Peter's Sermon: Explaining Pentecost
Acts 2:14-21
Turn in your Bibles to Acts Chapter 2. We begin our study this morning. Some strange reason as I began this message early in the week and study in preparation, I had this compelling desire to just talk about the importance of preaching. Now you say well that's just defending your own thing. That's right. There's no question about it, but I had this compelling desire to just really emphasize the priority of preaching as we enter into, of course, Acts 2:14, it's Peter's sermon on the day of Pentecost.
And I really didn't know why. I just felt this very strongly. And so I sat down, I just kept writing and writing and writing and writing all my thoughts about preaching. And I still didn't know why this morning and I got up and I preached away about the priority of preaching in the 8:15 service. After the service was over this morning, I started down and the gentleman came up and he took my hand and he said, "you don't know me, but he said I'm a preacher." And he said, "I've been 18 months in my church," and he said, "I needed to get away and reevaluate what I was to do." He said, "I...my wife and I took a room at the Holiday Inn down here and we decided we'd come here this morning and see if maybe God would speak to us." And he said, "Thank you, that's what I needed."
You just really never know what God is planning. Now for you, of course this sermon is superfluous. But anyway, Acts 2:14-42 is the sermon of Peter on the day of Pentecost. It is strategically important because it is the first Christian sermon ever preached. And thus it sets for us a pattern of preaching, apostolic preaching and a pattern that carries down even for our own preaching today.
Before we do get into it though, I do have some things that I want to say in regard to the priority and the importance of preaching since the first thing the early church did the first day it was born was begin by preaching. I think something was established that is of prior consideration. Now there's much literature being produced today about the church. I suppose in Christian literature and there's an awful lot of it, the two reigning things that seem to be dominating are counseling or Christian psychological therapy or whatever title you want to give to it, how to set your family straight, how to set your marriage straight, how to set yourself straight, and then how to set your neighbors straight, all the way down the line.
And the other great volume of material is being put out on the subject of the church, it's identity, it's contemporary priorities, where it fits, etc., etc. And the current church emphasis has in my mind one glaring omission. And that is that there seems to be in so many of these books and in so many cases of what people are advocating today, the omission of preaching. Now this greatly concerns me. I have read at least two or three books that eliminate preaching altogether from the life of a church, from the pattern of the church.
And I believe this is a gross injustice to God's pattern and God's design and is a miscalculation of the New Testament genius of Christianity and its dynamic. Today we have this great emphasis on whole gob of little group Bible studies and home interaction things and in their place they're all very good. But seminaries and colleges that are supposed to be producing men for the ministry today are teaching psychology and counseling techniques and they're producing reams of material on psychotherapy, group counseling, sensitivity training with certain deletions so it becomes palatable to Christianity, etc., etc.
And there are only perhaps a handful of seminaries in all of our country that are exceptions to that rule that are teaching men principles by which they can teach and preach with power of the word of God. The small group interaction bonanza is upon us. And it's part of the cycle of getting back to individuality in a computer in a mechanized age. I'm aware of that. But in many churches, the church life and the pattern of the Holy Spirit moving I the church is bogged down because men are lost in all kinds of foolishness that it's secondary to the power of preaching the word of God.
And we make no apologies at Grace Church for our preaching ministry. In fact, we've established it as a priority. When Paul told Timothy what to do about his ministry he said it as simply as you can say it. He said Timothy preach the word. Preach the word. The book of Acts is a record of apostolic preaching. And I'll give you a nice little journey through Acts right now. Don't try to follow me. But just listen and this will be a view of Acts from the standpoint of preaching and we'll see whether it's priority.
Acts Chapter 3, verse 20, "And he shall send Jesus Christ who before was preached unto you." 4:2, "Being grieved that they taught the people and preached through Jesus the resurrection of the dead." And then over to Chapter 8, skipping some sections, verse 5, then Philip went down to the city of Samaria and preached Christ unto them. Verse 25, "And they when they had testified and preached the word of the Lord returned to Jerusalem and preached the gospel in many villages of the Samaritans." Verse 35, "Then Philip opened his mouth and began at the same scripture and preached unto him." He only had one in his audience, but he still preached. Verse 40, "But Philip was found at Azotus and passing through he preached in all the cities until he came to Caesarea. Chapter 9, verse 20, "And immediately he preached Christ in the synagogue that He is the son of God." Verse 27, "But Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles and declared unto him...unto them how he had seen the Lord in the way and that he had spoken to him and how he had preached boldly at Damascus in the name of Jesus."
