Acts 2:22-36 - The Risen Lord Who Reigns

Lovid.

I'd invite you to take your Bible and turn with me over to the book of Acts and chapter two.

Acts chapter two.

On the eighth of September in 19 or 2022, a ninety six-year-old woman passed away in a Scottish house.

That very instant that she died, not that evening, um not that week, but that very instant that she did, her son, her eldest son, became king.

The moment Elizabeth expired, Charles became king.

There's an ancient law, uh Rex Nunquam Morator, which states that the king never dies.

And so he became king instantly.

Two days later, David White stood out on a balcony over a friy court in St.

James Palace, and he made a pronouncement.

And that pronouncement, two days later, didn't make Charles king.

And eight months later, in Westminster Abbey, with all the preparations and all the fanfare and the ceremony of oil and crown, that didn't make him king either.

Prince Charles became King Charles, and known as King Charles III, the very instant his mother passed away.

His authority did not need someone to put a crown on him or to cast a vote or to go through a process.

He instantly became king.

Not many authorities work that way in our life.

There are a few.

One of them is none of us took a vote on who was going to be our parent.

They just instantly became our parents.

And uh none of us woke up this morning and gave a consent form to the police department and told them that they only had a certain number of things they could catch us for once we got in the car.

But we drive like we're the authority anyway.

There's a lot of authorities that are over our life, but they don't come instantly over us.

They're the kind of authorities that day by day kind of creep in and they take over, and we recognize eventually that they're actually ruling over us, and we're not quite sure how all that happened.

One of those is fear.

Now, of course, there's that sort of fear that you get at 2 a.m.

when the phone rings and it shocks you awake.

I'm not talking about that.

Our bodies do what our bodies do, and God has built that into us.

But that fear that's been gnawing at you for weeks and weeks and months and years, that's a fear that's been enthroned by you.

Or take doubt.

Now, certainly there are is room for honest question.

There's room for someone to say, I really don't understand.

Help me out.

But then there's that doubt where you say you believe, but you've never actually settled it and say, I know.

And nor have you investigated it.

You've allowed that doubt to control and to rule over you.

And some of us don't need an illustration of what kind of ruler is enthroned over us.

You know right in your heart right now, those things that are actually controlling you.

There is a ruler, however, that we've never asked for, one that we've never crowned, one that we've never voted on, and one that by ourselves we can never take off the throne.

And that ruler is death.

It's something that comes after every single one of us, and not a one of us has anything that we can say about it.

It rules.

And so here we are this morning with rulers that we haven't crowned, that are there, and we can't uncrown them.

And then there are those things, those imposing things that we've put there, and then there's this one ruler as it is, death, that we can never set off of its throne.

I want you to take into our look at Acts chapter 2 three questions.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

Is there a ruler who has authority over death?

Second question I want us to bring into Acts chapter 2 is if there is such a ruler, how can I know that?

Acts 2 · chapter mention

And then last of all, is that ruler one I should surrender my life to?

So those three questions.

Is there a ruler who has authority over death?

Secondly, how do I know that?

And third, should I surrender my life to that ruler?

So here in Acts chapter 2, seven weeks after a public execution of a man named Jesus, an ex-fisherman stands up in the middle of a Jerusalem street and answers those very questions in the verses we'll be looking at this morning.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

As we look at Acts chapter 2, we enter in to what we've been looking at for a couple weeks.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

Nine o'clock in the morning in Jerusalem.

The spirit has fallen, a crowd is gathered, and some of them have already drawn some conclusions about what's happening, something that they can't explain.

Now, Peter, as we saw last week, took them back to the promise of the book of Joel and showed them that what was happening there in the streets of Jerusalem was in fulfillment of a promise made hundreds of years ago.

And now as we move deeper into this message, Peter is turning from the promise to the person.

And what we're looking at is part of the first Christian sermon ever preached.

And as we shall see, it has one subject the king.

The king.

God raised him up, ending the pains of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by death.

Now, those are verses 22 through 24, but we're going to be looking through all the way down to verse 36 this morning.

