COMING INTO GOD’S HOUSE
Roland H Brown
Acts 2: 22, 23, 32-41
When the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, as described in the opening of this chapter, it was the first indication of that great fact. And it was a fact, not a doctrine; the Holy Spirit came. He came to indwell persons on the earth. You think of the wonder of that. The evidence of it was that immediately the gospel was preached. A divine Person came down from heaven to indwell men. They were simple men, they were young men, some of them had been fishermen, and they had become disciples of Jesus. They had witnessed His rejection and crucifixion and resurrection. What men they were; men that had eaten and drunk with a Man that had been raised from among the dead.
The Holy Spirit came down from heaven to indwell them. At the beginning of chapter 2, a house is mentioned. The “violent impetuous blowing” that marked the coming of the Holy Spirit “filled all the house”. Not only were these individuals indwelt of the Spirit, but He was taking possession of the house, the house of God. The assembly which is spoken of in the Scriptures as God’s house, “a habitation of God in the Spirit”, Eph 2: 22. Out of that house, the house of God, went the preaching of the gospel. God wanted persons to come into His house and He still does. He wants to dwell with men. He has given abundant evidence of that: He wants to dwell with men, not on a temporary basis, but for all eternity. I wonder if you have ever thought about that. People think long and hard before they decide to go and live with somebody, whether it is a relation or whether they are thinking of getting married. ‘How would I get on?’ It is one thing to be friendly with somebody and see them from time to time; it is another thing to live with them. God indicates in the gospel that He wants to live with you. How would you feel? Would you feel comfortable living with God? Or would you feel uneasy about it? Would you feel that it would curb you in some way? You think of God expressing in the gospel His desire, a deeply held desire of God, to dwell with men. When we say men, it means men and women and boys and girls. God wants to dwell with you; He wants you to know His love at close quarters, and He wants that love to be reciprocated.
The amazing thing about this preaching of which I have read, which is the first preaching of this dispensation, is that it was made to the most guilty responsible people, the very persons who had been active in crucifying God’s beloved Son. The preacher did not ignore that in his preaching. He did not just give a sweet word; he addressed the reality there. He says, “ye, by the hand of lawless men, have crucified and slain”. These were the guiltiest persons on the earth. There were a lot of people then who were ignorant, but there was none as culpable as those to whom the gospel was first presented. I just want you to think about that because it tells us something about the grace of God. “The grace of God … carries with it salvation for all men”, Titus 2: 11. No one is excluded from the range of divine grace. Before He went up on high the Lord Jesus said to these men who became indwelt by the Spirit “that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name to all the nations beginning at Jerusalem”, Luke 24: 47. It was to begin there: the very place where Jesus died. You might have thought that if God wanted to live with men He might choose some other men than these, but those were the persons to whom God’s appeal through His faithful servant was presented.
This was the first preaching of this dispensation. Many hundreds of years have passed since this preaching, and here we are today at another gospel preaching. The message has not changed. The desires of God that lie behind the message have not changed. What has changed is that, instead of being at the beginning of the dispensation of grace, we are at the end of it. This was the first preaching. You may be hearing the last. You may not have another opportunity. I do not know if that weighs with you, but it weighs heavily upon me as asked to preach the gospel because the apostle Paul said to a young man when he urged him to preach the word, “be urgent in season and out of season”, 2 Tim 4: 2. “Be urgent”. It is very easy to become accustomed to the gospel message. It is very easy to think that because we normally hear a gospel preaching on Sunday that we always will. It is also easy to fall into the delusion that because we associate with Christians and believers who read their Bibles and speak about the Lord we are one of them just for that reason.
As Peter speaks to these persons he says, “Repent, and be baptised, each one of you”; each one of you. If they were to come into blessing they were not going to come into blessing en masse. They were not going to come into blessing as a family or as a locality. They were going to come into blessing, if they were to come in at all, one by one. God wants you to come in. He wants you to come into His house. If you are going to live with God, you have to be suitable to His presence and God has made provision that you should be before Him eternally as suited to His presence. You can “be holy and blameless before him in love”, Eph 1: 4. The gospel brings that message to us. God has made provision for you, such is His desire that you should live with Him, for you to be there and be there without fear. This preacher brings home their guilt, their responsibility. We need to be convicted of that. He urges them to have to do with God for themselves. I would like to raise that question with each of us. Much that is said in a gospel preaching is not remembered. Much of it is heard and not remembered, but we might be able to take away something. One of the things that we could take away is whether we have had to do with God for ourselves. He is spoken of in the Scripture as the God “with whom we have to do”, Heb 4: 13.
