Simon Peter No.8 The Transformed Man

speaks as the mouthpiece of Satan and tries to deflect him from achieving his father's wish and then the horror of that night when Peter denies his blessed Lord and rushes off into the darkness and one wonders how he manages to avert the temptation to commit suicide. So there was Peter. The last time we saw him publicly, that is outside of the the context of the disciples engaged in any activity at all, it's so completely contrasting with what you find in the second chapter of Acts.

Here he's central stage. There he was in the darkness wanting the shadows as between the light of the flickering flames of the high priest's fire in the high priest's courtyard he tried to distance himself from the Lord. Here he stands and he expounds who Jesus is.

There he's filled with temerity and fear. Here he has boldness and eloquence. There curses were upon his lips.

Now his tongue has been oiled by the blessed Holy Spirit. He's engaged in praise the like of which he's never offered before to the Lord God. There he wants to escape incognito into the remaining hours of the darkness.

Here he wants thousands of people to listen to what he has to say. There he seemed to be an untutored man. Here though he has no scholastic education at all, he impresses those who listen to him in the days that are to come who cannot understand how such a man with such limited education can convey such great truths in such a gripping fashion.

And so we ask the question what is the reason behind Peter now and Peter then? What is the explanation for the transformation in his character? Before the M1 got all the way to the northern part of Yorkshire my old dad and I used to pick it up at rugby and we'd drive the circuitous route down to rugby and then get onto the motorway and shoot down much more quickly to to London. I always remember that drive into rugby and the connecting point because there were a lot of pylons. It seemed as though it was a central area for the electricity board and the pylons are very high, they're huge things and they come in from all directions into the central grid and then you you watch them in your eyes they they lead off to the north and to the south and to every point of the compass and you know that from that centre in rugby or just north of rugby power is going to the North Midlands and it seems to me that when you read through the Acts of the Apostles what actually you are confronted with is nothing less than the divine grid as power is released in our world and it goes into Jerusalem and into Samaria and into Galilee and into the uttermost parts of the world as the disciples take the message of the Lord Jesus.

My dad-in-law is an electrician or was before he retired. On one occasion as he was working on a building site in Cape Province South Africa he unfortunately made a faulty connection or at least he gripped hold of a cable that was live thinking it was dead and actually he nearly finished up dead himself as the power of the cable went through him, scorched his chest and his face, caused a heart attack and in the providence of God eventually he recovered and is now fine as far as that accident was concerned. He linked into a power supply which was not conditioned to go through a human being.

When I was a student I sometimes used to go to All Souls Langham Place. It's a great Church of England. It had in those days the regular ministry of the Reverend Dr. John Starr.

The Sunday Observer some 20 years ago had a supplement of where to go to in London where it was free and it gave you some very useful tips especially if you wanted a cloakroom and you didn't want the what London Council put on and how to get into hotels and shops where the cloakroom facilities were better than the usual standard. But it also did a survey of the churches, the best churches to go to. And what it said of All Souls and John Starr's church was this, low church, high voltage.

And I thought that the journalist was using an uncommon spirituality as he assessed the atmosphere of that particular church. Low church, high voltage. It seems to me that the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ should be known by this one factor, it should be a power-filled organization.

If you like using the metaphor of the grid, straddled across the United Kingdom every local church connected up to this power supply of the Holy Spirit, the divine energy pulsating through the Church of God. That's how she should be. That's how she was in the days of the Acts of the Apostles.

To the end that those who were not Christians when they saw the way that the church was penetrating the Roman world said of the disciples, these are men who have turned the world upside down. But basically they were a fairly common, ordinary bunch that our Lord gathered together. And so you ask the question of the group as you ask specifically of Peter, what is it that caused the difference between Peter on the day of Pentecost and Peter as we saw him the night in which our Lord was arrested and tried.

And as you ask the question and search for an answer, you can relate your question and your search to yourself. Because I believe that God wants Christian people to be power-filled people. I'm not too sure that their contribution was over helpful.