And here's the focus of our message in one phrase: Bring your life to King Jesus, who is already enthroned.

Bring your life to King Jesus, who's already enthroned, enthroned.

And here's how we're going to unpack that this morning.

Because this Jesus who was crucified is both Lord and Christ, we are first of all to surrender our death to the king that death could not hold.

And because God has made this Jesus who was crucified both Lord and Christ, we are secondly to settle our doubt according to the word that God has already kept.

And then third, we are to submit our destiny to the one who is seated on the throne.

So let's take these three points and turn.

First of all, let's look at how we are to surrender our death to the king that death could not hold.

And verses 22 to 24 make that point very clearly.

And as we just said a moment ago, death is that one ruler that none of us have crowned, and yet none of us can remove.

And Peter's first movement in his sermon is to speak about one who has authority over death itself.

And let's watch how he does this, and then we'll bring it home to ourselves.

First of all, Peter doesn't ask the crowd to believe something new.

Notice what he does here in verse 22.

He asks them to reckon with things that they've already witnessed themselves.

And you'll see three phrases in verse 22.

He says here that these things have been attested to you by God.

And then he says also in verse 22 that God did among you through him, and lastly, just as you yourselves know.

Three times in this one verse, he's telling them, Look, don't trust me.

Let me don't let I'm not going to tell you about something that's happened far away in some other place at some other time.

He's saying, You guys know what I'm talking about.

You know this man, Jesus.

You watched him, and perhaps some of you have been watching him the whole time.

You watched him when he opened up a blind man's eyes.

You watched him when he cleansed lepers' skin.

You watched him when he called a little girl off of her deathbed.

You watched him.

You saw when a storm went quiet as at his command.

You saw and ate food among thousands of you from a little boy's lunch.

I'm not telling you anything new.

He's not preaching to them a legend that grew in the retelling.

He's preaching an eyewitness account to eyewitnesses of the person of Jesus.

He's not asking for faith yet.

What he's calling them to is an honest recognition of the things that they had seen, not the final judgment that the high priest or even the rulers in Jerusalem had made, but what they had seen Jesus actually do.

And notice what he does secondly.

He goes on to tell them that God's plan does not excuse a single one of them as they drove nails into the hands of Jesus.

He gets pretty direct here.

Look at verse 23.

Though he was delivered up according to God's determined plan and foreknowledge, you use lawless people to nail him to the cross and kill him.

Now hold those two things together because we we often assume they canceled each other out.

Well, because God planned it, um, it's nobody's fault.

Or because we did this, God must have been caught by surprise.

And we hold these two things separately.

Peter doesn't.

He says them both, and he says them both in one sentence, and he he doesn't even feel the slightest strain at all when he says that.

Isaiah spoke about that hundreds of years ago, right, Barbara?

That this man would be crushed for our iniquities and pierced for our transgressions, and yet it was also the Lord's hand.

It pleased the Lord to bruise him.

Unjust hands, sovereign purpose, both through at once, no contradiction.

Now watch how this works in a couple chapters.

And we'll look at this when we get to it in chapter four.

I just want to read this to you.

The church has been threatened.

They've been told to be silent.

And what do they do when people are anxious and threatened?

They withdraw, but they didn't withdraw in fear, they withdrew in prayer.

And when they prayed, they said this they prayed back to God that Herod and Pilate and the nations had conspired together to do whatever your hand and your will had predestined to take place.

They recognized that there was a God in heaven who was moving through the difficult things, including the crucifixion of Christ and even the threats that they were receiving.

And they knew that this God was in control of all those things and them.

And so they could find comfort.

They didn't have to cower in the face of all of this opposition.

They didn't file away God's sovereignty as something to pull up in an argument with someone who wanted to deny it.

They brought it to prayer, and it became a comfort to them.

But notice how Peter continues this.

He calls them to an honest recognition.

He doesn't let them loose in the responsibility that is thors, and yet he wants to move them deeper into this argument about who is actually ruling over death.

And in verse 24, he says it.