Every man woman and child will have to do with God at some stage. God is appealing in the gospel that we might have to do with Him now. He says, “Come now, let us reason together”, Isa 1: 18. The gospel is God’s initiative; it is His approach, His appeal; it is His appeal. It is not just the word of the preacher. You may like or dislike the preacher, or the way he speaks, or his presentation, or his eccentricities or whatever, but lying behind the appeal in the preaching is the appeal of the blessed God Himself; it is His initiative. He would attract your attention; He has something to say. There are a lot of people in this world who have a lot to say. There is a lot of talk; people talk about this and that, they talk about politics, they talk about the state of the world, the fear of warfare, and the fear of climate change. All these things might disturb life and make them uncomfortable. And they talk about staying in Europe or coming out of Europe and people have an endless amount to say about all that; but God has something to say: He will be heard. What He has to say is not about what is merely for time, but it is the most important thing you will ever hear because it is about the eternal destiny of your soul. He speaks to them about Jesus. If God is going to speak to you and me He has nothing else to speak about but to present Jesus to us. God loves to speak of Jesus. He has been speaking about Him in the preaching; He is being extolled today through the gospel preaching throughout the world. Hundreds of preachers all over the world are speaking about Jesus because God has no one else to speak about but His beloved Son. He wants to share with you and with me the pleasure that He has found in His beloved Son.
The Scriptures tell us how the Father spoke to Him at His baptism: “Thou art my beloved Son, in thee I have found my delight”, Luke 3: 22. That secret life was known only to the Father. But the Father expressed in the hearing of others His delight in that blessed Man. On the mount of transfiguration, He did not exactly speak to Him, but He spoke of Him. “This is my beloved Son, in whom I have found my delight: hear him”, Matt 17: 5. That is what God is saying in the preaching to all of us - to “hear him”. He would have us to listen to those tender accents of which we sang in our hymn (No 232). As Peter begins to preach he speaks of Him as “a man borne witness to by God”, One whom God delights to bear witness to. He speaks of what men did to Him. “Given up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye, by the hand of lawless men, have crucified and slain.” What does that tell us about the world in which we live? That God’s beloved Son was by the hand of lawless men crucified and slain. That was the world’s verdict. He tells us not only what men did, but He tells us what God has done. He says, “This Jesus has God raised up, whereof all we are witnesses”. One who was taken by wicked hands and slain was the One who became the Sin-bearer.
If you were to ever be before God as holy and blameless the matter of your sins has to be addressed. I wonder how you feel about that. Are you convicted that you are a sinner; that you have sins? It was a long time before I was convicted of that; I used to think that I was quite good as things went. I was a good boy; I did not do anything very bad. In His mercy to me God brought conviction of sin. He showed me what I was as a sinner in His sight. If there were people that I might otherwise have looked down upon because of their obvious wickedness, He showed me that everything that they did I was capable of doing. It was not a very pleasant experience to learn that the respectable person that I thought that I was, was a mirage; it was a delusion. I was a sinner in the sight of God, deserving from Him nothing but His judgment. He revealed to me what I was: God does not do that without also pointing you to the Saviour: the Saviour who is great enough “to save completely those who approach by him to God”, Heb 7: 25.
