Acts 5:29

A WONDERFUL CHANGE

‘Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men.’

Acts 5:29

Such were the bold words of St. Peter and the other Apostles when on their trial before the chief priests and the magistrates of their country. And what we notice is that they were spoken by one who only a few months before had denied with an oath that he even knew Jesus Whom now he witnesses to so boldly. It is a wonderful change. What wrought it?

The Holy Spirit came into the soul of St. Peter on that first Whit Sunday, and by His Almighty power He gave to St. Peter those graces and powers of character which St. Peter naturally was without, and converted him from being the man he was before into being the man we see him now.

I. He was naturally impatient, self-confident, and rash.—If you read his Epistles, you will see that the tempers he shows most all through those letters are the exact opposite of these—patience, calmness, and quiet endurance. He was naturally specially averse from shame or disgrace; probably there was in him, by nature, a touch of natural pride such as usually goes with an impetuous disposition. In the chapter from which our text is taken, you see him rejoicing in worldly disgrace. He was naturally unstable and wavering. He became the very model of steadfastness to the end. The change is thorough. He became all that he once was not. Hence from this we learn to look upon our natural defects—not as excuses for falling into the corresponding sins—but as indications to us of what ‘gifts’ we are to seek from God the Holy Ghost, if we are to be saved by Christ’s salvation.

II. What tempers do our duty to God and our duty to man demand that we should exercise?—In St. Peter’s case his peculiar duty was to lead what we may describe as the forlorn hope of the militant Church of Christ, and to brave everything, for all the years he had to live, in that service. Whoever else gave way he must not. Yet he had been the very man to give way most flagrantly, and, as we might think, most disgracefully. All forsook their Lord and fled; but no other Apostle had gone the length of denying Christ. And the position to which St. Peter was called was one which made it necessary, both in his duty to God and his duty to the Church, that he should stand firm in his allegiance to the one and in his duty to the other. And God the Holy Ghost made him fit to do both.

III. The one thing for us to do, and to be, is to be in earnest about our service, and to be undoubting in expecting, and in seeking, God’s grace and help. And here St. Peter is our example again. For let his natural weaknesses be what they might, St. Peter was hearty in his desire to serve God, and he was also thorough in his reliance on the aid of God. Nothing in all St. Peter’s early sermons is more to be remarked than the energy with which he referred all that he did and was to the power of God, and not to his own.