Analog Church 04: Peter's Sermon pt. 1

Acts 2, 16 through 21.

But this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel, and in the last days it shall be, God declares, and I will pour out my spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.

Even on my male servants and female servants, in those days I will pour out my spirit, and they shall prophesy.

And I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and vapor of smoke, the sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood.

Before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day, and it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

Acts 2, 25-28.

For David says concerning him, I saw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand that I may not be shaken.

Therefore my heart was glad and my tongue rejoiced.

My flesh also will dwell in hope.

For you will not abandon my soul to Hades or let your holy one see corruption.

You have made known to me the path of life.

You will make me full of gladness with your presence.

Acts 2, 34 through 35.

For David did not ascend into heaven, but he himself said, The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Welcome to church this morning.

I heard that there was a race out there today that made it a little difficult to get here.

Is that true?

Yeah, there's ti yeah, they're w they're all walking, so not really a race, that's what I heard someone say.

So the uh yeah, it's tough to keep track of all the 5Ks and 10Ks in Denver.

Um my company uh had a a 401k, and I thought that's too far to run.

It's a terrible joke.

Terrible joke.

Uh so welcome to church this morning.

My name is James Rastman.

I'm the lead pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

We are um uh the way to get involved with our church is there's basically two ways.

We gather large, which is what we're doing now, and we gather small.

So our small gatherings we call redemption groups.

Those take place in people's homes.

And if you would like to be a part of one of those where they we follow along with the same scripture that we're following in the main service, uh, and take just sort of a new angle at it and see what we can discover in that text together as we get to know each other.

So there's uh uh if you would like to be a part of one of those redemption groups, you can sign up at the welcome table in the foyer.

There's a table that says welcome table with a chalkboard, there's people standing around it with iPads, and you can sign up on those iPads.

Also, next week, uh we've got something special going on after the service.

The folks that we purchase our coffee from are called Queen City Collective Coffee.

And they're a small batch roaster here in Denver, and they uh uh one of the focuses, one of the reasons they got into the coffee business is they uh had some exposure to coffee farmers around the world, and they realized just uh that their living conditions had uh been terrible, and uh they uh realized that a way to help these people is by creating a real supply chain that they can benefit from by growing their coffee so they can actually be paid a real living wage with their coffee.

So they've developed these relationships with these farmers, and uh one of the uh groups of farmers in particular in Rwanda, uh, it's a it's a group of predominantly female farmers that they've partnered with, and uh they requested a community center.

They went to them and said, How could we help?

How can we uh impact you uh while you're growing our coffee?

Um and so they requested a community center, so a place for the kids to go during the day, um during the off season, a place for the community to gather, they can have sewing machines and different sorts of things in there that the whole community can use.

So we are partnering with Queen City Coffee to raise the funds to build this community center.

So it'll cost$10,000.

Um and that's our goal.

That's what we're uh trying to be a part of raising for them.

So next week they're going to be here, the folks from Queen City, and they'll be downstairs in the foyer, and they're gonna we're gonna do a cupping, which is what they call it when you taste coffee.

And we're going to taste all their coffee from all over the world.

Uh we'll be serving their Rwandan coffee, um, and you'll have opportunities to give and learn about their whole process.

So be sure to show up next week if you like coffee, uh, which is another way of saying everyone.

Um okay, so that's it for announcements.

Uh, I'm gonna go ahead and pray real quick before we dive into the text.

Father, I we ask that your spirit would inhabit this place.

Lord, we all come in with minds that are full of distraction and concern and worry.

Lord, I pray that we would be able to set those things aside for this next little while.

That we can be in the presence of your word together.

Lord, that your word would come and it would work on our hearts and it would refine us and it would shape us and it would show us who you truly are, so that we may know you and worship you in spirit and in truth this morning.

Lord, provide us this space with you.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So the book that we're moving through is called Acts.

And we're in a series called Analog Church.

We're basically looking at the early church as an analogy for how we should operate as a church today.

How can we, as a church today, have the same day one clarity that the early church had?

And the book that we're moving through, the first four chapters of, is called the Book of Acts.

It's because it recounts the acts of the apostles, the things that they did.

But uh that may be a misnomer, because if you move through the book, a lot of it, a substantial amount of the book, is preaching.

Uh I I didn't develop these stats.

A man named John Stott, a good friend of ours, uh, did.

When whenever I mention John Stott, I always say our friend.

I don't know why, but I've just started that and it's stuck in my head.

He's he's a great Bible teacher.

And uh he developed these, he did the math, I guess, and shows that approximately 20% of Luke's text, which is Acts, is devoted to addresses by Peter and Paul.

So a fifth of the book is just Peter and Paul preaching.

And if you add Stephen's speech right before he's martyred, the first church martyr, he gives this incredible speech which moves through the whole arc of redemptive history.

And if you add that, then 25% of the book are addresses, they're sermons, they're preaching, they're expounding the word of God for a group of people.