But the United States saddled us with a tour some while ago of the power men. They also went to South Africa. And these were Christian men with bulging biceps who went from church to church and youth festival to youth festival and showed how they could blow up hot water bottles and how they could with their bare hands easily tear apart a three-inch thick telephone directory.

Now forget that in terms of an illustration, a literal illustration. But think of the principle of power because that ought to be something that Christian people do illustrate as they make their way through this world. And this is something that the Apostle Peter is illustrating here in Acts chapter 2 because we find him speaking out with great boldness, with great eloquence, with great passion, and with great conviction to the extent that people stand up and say, Peter what must we do? Now look there are several possible explanations for the change in Peter's temperament.

After all he's seen the risen Lord and one might credit that as being the cause of the change in Peter. The disciples are gathered together in the upper room. You remember the account in John and in the Synoptic Gospels? And our Lord mysteriously and remarkably comes through and presences himself.

But you don't read that directly after that Peter starts to preach. Indeed you find an example in the Gospel of John where our Lord is with the disciples and he says in the 23rd verse, this is another resurrection appearance of the 20th chapter, if you receive the Holy Spirit, if you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven. If you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.

But even after that the Lord Jesus charging them with the ability to proclaim the gospel and to grant absolution to the penitent sinner, you don't find Peter doing this. Tim very grippingly and with his typical clarity addressed us just before Christmas Sunday with the encounter of our Lord Jesus and Peter on the seashore of Galilee where they had both met some three years earlier. And Peter is commissioned afresh by our Lord Jesus as one of his disciples.

He's told to go and feed the sheep, to go and feed the lambs. You remember that threefold charge? And yet, and yet you do not find Peter doing this, do you? Not immediately. Peter sees the risen Lord, is commissioned to preach the gospel, has this personal encounter with Jesus on the seashore of Galilee, and yet he's not immediately heralding the good news.

In fact, our Lord Jesus does tell Peter and the rest of the disciples that consequent upon his return to his heavenly Father, they are to wait in Jerusalem and there they will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. They will receive the promise of the Father. When you get to the Acts of the Apostles in the first chapter and the eleventh verse, you find that the angels are telling the disciples not to continue to look up to the heavens for the return of the Lord Jesus, for the Savior will come back in the same way in which they have seen him go, and he will go at the timing, he will return at the timing that he has decided upon.

But, verse 5, in a few days time you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit. And so they go to Jerusalem and they wait for the gift of the Holy Spirit, the descent of the third person of the Trinity. Verse 8 of chapter 1 of the Acts of the Apostles, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.

In other words, the reason Scripture supplies why there has been such a great transformation in the character of Peter is not simply because of the resurrection of our Lord or the personal encounter which our Lord has with Peter on the seashore of Galilee. The reason is because he has been linked into the dynamic of the third person of the Trinity. Thomas Aquinas is a man who is very well known in Catholic circles.

He lived around the 12th century. He wrote a great work on theology which, as far as Catholics are concerned, has never been surpassed. It wasn't, however, completed.

And when Aquinas is an old man, someone comes alongside Thomas Aquinas and they ask, when are you going to finish this particular treatise on theology? And Aquinas speaks out some words which you will find in almost every biography of that great man. He says, I have had such a holy encounter with God, something so great and so profound has happened in my life that all that I have done previously seems quite insignificant. He has such a remarkable experience of the dynamic of the Holy Spirit.

A French philosopher by the name of Pascal, a man, a great scientist. In his day he was the person to which all his colleagues turned so that they would have their minds sharpened by the latest scientific thinking and conclusions. A man who became a legend in his day for thought and for clarity of scientific understanding.

On one occasion he has a dynamic, a dramatic experience of the Holy Spirit. Now we're not talking about some emotional man who's gone to some Christian festival where the music sometimes is a little loud and there's a repetitive beat and emotions are aroused. I'm talking to you about one of the greatest intellects that Europe has ever known.