He is a mighty Saviour. He is spoken of here as “Jesus the Nazaræan”; that is how He was known among men, how He was despised by men. We need to make no apology for speaking of Jesus because He is a mighty Saviour. He came into the world to save sinners. Have you been saved by Him? He is seeking you in the preaching. If you have not yet been found by Him He desires to find you in the preaching and make Himself a reality to your soul, not just someone that we read about in the Bible. It is very blessed to do that, to read your Bible, to read about Jesus in the Bible, but God desires that you should come to know Him, and in coming to know Him that you should come to love Him and in coming to love Him you should devote your life to serving Him. Peter says, “This Jesus has God raised up, whereof all we are witnesses”, One who came into the world to save sinners became the Sin-offering. He bore the judgment of God, and that is a solemn consideration. Think of a Man alive on the cross under the judgment of God for sins that were not His own. There were sins that I committed, perhaps lightly committed; perhaps I thought that nobody would ever see them, and I discovered that God had seen them, since nothing escapes His eye, and that if I was to dwell forever in the sunshine of His favour those sins must be faced up to. They were laid upon Jesus: “Jehovah hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all” (Isa 53: 6); what a load Jesus bore. If you think of your own sins, perhaps you can think of some of them, but you think of Him bearing the iniquity of all who trust Him, bearing it before God, taking their sins upon Himself as if they were His own and bearing - and not only bearing but exhausting - the judgment of God against them; being made sin. Not only being the Sin-bearer, bearing the sins of believers, but being made the very thing that He hated. Having become the Sin-bearer He died and was buried. He rose again, and these men were witnesses of that; they are witnesses of His resurrection.
They ate and drank with Him after He arose from the dead. I want you to think about that; the One who was the Sin-bearer, the One, as Peter says, “who himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Pet 2: 24): think of the precious body of Jesus, “thou hast prepared me a body”, Heb 10: 5. This morning we put our hands to that loaf of which He said, “This is my body which is given for you” (Luke 22: 19), the body of Jesus. In that body He bore the sins of all those who trust in Him; “bore our sins in His body on the tree”. How real it becomes as we think of that. Having borne them, and borne the judgment of God and been buried, He was raised. What does that tell us? What does it tell us that the One who bore our sins in His body “has been raised up from among the dead by the glory of the Father”, Rom 6: 4? It must mean that those sins have gone from the sight of God. God would not have raised from the dead One who was still bearing my sins in His body. The resurrection of Jesus is the great testimony to the fact that those sins have been righteously atoned for; they have been covered in God’s sight. He is able to say of believers that “their sins and their lawlessnesses I will never remember any more”, Heb 8: 12. He is able to say that. They did come in remembrance before God; they came in remembrance before God at the cross of Jesus, a most solemn matter to think of. God did not relinquish His essential integrity, His holiness and His righteousness; He expressed upon the Sin-bearer His utter hatred of sin and of the man that sinned, and He did it without any mitigation.
The One who became the Sin bearer has been raised from the dead, and not only raised, but, as Peter says, “been exalted by the right hand of God”; think of that blessed Man once the Sin-bearer, bearing sins, now installed in the highest place in the universe. No other Man has ever been there, to sit at the right hand of God. He sits there by divine invitation: “The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I have put thine enemies to be the footstool of thy feet”, Mark 12: 36. We preach a glorified Saviour; He was once here in humiliation as the Nazaræan; He once became the Sin-bearer, but He is now exalted in glory and God presents Him with great delight in the preaching. God has great joy in presenting Christ to men not only as an object for faith, but an object for affection. The way that He has gone for me is the way that He wins my heart because He has done for me what no other could do and what no other would do. He was not only able but He was willing to do it. In the consciousness of that I can say He has won my heart, and He wants to win your heart too; He wants to win your heart. These persons, the more they heard of this remarkable preaching, the more uncomfortable they became. It says, “they were pricked in heart”. Their conscience was working on God’s behalf. The gospel goes forth, you have a conscience and it works on God’s behalf. The word of God is directed at the conscience, but not only is it directed at the conscience, it is directed at the heart. God reaches the heart of man often through the conscience and as they listened to this remarkable testimony it says, “they were pricked in heart”. There they were, their guilt presented to them, and in their desperation they say to Peter, “What shall we do, brethren?”. What a question that is. It would be a wonderful thing, if as a result of the gospel preaching that question rose in any heart here tonight - what shall we do? You may wonder what they could do. What they had done could never be undone, their lawless and wicked hands had taken God’s Son and crucified and slain Him, there it was: it could not be undone, but there was something they could do.
Peter speaks of repentance. It is the way of salvation for those whose hearts or consciences are pricking them. Repentance is towards God, the God against whom we sin. Peter says, “Repent, and be baptised, each one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for remission of sins”. How wonderful to be free from a pricking conscience. How wonderful to know that your sins have been remitted or forgiven, to receive that and then to receive something even greater than that. In the gospel, God addresses the sinners need; it needs to be addressed and only God can address it. There is much more in mind than simply meeting your need: “ye will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit”. Can you think of anything more amazing than that? These persons hearing this preaching were the most guilty persons in the world: they had taken God’s Son; there had been an outrage of justice. The apostle speaks of the scandal of the cross (Gal 5: 11); it was an outrage what they did. It could not have been undone by them.
