Preached at Carisbrooke.
“Repent ye therefore and be converted that your sins may be blotted out.”—Acts iii. 19.
St. Peter had been telling his countrymen that the Jesus whom they had crucified was their Lord and Christ. Strange words! They expected a King, who was to reign over them and to put down all other people; they were doubting and debating how He would show forth His glory to men; how He would begin His conquests over the world. And now a poor fisherman stood up in the midst of them and said, ‘He has shewed forth His glory to us, He has begun His conquest. And you have been yourselves helping to bring forth that glory. You have been preparing the way for His victory. For you have given Him up into the hands of the Romans, and they have hanged Him upon a tree. There is His death upon that Cross, He has manifested the glory of God, and because He could not be holden of death, because He was the Son of God, He has risen from the dead, He has ascended on high. There is the beginning of His victory over all nations.’
St. Peter said, ‘This crucified Man is Lord,’ that is to say, ‘He is the Ruler over men, over their spirits and over their bodies. He is the Ruler over the earth which He has given men to replenish and subdue.’ And St. Peter said further, ‘He is Christ.’ That is to say, ‘He is anointed with the Spirit of the Eternal God. That Spirit dwelt in Him while He was upon earth without measure. That Spirit, since He has ascended on high, He pours forth upon men, that they may know Him and know His Father, and that they may bear His image, and His Father’s image on their hearts.’
I. On this ground the Apostle rests the exhortation in the text, “Repent, therefore, and be converted;” these two words do not mean the same thing. But they commonly are found together in the Scriptures; one is not perfect without the other. To Repent is to change our minds; to think quite otherwise of some matter or some person than we have been used to think. St. Peter knew what the people he was speaking to thought about God. He knew what he himself had thought about God. They thought of Him as an enemy from whom they were to fly if they could, and whom if they could not escape they must persuade by all arguments and bribes not to destroy them. Now it was this mind of theirs which St. Peter desired that they should change. These were the thoughts from which he wished to deliver them. But he could not work this change or deliverance. He had not been able to work it in himself; he certainly could not produce it in anyone else. If they merely listened to his arguments, or to the arguments of any man or any angel, they would go on suspecting God; they would suspect Him more every day, because every day they would be doing more wrong acts, speaking more wrong words, thinking more wrong thoughts, which He must hate. But St. Peter was not using his own arguments or the arguments of any angel, he was using God’s arguments. He was speaking as His messenger. He was declaring that Jesus Christ in dying and rising from the dead had shewn forth God’s mind to His creatures. Christ had shewn how God felt to those who were feeling estranged from Him. Christ had revealed Him as a Shepherd seeking after the sheep who had wandered from Him; as a Father watching over the prodigal who had gone out of his Father’s house into a far country, and had wasted his substance in riotous living. He had set forth this Father not only in His words but in His deeds; going about doing good, healing the sick, casting out devils, He had set Him forth most of all in His own sufferings; entering into the death of all men, bearing their sorrow and their sin. He had shewn that there is a Living Power proceeding from the Father and the Son which could change the minds and hearts and wills of men, which could turn them from evil to good.
St. Peter, then, preaching of this Lord and Christ, affirming Him to be the Son of God, could say to these Jews, ‘Repent, change your minds about God. He is not, He cannot be, such a One as you have taken Him to be; He must be just the opposite of this. All your suspicions of Him must be wicked and false suspicions; which an Evil Spirit, a Slanderer, has sown in your hearts. I bid you—because He bids you—cast them aside.’
II. And if you do cast them aside, if you do repent or change your minds about God, then you will turn or be converted to Him. You have been turning away from Him. He has been with you when you rose up, when you lay down. He has been your Protector, the Giver of your life, the Renewer of your life. He has been speaking to you continually. Every tree and flower; every sunrise and sunset; the voices of friends who are with you and who are gone from you—all have brought messages to you from Him. He has been conversing with you in lonely hours when there was none else beside you. He has been bringing deeds you did, thoughts you thought, long ago, to your minds. He has made you see how evil they were though at the time you might think nothing of them, or find them pleasant. He has sent you blessed memories and recollections of days gone by; of lessons you learnt on your mother’s knee, or out of holy books, or through the life of good men. Yet you have turned away from Him. You have been seeking treasures here and there, in the earth at your feet, or at the end of some rainbow which you could never reach. You have been always in want of something, you could not exactly say what, which would make you happy, which would perfectly content you. And all the while the good you wanted, the Being who would have satisfied you was close to you, and you turned from Him. But now that you know what He is, now that you know His face is turned to you, turn yourselves to Him. Let Him who has not spared His own Son, but given Him up for you all, bind you to Him. Let Him hold you fast. Do not struggle to separate yourselves from an Everlasting Friend. Yield yourselves to Him. Suffer Him to rule over you, for to be His servants is to be perfectly free.
