Jesus is the answer to the problem you may not know you have

Is there a sense of something missing in your life? While that feeling might lead you to seek God, it may not be the root of your deepest need. In this sermon on Acts 3, Joel Virgo breaks down Peter's powerful sermon after the healing of the lame man, revealing how Jesus is the ultimate mediator for our spiritual condition. He is the Prophet who brings truth to our ignorance, the King who brings order and purpose to our chaotic lives, and the Priest who offers forgiveness for our greatest failures. Jesus is uniquely and divinely equipped to solve our real problems, including the ones we might not even know we have.

Please note that the transcript below has been AI-transcribed from the sermon’s audio recording and may contain transcription errors.

Reading from Acts 3

Really good to see you. I'm Joel, if you're new here. We're going through the book of Acts, the early chapters of the Book of Acts here at Grace City at the moment in our Bible teachings. So if you have your Bible with you, maybe you want to turn with me to chapter 3. Last week we reached the point where, in this story of the first church—that's really what the Book of Acts gives us—a miracle causes a commotion. And the whole city of Jerusalem comes out to see what's happened. Peter, Jesus' closest disciple, gets up and gives this message. He uses the moment and speaks to the crowd. And what we have in the rest of chapter 3—we started it last week, we're going to finish it today—is the sermon that he preaches.

We're just going to read it out and then I'm going to preach a sermon. You'll find that my sermon is longer than Peter's. But the reason for that is in the book of Acts, and in Luke, and the Gospels, we have sermons, but we have kind of espresso sermons. We get the real essentials because they would have preached for a long time, trust me, they would. And what we do—what my job, people like me is to kind of expound it, you know, turn it into an Americano, kind of just help you get the whole thing. So I have to sort of try and draw out the pieces that Peter's put in there and we'll do that after we've read.

So, chapter 3 again, and I'm going to pick up this time from verse 11 and we'll go to the end of the chapter. It says this:

"While he clung to Peter and John, all the people, utterly astounded, ran together to them in the portico called Solomon's. And when Peter saw it, he addressed the people: 'Men of Israel, why do you wonder at this, or why do you stare at us, as though by our own power or piety we have made this man walk? The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our fathers, glorified his servant Jesus, whom you delivered over and denied in the presence of Pilate when he had decided to release him, but you denied the holy and righteous one and asked for a murderer to be granted to you. And you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses. And his name, by faith in his name, has made this man strong whom you see and know, and the faith that is through Jesus has given the man this perfect health in the presence of you all. And now, brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers, but what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets that His Christ would suffer, He thus fulfilled. Repent, therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord. And that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago. Moses said, ‘The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers. You shall listen to Him in whatever he tells you, and it shall be that every soul who does not listen to that prophet shall be destroyed from the people.’ And all the prophets who've spoken from Samuel and those who came after him also proclaimed these days. You are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant that God made with your fathers, saying to Abraham, 'And in your offspring shall all the families of all the earth be blessed.' God, having raised up His servant, sent him to you first to bless you by turning every one of you from your wickedness." - Acts 3:11-26

Let's just pray together. Father, we thank you for your word again, and we confess, God, without your help now, we will be wasting our time here, or at best we'll just fill our minds with a little bit of extra information from history. But when you send your spirit to open our eyes to see the glory of your Son Jesus, power is involved. Lord, life can be born spiritually. All sorts of transformation can take place, and we say, God, please, that's what we've come for. We've come to meet with the living God. We've come to hear your voice, we've come to see your son. We pray, glorify Him by the help of the Holy Spirit. Help us to see Jesus now and be changed as we do so. We pray for that, we pray for that according to your mercy in his name. Amen. Amen.

Jesus as Our Mediator

So Peter is presenting Jesus as a mediator in this sermon. A mediator is somebody who brings two parties together. Maybe you've had a situation where you've been estranged from somebody or you've seen this happen, where two individuals or groups need a mediator to help conduct a kind of reconciling, a kind of finding harmony together. And when we see Jesus presented in the Bible, it's often in this understanding. He is the mediator, the one mediator, as Paul says to Timothy in another place in the New Testament, "there is one mediator between God and man, between heaven and earth, Jesus Christ." And Peter's presenting Jesus in that way, but in a way that actually we have to humble ourselves to kind of learn some of Peter's language, some of Peter's culture and context so that we can get the best of it.