In fact, when you look at the book, uh you'll notice that whenever the word, whenever the term word of God is used in Acts, it's actually referring to preaching.

It's referring to the preached word of God.

And so there's an amazing thing that we can see in this, and I'm trying to build in a little job security at the beginning of the sermon, that when you there's something unique about the word of God when it is proclaimed, that the Holy Spirit inhabits.

So that as long as the preaching conforms itself to the scripture, then it's as though the it's as though God Himself were doing the speaking.

So here's what this should do.

When you hear preaching of all kinds, you should be able to be really generous.

Even when you're hearing someone and it's like, I don't really like his style, I don't, that 401k joke was so lame that took me out of the game.

You know, there's this generosity that we can have when we're listening, and fearing, you know, when they are really expounding the word.

It's it's as though God Himself were laying these things on our hearts.

I was sharing this, I was sharing this with Zach because that's something that I actually learned through one of my seminary classes.

And Zach said, yeah, that sounds like something they'd tell a group of preachers.

Um, yeah, take that as you will.

But uh we have this hope that when we conform to the Word of God and we proclaim it, the Holy Spirit inhabits that and applies the word to our hearts as though God Himself were speaking it to us.

It's the way we see the term Word of God used throughout Acts.

And so we're approaching our first sort of sermon that we're preaching on.

This is the first in our series where we'll be preaching about preaching.

And it is uh Peter's sermon on the day of Pentecost, where uh the Holy Spirit has fallen and he stands up and he explains what exactly has taken place.

Now, this is a huge chunk of text.

I think it's verses 16 to 41, is what the whole text covers.

So that's a huge chunk of text to cover in one week.

Thankfully, we're doing it in two weeks.

But I want to explain the approach that we're taking.

What I had tried to do and when I initially laid out this sermon, I just broke the speech in half.

And so we would cover the first half, the first week, then we'll cover the second half, the second week.

But then as I was doing that, and as I was trying to uh write those messages, it was it just felt too strange.

And what I saw was that there this sermon is really moving towards one point.

It's moving towards one climactic point.

And that point is this Jesus Christ, whom you crucified, God has made both Lord and Christ.

That's the climactic moment.

This Jesus, well, I'll quote it exactly, Acts 2.36, let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you have crucified.

That's the point of the sermon.

It's all moving towards that.

So that the people might see that this Pentecost event, this incredible outpouring of the Holy Spirit, so that people are speaking in languages that aren't their own, that everyone can understand, what this means is that that Jesus who we were a part of crucifying, he's Lord in Christ now.

He is the promised one who will bring our salvation, the Christ, and he now sits at the right hand of the Father.

All authority in heaven and on earth is his, and that means we approach him, the person who the last we saw was in the least powerful state, on a cross, now he is Lord.

So that's the point that we're moving towards.

Now the way Peter gets to that point is he looks through two lenses.

And what we're going to do is we're going to spend one week on one lens and the other week on the other lens.

So right now we're at the eye doctor, and they're going to drop down one lens, and we're going to say, we're going to say, yeah, better.

And next week we're going to drop down the other lens in front of it.

We're going to say, there it is.

Now they're both laid together.

So expect to leave this sermon and think, yeah, better.

And then next week's sermon, expect to leave and say, ah, there it is.

Here are the two lenses.

The first lens is the lens of the Old Testament promises.

See, Peter preaches in the same way that we try to, which is he looks at the scripture and he expounds the scripture to interpret the present reality that he is in.

And that's what Peter does.

The first lens that he moves through is he quotes three different passages from the Old Testament.

One from the book of Joel and two from Psalms.

And by looking through this Old Testament lens, he's able to explain what is happening at Pentecost and explain through the promises of the Old Testament that this Jesus who was crucified is Lord and Christ.

So we're going to look at that lens first.

Next week, we're going to look through the lens of Jesus' coming.

So Peter looks at the life events of Jesus.

And he says, see how these explain that this Jesus who is crucified is both Lord and Christ.

So this week, first lens, which is the Old Testament promises.

So that means we're going to skip over a lot of the text in Peter's sermon, and we're just zeroing in on those quotes, where he quotes directly from the Old Testament in his sermon.

We're going to look through those.

By doing this, we're going to learn a couple of things.

We're going to learn how to interpret our own life.

Well, I'm getting ahead of myself.

We're going to learn how to interpret Scripture.

You know, how do we know how to best interpret the Old Testament?

For so many of us, the Old Testament is like this enigma, it's this riddle, and it seems so disjointed from the New.

And I think a lot of the reason we study the Old Testament so poorly is because we aren't really studying the New Testament.

The New Testament teaches us how to expound on the Old Testament.

And when we see how Peter does that, we're going to learn how to interpret Scripture, and more than that, we're going to learn how to interpret our own lives.

Because it's the same method.

We need the same lens to understand Scripture and to understand our own lives.

And that lens is Christ's.

So, what we'll see is Peter's quoting of these Old Testament passages.