You can go to Chapter 13, 14, 17, 20, and right on out to the end of the book of Acts and you'll find that the priority in the church was the preaching of the word. Now it's important to have Bible studies. It's important to have Sunday School. It's important to have home action groups. It's important to have a lot of things. Nothing supplants the preaching of the word. Preaching is characteristic of Christianity. Broadus in his classic volume on preaching says, "No other religion has ever made the regular and frequent assembling of the masses of men to hear religious instruction and exhortation, an integral part of divine worship except Christianity. It's the genius of Christianity as so designed by the Holy Spirit. Others have copied it because of it's power."
In the ministry of Jesus the Bible says that Jesus came preaching. And in Luke Chapter 4, I love Jesus' view of His own ministry. He says in verse 16, "He came to Nazareth and when He was...where He'd been brought up and as His custom was Jesus went was, Jesus went into the synagogue on the Sabbath Day and stood up to read. And it was delivered unto Him the book of the prophet Isaiah and when He had opened the book, He found the place where it was written. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He hath anointed me to," what, "to preach." "To preach the gospel to the poor. He had sent me to heal the broken-hearted. To preach deliverance to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised to preach the acceptable year of the Lord and He closed the book and gave it to the minister and sat down."
The priority of Jesus Christ repeated three times and the prophecy of Isaiah was that He came to preach. John writing many years after that looked back and said, "Jesus cried in the temple teaching and saving." Jesus boldly preached. His preaching was powerful. His preaching was urgent, but His preaching was at the same time compassionate. Preaching involves the gospel proclamation and it also involves theological instruction. And for a moment, I'd like to get you into a definition of preaching.
So often we hear this statement, well, he's a good preacher, but he's not a teacher. There's no such thing. He is not a good preacher if he's not a teacher. He's the worst kind of preacher. There is no such thing as preaching without teaching. The theological view of preaching right out of the word of God is that it contains the proclamation with the doctrine with the instruction. That's how our Lord preached. He left that legacy to all. He told His apostles to go into all the world and to preach and to teach, and there's no difference. They are the same. In fact, those two words are used in the gospels interchangeably when referring to Jesus Christ.
For example, in Matthew, it'll say in Jesus Christ taught. And in a comparative passage in Luke, it'll say and Jesus Christ preached. And in the very same incident recorded by various views, the two words are used interchangeably. So that preaching without teaching is non-existent. Preaching was the announced purpose by Jesus Christ. It was the announced purpose given to His apostles and they carried out in the book of Acts and it's not different today. Paul said to Timothy preach the word.
The history of the church records the preaching of the word of God. Now there have been many things that have come along to try to supplant it. We have a lot of things today that try to replace preaching. And the sad part of it is that most people let it happen. And you open your newspaper and instead of seeing through the church page, men preaching the word of God, you read about musical, phantasmagorias, and movies and this and that and the other thing going on and they all have a place. Never do they have a place in supplanting the powerful Spirit energized preaching of the word of God.
And we can talk all we want about radio programs and TV programs and Christian movies and drama and everything else, but to me all it is, is a challenge to make my sermons more relevant, more fresh, more dynamic and more exciting so people will want the real stuff. Now, I'm not discounting the place of all of those things. I'm only establishing the priority of preaching. Those things have their place. And sometimes they're used to good effect. They can never supplant the preaching of the word. A holy man gifted to preach by the Spirit of God and prepared in the word of God has not equal in a power presentation of the truth. That's the pattern of scripture.
And if the preaching doesn't make it, it's not the fault of the method, it's the fault of the man. Social work and pastoral work are all important, but they never compensate for a lack of power in the pulpit. This is the thing that God uses abundantly. And you know, I have to ask myself today the sad question, where are the preachers? Where are they? So many times people say to me where are the men who preach the word of God? Where are they? I don't know where they are. They're few and far between, I know that. Where are the great men who preach and teach God's words whose lines are so saturated with the word of God that Spurgeon said their blood is bibbling.
Where are the men of God who are lost in their message with no personality and no gimmick just firing out the word of God and the energy of the Spirit? Where are these men? Great men of God don't just work with small groups, some do. Not exclusively. Great men of God are men who proclaim the truth of the word of God to thousands of people. You can go back in history and look at the revivals that have happened through history and they've centered around the preaching of the word of God.
I was reading about Whitfield. What a masterful man he was, and what a man of God and what a powerful preacher. And Whitfield, you know, preached in Bristol to 20,000 people regularly, often daily. Sometimes when Whitfield got up in the morning, there'd be 10,000 people outside waiting for him to begin. Often he preached to 40,000 people. It is said that near Glasgow, Scotland he preached to as many of 50,000 to 100,000 people. Now this was without any...this was without any preparation. This is without any publicity. This is just people drawn to the power of the word of God.
