Acts 5

Stubborn Peter

We must obey God rather than men. Acts 5:29.

All the world over, people who have had the good luck to be born in Scotland are spoken of as having in them the making of good citizens and good church members. They are also said to be dour which means something akin to stubborn. You boys know some stubborn fellows at school. Stubbornness is met with among girls too. “Stubborn!” some boy may be saying, “that was why Macgregor was thrashed. The master called him ‘a stubborn fool.'” And I have known a girl who had a long task set her for the same reason. All the same, the world is better because there have been a few stubborn men and women in it, and a stubborn boy may be a very splendid fellow.

Stubborn comes from a good old English word, “stub,” meaning the short stump of a tree, from which all the branches have long since been broken or cut off. The wind has no effect upon it. There the “stub” stands, firm and immovable, almost like a rock. Now, if you think for a minute, it will dawn upon you what the real meaning of “stubborn” is.

Think of Peter having become a “stub.” You remember what a cowardly sort of fellow he showed himself one night. Now a great change has come over him. He is “stubborn.” When told that a certain course adopted by him is disapproved of, he stands firm and says, “We must obey God rather than men.”

I remember once hearing a boy play the violin at a concert. He was very nervous. After he had played a page or two of his piece, he seemed to forget, for he stopped. Do you think he gave up, and ran from the platform? No; he stood and waited for a few moments, then began again, stopped once more, tried yet again, and at last succeeded splendidly. It is out of such boys that the Peters are made. In his efforts to do right, didn't Peter break down more than once? He seemed to have no courage in those days. He even denied Jesus Christ. But he wept; and then he just tried again.

The Resurrection of Jesus taught Peter many a lesson. He knew that his present action might mean giving up his life. But while he looked at the magistrates, and knew that the Roman government was behind them, he remembered that on his side was the King of kings. The law of the land was written on tables, but in his heart was the law of God. “We must obey God rather than men,” he said. God had pointed out the way to him: he would go straight ahead.

It is the law of God in the heart that can make boys and girls “stubborn” in this good sense.

Lying on his face before the fire in an American log cabin, a little “stubborn” fellow committed to memory the four Gospels, Aesop ' s Fables, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. When he was nineteen, he saw a young girl sold at public auction, and told his brother, that if ever he had a chance he would hit slavery the hardest blow he could. At twenty he earned a new suit of clothes for himself by doing some work for a farmer. Several years later he was elected a Senator, and later still a President. Lincoln for it was he worked as hard to help men as slave masters did to recover an escaped slave to bondage. Many of the Americans who love his memory think that the name of Abraham Lincoln will one day be mentioned alongside that of Moses, Julius Caesar, Paul, Shakespeare, and shall we ourselves add? Peter. What made Lincoln “stubborn” was that God had written a law of love in his heart. He had a great deal of sorrow in his life, and in the end men slew him, but he did a great work. His motto was, I “must obey God rather than men.”

Boys and girls, are you to be like Lincoln, like Peter stubborn in obeying God rather than men?