He has this remarkable experience of the Holy Spirit. He writes it out on a piece of paper and he has it stitched inside the inside of his, he has it stitched inside the covering, the inner covering of his coat. Fire, great fire, power, holiness, the presence of God.

In note fashion he describes this overwhelming experience that has been his and as a result almost the same sort of reaction of that of Thomas Aquinas of centuries before. He's a completely different man with values which are different and goals which are different. You see the power of the Holy Spirit as personally felt and manifested within the life of an individual can utterly and completely transform them.

When John, the cousin of our Lord Jesus, sees the Savior approaching him on the banks of the River Jordan, three times you will discover in the gospel of John he refers to his own tendency to baptize people in water and then by contrast he speaks of his cousin and he says, but there is one mightier than I, the latchets of whose shoes I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with Holy Spirit. The only explanation for the spiritual grid that goes out from Jerusalem to Samaria and onwards to Rome and to Spain and to Africa and to India and on to China is that these early disciples have linked into the dynamo of God's own energy, God's own power and through them pulsating out is that mighty irresistible force of God's own power.

Now it's this that Peter has tapped into. Let me put up a series of questions. When was Peter converted? Now that's not an easy question to answer.

Our Lord, in the events leading up to his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, you remember in Luke's Gospel he speaks to Peter and he says to Peter, although Peter has protested that he will always be with Jesus, Jesus can bank on him. The Savior says, no Peter you will let me down before the cock crows who will have denied me three times, but when thou art converted, you remember, strengthen your brothers. Yet when our Lord Jesus is actually praying his high priestly prayer, it seems as though he refers to the disciples in terms of, well they are regenerate.

Thine they were and thou didst give them to me. It's not easy to exactly pinpoint Peter's conversion, but it's obviously towards the end days of the public ministry of our Lord Jesus Christ. Here's a second question which I perhaps can answer more exactly.

When was the church established? Now the traditional response to that is that the church was established on the day of Ecclesiastes. She comes from the womb of the Holy Spirit, or rather she comes from the womb of our Lord Jesus through the midwifery of the Holy Spirit as he as an infant came from the womb of Mary again through the midwifery of the Holy Spirit. But actually there's no reference to the word Ecclesia, to the word church in Acts chapter 2 is there? And when you turn the pages back in John's Gospel you find our Lord Jesus in a reference to which I've already directed you with the disciples.

It's the 20th chapter of John's Gospel. He's there in the upper room. He's manifesting himself and in the 21st verse of John 20 he says to the disciples, including Peter, peace be with you as the Father has sent me I am sending you.

And with that he breathed on them and said receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone his sins they are forgiven. If you do not forgive them they are not forgiven.

Now some people have interpreted this as being prophetic of Pentecost and yet the problem is that the original language will not allow it. This is a Greek past tense. He breathed on them the Holy Spirit.

He says at this point receive the Holy Spirit. He gives them evangelistic authority. If you forgive anyone his sins they are forgiven.

If you do not forgive them they are not forgiven. All that the church stands for is encapsulated into those two or three verses. My argument is, and I've got other theologians who will come and defend the point more eloquently than I can, that the church was born before the day of Pentecost.

Then what happened on the day of Pentecost? And the answer is simply and blessedly this. The church was empowered on the day of Pentecost. You shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you and you shall be my witnesses.

And the grid picture is set up only the metaphor is different as you find it written up in the Acts in the first chapter of the book of Acts. This my friend and only this explains the difference that there is in Peter before Pentecost and Peter after Pentecost. The Baptist is quite right.

He says of the Lord Jesus he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. When you are born again the Holy Spirit brings you into the body of Christ, baptizes you into the body of Christ. But there is more than this.

It can happen at the same time. Sometimes it will happen with a time gap. As far as Peter is concerned there is a distance.

A matter of a few days, a matter of a few weeks. I don't care. There is a difference.