We're going to see how he interprets it.

We'll learn how to interpret our own lives.

So let's go ahead and jump in.

Acts 2, 14 to 16.

This is when Peter first stands up and begins addressing those at Pentecost.

He says, But Peter, standing with the eleven, lifted up his voice and addressed them.

Men of Judea, and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and give ear to my words.

For these people are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day, which is 9 a.m.

But this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel.

So this is the way that Peter frames his speaking.

The Pentecost event happens, the Holy Spirit falls, people are speaking in tongues around them, the tongues of fire came and landed on the apostles and those that were gathered with them.

And now all of these normal, everyday people gathered from all different parts of the Roman Empire are proclaiming the mighty works of God to each other.

Unhindered by the differences in language, they are all shocked to see we understand each other.

And there were two opinions on this.

One of them stood back in bewilderment and just said, I don't know what's going on.

What is happening here?

And the other group says, they're drunk.

That's what's happening.

These people are just all drunk.

I love that.

Okay, I don't love that.

That people thought the Holy Spirit was just a bunch of people being drunk.

Here's what I love about that.

I love that the Bible records it.

The Bible records the immediate doubts that people had of the Holy Spirit that they saw.

And I also love what this tells us about the way we see things as humans.

We are so quick to just slide a mystery into one of our pre-existing categories.

And then once it's in that category, we don't have to wrestle with it anymore.

We don't have to deal with it.

And so that's what we see the crowd do.

Some of them stand in the mystery and they say, I just don't know what's happening.

And the others are like, oh, people acting crazy?

I have a category for that.

They're drunk.

It's not the Holy Spirit, they're drunk.

Done.

Peter speaks directly into that.

And he argues from just like a normal position.

He says, look, they're not drunk.

It's 9 a.m.

It's a very practical argument to begin to begin this sermon explaining Pentecost.

They're not drunk, it's 9 a.m.

Look at what time it is.

We haven't even had time to get drunk yet.

And there's a uh and then he moves in and he takes this interpretive method.

And what it is, is he says, this event, this is that thing that Joel talked about.

The prophet Joel, this event that's happening, this is that.

We have a way of understanding this strange thing that's happening in front of us.

And the way to do it is to look at what was promised in Scripture.

And we can see that this event conforms exactly to what was previously promised.

So that's the way the Old Testament seems to be used in the New Testament.

It says, look at this current event that's happening.

This is that.

And Peter shows it to us.

This is what preaching is supposed to do.

Preaching is supposed to take our context, which is full of mystery and bewilderment, even when we try and understand ourselves, maybe especially then.

And we come to a place like this with from all these different positions in our lives, and we have these questions like I'm in the midst of this very particular suffering.

Why am I in the midst of that?

There's this lust that's raging in my heart that I can't seem to keep at bay right now.

Why is this happening in me?

There's this tumultuous experience I'm going through with my friends, and this is a hard place to be.

All of a sudden I feel this deep loneliness in our city.

You know, we're surrounded by these mysteries in our lives.

And what preaching is supposed to do is supposed to take the word of God and say, let's look at it through the lens that God has given us.

And let's see how this explains the suffering that we're in, the difficulties that we're experiencing with our sin.

And perhaps even provides us a hope in the midst of it.

And that's what Peter does.

He says, look at this context, look at the strangeness of this experience.

And he says, This is that.

What you're experiencing is just what was talked about in Scripture.

And from that, the people are able to see, oh, I'm no longer just looking through my own lens.

My life isn't just, I gotta gather up enough of my own data points so that I can try and make sense of this world that I'm in.

Instead, God gives us his word that it can shine like a light into our lives, and we can see, I finally have a context.

I finally have an understanding of the suffering or the difficulty that I'm in.

And even better than that, I have a hope in the midst of it.

That's what Peter does when he applies these scriptures, and especially Joel.

So he taught, he goes through three different Old Testament quotations, first one being Joel, the second two are from the Psalms.

And so we're gonna look at each quotation.

In the first quotation of Joel, what we find is the context of our lives.

We discover how we can discover our own context, which is important because the world's been happening for a very long time, and we all got here relatively recently, and we were just kind of thrown into the story.

So we need to discover the context that we're in.

Next, we need to discover the fuel for our lives, which is what can keep us going through the hardships and difficulties of life.

And then next, we're going to see the aim of our lives, which is what is it that our lives are moving towards?

What are we arcing towards?

What's our purpose?

So the context, the fuel, and the aim.

So let's go ahead and look at Joel.

His quotation of Joel.

To find the context.

In Acts 2, 16 to 21, Peter quotes this.

He says, But this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel.

This is that.

This is what was uttered through the prophet Joel.

And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams, even on my male servants and female servants.

In those days I will pour out my spirit, and they shall prophesy.

And I will show wonders in the heavens above, and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and Vapor of smoke, the sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day.

And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

So Peter quotes directly from the book of Joel, except for one thing.

He changes one phrase right in the very beginning.

