“HOW TO RESPOND TO PERSECUTION” (PART 1)
ACTS 4:1-12

I. Introduction
There was a time when there were a lot of door-to-door salesmen. Some of you may recall the doorbell ringing and hearing a female voice say, “Avon calling.” Others of you might remember the Fuller Brush salesman, or the World Book Encyclopedia salesman, or in the Chicago area where I grew up, the Electrolux Vacuum Cleaner salesman.

Those guys were relentless, and a lot of them were really good at getting $150.00 for a $40.00 vacuum cleaner. They always had big smiles and no shortage of confidence in them-selves and their over-priced vacuums. And the fact is that they sold a lot of them. But if an Electrolux salesman showed up at your front door, rang the bell, and timidly asked, “You don’t want to buy a vacuum cleaner today, do you?” it was pretty clear he had little or no confidence in himself or his vacuum cleaners.

Before God called me into the gospel ministry I spent nearly thirty-five years in industrial sales. I represented a St. Louis based company that designed, engineered, and built electric heaters, temperature sensors, and related control systems. Early in my career I learned two things of particular importance.
• First, I had to learn about the products I was selling. You can’t sell heaters, sensors, and control systems if you don’t know how they work.
• Second, I had to learn to accept rejection and remain positive. Good industrial sales-men are a lot like good hitters in baseball; even the best only succeed about 30% of the time.

While there are vast differences between salesmanship and evangelism – evangelism relies on the gospel and the power of the Holy Spirit – there are at least a few parallels.
• First, you need to know something about the Lord Jesus and his gospel. How can you tell someone about Jesus if you know next to nothing about Him?
• Second, you need to accept the fact that you will face rejection. The simple fact is that most people will reject the gospel. Scripture tells us that many hear it, but only a few respond to it. That’s why Jesus said, “For many are called, but few are chosen (Matthew 22:14).”

But there’s a third lesson that took me a little longer to learn. I learned that you have to know your potential clients and understand their needs. I learned that my success would be linked directly to theirs. The bottom line is I had to convince prospects that what I had to offer could help to make them successful.

The best salesmen believe their customers can’t live without whatever it is they’re selling that day. So too, the best evangelists believe the lost can’t be saved without Jesus.
They believe Him when He says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me (John 14:6).” And they believe the Apostle Peter when he says, “And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men, by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12).”

There’s another difference between salesmanship and evangelism. A salesman’s effective-ness can usually be measured by his income. But it’s different for an evangelist. An evan-gelist’s effectiveness can often be measured by the persecution he suffers.

And just to be clear – our effectiveness in evangelism is not determined by how many people we lead to the Lord. Rather, our effectiveness in evangelism is determined by our faithful-ness to the gospel and how clearly we present it. Lest our egos get in the way, we need to remember that we don’t save people. God saves people!

But the fact remains that our faithfulness to the gospel and our willingness to tell others the truth about Jesus will often result in persecution. In Acts 4 we find the church in its infancy. The persecution is beginning. And over the next three hundred years Christians would be thrown into dens of ravenous lions and other wild animals. Nero would have them tied to stakes, cover them with pitch, and set them on fire. They would be beaten, stoned, and hanged. They would be skinned alive and crucified. The Christians would suffer unspeak-able cruelties and tortures. And, with the exception of John, every one of the apostles met a similar fate.

But was the church destroyed? No, it was not! On the contrary, it became more mature and stronger than ever. That’s what persecution does. It purifies the church by weeding out those who claim to be believers, but are not. And it strengthens the true Christian as nothing else can. One of the early church fathers, Tertullian, wrote, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”

Now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Christians here in the West are beginning to suffer such bloody persecution. Such attacks as we have recently seen will only increase. But most of the time Satan is more subtle than that. The devil usually attacks us by going after our egos, our pride, our need to be accepted by others, and our desire to conform to the world around us. John MacArthur has said “…letting believers live self-centered, compla-cent, worldly lives is more effective in keeping people from being attracted to the Christian faith than killing them. Martyrs are respected for the strength of their character; compro-misers are despised.” You know he is right!

That the young church would face persecution should have surprised no one. That’s why I asked Johann-Peter to read from John 15 to open the service.
John 15:18-19 (Jesus speaking)
18 “If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you.
19 “If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”

Later, the apostles taught the same truth.
2 Timothy 3:12 (Paul speaking)
12 And indeed, all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.