When we feel spiritual need, you and me, in our ordinary 21st century Ottawa lives, we might experience a whole range of feelings of need. We might have been driven to church this morning out of a sense of just a gap in our lives, something that's missing. We just know there's a piece that I don't have. There's some contentment that I lack, and that can be the thing that triggers us towards the church context. That could be the very thing that brought you here today, for example. But what I find is that often the presenting need, the immediate emotion that I feel, is just the first clue because it takes me on a journey of having to learn about needs that I didn't even know I had.

I'll give you an example. I remember a few years back going to see the dentist, and it wasn't because I had an appointment. It was like I needed to see the dentist, and I wasn't used to this. I've never had major pain in my mouth that bothered me, but on this occasion, it's like I had a swelling in my gum and a real pain, and it was like, "Oh boy, I need... now I know why people see the dentist." And I called in, I got an appointment quick and I was there kind of explaining to this guy, you know, the pain and pointing out this swelling, and I thought he'd be really impressed and, you know, "Wow, you brave guy, let's fix that." But actually, he was rather more concerned with the tooth, a tooth along from there. And he's like, "Yeah, okay, very interesting, but this tooth next to the one you're pointing at is the one that you need to be worried about. In fact, we're going to have to take it out today. I've got to take it out today." He did the whole thing, you know, he knelt on my chest to pull it out. I'm not exaggerating, he was serious about it. He was qualified, he was a good dentist, I'm not... you know. And one of the reasons I know he's a good dentist is because it actually did fix the problem. But I didn't understand it. I was like saying to him, "Yeah, but that's not even the tooth that's causing that. The pain's not even... that's not where the gum is." He's like, "Yeah, I know, I know, I know. That was the thing that drew you here. But here, let me show you why." He got an X-ray. He did the proper science and he said, "Let me show you, this is the real problem here. This tooth, you don't even know hurts. It's not causing you the trouble, but it's the real trouble. It's not the thing you're aware of, but it's where the problem's coming from."

When we come to the Bible, when we come to church, we need to adopt a posture of humility where we say, "Yeah, I realize my need of God, but I'm going to have to submit that to learning things about my condition that may be different than what I even... even the pain that drew me here, I could misunderstand it. I might not even understand what I need Jesus to do for me. I just know I need God." That's good. That's a good start. It's a good start. It gets you in the clinic. It gets you in the surgery. But when we come to him, we need to humble ourselves and say, "Okay." Like when you come to a dentist, you come to someone with authority to diagnose you. And this is what we have in scripture. We have the wisdom from above. This isn't opinion, this isn't just to join the general kind of, you know, pontifications of our age. It's not just consensus. It's not just ideas. This claims to be more than that. It claims to be the wisdom from above. It claims to be God saying, "This is... let me explain to you what you need."

And I say that because what we just read from Peter is full of all kinds of language and words and ideas that are a bit alien to us. He talks about Jesus being a prophet. He talks about Jesus being the Christ, and we'll talk about that in a moment. He talks about Jesus in language and ways that to us seem like, "That's not what I... when I said I needed God, I didn't... I didn't wake up this morning thinking, 'You know what I need? I need a prophet. What I need is a priest. What I need is a... what I need is a Messiah.'" All those kinds of weird language, those weird concepts, that's not the first thing that's on our mind. The first thing on our mind is our need, our emotional wants. But we have to approach God humbly and say, "Okay, maybe you can help me to see what my real need is and see how this mediator you've provided, this Jesus, really is uniquely able, uniquely, divinely equipped to help me." To help me in ways that I'm aware of and to help me in some ways I'm not aware of. To deal with the real problem, to deal with the real me, the real issues.