Peter is a disciple. Peter is commissioned to preach the gospel. It's there in John's gospel.

You cannot deny it. But he is unable to do this. He goes with the rest of the disciples.

They wait in Jerusalem for this promise of the Holy Spirit, the promise of the Father, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the baptism of the Spirit. And then in the Acts, the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles you read that there is this divine outpouring of the Spirit of God. And a man with limited ability is raised to heights of eloquence.

A man of limited power is given an abundance of power. A man comes forefront into the history of Israel and he makes such an impact upon his people and indeed upon the Christian community that devolves from this day that there are few people who can hold shoulder, who can stand shoulder to shoulder with Peter. But this is my point.

The reason for the transformation in the life of Peter is that experimentally he knew the mighty effulgence of power, the cascading down, the sweeping over, the rushing mighty wind, the tongues of fire resting upon him that makes him the man that he has now become. Not a perfect man. Not a man with no foibles, with no frailty.

That will never happen this side of eternity. There will still be problems that he will have from his old life. The old Adamic nature that will sometimes still surface.

But there will be a detectable difference down the years of his pilgrimage after his mighty baptism with the Spirit than was discerned before that occasion. Now I say that not only do you discover this in the Apostle Peter, you find it also is the explanation, the only explanation that there is for the mighty ministry of the Apostle Paul. Here he was, small man, probably nothing to admire about him physically.

Someone somewhat cruelly but perhaps accurately described him as a hooked-nosed little man suffering from sometimes uncontrollable bouts of malaria. And yet this man, with no beauty at the outward level, is so used to establish churches around the world. Listen to him as he writes to the Corinthians in the third verse of the second chapter of the first epistle, I came to you in weakness and fear and with much trembling.

My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power so that your faith may not rest on man's wisdom but on God's power. He's giving exactly the same explanation as to why he has been so successful in Thessalonica, this Greek city riddled with idolatry. He says of the Thessalonians as he writes his first letter, we always thank God for all of you, mentioning you in our prayers.

We continually remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith and so on because our gospel came to you not simply with words but also with power, with the Holy Spirit, with deep conviction. And you know how we lived among you for your sake. Think it through my friend, he had no Bible, he had no literature, he had no public address system, he had no backup organization in Jerusalem, he's on his own.

He doesn't have the dynamism, he doesn't have the attractiveness of some people and yet this little man, he comes into Thessalonica, he starts to speak, they listen to him, he demonstrates the power. It's not just the power of eloquence, they knew eloquence at Thessalonica, they knew eloquence in Athens, they had the philosophers, all of the Greeks knew what it was, at least many of the Greeks knew what it was to soak themselves in the best intellectualism of the day. But Paul comes into their cities, he has something to say, he has an authority, they stop, they listen and there along he's planted a church.

How do you explain it? The answer is you can only explain it through the power of the Holy Spirit, through the dynamic of the Spirit. And when the church continues to try to progress, to try to advance without recourse to the dynamic of the Spirit, then she surrendered herself to the intellectualism of the Greeks as there was a resurgence of this in the 1850s and on into the early decades of this of this century. You say, are you trying to establish this? That for us today to know the sort of transformation that Peter knew, we too must have the dynamic of the Spirit of God in our lives? I am affirming this.

I am saying that though you are regenerate, it does not necessarily mean that you have received everything from the Lord. I am saying that for ordinary Christian people there is a plus to which you can go in terms of experience and the release of power. You can come before this great God and ask him to do things for you similar to what he did for Peter and Paul and all the Apostles.

You say, but these things finished at the end of the first century. Not a bit of it, my friend. I've given you the illustrations of Aquinas and Pascal.

Have you never heard of Jonathan Edwards, the great revivalist in the Great Awakening in the Americas in the 18th century? Do you not know anything about John Wesley, this erudite scholastic man? My wife and I were in Bristol not so long ago. We stood outside Wesley's first chapel there. When he came back from America, he was an utter failure.