I love that phrase, don't you?

It's not God chose to raise him up, or it it kind of worked out that way.

It was not possible for death to hold him.

Death reached out its authoritative hand to Jesus, just like it had reached out to every single other person placed in the grave.

And it found out that it could not grip him, it could not hold him.

It was not possible for him to do that.

And I love how Peter puts this, and he draws from the Old Testament that moment where David himself is found to be wrapped up in the cords of death in Psalm 18.

And he says that Jesus brings an end to the pains of death.

It's an interesting picture because the way it's describing is taking us into the labor room of the hospital.

And any of us who've been in that labor room as a witness know what that room looks like and sounds like.

Until you hear a cry and you realize what it was all for.

A life has come into this world.

Christ entered into death in order to bring life.

And on Friday, when he was crucified, it sounded like there was nothing but pain and loss and a sealed tomb.

It sounded like it was over.

It sounded like it was the end.

It sounded like everything was finished, and someone must have thought, this this has to stop.

Every expectation was that the story was over.

But Friday didn't extinguish life.

Friday was the beginning of the labor pains that would extinguish death.

That's what it was.

You see, the cross wasn't the dead end.

The tomb was not the final prison.

And what looked like defeat was simply the labor of redemption.

And when that morning came on Sunday, that resurrection day dawned, the cries of a suffering grave ended with the shouts of life's victory.

The pains of death could not do their work on Jesus.

The Son of God stepped away from a grave and held on to a life that death could not hold.

Now, here's what this is telling us here.

Death is a servant, but death is not a king.

Death is servile to a different king, and his name is Jesus.

Now listen to how Peter puts it.

It could not hold him.

And these aren't just Peter's words.

Paul himself, some eleven chapters later, goes back to the very same passage that Peter is proclaiming, and he says the exact same thing that Peter did.

The spirit who raised him from the dead will also bring your mortal bodies to life through the Spirit who lives in you.

What happened to Jesus in the life that he had and the authority that he showed over death itself is promised to all who believe.

Death is but a servant to those who own Jesus as king.

Now, Peter's not talking about a metaphor here, and this is not the moment for us to sphere off into some sort of three steps on how to defeat the enemies in your life, and talk about, you know, your boss or you know the bad situation at home.

He's talking about flesh and blood.

He's talking about a real corpse.

He's talking about a body that was taken down off of a cross that was wrapped up and stuck into a tomb, and people walked away with tears in their eyes.

And what he's saying is that body is the body that God reached down to.

And this is important for us.

The writer of Hebrews talks about this.

He said that all of us bear, whether we admit it or not, a common fear.

We have the fear of death, and because of it, we're held in slavery all our lives.

Hebrews 2, 14 and 15.

Now we may not admit it, but it's there.

It's a fear, though we may not admit or might not even in a moment be conscious of, it lies underneath and with the soul.

For some of us, it is a very real and very visible and very tragic reality.

Some of us have lost loved ones, some of us even this year, and we are still trying to come to grips with the hole in our life that's shaped exactly like that person.

Some of us are dealing with family members, loved ones, parents who are watching move day by day just a little bit further away from the strength in life that we've watched.

For some of us, we're the ones who are ill.

We're the ones who are coming to grips every day with the reality that death is a lot closer to us than we had assumed even a few years ago.

And some of us are just well perfectly well this morning.

Thank you very much.

And uh reminding me of death.

Well, I didn't know I was gonna have to deal with that when I came to church this morning.

But listen to what The scriptures say.

They're not here to scare us, they're here to encourage us.

It's telling us that death doesn't have to be the final authority we all assumed it was.

Because it isn't anymore.

Jesus is king over death.

And that the same spirit who raised him up will also raise up all who believe on him.

We can surrender our death to this King.

We can give ourselves to him.

I want you to ask, ask yourself this question.

When was the last time you talked to God about your own death?

When was the last time you talked to God about the death of one of your loved ones?

When was the last time you said in faith, Lord, though I faced this, I know it will not conquer me because you conquered it.