Jesus as Prophet

And Peter presents Jesus as a mediator. There's a... I can see how he specifically refers to Jesus as a prophet. He also refers to Jesus as a king. You don't see that word there in its English form, but I'm going to show you later that it's there. And he even seems to show Jesus as a priest, which if there's time we'll touch on as well. But let me just go through this. First of all, Jesus is referred to as a prophet right there in verses 22 to 24. Peter said, "Moses said, 'The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers. You shall listen to him in whatever he tells you, and it shall be that every soul who does not listen to that prophet shall be destroyed from the pe1ople, and all the prophets who have spoken, from Samuel and those who came after him, also proclaimed these days.'"

He's presenting Jesus as God's prophet. What does a prophet do? A prophet communicates, speaks, reveals God, brings revelation of God. A prophet is the one who solves the problem of our ignorance. That's the problem that we have, that we need a mediator for in this instance. We're ignorant without a prophet, without God speaking, without God opening our blind eyes and our deaf ears and allowing revelation to come. Our hearts remain in darkness. Our minds are ultimately confused spiritually. So God has kindly stepped into history by giving prophets one after another. He names Moses and Samuel, refers to others, but ultimately in the prophet, the one that these were all pointing to, Jesus, the true prophet, the one sent from heaven to open the eyes of the blind, to reveal the truth of God. This is what we need. We may not realize it, but this is actually what we need.

When we're honest, we do actually realize how blind we are spiritually. In fact, we can go to the other extreme and start to talk in over the top ways that no one can ever know if there's any truth spiritually. We can end up making those kinds of claims. We can sort of, I guess, living in a kind of 21st century culture where we've swallowed the Kool-Aid of relativism and all kinds of postmodern philosophies where really there's no such thing as truth in the end anyway. So people, you know, clever people get on television and say things like, "You can't know anything about God. Period." And that gets everyone's approval, maybe even gets a round of applause. It's like, "You can't know." It's as if we all agreed that, "Oh yeah, that's for certain, you can't know anything about God." But if you just stop for a moment and examine that sentence, you realize it is a nonsense. It's futile. It's truly absurd. If you say you can't know anything about God, you just claim to know something about God, and that is that he can't speak. "You can't know anything about God." Why? "Because he's mute." "Well, how do you know that?" We're claiming incredible knowledge when we say that. We're claiming to be certain that he can't speak. How dare we assume that? How can we be so presumptuous?

Surely a God who is a real God might have the ability and might even have the desire to reveal himself. And in fact, when we come to the God of the Bible, he's just that. It's who he is. It's who he is in essence. He reveals himself so much so that Jesus is referred to as the word, the radiance of the Father's glory. He is the image of the invisible God. The Bible acknowledges that no one has seen God, no one sees God the Father. It's not news to you if you've read the Bible. The Bible got there first. We get that. God is spirit. There's an invisibility about God that makes it hard for us to see and understand Him, and we certainly can't examine him in a test tube in the way that people might insist on for the only way of knowing something. Yeah, we get that there are limitations to how we can know, at least if you want to know scientifically, that's going to be an interesting journey. But there are a lot of things that we know that we don't know scientifically in that sense. There are a lot of things that we just know, like stuff to do with morality and stuff. You don't know that some things are wrong because of a report from a laboratory. You just know. And there are things that we, children, just know. There are things that we grow up just knowing.

And in fact, the God of the Bible chooses to reveal Himself in various ways. There are ways that he reveals himself through what he's made. If he's created everything, then everything speaks of him. So everybody, from kids to professors, can acknowledge the fact that there's a normal human experience of looking at the world and saying, "I think it speaks of somebody. It speaks of a person. It speaks of a mind behind it all." Yeah, God reveals Himself in those ways. Many of us, we might even talk of that as a... you might enjoy time on your own in creation, you know, visiting places that help you to feel closer to God, feel more spiritual. That's a kind of a normal thing for human beings. But this God, he's chosen to reveal Himself through various means. But his great desire all along was to reveal Himself wholly, to show his heart to us. To show himself to us unmistakably, so that we could say, "I have seen the Lord because I've seen him in the face of his Son."

