my bad I went to heaven. When the bad stack grew so high, the temptation was to stop trying altogether. That is a Judas approach — despair without repentance.
Religion as a False Solution
The third reaction, and the one most people choose, is moral realignment — religion. You hear there is a problem, you know there is a problem, and you decide to do something about it yourself. That is why the last week of December is a fitness instructor's favorite week of the year. People resolve to change, gym memberships explode, and attendance spikes for a week or two before fading away. The same pattern shows up in Bible studies: the first two weeks of January, you cannot find a seat. People come, get their coffee, and disappear. Come back in three weeks, and the crowd has thinned considerably. That is moral realignment. That is religion. You identify the problem, name it as sin, and try to fix it yourself. The Bible says you cannot.
The Only Solution
The one solution is Jesus. Your fundamental problem is sin — not a better job, not a new spouse, not a better body. Work on your health, work on your mind — those things are worthwhile. But the root problem is sin, and the only answer is Jesus. That is Peter's point, and that is the point of this message: that is precisely why Christ died.
If you are here right now and you are confused, uncertain what to do, there will be men and women available at the front of the room after the service. The office is open tomorrow morning, and there is staff who would love to meet with you and talk through it.
The Result: Three Thousand Saved
Now look at what happens in verse 41. The promise is stated in verse 39, and the result is staggering: three thousand people were saved that day. What happened next — how this newborn community of believers lived and grew together — is taken up in verses 42 through 47, which will be covered in the following week.
A Church Founded on Acts 2
Because I was here the first week, the first message ever preached in this church was Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47. This is what a church is to do. This is what a church is to be. We will look at it next week.
Father, thank you. I look at that clock, and it just keeps moving, and we are three minutes and thirty seconds late, God. I cannot wait for when we have eternity, and a year will fly by. God, thank you. Thank you, and let us feel that sense of urgency if we have never responded, and that sense of gratitude if we have. God, thank you for Jesus, for His life, His death, and His resurrection, and we pray to You in Jesus' name, amen.