And maybe you're here this morning and you've done that and you're still afraid?

God will not send you home to work on your faith.

The amount of your faith is not going to change one bit Christ's authority over death.

There was a man who looked at Jesus when he found out that Jesus could heal his child.

And he said, Lord, I believe.

Help my unbelief.

And Jesus didn't say, Well, as soon as you get that help, come back to me and we'll take care of the problem.

He was giving his child back, even in the midst of his admitted weakness.

Peter is not describing a technique here.

He is announcing the reign of a king, Jesus.

And because God has made this Jesus who was crucified, both Lord and Christ, we can surrender our death to him.

And you might be saying to yourself this morning, well, that's a beautiful claim.

How do I know it's true?

Well, this is exactly the very question that Peter anticipates and answers in the very next section.

So let's move to that point.

Not only can we submit our death and surrender our death to the king that death could not hold, but we can settle our doubts on the word that God kept.

And we find this in verses 25 to 32.

Now there's a big difference between believing something and having it settled.

And Peter here is about to hand this crowd some things that will settle any doubts.

And the first thing he does is that he mentions a psalm from David that cannot possibly be about David.

Because it's talking about his grave, which is already in Jerusalem, and another one that's empty.

Notice how he draws out this psalm by King David in verses 25 to 28.

Listen to what he says.

And he uses David's name specifically because David is the most, probably the most trusted name in this place.

For David says of him, I saw the Lord ever before me, because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken.

Therefore, my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices.

Moreover, my flesh will rest in hope, because you will not abandon me in Hades or allow your holy one to see decay.

You have revealed the path of life to me, and you will fill me with gladness in your presence.

That's a beautiful passage of scripture.

It's one that speaks of confident hope.

And it's one of those passages that you might want to put on some cardstock and put in a frame and stick on your wall.

Or it might be one of those verses that's so nice you might you might go over to Levi and say, Levi, uh, does your company have a card for this?

And I'd like to take it to a hospital.

But notice what Peter does with it.

He doesn't put it on a wall or in a card.

He announces this and he tells us exactly what it's talking about.

Verse 29.

Brothers and sisters, I can confidently speak to you about Patriarch David.

He is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us today.

His tomb is still with us today.

Think about this for a second.

Peter is standing within walking distance of David's grave.

This is a site that everyone that he's talking to could go visit, and probably a lot of them already have.

And what he's saying to them is, go have a look.

Go have a look.

He's dead, he's buried, his grave is with us to this day.

His bones are there.

Decay took his body.

So whatever Psalm 16 is about, it's not about David.

Notice what else he has to say.

This Psalm is not about David.

David wrote as a prophet, and he wrote on the basis of a promise.

Verse 30.

Since he was a prophet, he knew that God had sworn an oath to him to seat one of his descendants on the throne.

Oh, that's what this is about.

This is not about David himself.

This is about some future son.

And you can read about that promise in 2 Samuel 7.

If you want to have a look at that, I encourage you to do so.

Verses 12 and 13 are exactly where you want to have a look.

So David is looking down the corridors of time and up until this point in time, nearly a thousand years.

And what is he seeing?

He's not seeing something for himself, he's seeing a future tomb, a future tomb that's going to also be there on this very same day of Pentecost.

One that these people could visit.

And he's saying, Look, you could visit my tomb and I'll be there, but you can go to that tomb, and it's been promised for a thousand years that it'll be empty.

There's a greater son.

There's a greater son who will go into a grave, and the grave will not be able to keep him.

It will not be able to find decay on his body.

And Paul stands up and says the exact same thing in Antioch when he says this you will not let your holy one decay.

David, after serving God's purposes in his own generation, fell asleep and was buried with his fathers and decayed.

But the one God raised up did not decay.

Two apostles, two cities, one psalm, one promise, one person.

And so here Peter is telling us that we can surrender our death to a king death could not hold.

Because there is something we can rest our doubts on.

We can give our doubts and put them underneath the God who kept his promise.

Who kept his promise.

Verse 32.