And this is without a microphone. Think about that. His voice must have been something unbelievable. Even if you didn't want to listen, a lot of choice. He was sometimes accused of rambling in his sermons and getting off the point. Who wouldn't preaching all day, every day like that. But he replied, "If men will continue to ramble like lost sheep, I'll continue to ramble after them." At 70 years of age George Muller preached regularly to 5,000 people. Moody, Spurgeon, Edwards, Finney, and the rest preached and taught to thousands of people in great crowds and great tabernacles and great congregations and they preached in the Spirit's energy with great power.
There's nothing sacred my friends about small groups. People say to me, well, isn't your church getting too big? I mean, if you get too many people there, what happens to your small groups? And my answer is, if God wants to build a church where the word of God is preached, I don't care if He brings 50,000 people if that's His desire. I believe in the word of God as preached. And we need some men today like that. We need some faithful, some bold, some powerful men, some holy preachers who make no compromise with the world, no compromise with the flesh, no compromise with the devil, and stand true to the word of God and declare with fire and power.
And I sometimes wonder where they are. I pray God, that out of this congregation He'll raise up some. I really do get weary of the view that the ministry is glorified group therapy. The preachers are errand boys for a congregation or a denomination. I think we need to establish the priority of preaching. And I pray God that in this church this will be a place of powerful preaching and that we will never substitute anything for the Spirit energized preaching of Christ, His cross, and the word of God. Now if you haven't gotten, I believe in preaching.
You say well where do you get all this? Where do you get the idea of the priority? Well, the first thing that happened on Pentecost was just that, and as we come to Chapter 2, verse 14 that's where it all begins. Don't go there yet, I'm not done with the introduction. Peter is the preacher. And Peter is Spirit filled and Peter's been restored and Peter's a firebrand now and things are going to happen, and it all begins with a sermon. Now people can try to design the sermon out of the service and enter in with all kinds of different things and so forth and so on, but there's never to be replacing of that.
Acts doesn't say that after being baptized into Christ's body in Chapter 2 and being filled with the Spirit and beginning to speak the wonderful works of God and all those languages and gaining the year of the multitude that they all broke into small groups for interaction. It doesn't say that. Or that each received a mimeographed sheet for their independent study. Doesn't say that either. Or that the disciples immediately went into 12 weeks of training for pre-evangelism. It says that when the Spirit of God had filled them, they stood up and they spoke. And later in Acts it says when they were filled with the Spirit, they spoke the word with what? With boldness.
The dynamic of the Spirit of God issued itself in the birth of church in the preaching of the word. And I think it still does. I think it still does. When the Spirit had come, we saw the strategy last week didn't we? We saw how the Spirit of God set the scene for the sermon. Beautiful. By the sound that they all heard of the wind, the crowd gathered. And when the disciples began to speak in all of these languages, they were amazed and shocked, they were at God with wonder, they were astonished. They couldn't figure it out. Some of them said they're drunk. They couldn't understand how these Galileans from up there where the Hacedes lived in the northern part, they're not even educated. And here they are rattling off these languages like mad. They couldn't figure what was going on.
The Spirit of God had set the stage. They were together, they were confused. It was time for somebody to come in who wasn't confused and eliminate the confusion, perfectly setting the stage. And as we begin in our study today we're just going to barely get into Peter's sermon. You say how come it takes you four weeks to preach one sermon? That's my problem. Peter preached it in one shot, I can't.
I want to take you into it and show you the details. It's a good thing I wasn't there on Pentecost or this sermon would have run into Chapter 7. But anyway, Peter got it out a lot faster and easier than I did, but lets face it. He had direct inspiration from the Holy Spirit for every word. I fumble around, but I hope I get there eventually. Not to inspiration, but to the end.
In Chapter 2:14 to verse 42, this whole sermon appears and we'll be in it for a couple of weeks because I want you to see it. Strategically, it is the pattern of apostolic preaching. It's the foundation of all of our apostolic proclamation. The preaching of the cross all through Acts, through the Epistles and even today follows this pattern or should follow this pattern. But the Spirit had set the scene so perfectly. He had even tied the whole thing into the God of these people, the true God of the Old Testament by making these languages to speak the wonderful works of God. So that the people were seeing this miracle and they would say well it's a miracle, therefore it comes from a supernatural source.
Well, it either comes from the devil or God, because they're the only two supernatural sources. And if they're all declaring the wonderful works of God, you know the devil's not in the business of doing that. So therefore, the Spirit had stage the deal, getting them altogether confusing them and then having them hear the wonderful works of God tying it all into God. And now with that beautiful illustration, that beautiful stage set, Peter just slips in and just fires away.