This is what Jesus came doing; he came revealing the living God. Revealing him, so that yeah, it is honestly possible for ordinary 21st century people like you and me to be able to say, "Yeah, I do know him." "How can you say that? What a claim." "Well, not because of my great wisdom. Kindly he has stepped down to reveal himself." He says in John chapter 8, "I am the light of the world. He that follows me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life." That's what Jesus wants to do for you. He wants to reveal God to you. He wants you to know God. He wants to open up your heart and mind to actually have genuine knowledge of God, fellowship with God, relationship with God. It's a privilege that we have because of this mediating prophet who breaks into our lives.

And Peter is presenting Jesus as the prophet, the revelation of God, the ultimate revealer of God, to which all other revelations of God are a kind of clue. They're a pointer, and we need to see them like that. Peter's preaching here to Jerusalem people, to the people who live in first century Judea, and they have their history, they have their prophets, they have Moses, they go back to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, they have Samuel. He's naming these people on purpose in his sermon. He's saying, "You guys, you have this phenomenally privileged legacy. You belong to a glorious heritage. What other people could there be than the people of Israel, people that belong to the living God who had the prophets, all the privilege of revelation over centuries, all that you have, the law, the prophets, all of this richness."

The only problem is sometimes the things that we have that are gifts from God can cause us, because of our pride and stubbornness, to resist the ultimate gift from God that these other gifts were intended to point us to. And this was their story. They rejected Jesus because they chose all the things they previously had that pointed to Jesus instead of him. But you know, in a sense, that's a temptation for everybody. We will all have to face this because there are so many things that we have and enjoy and receive from God in life that actually can become weirdly reasons we miss the great gift God wants to give us. This will happen to you.

See, for these guys, it's literally Moses. It's literally the issue. It's like, "How can you... how can you present to us a prophet who is greater than our Moses? How can you do that?" And it was offensive enough for some to not listen to Peter. And in the end, it was offensive for some to violently reject the disciples. And that's a kind of a religious version of this, but you can, you will have your own version of this, where there will be some gift that God gives. It may be even a noble thing. It can be strange, the kind of snags that people find blocking their path to knowing God through His Son Jesus.

Sometimes it's something obviously, you know, suspect, some kind of addiction, some kind of criminal behavior, you know, some kind of tearaway. It's like, "Obviously we know this person's going to have it." But no, often it's actually... you know, in some contexts it's people... I've met people who [say], "If I become a Christian, I'm going to really upset my family. If I become a Christian, it's going to be... and doesn't God care about my family? Doesn't God care about my parents? Doesn't God care that I honor my father and my mother? Surely, I don't want to upset, I don't want to cause trouble." And what we're doing is we're choosing that as our final authority. We're choosing that as the final word. We're saying that is the prophet. That's the final word. But here's the thing, it's not the final word. God has said, "Jesus." He's given us his son. He's presented him. He said, "Here is my beloved son. Listen to him. He is the final word."

And what we find actually is when we come to know Jesus as the final authority, as Peter's inviting his crowd to do, you don't actually lose these other gifts that God gives. You get them back better. The ones that came to know Christ in a strange way, they came to know Moses better. They came to understand Moses, they came to understand the Old Testament. They're like, "Oh, it all speaks about Jesus. It's all about Christ. Now we know it better. It makes more sense." Now you look at things through the lens of Jesus, they start to make more sense than you ever imagined possible. The Bible makes so much sense to me now. I see Jesus is the point of it. But friends, it's not just the Bible that makes sense. All things make sense through the lens of Christ. Creation, your career, your family, your hopes and dreams. You see it through the lens of Christ, it starts to make way more sense.