1 Peter 2:21 (Peter speaking)
21 For you have been called for this purpose, since Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in His steps…

Persecution for the sake of Christ is a reality for the true church. It begins in Acts 4.
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II. Review
In Acts 2 the church was born on the Day of Pentecost. The truths about Jesus Christ, who He is, what He has done, His Second Coming, and the call to repentance and faith in Him alone were preached and taught. The result was that thousands were convicted of sin, came to saving faith, and built the church. They were baptized; they devoted themselves to the study of God’s Word; they spent time in communion with God and with each other; they prayed together; they shared their goods and possessions; and they praised the Lord.

In Acts 3 Peter healed the lame beggar in the temple, gave the glory for the miracle to Jesus, and told the Jews once more that Jesus was in fact their Messiah, that He had come to offer them salvation, but they had refused and rejected Him and had Him crucified. Peter ended his second sermon with this…
*Acts 3:26
26 “For you first (the Jews), God raised up His Servant (Jesus), and sent Him to bless you by turning every one of you from your wicked ways.”
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III. Text
That brings us to this morning’s text. Peter’s preaching has had a profound effect on those whom God had called. Thousands had repented and received Christ. But the very same preaching also had a profound effect on those who refused Christ and rejected Him. Listen, just as the children God love His Word and desire to hear it, so too the children of this world hate His Word and want no part of it. They will fight to undermine it and generally do what-ever they can to stop it.
*Acts 4:1-12 (Please stand with me in honor of reading God’s Word.)
1 And as they (Peter and John) were speaking to the people, the priests and cap-tain of the temple guard, and the Sadducees, came upon them,
2 being greatly disturbed because they were teaching the people and proclaim-ing in Jesus the resurrection from the dead.
3 And they laid hands on them, and put them in jail until the next day, for it was already evening.
4 But many of those who had heard the message believed; and the number of the men came to be about five thousand.
5 And it came about on the next day, that their rulers and elders and scribes were gathered together in Jerusalem;
6 and Annas the high priest was there, and Caiaphas and John and Alexander, and all who were of high priestly descent.
7 And when they had placed them (Peter and John) in the center, they began to inquire, “By what power, or in what name, have you done this?”
8 Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, “Rulers and elders of the people,
9 if we are on trial today for a benefit done to a sick man, as to how this man has been made well,
10 let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead – by this name this man stands here before you in good health.
11 “He (Jesus Christ the Nazarene) is the stone which was rejected by you, the builders, but which became the very corner stone.
12 “And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under hea-ven that has been given among men, by which we must be saved.”

By the end of Acts 2 everything looked good. The new church was growing. It was causing the world around it no offense at all. In fact, Acts 2:47 says that the church was “…having favor with all the people. And the Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved.” If the history of the early church ended right there we might say that everything was just fine. Everyone was happy and the church growth movement was off to a rousing start.

But then something happened – In Acts 3 Peter told the truth. He said that God sent His Son to save the people from their sins. Peter said that the people, led and influenced by their most religious leaders, had not only refused and rejected God’s Son, but they had had Him crucified. Then Peter went on and told them that God had raised Jesus from the dead and that He was alive in heaven and seated at His Father’s right hand. Then Peter said that the Jews needed to rethink who Jesus was. That is to say, they needed to repent and trust not in themselves and their religion, but in Jesus alone. Only then would God’s blessings, pro-mised to Abraham all the way back in Genesis, finally come to the Jewish people.

That was the truth. But believing it would require the people to acknowledge and admit that they were sinners, and that they would have to turn away from their sin. More than that, they would have to give up their deeply held religious beliefs and all the rites, rituals, trap-pings, and traditions they cherished.
And more than even that, they would have to relinquish the power and authority that the reli-gious leaders of Israel clung to. Peter had not yet said all of that, but it was clear to the Jews that if what he was saying were true, they were in trouble, and they knew it. So, just as they had already silenced Jesus, now they would have to silence His followers too.

Why? We already know why – the world hates the truth, and it hates those who proclaim it. Jesus said, “If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you (John 15:19).” Thus the persecution of the church would begin.
*Acts 4:1-4
1 And as they (Peter and John) were speaking to the people, the priests and cap-tain of the temple guard, and the Sadducees, came upon them,
2 being greatly disturbed because they were teaching the people and proclaim-ing in Jesus the resurrection from the dead.
3 And they laid hands on them, and put them in jail until the next day, for it was already evening.
4 But many of those who had heard the message believed; and the number of the men came to be about five thousand.

After Peter preached the sermon that ended in Acts 3:26, both he and John were conversing with the crowd. This is when the authorities come to arrest them. The priests are those who conduct the prayer services. The captain of the guard is, for all intents and purposes, the chief of the temple police. The Sadducees are the sect that provides the high priest each year. They’re the religious aristocrats of the day, and the political rivals of the Pharisees.