If you go and you look at Joel, this Old Testament prophet, one of the twelve minor prophets, they uh uh he begins this phrase by saying, afterward, afterward it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.

But Peter shifts that to in the last days.

So what Peter is doing is these phrases are in some ways interchangeable, but he's wanting to make something very clear, which is that because the spirit has now been poured out, because Christ is resurrected, he's ascended, and he's poured out the Spirit, we can know where we are in history.

And where we are is the last days.

That's a term that Scripture uses to describe our present moment, the world after Christ and before his second coming.

These are the last days.

This is the final move of God's plan to redeem all of creation.

And that's where we find ourselves now.

So Peter switches up this phrase because he wants to make it really clear.

And to his hearers, it would have been.

They would have caught a minute turn like that because did you notice Peter just stands up and quotes this passage?

They all would have been able to.

So he switches this phrase to let them know we're in a new context now.

Look at how the Spirit has been poured out.

We are now in the last days.

A lot of people interpret this as something that is to come, that will be far off.

The last days are days that are approaching, but that's not the way Peter says it.

He says, We're in the last days now, the final move of God's redemptive plan, which is to pour out his spirit so that his redemption will move throughout all of creation under Christ's lordship.

We can look at a couple more phrases in this, and that he says that the Spirit will be poured out.

Now, this word is meant to connote like an overflow, an abundance of the Holy Spirit.

It's being poured out in an inexhaustible way, and it's being poured out on all flesh.

It means irrespective of kind.

And Joel breaks this down further.

So he says, look, this will be on sons and daughters, which means that the spirit will be poured out on both men and women.

It won't recognize these gender distinctions.

The spirit will be poured out on old men and young men, which means people of all ages.

It won't recognize this age distinction.

The spirit will be poured out on servants, which means there isn't a status that it's lining up with in society.

Instead, it's poured out on all people.

This is a new type of church.

This is a new type of movement in world history that doesn't conform to any of our other movements descriptions.

It's all different now because it includes all of them.

The Spirit is poured out in this incredible way, and all of these people are given the ability to do something that only a few in world history have been able to do, and that's prophesy.

So that means they will be able to declare the mighty works of God to the world.

All of these different instances, Martin Luther was the one that helped me out with this one.

It's that when he says, You shall prophesy, you'll see visions, you'll dream dreams, these are all saying the same thing.

The main means that we see God revealing himself in the Old Testament is through these visions that were given to certain prophets, through dreams that were given to certain prophets.

These are all prophecy.

And we see that happening at Pentecost, because all the people who receive the Spirit, what are they saying in these different tongues?

They're declaring the mighty works of God.

So that means when we have the Spirit, we have the ability to speak, even as the prophets of old spoke.

But there's not just a few of them speaking to a body of people.

It's the whole body of Christ.

We're a kingdom of priests, a kingdom of prophets.

When the Spirit enters into you, you are made a witness of the mighty works of God.

Things that were only for the most elite, the most special, the selectly chosen by God is now poured out by his spirit onto his church.

We're equipped in this way.

Nice.

Don't be distracted by this thing I'm pointing out.

We're equipped by the Spirit to bear witness.

Next says, I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and vapor of smoke.

The sun shall be turned to darkness.

Now, what this refers to is, well, I'll just say, like, there's I've I've known people that are like, the moon's turning red, Jesus is coming back.

And we all laughed, we all laughed.

So here's the thing.

This is written in a very particular way.

It's called uh it's it's apocalyptic, is the type of language that's being used here.

And what it's referring to is this cultural upheaval.

We see the sun becomes dark, the moon becomes dark like blood.

The normal rhythms that have defined existence will be inverted by the prophetic witness of the church.

That's a big thing.

I hope a little weight settled on your shoulders.

Because what have we seen?

The normal ways that the world operates.

It operates in these normal power structures, these exchanges of us versus them.

It lives in these normal stratas that we saw of men versus women, of the old versus the young, of the rich versus the poor.

And yet we're seeing something that's going to undo all of those normal dichotomies.

And by the declaration of the mighty works of God by the Spirit-empowered church, all of culture will begin to shift.

So that we will see these dichotomies displanted by movements of love towards one another.

So that the defining sense of power won't be holding power over others to cause their sacrifice.

It will be sacrificing ourselves for the benefit of others.

What he's saying, what Joel is saying, is that there will be in the in what Joel was looking forward to, and what Peter is saying, this thing we're seeing is that thing that Joel was looking forward to.

It means the total cultural transformation of the world by the witness of the Spirit.

This is what we're called to.

This is what we hope to see happen: a total cultural upheaval.

So Peter offers this interpretation, and I want to add one more thing to it, which is if we consider what it means that the Holy Spirit has been poured out, has been poured into us.

One of my favorite descriptions that I've heard was from Tim Keller, the Protestant Pope.

And he said, uh, he made this description, and it was from Lord of the Rings, and those are like two of my favorite things, Tim Keller and Lord of the Rings.