So the strange thing of maybe being at a wedding and seeing a Christian groom and a Christian bride look in each other's eyes and say, "There's someone I love more than you," and you think, "What the heck, this is a weird wedding. Weird people." But as C.S. Lewis said, if you love Jesus more than you love other people, you love other people better than you would have done before you loved Jesus. Because life starts to assemble the right shape around Christ. Before Christ, it was all haphazard and down to just whims and instincts and things that we got wrong all the time. But when we start to build our lives on Christ, we start to see what Paul means in Colossians 1, "in him, all things hold together," including our lives. They start to hold together because they're built around the primacy of the final word, Jesus, the authority from heaven. And we start to take him seriously, so we start to take Moses more seriously, we start to take the whole Bible more seriously, way more, and we start to take our families more seriously, our friendships, our money, our decisions, our careers, not because of... because of Jesus, because of Jesus. So Peter's presenting him as a final word, and we need to make that decision about whether he really is.

And for some of us, there's a tug because we can't imagine anything better than the things that we are obsessing about. You know, like kids, if you're going on a family vacation, maybe you're going to Europe for the holiday of a lifetime, and it's like you're just at the airport and your kids see a Tim Hortons. It's like, "These are Tim Hortons!" And you're like, "You're going to miss the plane!" "Yeah, but there's a Tim Hortons, Dad, you don't understand!" And it's like, "Yeah, I know Tim Hortons is good and, you know, sent from heaven and all the rest, but I promise you... I promise you, let's get to the gate. There's... you don't understand." We don't understand what God invites us into in His Son Jesus. It takes a certain adjustment for us to think, "Yeah, I'm going to face the other way from the things that I see as more important than Jesus. I'm going to follow this one that he's given me. I'm going to trust him." And it's costly, it's costly, friends. In our lives, the things that I've had to let go of, like many of you, because of Jesus, you think, "Wow, I've lost so much." But here's the striking thing: when you do that, you realize you haven't really lost anything. Jesus said so. He said if you lose everything for my sake, you'll get it back. If you hold on to your life, you'll lose it. If you lose it for my sake, you'll get it back. This is what Peter's presenting.

Jesus as King

He's also presenting Jesus as a king. We've just got time to touch on these other features of his message here. Jesus is presented as a king. We don't see the word king here, but we do see the word Christ. Jesus is the Christ, the Christ of God, and he presents in, let's find the specific verses, in 18 to 21. He says, "What God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled. Repent, therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the p2resence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, the Christ appointed for you."

And when we get the word, because we think "Jesus Christ," we think, you know, that's Jesus' surname, like his parents were Mr. and Mrs. Christ. Well, let me use a recent example from history. Some of you may have watched on your televisions the coronation in London of the recent coronation of Charles III. I know you all would do that because you're all, you know, model subjects. So, there was a point in the ceremony where they put screens around him for the anointing. Literally, oil is placed on the sovereign's head. That is a vestige of something from here. He was Christed. Charles III on that day in Westminster Abbey in London was Christed. He was Messiah. The Hebrew word is Messiah, the Greek word is Christ. It means the same thing. He was oiled, literally anointed with oil. The idea being that there's an empowerment for the reigning monarch, there's an empowerment for the rule, to do the work of reigning. You are equipped with spiritual authority. And you know, when people like Charles have oil put on them, it's symbolic of this idea in the Bible of God having a son who he has anointed with his spirit. This goes right to the heart of who got the Trinity, the God who's Father, Son, and Spirit. God has a son, he's put his spirit on him so that his son can reign as king. That's the plan.

So when the Bible represents Jesus Christ, it's literally what it means: he is your King. He's the King, he is the King you've awaited, the King for whom you have longed. Now you don't necessarily wake up in the morning, like I said, thinking, "You know what I really... I just feel I need a king in my life." For many of us, that's the last thing we kind of... but when we understand the shape of the Bible's story, actually, the idea is suddenly tantalizing. We see that the appropriate desire for this great ruler who will come and will set things right, who will come and rule with justice and bring peace and bring righteousness, and he will reign with humility and he will be this perfect model of honorable government that will know no end, and he's just perfect. I think in a way, we still have a kind of hint of this in our psyche. You know, we do get excited about a boss who we kind of respect. We do get excited about those sports coaches who are just legendary. You know, the ones who just... "Yeah, when this guy was coaching the team, that was when they went through their golden age." And you kind of... every team knows what it's like to have somebody named as the successor to the failure that's currently coaching, and it's like, "Wow, this is going to go... this is, he is the guy." And it's that on many levels. Maybe somebody, you know, presidents, prime ministers, what can gather around a new leader is a kind of wave or a bubble of massive hope. Hope, because a great king, a great ruler can change everything. That's the idea that's kind of locked in for us. Whether we, we kind of, we might not like it, but it's there in us. We put our hope, you know, even like a new boss, new line manager. And what we have in the Bible is again and again, scattered through the pages, these often beautiful rhapsodic kind of descriptions of a coming king, who will set things straight, who will rule and govern, and as Peter says here, restore all things.