Think of Pharisees as the religious legalists of their day. They clung to the written law and the Jewish religious traditions, and they believed in the resurrection of the body. The Saddu-cees, on the other hand, were the religious liberals. They rejected both God’s sovereignty and predestination. And they rejected the whole idea of the bodily resurrection of the dead.

Acts 4:1 says that these people (the priests, the police, and the liberals) “came upon” Peter and John. The Greek word translated “came upon” carries with it the idea of an assault. It isn’t hard to see why these religious leaders despised what they were hearing from the apostles. After all, the Sadducees were the religious authorities. Peter and John were neither educated nor trained. They were amateurs who had no right to teach in the temple.

But what really bothers the Sadducees is that the apostles are preaching the resurrection of the dead. And if that isn’t bad enough, they’re saying that this Jesus, the one whom the Jews had only recently rid themselves of, has been resurrected and He is alive in heaven. So the Sadducees need to put a stop to Peter’s and John’s preaching, and they need to do it fast.

But what if what Peter and John are saying is true? What if Jesus has risen from the dead? What if He is alive?
Then the Sadducees, and all of the Jewish religious leaders who had a part in Jesus’ murder, are in serious trouble. If it is true, the religion they’ve been pushing on the people is a lie. If it is true, they’re heretics, and they’ll lose their power, their authority, their position, and their prestige. These men know that if Jesus is the Messiah, they’re all finished. In his commentary on Acts, John Polhill addresses the Sadducees’ reaction to Peter and John.
“…the idea of a general resurrection was an apocalyptic concept with all sorts of messianic overtones. Messianic ideas among the Jews of that day meant revolt, over-throw of (Rome), and the restoration of the Davidic kingdom… (The things in) Peter’s sermon alarmed them – resurrection, Author of life, a new Moses. These were revolu-tionary ideas. The movement must not spread. It must be nipped in the bud.”

In Acts 4:3 we’re told that it is too late in the day to convene a trial for Peter and John, so they’re just thrown into jail. But the truth that has been preached, the gospel that has gone out from the steps of the temple, has done its work. In v. 4 we’re told that Peter’s preaching ultimately led to five thousand more people repenting and coming to saving faith in Christ.

But even without Acts 4:4 we would know that the gospel had done its work. The Word of God always does its work. One of my favorite OT verses proves it.
Isaiah 55:11
11 So shall My word be which goes forth from My mouth; it shall not return to Me empty, without accomplishing what I desire, and without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it.

We need to understand that the gospel will always go out, and it will always do what God wants it to do. And there is a corollary to that. The Christian will always be persecuted for getting the gospel out. If you live the kind of life that God calls you to live, you will clash with the world around you. That is to say, you will conflict with the world’s systems.

Many of those conflicts will be fairly insignificant. You may have a neighbor who thinks you’re a religious nut. Or you may lose some of the friends you had before you became a Christian. On a more serious level you may become estranged from family members or even lose a job or a position. I’ve experienced some of those things myself.

Those things are persecution. But we should not feel sorry for ourselves when we are perse-cuted for our faith. When we’re persecuted for it, does it not mean that the world around us recognizes that we belong to God, that we are in fact Christians? Paul said that God uses the troubles of this life – persecution included – to strengthen us and to glorify Himself.
2 Corinthians 12:10
10 Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ’s sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong.

Listen, Christian, it is when you are weak in yourself, that you are strong in Him.
Do you remember what Jesus said about persecution? He said “Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:10).” So when it comes to handling persecution for your faith, consider the instructions given to us in by the writer of Hebrews.
*Hebrews 12:1-4
1 Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance, and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,
2 fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
3 For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you may not grow weary and lose heart.
4 You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin.

What is he saying? He’s saying that even though all Christians suffer some degree of perse-cution for their faith, we haven’t suffered martyrdom. But some professing believers never seem to suffer any persecution at all. Why is that? Ask yourself this: If you are a Christian, if you’ve put your faith in Christ and in Christ alone, and you’ve never undergone any persecution, you need to ask yourself, “Why?”
• Could it be that you’ve succeeded in keeping your faith a secret from the world around you?
• Could it be that you’ve hidden it so well that no one knows?
• Could it be that you’re so deeply immersed in the things of this world that your faith has become all but invisible?

If so, it would be good to remember Paul’s words to Timothy: “…all who desire to live god-ly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted (2 Timothy 3:12).” This is precisely what Peter and John are now experiencing in Acts 4:3. But look at the fruit; look at what God does with it. It’s right there in v. 4 – “But many of those who had heard the message believed…”
*Acts 4:5-7
5 And it came about on the next day, that their rulers and elders and scribes were gathered together in Jerusalem;
6 and Annas the high priest was there, and Caiaphas and John and Alexander, and all who were of high priestly descent.
7 And when they had placed them (Peter and John) in the center, they began to inquire, “By what power, or in what name, have you done this?”