And the description that he gave of the Holy Spirit was this.

There's this scene where Frodo is is wearing this and this, it's called Mithrail.

Now I'm talking to four of you.

And there's uh uh it's this armor that the elves made, now too.

And they it's the it's this incredible value, and his uncle gave it to him, and so he's wearing it under his clothes, and he hears some other people that he's walking with talking about this mithril coat that's just been rumored.

And it they're saying this thing is absolutely priceless.

This is it it's its value is beyond compare.

And all of a sudden, Frodo starts to realize, like, oh wow, I'm wearing this incredible thing.

I had no idea how amazing this thing is that I'm wearing.

That for many Christians, for us in this room, the Holy Spirit is like that coat.

Right?

It's this thing that we have.

It's it's in us now.

The Holy Spirit, if you're a Christian, is in you.

And yet we don't consider it of much value.

We don't understand, we haven't really been told, we don't really get the value of this spirit that's in us.

But you experience its value in these incredible ways.

You experience it as a conviction of sin that you'd never felt before.

I talk with so many young Christians that are all of a sudden experiencing this conviction of sin, and it's like, man, this really hurts.

Like, I remember before I was a Christian, I wasn't burdened by these sorts of things in my life, and it's like, praise God.

The Holy Spirit.

This means you have the Spirit of God in you, who is shining a light into your soul, and he's no longer going to let you be ignorant of those things which are stealing your joy in him.

He's going to show them to you.

That way you might war against them by his power, no longer by yours.

He's going to humble you before him.

That way your mind never tricks itself again into thinking you could save yourself, but it always comes back to a new dependence on Christ.

Look at this incredible value that the Holy Spirit is working in your life.

It is preserving you from the inside out.

It's preserving your faith in real time.

Yet we experience it as like, oh, I wish I didn't feel bad about sin.

It's like, no, praise God.

Praise God for this conviction because otherwise you're hopeless.

You will just depend on yourself.

We have this amazing value in us by the spirit.

And yet we don't see it.

We don't see it.

I had another example, but I'm just gonna stick with that one.

You know, so what Joel has described is the last days, and then we've seen the pouring out of the spirit, and then he moves on to this last sort of phrase that he slips in at the end, and he he says that this is going to take place before the day of the Lord, that great and magnificent day.

Here's what that means: that means this age that we're in, it has a beginning, which is Jesus, where a new spirit-empowered people move through history, and it's moving towards an end, which is the day of the Lord, that great and magnificent day.

We have something that we're looking forward to.

And what that is, is when Jesus comes again, when he finally returns, he's going to perfectly establish his kingdom.

Right now, we proclaim his kingdom is coming, and in many ways it is already here.

It is present in his church, it is present in the places that we are influencing with the culture that Christ has instilled in us by his spirit.

And it's growing throughout history.

But there will come a time where Jesus returns and he judges all wickedness as wickedness.

Now look, the judgment of God throughout the Old Testament is always referred to as good news.

This is something to look forward to.

We're surrounded by injustice.

We see it all the time.

We find it in ourselves and in relationships.

Imagine the joy you could experience in your life.

If there was no more injustice that you were trying to navigate.

The day of the Lord will bring that.

Christ will be king over all things, even over all things in you.

What good news that will be.

We're moving towards that day.

When a new heavens and a new earth will be finally established.

You should let your mind wander there sometimes.

Should let the obstacles that you encounter in your life provoke your imagination and think, what's it gonna be like?

When I no longer have a have a what's I'll use today, when I no longer have a Sunday night ruined by my anxiety for the week.

But I'm able to just enjoy my family and be with them.

What's that gonna be like?

How much more joy is there going to be in the immediate presence of God, where you no longer chase these idols for years and decades and then end up crushed by them, but instead you're able to pursue immediately the Lord.

You should let your mind wander there.

The new heavens and the new earth, the day of the Lord is coming.

So here's our context.

The last days have been inaugurated by Christ.

The first deposit has been made.

The Holy Spirit has been given to us, the church, to bear witness that Christ is the King and His kingdom is coming.

And as we move through the world, his kingdom spreads by the power of his spirit, and we're moving towards something.

So here we are in the middle, in this day of opportunity.

This day of opportunity in which Joel says, And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

This is the hopeful moment that we're in.

We are in a time in world history where we can proclaim, if you call upon the name of the Lord, you will be saved.

What does it take to experience that new heavens and the new earth?

What does it take to be cleansed from your sin now?

What do you have to do?

You just call on his name.

That's the moment we're in.

That's the context.

Next, Peter says a lot about Jesus, which we're gonna skip over.

We're gonna cover next week.

Not that we typically skip over those parts.

And he moves on and he uh he later quotes from Psalm 16, and he quotes this particular passage.

He says, uh in Acts 2, 25 to 28, for David says concerning him, he's talking about Jesus.

He just talked a lot about Jesus, now he's going to say, here's an Old Testament passage that proves what I just said about Jesus.