The most unworthy persons were the first to hear that remission of sins was available and, more than that, God was prepared to impart to them - people like that - the gift of His own Spirit. What a remarkable thing that is. How it underlines the desire of God to dwell with men. Not only has He operated at tremendous cost to meet all that I have done and all that I am, but in His grace He would impart to me His own Spirit so that I might be comfortable with Him in His house, so that I might have holy affections and emotions that are akin to His own. Can you think of anything more wonderful than that? If people are going to live together in close quarters they are worried about how they are going to get on, whether they are compatible, but you think of God imparting His own Spirit. I once heard Mr Eddie Walkinshaw put it something like this: “If I could give you my spirit you would see things as I see them; you would feel things as I feel them; my tastes would become your tastes. I cannot do that, it is not possible for any of us to give our spirit to somebody else, but it is possible for God to give you His Spirit. He intends those three things: you would see things as I see them, you would feel things as I feel them, and my tastes, likes and dislikes would become yours; and in a word, you would live in my life.” I found that a very helpful illustration of what it means to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit so that I might see things differently. I see things as God sees them, not just as I looked at them before, but they come in a new light. Perhaps things that I was casual about and would have carelessly entered into they look different when you have had the Holy Spirit imparted to you. Suddenly I get a taste for things perhaps that I thought were not of much interest, a taste for the things of God. You only get that through the gift of the Holy Spirit: none of us was born with a taste for the things of God. There are some things in the world that people speak of as an acquired taste. The things of God are an acquired taste; God wants to share them with us, and the Holy Spirit is given to us to reveal to us the things that God has prepared for those that love Him: “Things which eye has not seen, and ear not heard, and which have not come into man’s heart”, 1 Cor 2: 9. You think of what has been opened up to you through the gift of the Holy Spirit, a whole new world is being opened up to you. The great thing about it is that the things that have been opened up to you are eternal. What you may have found your life and your joy and your satisfaction in before is called temporary; “temporary pleasures of sin”, Heb 11: 25. The things that the Spirit of God will open up to you will enrapture your heart. They will produce in your life a profound change, and your view will be lifted above the mundane and the day-to-day. Righteousness will be fulfilled in the power of the Spirit, “life on account of righteousness”, Rom 8: 10. You get a view of another Man in another world, and just a glimpse of that will enrapture your heart, and the result will be that you will be comfortable in God’s presence. As indwelt by His Spirit, you will be very happy to dwell with Him eternally without fear, because “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4: 18); perfect love is what the Spirit of God will shed abroad in your heart. It is a service that He delights in, to shed abroad in the human heart the love of God; that is that I know consciously, and not just because I sing the hymn, that Jesus loves me. Most of us have sung and learnt that -
Jesus loves me! This I know,
For the Bible tells me so.
Anna Bartlett Warner (1827-1915)
As the Spirit of God sheds the love of God abroad in my heart, I learn that it is not only in the Bible, but it is the conscious joy and experience of my soul. It is a wonderful thing to be loved, and persons indwelt by the Spirit of God know that they are loved. Paul says, “the Son of God, who has loved me and given himself for me”, Gal 2: 20. Such a person: he was conscious of being loved by the Son of God no less, and that love had been proved in the giving of Himself. These persons heard it and accepted God’s word.
The gospel comes to an end: will you accept it or will you be careless about it? Will you put it off to some future date or will you, in exercise of soul, have to do with God now, and be sure that the greatest blessings that are available in the universe are yours, your own property? So that you can be sure of your sins being forgiven, and if you have not received that precious gift of the Holy Spirit, you may ask the Father to give it to you. The Father gives the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him. May the preaching tonight promote exercise with us each to lay hold of these things. One preacher said to a young man, “Lay hold of eternal life” (1 Tim 6: 12); do not let the gospel message and the appeal of God slip through your fingers. Lay hold of what is presented to you and make it your own and enter into the joy and blessedness of it not only for time but for all eternity.
May God bless the word.
Maidstone
25th March 2018