Here is yet another opportunity for us to see the sovereignty of God worked out in the lives of His children. The apostles’ persecution is about to open a door they could never open.
They will preach to the Sanhedrin. Although it was under the ultimate authority of Rome, the Sanhedrin ruled in Israel. These rulers (the priests), the elders (the tribal heads), and the scribes (the lawyers – Pharisees) were presided over by the high priest (a Sadducee). The current high priest was Caiaphas. The former high priest was Caiaphas’ father-in-law Annas. (The two men named John and Alexander in v. 6 are unknown to us.) This is the same ruling body that only a few months earlier had condemned Jesus. Now Peter and John will stand before them and preach a risen Christ.

Is this amazing or what? Try to imagine a joint session of Congress, with all nine members of the Supreme Court, and both the former and current Presidents in attendance. Now try to imagine that they all want to hear from a simple country preacher who has no credentials and no formal education. He is stood before them and asked, “By what power or in what name, have you done this (Acts 4-7b)?” Done what?
*Acts 4:8-11
8 Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, “Rulers and elders of the people,
9 if we are on trial today for a benefit done to a sick man, as to how this man has been made well,
10 let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead – by this name this man stands here before you in good health.
11 “He (Jesus Christ the Nazarene) is the stone which was rejected by you, the builders, but which became the very corner stone.

How can you be filled with the Spirit? If you, consciously, deliberately, and consistently submit yourself to God, you will be filled with the Holy Spirit. And persecution will only drive you closer to the Lord. Peter and John were prepared for this moment in front of the Sanhedrin because they were filled with the Holy Spirit and they remembered Jesus’ words.
*Luke 12:11-12
11 “And when they bring you before the synagogues and the rulers and the au-thorities, do not become anxious about how or what you should speak in your defense, or what you should say;
12 for the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say.”

Jesus is saying that we don’t need to rehearse lines or memorize a script for use when we’re persecuted. We just yield ourselves to Him, and let Him handle it! What an encouragement!
Can you imagine what God would do with LBC if each one of us would simply submit our-selves to the Holy Spirit?

In Acts 4:8 Peter doesn’t shrink from the confrontation. Rather, he embraces it. In v. 9 he challenges them. And in vv. 10-11 he boldly and confidently answers the question that was put to him – “By what power, or in what name, have you done this?”
If I may paraphrase Peter: “Jesus did it! It was Jesus, the one from Nazareth, the one you refused to believe in, the one you crucified. But God raised Him from the dead. Jesus is the power and the name by which this formerly lame man stands before you today.”

Peter was telling the Sanhedrin the truth. But it was truth that the members of the Sanhedrin did not want to hear. He was offending them. Listen, Christian, the gospel is an offense to those who do not believe it. It offends them because it exposes their sin and condemns them for it. The Sanhedrin was at the center of the power of Israel and the Jews.

In Acts 4:10 Peter tells them that they killed Jesus, but God resurrected Him from the dead. In Acts 4:11 he tells them that God gave them their Messiah (the cornerstone), but they (the builders) rejected Him. In all of this Peter is telling them that despite their religious efforts and fervor, they have turned their backs on God and are standing in opposition to Him. Thus their religion is worthless. Could anything be more offensive to a religious person than that?

But there is an alternative to worthless religions. And Peter will tell them what it is.
*Acts 4:12
12 “And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under hea-ven that has been given among men, by which we must be saved.”

In our pluralistic culture today this may be the greatest offense of all. How dare you claim to have absolute truth in a post-modern culture that prizes relativism and tolerance of virtu-ally anything no matter how bizarre, vile, or obscene it may actually be? That’s offensive. How dare you question or condemn anyone’s lifestyle or actions? That’s offensive. How dare you tell anyone that their religion is false and is leading them down the wrong road? That’s really offensive! And that’s why the Gospel of Jesus Christ is an offense to the lost. And that’s why, when it is preached and taught without compromise, persecution comes.
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IV. Conclusion
Let me close with this thought. When the church is persecuted it doesn’t weaken and falter. On the contrary, it is strengthened and marches forward. It is purified in that false believers succumb to the pressure and leave, while true believers’ faith is made deeper by seeing God work, and they become part of a greater work. Listen, there is a joy in suffering persecution for Christ that no one knows but those who have experienced it.
*James 1:2-4, 12
2 Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials,
3 knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.
4 And let endurance have its perfect result, that you may be perfect and com-plete, lacking in nothing.
12 Blessed is a man who perseveres under trial; for once he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life, which the Lord has promised to those who love Him. ~ Pray ~