He knew the Bible. He was one of the great intellects of the church, but spiritually he was paralyzed. He went to a prayer meeting just near Fleet Street, London, and suddenly somebody starts to read from the Gospel, from the Epistle to the Romans, and the fire of God falls down upon Wesley.

And he's changed. He's transformed. Both he and his brother are taken into a dynamic, into an experience of the Lord the like of which they've never had before.

And old George Whitefield is having exactly the same experience, and together they combine forces, and they go out throughout this country and throughout America, and they plant churches. The grid expands. There's a man called Howell Harris.

He was a schoolteacher, a very humble man, in no way gifted. He has the Gospel explained to him, and three weeks later he has a mighty experience of the Holy Spirit. This again is in the 18th century, it's in Wales.

And he wants his father and mother to know the Savior, and he wants his colleagues to know about Jesus. Three weeks after his conversion, he says, My heart waxed within me, and I melted under the sway of the Holy Spirit. And he started to take books.

He couldn't preach, and so he read books to other people. And as he was reading these great pious works of ministers of decades ago, suddenly he said an authority would fall on me. And he said, I didn't really know what I was doing, but I was starting to speak.

And as he spoke, still because he's such a gentle fellow with his head down, people think that he's actually reading. He's not reading. He's been borne along by the Spirit.

As he speaks, more people gather. And as a result of this, many people come and listen to Howell Harris. He's so successful in his ministry that Whitfield gets him to preach in the tabernacle in London, and crowds and crowds of people come and hear this great man.

You say, is that what can happen to me? Of course it can, as you link him with the power, the dynamic of the Holy Spirit. I knew a man, I cease with this illustration. The name of the man was Albert.

He used to meet with us in my home city. He was a down-and-out. There was a, what we called unkindly, a doss house in Sheffield, and that's where he lived.

He was amongst the folk who live at the level of the gutter. And on one occasion, somebody explained the gospel to him. He couldn't even read.

And he so falls in love with the Lord Jesus that he teaches himself to read the authorized version of the Bible. He starts to come to our church. He absorbs the Word of God in a most remarkable fashion.

And then eventually he breaks the sound barrier and he starts to pray, such prayers you never heard. He was a man who wasn't skilled, obviously. I've spelt out the background in terms of scholasticism or what have you.

But the Spirit came upon him. It gave him an unction. And he became one of the mightiest men that we had in our church.

That's not the 17th century. It's not the 18th century. That's the 20th century in a humble church that still exists in the center of my home city.

But come back to Peter. He stands, the rabbis generally sit. He speaks with boldness, with a loud voice, and he addresses a word from the Lord.

The exact expression is, he heralds, he trumpets forth the Word of God to this gathered community of people, of which there were at least 3,000. He speaks about Jesus. He exalts this Jesus who he's been cursing only just a few weeks before.

And great power attends his ministry. And as a result these people cry out, what must we do to be saved? And the only explanation as far as Peter's success is concerned is, he's given his heart and his life to the control of the Spirit of God. And as it was for Peter, so it can be for you.

Let's pray. Lord, your Word indicates that there is a great deal for us to receive from yourself. Many of us here have experienced regeneration and known the power of your Spirit.

Some have known that additional assurance of your grace, your dynamic. But Lord, we're praying that all of us may, in this new year, enter into a depth of experience and a release of power the like of which we've not known up to this point. Oh breath of God, come sweeping through us.

What you did for Aquinas in his latter years. What you did for Pascal. What you did for Harris.

What you did for Wesley. What you did for Alfred. Lord, will you do it for us? And may there only be one explanation.

Not that theologically we've got it all together, though we thank you for our understanding of Scripture to this point. But rather, the Holy Ghost came upon us. We were filled to overflowing and we became part of the grid, the network of the dynamic of the Spirit through which his power pulsates in this world, especially in this area of the country.

Hear us and bless us to this end. For Jesus' sake. Amen.