For David says concerning him, I saw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand that I may not be shaken.

Therefore my heart was glad and my tongue rejoiced, my flesh also will dwell in hope, for you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your holy one see corruption.

You have made known to me the paths of life, you will make me full of gladness with your presence.

In this section we see what is the fuel of our lives.

How do we live in this context, this middle period full of opportunity?

How do we live in this context amidst all the suffering?

Because the day of the Lord hasn't come yet to remove those things.

We stand before it.

And so Peter quotes David, and what we see is he quotes from the Psalm of David, and what we see is that through the Spirit, David was speaking the very words of Christ.

So we're doing some gymnastics here.

David himself, while he's penning this psalm, by the Spirit moving through him, he's speaking the very words of Christ.

And so that's why Peter can say that this section of this psalm, David is speaking about Christ.

Now, when if you were to interview David when he was writing it and say, hey, uh, do you mind if I interrupt uh that psalm?

Uh what do you what are you talking about here?

He would probably say, like, well, the Lord has been this comfort to me.

He's been this amazing comfort to me, and he's brought me this incredible peace.

And uh I don't know, it's tough to explain.

You know, the intervention of the Spirit in my heart is a difficult thing to explain explicitly.

But uh I I think that my hope is so certain in the Lord that I don't even have to be afraid of death.

I'm never gonna see death.

There's this sense in which I'm never even gonna see corruption.

That's the closeness with which uh I am before the Lord.

He probably wouldn't have said, I'm speaking about Jesus, the Nazarene, who's coming in the future.

It doesn't, prophecy, I don't think, worked that way.

And yet the Spirit was moving through David so that these words, that type of closeness, was the very words of Christ.

And we see what he's doing.

He's he's he says, the Lord is always before me.

It's like David himself is just beholding the Lord.

He's at his right hand, so that David's like, I won't be shaken.

I know that I can't be shaken because the Lord is so close to me.

His heart is glad because of that.

He dwells in hope.

Think how foolish it is to dwell in a world where you know that the story of everyone ends in death, to dwell in hope.

That his, because he says, For you, God, you won't abandon my soul to Hades, you won't let your holy one see corruption.

Now, Peter moves through this text, and the way that he describes these must be the words of Jesus, is he says, Well, we know David did die.

David died, and his body, it was corrupted by the earth.

It did just, you know, get eaten up by worms and things.

So, Peter, in expounding on this section, he says in Acts 22, 31, he says, about David being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on the throne, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption.

Here's what I want you to see in this.

By the Spirit, David was given the words of Christ, so that they became his words.

So that this hope that applies directly to Christ, the one who didn't see corruption because death was not able to hold him down, the one who is at the right hand of God, enjoying God's presence completely, that that type of hope, which is Jesus' hope by the Spirit, became David's hope.

We have that same spirit.

So that these words of Christ become our hope.

Not because of us, not because of the things that we've done.

What did we do to earn the Spirit?

Nothing.

It was given to us by God and His free grace.

And yet, with the Spirit in us, we can look at the very words of Christ and say, Lord, by your grace alone, those are mine.

This promise, this promise where you say, My flesh will dwell in hope, you won't abandon my soul to Hades.

You have made known to me the paths of life, you will make me full of gladness with your presence.

Because Christ has united himself to you.

Those words are your words.

This is the power of the Holy Spirit.

This is why we can read through Scripture and all of these promises that we see made about Christ throughout Scripture.

By the Spirit in us, we can say those are ours now.

We've been united to Christ in that same way.

This is outrageous news.

And what this describes is the very fuel by which we can live our lives.

And that fuel is that we behold Christ.

That is the power which moves us through this present stage before the day of the Lord.

Is that we are called to behold Christ, as though he's standing right before us.

There's a lot of strange stories in the Old Testament, so I picked one.

This is in Numbers 21.

I want to use this as just an illustration of beholding.

In Numbers 21, I'll go ahead and read it.

This is verses 5 through 9.

Moses is leading the Israelites around the wilderness, and they become frustrated.

And the people spoke against God and against Moses.

Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?

For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food.

I'm going to draw one more parallel.

The Israelites are rescued by God during the Exodus.

Remember, Charlton Heston takes the staff and the water splits, and they walk through, and then their enemies are washed away behind them.

They're freed.

They're no longer slaves in Egypt.

They're freed.

They're rescued.

It's their sort of gospel type of moment.

Now they're in this middle state where they're wandering around in the wilderness, looking forward to the day when they finally enter the promised land.

Do you hear the parallels?

Do you hear the parallels between where we are now?

Christ has come.

We are rescued.

We are no longer captives to sin.

We've been freed.

But we haven't entered the promised land yet.

So we're moving through, still corrupted by sin in many ways, yet knowing we are freed in Christ.

So how do we live?

How do we live in a way that guides us to the promised land?

Okay, that's the parallel.

Our food is really bad, we miss Egypt.

That's a paraphrase.

Then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died.