III. You will see that St. Peter could not call upon his countrymen to repent without also calling on them to be converted, to change their minds concerning Christ, to act as if He were a friend and not an enemy; trust Him instead of distrusting Him, this was in fact to turn to Him. This was to recollect the Father who had given all His creatures bread enough and to spare, while His own children through their own fault and folly were perishing of hunger. This was to arise and go to Him, saying, ‘Father, we have offended against Thee and before Thee, and are not worthy to be called Thy children.’ For now first they would feel that they had sinned. Before, they might have felt uncomfortable in a thousand ways, restless, desponding. They might have accused others of doing them great injuries; they might have accused themselves of great foolishness: they might have had both remorse and shame for acts which had been done and could never be undone, but they will not have said We have sinned. No one says that till he feels that he has been disbelieving, distrusting, disobeying a Father; that he has been fighting against One who was always caring for him and doing him good. Then comes the sense of sin; then comes the confession of sin. And the confession, though it may be full of sadness, is also full of joy; because it is throwing off a weight too heavy to be borne, because it is to return to One who more wishes to take the load from us than we wish to be rid of it.
IV. And so St. Peter might well add to the exhortation, “Repent and be converted,” those other words “that your sins may be blotted out.” Remember, I pray you, to whom He spoke these words. Many of those who heard Him will have joined in the shout Crucify Him! when Jesus was standing before the Roman governor and Pilate wished to let Him go; some may have bowed the knee to Him in mockery, when He wore the purple robe and the crown of thorns, some may have imitated the priests who said “Let Him come down from the Cross; He saved others, Himself He cannot save.” To one and all, whoever might be there, whatever they might have been, St. Peter addresses the same words, he holds out the same hope: ‘Your sins may be blotted out. You may be made new and pure creatures.’ The Jews were not unused to this language. They knew that their great King David, after he had committed his terrible sin, after he had been an adulterer and murderer, had prayed, “Make me a clean heart, Oh God! renew a right spirit within me. Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean, wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” They were certain that what he prayed for was granted; that he was fearfully punished for his transgressions, but that his heart and spirit did become right and true; that he did rise up a new man. This blessing which had been given to David, St. Peter said was bestowed upon all men who would receive it. God owned them in Christ as His children. He promised to put the evil which had become part of themselves far from them. He said that the new and pure and holy mind of Christ should be their mind. They might sink lower and lower into the dark and selfish and separate nature—the stagnant pool out of which all foul odours had come, which had bred all fevers and pestilences. They might continue selfish creatures, foes to God and to each other. But they might claim to be members of Jesus Christ, to have that true human nature which is in Him who is One with the Father, and in whom the Father sees all and loves all. Thus their sins could be blotted out. I do not say they would not be haunted continually by the spectres of evil they had done in past time. I do not say they would not be continually reminded of a flesh and a world and a devil, that would drive them into deeper evil still. But they would have a right to say, ‘Jesus our Lord and Christ has died to set us free from those dark shadows of the past, and from you our present seducers. He has risen again, and lives to put you under His feet. Married to Him, trusting in Him, we can defy you. We know that He will overcome you altogether at last. In that hope we can live and work with Him for your extirpation in ourselves and in our fellow-men.’
Brethren! I said the first words of St. Peter—those in which He declared a crucified Man to be both Lord and Christ—were strange and startling words to those men who heard them first. You cannot be surprised that many of them cried, ‘What! Are we to believe such tidings—such monstrous tidings—on the words of an ignorant Galilean, a mender of nets?’ The surprising thing is not that so many rejected his word, but that so many believed it. The surprising thing is that it made its way beyond the limits of Judea and Palestine, that it reached Greece and Italy, that it came over to Britain, that at last the most civilized and powerful nations of the earth received it as the very ground of their existence. You are here to-day, this church stands in this village, because our fathers confessed, because our nation confessed, that the Jesus who was crucified on Calvary is both Lord and Christ, is the Son of Man and the Son of God.
This is indeed marvellous. Others may account for it as they can. I believe it came to pass because the message was a true message; because it was what all nations were craving for; because it was what God had stirred them up to crave for, because it was what the Lord created them to receive. Therefore, though they had a thousand motives without, and ten thousand within, not to receive it, though it contradicted all the feelings and notions respecting God which belong to our evil nature—though it turned the policy of the world upside down—yet peoples and races and kingdoms bowed before it; the Cross proved itself mightier than all the powers in earth or hell.