God has raised this Jesus.

We are all witnesses of this.

Peter didn't say, We all believe he rose from the dead.

We're witnesses.

We ate with him, we touched him.

Paul would later say there's 500, most of which are still alive.

And Paul was saying that to the Corinthians as an invitation.

If you would like to have a talk with them, there are a lot of them.

I'll give you their phone number.

You can speak.

What is Peter offering to them?

Promise and testimony in the face of their doubts.

Promise and testimony.

The word of God spoken centuries earlier and the attestation of the people who watched it happen in real time.

Some of you bought a house, and in the process of buying a house, probably someone went through some records that you might not even have realized.

They went back through the claim deed of your house and title of your house, and they searched whether or not there was a clear record.

And everything that might have been held against that house and every transaction that affected that house was examined.

Every sale, every transfer, every lien, every loan, everything.

And if that title was clear, you could, before you said, I love this house, and before you signed the papers, they would have to determine it can be yours.

And here the Lord, for a thousand years, has offered in Jesus Christ the clean record of the promise of God.

And he's saying, It is here.

And this is what Peter's doing in the streets.

He's holding up the promise, and he's saying, We saw this happen.

You can submit your death to this king because you can offer your doubts to the promises of God that have been fulfilled.

They're there.

Sunday morning, the resurrection.

Christ is ruling.

Now notice where Peter is saying all of this.

Peter is not headed off to some far distant land and speaking about the resurrection of Christ.

He's not waiting for some future generation where all the memories of a person named Jesus have grown dark and dim.

This is seven weeks after the execution.

This is in the city where it happened.

This is within walking distance of both tombs.

And he's preaching the resurrection in the very place where it could be dispelled if it had never happened.

What does he give them?

He gives them a text, Psalm 16, he gives them a location, David's tomb, and the empty tomb.

And he gives them a roster.

We are witnesses.

Have a talk with each of us.

So a document that predates the event, Psalm 16, written some thousand years before it happened.

A grave that any one of them could have visited, and witnesses any one of them could have interviewed.

What is he telling us here?

The gospel that Peter is preaching is not asking these people to stop thinking.

The gospel he's preaching to them is meant to answer their doubts.

He's giving them the answer.

And he's asking them look, if you do have doubts, just go and see.

Read the word, go to the tomb, and talk to us, and we can tell you.

And think about this.

The people that didn't want to hear this message that Peter is proclaiming, the people that wanted to put Peter and everybody else uh into prison and to stop this, who had every reason to do so.

Think about them just for a second.

They had the authority to do so, they had the jurisdiction to do so, they had seven weeks to do so, they had a garrison behind them to do so.

There was only one thing that they needed to do to quash this group.

Show them a body.

There wasn't one to show.

They could not offer that body, they never produced it.

Now think about this for a second.

It's one thing to die for something that you believe, it's a whole nother thing to die for something you dreamt up.

Think about what happens to each of these apostles.

They all face horrendous deaths.

And to a person, there wasn't a single one of them that said, you know, you know, we just kind of made this up.

Not a single one of them.

What is this telling us?

Faith in Jesus Christ is not a leap in the dark.

It's not.

It's not I've decided to believe something lovely because, well, the opposite just kind of scares me.

It's not that either.

It's a conclusion to be drawn from a promise made.

It's a conclusion to be drawn from facts that have been witnessed.

It's a conclusion that can be yours.

It can be yours.

Peter's not telling people to try harder to believe.

He's not telling them to make peace with their uncertainty.

He's telling them to go check it out.

And once you do, your doubts will be dispelled, and you can give yourself to the promise God has already fulfilled.

So here's something if you have doubts this morning.

Take 1 Corinthians chapter 15.

1 Corinthians 15 · chapter mention

Read those early verses of chapter 15.

And underline every single name that's written there.

How many witnesses are there?

And then read Luke chapter 24, where Luke writes about the resurrection.

Luke 24 · chapter mention

And mark this out.

Luke takes the very first words of the proclamation of the resurrection and shows that it was the women who made the declaration.