And the people came to Moses and said, We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord and against you.

Pray to the Lord that he might take away the serpents from us.

So Moses prayed for the people, and the Lord said to Moses, Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole.

And everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.

So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole.

And if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.

Here's the deal.

We live in a world totally corrupted by sin.

And we live in a world that by our sin in our own lives, we are surrounded by these fiery serpents that bite and disease us.

And so God gives them this opportunity to continue to move through the wilderness, surrounded by these dangers of sin, but now with a way to cope with them, with a way that can bring healing in the present moment.

He says, take one of these fiery serpents and put it on a pole.

Take this sin and put it up on a pole, and then if anyone gets bit, he just has to look at the pole with the serpent on it, and he'll be healed.

Look, the method is the same.

Because God took Christ, who he made to be our sin, and he puts him on the cross, and he says, if you just look at him, you will be saved.

If you quit looking to yourself, but you look to Christ, then you'll be saved, and that will be the fuel that allows you to keep moving through the wilderness.

So you need to cultivate this ability, this reflex to look back to Christ, to bring the clarity, to bring the understanding of where you are in your life.

Do you feel beat down by your sin?

Look to Christ.

Do you feel beat down by a corruption?

Look to Christ.

Do you feel a gratitude for where you find yourself in your life now?

Look to Christ.

That's the reflex we need to cultivate.

Because Christ's words have become our words by the Spirit.

Finally, the aim of our lives.

Acts 2, 34 to 35.

For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.

Peter moves to this final point of the crucified Jesus.

And he says, look at how David talks about him.

He says, The Lord said to my Lord, that couldn't be referring to David.

What that means is the Father has said to Jesus, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.

It means we're in the midst of a process.

A process of all wickedness, all evil in the world being brought to account.

So that the purpose that it serves is to be made the footstool of the Lord, the demonstration of God's glory by it being brought under his feet.

Now it hasn't happened yet.

It's something that is happening.

It's happening in a process that we are in.

And the final coming of Jesus that will be the reality, that all of his enemies will be made his footstool.

But what this means, this final point through the Old Testament that Peter is making, is that Jesus is the Lord.

So we have the context of our lives, which is that we live in a world that's been corrupted by sin.

But Jesus entered in, and he's initiated these last days.

And these last days will be marked by a renewal and a redemption that's brought about by the spirit-empowered church that's moving and declaring the mighty works of God.

And it has an aim.

And this aim is the day of the Lord, which will make all things new.

And it has a fuel for the people in the midst of it, which is that constant looking back to Christ.

When we're floundering in the wilderness, it's cultivating this reflex where we look back to Christ and we say, look at these promises that He's given us.

I feel like I've been abandoned and forsaken.

But He says, I will never leave you nor forsake you.

And if those are Jesus' words, then those are my words now because Jesus has united himself to me.

If you're a Christian.

See, we have this fuel and we have this aim.

And the aim is that Jesus is Lord.

And he will be Lord over all the sin and all the corruption in our hearts.

And he will bring about who we were really originally meant to be.

And we see that aim.

We realize that aim by a constant looking back to Christ.

So he moves on and he sums up this argument, which we've only looked at from one side today.

We've only looked at from the side of the Old Testament.

And he says, Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.

That's our good news.

That Jesus, the one who died for our sin, who we crucified by our sin, is both Lord and Christ.

It's terrifying news, but it's good news.

Because Jesus is the Lord.

He is merciful.

And we live in this time where anyone who calls upon his name can be saved.

So what can we learn about interpreting Scripture as we saw Peter do it?

Now I'm gonna post a quote.

Out of the context of this whole essay, this quote is probably going to feel incredibly controversial to some.

So I hope you're interested.

This is from a man named Donald Bloch, and he offers up this method of interpretation for Scripture, how we ought to interpret it.

He says this: He says, the word of God is neither the text nor the psychological disposition of the author behind the text, but is instead its salvific, means having to do with salvation, significance, seen in the light of the cross of Christ.

The criterion is not the original intention of the author as such, but the intention of the Holy Spirit.

See, when we understand Scripture as being penned not primarily by these authors that we know and read and quote by name, Luke, Paul, Matthew.

But we see that there's a deeper intention behind these words, which is the guidance of the Holy Spirit himself, who is bringing these words to life.

And the way that the Holy Spirit works to show us what is the truth of this scripture, is he allows us to see it through the lens of Christ.

And that's what Peter does.

Peter looks at these Old Testament passages and he says, you know, now that I know about Christ, I can see clearly what the Holy Spirit was saying.

This bit about Joel, this was about when Christ would ascend to the throne and then he would pour out his spirit on all flesh.

Because of Christ, I can see exactly what this meant.

This confusing bit in David when he says, I'll never die and I'll never, my body will never see corruption, he was, that was the Holy Spirit referring to Christ.

The Holy Spirit made Christ's words David's words.

And now through Christ, I can look at the Old Testament and I can see this has all been pointing to him.