Well! But those words of St. Peter which follow these, what of them? He said “Repent, therefore, and be converted, and your sins shall be blotted out.” Is that sentence worn out? Has that nothing to do with Englishmen as well as with Jews? Brethren, I do not think we any of us know the least what it had to do with the Jews, if we have not learnt by experience what it has to do with ourselves. I do not think we could tell how the Jews thought of the God who had made a covenant with them and chosen them to be His people, if we were not bitterly aware how we have thought of Him who has made the better covenant with us, and chosen us to be witnesses of His Truth and Love to all the families of the earth. Are you astonished when you hear how stiffnecked the Israelites were, how they refused to believe in the God who had led them through the Red Sea, who had borne them as on eagles’ wings across the wilderness? Does it not strike you that we have been the sharers in a greater Redemption than that—we have been borne, we are borne day by day, through greater perils? And do we believe the more for that? Do we trust Him who has taken us to be His children, who has declared that we belong to the Body of His Own Son, who has sealed us with His Spirit? Do we not continually believe this God, this Father, this Deliverer, to be our foe; One whom it would be well if we could banish from us for ever? Do we not act as if we wished that there were no such Being; as if we only acknowledged Him because we dare not deny Him? Oh! Brethren, must not the message come to us also, ‘Repent! Change your minds altogether respecting Him whom it is Eternal Life to know, Eternal Death to lose. Do not maintain a perpetual war with Him who has made peace with you in the Blood of His Son! Do not treat that Blood as if it were a common unholy thing, not a witness and pledge—as Apostles declared, as our fathers believed of His love to men, of His reconciliation of the world.’ All of us have need of this repentance—none more than we who preach it to others. How continually do our hearts accuse us of repeating the words which record the greatest wonder in heaven and earth—of arguing about them—of condemning those who do not receive them—whilst the faith, the hope, the love, which they expressed is hidden from us, is as though it were not. How often the message of the angels—when it is uttered from our lips—comes darkened by the thought that we have not given glory to God in the highest, or helped the cause of peace on earth, or done deeds of good will towards men! What a knell of death rings in our ears, along with the promise of Eternal Life.
What do such lessons teach us? Is it that we should doubt the might and efficacy of God’s Word? Is it not rather that we should always recollect ourselves, always declare to you that this call to Repentance comes from Him and not from us; that as there are none who do not need it, so there are none who may not profit by it; that it is addressed to the drunkard and the harlot as well as to the most religious; that the sin of all is the same—unbelief in God, distrust of His Goodness and Truth—that the remedy for sin is the same for all, the Love of God manifested in His only begotten Son, shed abroad in our hearts by the Divine Spirit?
And so the command ‘Convert or turn yourselves to God,’ is for us also inseparable from the command, ‘Repent or change your minds respecting God.’ ‘This is the name,’ said the Prophet, ‘whereby the child of the Virgin shall be called—Emmanuel, that is to say, God with us.’ It is the promise of all the Scriptures, that God shall come nearer to men, that He shall dwell among them. But it is our inclination to think that instead of being nearer to us, in closer converse and communion with men than He was in the old times, He has gone further from us; that then He revealed Himself with open face, that we can only behold him through a veil. Oh! Brethren, it is our wish that is father to this thought. We desire that God should be at a distance from us—therefore we persuade ourselves that He is. We do not like to retain Him in our knowledge; therefore we do not think it is possible for us to know Him. But the Light is about us, however we may shut our eyes to it. And when we believe that God is not the tyrant we have taken Him to be—that He is that Father of whom Christ said: “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father,”—when we believe this, we turn to the Light from which we have been turning away; we desire to come to it that our deeds may be made manifest: if it is ever so searching we are sure that it is blessed; if the darkness invites us ever so much, we are sure it is deceitful, bewildering, accursed.
Oh, let us cherish this belief more and more. Let us act upon it more and more. For then we shall find that the Apostle’s last words are fulfilled to us, as much as to the people of any former generation. We, too, may have our sins blotted out. We, too, may have clean, free, purified consciences. We, too, may know how the blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin. When we turn to God, not that we may obtain indulgence for our sin, but that we may be delivered from it; not that we may gain some blessing for ourselves from which others are excluded—but that we may partake of that perfect sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, which was made for the whole world; we shall find that every promise of God in Christ is Yea and Amen, that the fulfilment does not fall short of the expectation, but exceeds all that we can ask and think. For then we shall look forward to that time of refreshing from the presence of the Lord, of which the Apostle speaks at the end of this verse. We shall expect the appearing of the Lord Jesus Christ, that restitution of all things which God hath promised by the mouth of all His holy Prophets, since the world began. We shall wait for this Revelation and hasten towards it, because it is the Revelation of Him who is the perfect Light of the world: because before His brightness all that is false and corrupt and evil must for ever flee away.