Now that may not seem like much to us at all, but in that day it meant a lot.

Because God, in his glorious irony, who likes to upset the wisdom of men, took the message from the very people, women, that the society in that day wouldn't listen to to begin with.

Because their testimony could not be held in a court of law as authoritative.

And yet, to the whole earth, the king of heaven said, You better listen to that testimony.

It's glorious irony.

So if you have your questions, go to 1 Corinthians 15.

Go to Luke chapter 24.

Luke 24 · chapter mention

Go to those other places.

And if you would like, let's talk.

Micah would love to talk with you.

Right?

I would love to talk with you.

Ethan would love to talk with you.

Bob would love to talk with you.

Find some trusted person right with you here and say, can we talk about this?

I would love to talk about this.

Because Peter is not saying, you know, you just need to believe, or you need to just sort of accept something that's sort of a dreamy, dreamy possible future that can help comfort you in the midst of the stark realities that were all just particles of dust that will return to dust.

He's saying, look, God gave a promise, God fulfilled a promise, and we saw it happen.

And that testimony is recorded to our day here.

So we can surrender our death to the king, death could not hold.

Because we can settle our doubts on a word that God kept.

And here's the last point that Peter wants to draw out here.

Submit your destiny to the one already seated on the throne.

Submit your destiny to the one already seated on the throne.

Every one of us lives under some authority.

Some we've put there, one we can't take away.

But there's an authority we can submit ourselves to, and we should, and Peter invites us to.

He said, Since he's exalted to the right hand of God and has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit, he has poured out what you both see and hear.

Catch that.

Peter is saying everything about this person, Jesus, the things that we talked about before, the miracles, the plan, the cross, the empty tomb, everything that you're witnessing right now, the people scattered about, the sound that you heard, the splitting of all those tongues that you saw, the people crying out in your language, the mighty acts of God.

Let me tell you where all that came from.

There's a person that you crucified already on the throne.

And it's happening now because he is.

He's there.

And he brings the next verse into play.

Verses 34 and 35.

For it was not David who descended into the ascended into the heavens, but he himself says, The Lord declared to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies my footstool.

Same move he made before.

Talking about David again.

And he's saying, David is not talking about himself here.

David never ascended.

He's acting as a prophet, and he's talking about someone who's greater than him.

This King David is talking about a greater king by calling him my Lord.

My Lord.

King calling someone else Lord means he's a mighty, mighty one.

And this psalm that he quotes is reached for throughout the whole of the New Testament.

It is the most often quoted chapter in all of the New Testament.

Jesus quotes it when he stops the Pharisees where they're standing.

Hebrews builds an argument of it out of in Hebrews chapter 1 and verse 13.

Hebrews 1 · chapter mention

Paul tells the Corinthians that Christ must reign until he's put all his enemies under his feet.

Notice the word that Peter uses here as he quotes David until I make all your enemies your footstool.

You know, when we hear the word footstool, we kind of think furniture, right?

We think, you know, do you want to go over to Raymore and Flanagan and have a look at the footstools?

Yeah, kind of soft, you know, and put your feet up.

The crowd standing in front of Peter are not thinking Raymore and Flanagan.

They're not thinking furniture.

They're hearing something very, very ominous.

There's a scene in the book of Joshua where five kings are dragged out of a cave.

And Joshua calls his captains forward and he tells them this in Joshua 10.

Come here and put your feet on the necks of these kings.

So the commanders came forward and put their feet on their necks.

This is the picture.

It's not furniture.

It's a neck.

And every person in this room, every single one of us, is going to bow to a king.

And we've got our neck under something's foot.

And here Peter is talking to these people.

He's just told them you crucified the Lord of glory.

He is both King and Christ.

He is the Messiah, the anointed one.

He is the one who has been awaited for, and you crucified him.

And he's going to be, as he is, ascended, standing on your neck.

Oh dear.

You mean to tell me he was Lord?

Kurios?

The very Greek word that takes the translation of Yahweh from the Old Testament?

We crucified God?