He brings it all together.

When David says, the Lord said to my Lord, what could that possibly mean?

It meant Jesus is Lord.

So when we look through the lens of Christ, we're able to see the intention of the Holy Spirit in Scripture.

So that's what it says about how to interpret Scripture.

Here's what it says about how to interpret our lives.

We need to apply that same method of understanding.

I'm so corrupted by sin.

I feel strangled by this death.

How can I possibly move with this guilt that I experience?

You have to look through the lens of Christ.

You have to be able to say, Lord, this you made Christ's sin to be my sin.

So that I might experience the righteousness of God.

You need to look at your own life, be able to interpret your own life through the lens of Christ.

It's the only thing that brings the real context, the real coherence, the real understanding of who you are.

When you say, these promises aren't mine because of something I've done, they're mine because Christ is the Lord and He united me to himself.

Can you approach Scripture that way?

Can you learn to approach your life that way?

So that these problems that you see stacked up before you, you realize I've been united to Christ, and how did he demonstrate his glory?

He moved through suffering.

He didn't go around it.

And if I've been united to him, then surely he can strengthen me to move through this.

Learn to look at Christ and look at your life, interpret your life through the lens of Christ.

That's the interpretive framework we have.

Okay.

Well, I'll take one question, if we have one.

Oh, of course.

What does it mean to speak in tongues?

The times that I have observed it, supposedly happening, it appears to just be unintelligible babbling.

Do Christians still experience this?

And if so, should it be something that we aspire to do?

Please, something more controversial next time.

All right.

Now, look, I wish that I could come to you as a theology textbook that didn't shift and didn't move.

But I can't.

My theology is a work in progress, just like yours is, and it's moving through these deep mysteries.

So, all that to say, take what I say with a grain of salt.

So what it means to speak in tongues as we see it in Acts is speaking in other languages.

We don't see evidence of speaking in tongues in Acts to mean uh sort of an incoherent babbling.

And these tongues events that happen about seven times in the book of Acts, they always seem to align with this particular situation, which is there had been an assumed group of people that the Holy Spirit was designated for.

And now there's this new group of people that we're exposed to that the Holy Spirit doesn't, we don't really think applies to this group of people.

And then all of a sudden, this new group of people who we thought the Holy Spirit didn't apply to begin speaking in tongues.

We think, oh, in a new way, this must be for everyone.

So we see that happen with the uh gathered Jewish people at Pentecost, we see that happen with uh Paul's, or excuse me, um uh John the Baptist's disciples, we see that happen with a Roman soldier, and in all of these cases, the Holy Spirit uses this particular gift to say the same thing over and over again.

The gospel is moving through all of these normal barriers.

Now, I am of the opinion that the gift of tongues, at least in normal contexts, does not happen.

And I think that for a couple of reasons.

One is that I think that there are foundational gifts that were given to the apostles for a particular reason.

That particular reason is to demonstrate the spread of the gospel initially.

Secondly, I think that it's a helpful position because what it helps establish is a closed canon, which means that scripture, uh, while it was being formed, was empowered by these particular foundational gifts, and now that it is formed, God speaks primarily through the Bible.

And it's a safeguard, and maybe I'm placing a safeguard too far, but I've been around communities that start speaking prophetically, saying, Thus says the Lord.

And I think that's a dangerous thing to do.

Lastly, so the term for that, the term for someone like me with my condition, is a cessationist.

Which means I think these things have ceased.

Now, okay, how vulnerable do I be?

I've seen weird things happen by people whose faith I trust.

And who am I to say that God can't do just whatever he wants by the power of his spirit working in us?

So I'd say I'm a cessationist that thinks God can do whatever he wants.

That's my answer.

Okay.

One more litmus test.

Is the gift of tongues that you're seeing pointing to Christ?

This is the way that we're called to interpret, like all of Scripture, through the lens of Christ.

Are you interpreting your tongues through the lens of Christ?

Is it making Christ great?

Is it making Christ Lord of your heart?

All right, let's pray.

Lord, that we'd feel compelled to practice.

I I'm nervous that people will leave and will be like, I don't know what it what really happened there.

I don't know if I really got much.

I kind of remember that tongues question though.

Lord, what I pray that people will see this is a foundation.

And I hope it's it provokes people.

Father, I pray for our church that we would be provoked to see our lives through the lens of Christ.

So that when we consider, you know, I haven't really felt like I've been sinning much lately, that we'd look at Christ and see his perfection and be humbled and then grateful for his grace towards us.

And when we feel so broken by our sin that we would look at Christ and feel humbled and praise you that he took our sin upon us, that we might be made free.

Father, would you move in our heart in those ways?

Lord, we try and get clear of our thinking before you.

But how can we possibly fit you in our minds?

Theology is just better defining a mystery.

Lord, I pray for the day that our faith becomes sight.

Lord, would you give us glimpses of that here?

As we humbly approach you with what we think we know of you now.

Lord, we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.