The Spirit of God has done all the preparation. And this is a fantastic sermon. The results, verse 37, look at the results. When they...I'll give a look at the end before we get there. "And when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart and they said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, men, brethren, what shall we do." I mean, they were shook. And verse 41 says, "Three thousand of them were saved and baptized."
It's wonderful to see Peter doing this, isn't it? That's what's known as recovery. Now I want to give you a little view of preaching in terms of what I mentioned earlier, it's content. The word preach, kerusso, is to proclaim or herald a proclamation. It means to announce a proclamation. That's kerusso and from the word kerusso comes the noun kerugma. Now kerugma is preaching the content of the proclamation. When I get up and preach, what I have said or what I have proclaimed is the kerugma or the body of proclamation.
And the kerugma in the New Testament was made up always of the same things. First of all, it centered in Jesus Christ, always. And throughout the book of Acts it involves the fact, number one, that Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecy. It was always tied into the Old Testament prophecy. Secondly, it always indicated that Jesus was God in human flesh. Thirdly, it centered on his life and work particularly death and resurrection. Fourthly, it always talked about his second coming and fifth, it always ended with the fact that salvation was alone in Him and anybody who rejected it was lost forever.
That was the kerugma. That was the content of the proclamation. But may I add something very, very important. Apostolic preaching and all preaching was not just kerugma. It was not just proclamation, it was also didache. Didache is the Greek word for teaching. And Didache, from which we get didactic which has to do with teaching referred to actual reasoning and doctrine so that Christian preaching was a combination of kerugma and didache. And you can spring that on your friends and they'll think you've got the scholars corner on it.
But kerugma and didache made up preaching. There is no such thing as preaching without content and doctrine. They always went together. They always overlap in Acts. There's no preaching without teaching. Frequently for example, in the book of Acts we read that after one of the apostles had preached, it doesn't say that people were convicted or converted, it says that people were persuaded. And the very fact that that term is used indicates that they were going through a logical process. That there was doctrine involved, that there was a body of truth. How many times have you heard a cheap presentation of the gospel that never did start at the beginning and end at the end and then when the appeal was made, the appeal was made on the basis of nothing really.
And the only response could be an emotional response. All of the preaching in the book of Acts and in the New Testament a true apostolic preaching has integrity my friends. That is it gives the kerugma and the didache before it ever makes the appeal. Stott says in his book The Preacher's Portrait, you never make an appeal without a correct kerugma. A correct proclamation. And vice versa, you never give the kerugma and the didache without making an appeal.
You say why do you always have an invitation. Just because I believe that that's what you ought to do. If you're going to ask somebody to do something, then you ought to give them a chance to do it. The best example I think of this is Paul in Ephesus. And you know, Paul was there for two years, because he had a lot to work against, you know. That was a pagan place. And he argued...the Bible says "he argued daily in the hall of Tyrannus." And some of the old manuscripts say he argued from the fifth hour to the tenth hour. That's five hours a day for two years.
Paul argued or reasoned, his preaching was doctrinal preaching. That's 25,000 plus hours of preaching I figure. That's a lot of preaching. No wonder the next verse says all the residents of Asia heard the word of the Lord. And Paul's content was kerugma, proclamation of Christ and didache, doctrinal instruction, the two go together. So this we understand then first of all, the importance of preaching and its priority and secondly we understand the character of preaching.
Now we'll get to my sermon and Peter's. Now as we come to this sermon, it falls into four parts and really all sermons do. So it's a perfect pattern of preaching, a good one to teach preaching from. It has an introduction. It has a proclamation or a body. It has an appeal and then a result. And all good preaching, incidentally has a result. The introduction explaining Pentecost, the proclamation exalting Christ, the appeal exhorting people, and the results examining effects.
Today, we'll only look at the introduction and may not get too far into that. We'll see. Verse 14, "But Peter standing up with the eleven," now that's nothing new for Peter. He was always standing up to say something only this time it's under the control of the Holy Spirit, which is a nice change. And you'll notice that he's standing up here with the eleven and that indicates that Matthias had been absorbed into the eleven having been selected at the end of Chapter 1 and now the body of the twelve is complete.
So Peter stands up. Now the moment is fantastic. The Holy Spirit has set the stage. The people are confused. Their minds are all messed up. They can't understand what's been going on. From their standpoint everything is ready. From Peter's standpoint everything is ready. He's been filled with the Spirit of God. He's about to open his mouth and God is going to