Christ, the Messiah, the king we should have bowed to, we killed.

Yes.

All the verdicts that humanity put down on that Friday.

Crucify him, crucify him.

He said he was the King of the Jews.

If you're the Son of God, ask him to take you down.

He's a liar, a blasphemer.

Crucify him.

What more should we say?

You see what he did?

He's seditious.

All the judgments of humanity on that Friday have been trampled down by the judgment of God on Sunday when Jesus was brought out of the grave, and forty days later brought into the throne room of heaven itself.

And there he is, with enemies under his feet.

And the people there that day are asking themselves, What does that mean now?

What do we do?

What do we do?

This indictment is staring down on us, and it is harsh and hard.

Is there no hope for us?

They're crying out.

But Peter's words are not just in an indictment, they're a glorious invitation.

Listen to what he says to them after they ask this question.

Verse 37 is the question: what should we do?

And he says to them, Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins.

Relinquish your judgment about this man.

Repent of claiming yourself as the Lord of your destiny, and submit yourself to King Jesus in a public display of allegiance through the baptismal waters.

And guess what?

As you step into life, his life, you will receive forgiveness and the assuring gift of eternal salvation through the gift of the Holy Spirit Himself.

Their response didn't make him king.

He was already king.

But what they learned there was this message about Christ was not something just to receive for information's sake.

And it wasn't just to hear as a harsh indictment against their sin.

It carried with it a glorious invitation, a forgiveness and life and acceptance.

As they submitted their destiny to the one who's already on the throne.

The judgment of this world doesn't claim him as Lord.

And they wonder peculiar wonder why you most peculiarly are doing so.

And claiming Christ as Lord has cost you.

The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory that will be revealed within us.

There's no loss, there's no loss in surrendering your destiny to Jesus.

And some of you have claimed Christ as your Savior, and you've just neglected the King, and you've allowed other things to creep in, to call more strongly to your mind and your life and your decisions than Him.

Come back.

Come back to Him.

And perhaps you're in this room this morning and you've never surrendered your destiny to the king who's already on the throne.

I want you to hear something.

And it's a warm, warm word.

3,000 of these people that Peter had just spoken to and said, You, by taking wicked persons, have crucified.

You whose necks ought to have his foot planted firmly on, you can live.

You can have life.

And this morning, there's not a sin you've committed.

There's not a treachery that you've done.

There's not a neglect of God that you've followed.

There's not a blaspheme against his name that you have uttered, that this king will not forgive.

If you come and bow yourself to him, he called out to these men on that day, and some 3,000 of them said, Jesus is now Lord of my life, and he is the savior of my soul, and I will give my life to him, and I will publicly announce that to all by following in the name of Jesus, the others who are doing so into the waters of baptism, to declare to all this city, the same guilty city I live in, that I have a new king over me.

In his name is Jesus.

Will you come?

Will you come?

Let's bow.

Let's bow.

Father, we thank you for our glorious Lord Jesus Christ.

We thank you that He is Lord over death.

And death could not grip him, it was not possible.

And we thank you that to all who believe on Him is given this promise.

Though you die, you shall surely live.

Thank you for the promise that the grip of death that could not hold Jesus cannot lay its grip on us and hold us firm.

Because Christ is Lord over it, and He is Lord over us.

And to us He has given us the sure and certain promise of everlasting life.

We thank you, Father, that we can lay all of our questions and doubts and submit them into the hands of your weighty promises, who will assure us that everyone is yes and amen, true and right and worthy of belief.

And we thank you that as we submit our destiny to you, you are a God of compassion and love and grace and mercy, and that you will not refuse a single one who comes to you.

You will not cast them out.

Father, we're not here to step out on the balcony in London and read out a proclamation that Jesus is Lord.

He already is.

We're not here to make him Lord of our life, he already is Lord.

We are here to bow.

And bow willingly we do, and bow welcomely we do, and bow, bow wondrously we do.

Bow, Father, with glorious awe within our hearts.

Jesus is King.

Hallelujah.

Amen.