He's set to restore all things, and of course, of course, we could do with that. Of course, we yearn for that. Perhaps more and more. I mean, I, you know, in my lifetime, I'm 50 now. My observation over the decades is that I feel as though I've never lived through times of less hope than the years I live in now, globally speaking. I feel like there is so much pessimism in comparison to what I grew up in, in the 1980s. There's so much, there's such a different atmosphere globally, culturally. And I think you as a believer, or someone that's searching into these things, can be so shaped by that culture where you just assume that there's a kind of general drudgery and futility about history. That there's just... it's just ebbs and flows. It's just, you know, economies thrive and then crash and rulers come and leaders who are promising and then they implode and it's just wars and destruction and environmental concern. It's on every level. It just seems like history is going, at best, it's going in a wobbly direction. What we have here is this promise that whatever meandering route it seems to be taking, history has purpose because there is a king who's set to reign forever and bring it righteously and bring truth, humility, and justice.

And don't forget, when Peter's saying all this stuff, he's got a visual aid right next to him. So at the very beginning of our passage, there's a guy clinging onto him. We talked about it last week, the man who was lame, and it says early on the chapter, "Everybody in Jerusalem knew this guy because he chose the best place to beg in the whole city, the gate Beautiful." It was famous that he was lame. Everyone knew he was lame. He hadn't had use of his legs all his life. He's a famously ruined beggar. And here he is, as Luke's described for us, he's walking, he's leaping, he's praising God, the visual aid of the power of Jesus to restore broken creation. We look on a lame man and we see that he's well. He's in perfect health, as Peter says, "perfect health." It's a visual aid of what Jesus is destined to do for creation. If he can heal a broken man's legs, he can heal a broken creation. He can heal a broken universe. It's what he's destined to do. This is what was given them, the promises in the book of Isaiah about when the king will come, that the blind will see, the deaf will hear, the lame will leap for joy.

And so there are times in our lives in history where the kingdom bursts in, where the future comes into the present. The reign of King Jesus suddenly seems to emerge in certain ways. We get dramatic answers to prayer and transformations and lives change and sins forgiven, bodies healed. Church is thriving. It's called the kingdom coming. It's wonderful. It's what we pray for when Jesus said, "Pray like this, pray your kingdom come." That's what we're praying for. We're praying for the arrival of King Jesus through history, in time and space, as we look forward to the ultimate coming of Jesus, where he sets everything straight all at once. This is what we hope for, friends. This is what you need. You need a prophet to reveal God in his final word. You need to know God, you need your ignorance to be dispelled. You also need a king, someone you can hope in who will set things straight. This is our longing. This is our desperate need.

Jesus as Priest

But then finally, in a less explicit way, there's another mediator. There's another category of mediator through the Bible. Some of you know, I guess you know where I'm going with this already. You know how the Bible maps out these three primary mediators through the Old Testament: the prophet, the king, the third one that is only kind of subtly in here, but it's there. Is the priest, the priest. And why do I say that? I say it really just because of what Peter says in verse 17. "Now brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers, but what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled. Repent, therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord."

See, Jesus being a great king is kind of... that's encouraging in a sense, but it doesn't solve all my problems. Not necessarily good news if you're on the wrong side of the king, right? These people have killed him. They crucified, they had him sent away for execution, the worst kind at the hands of the Romans. They, they are the generation who did the most hideous thing in human history. That's what he's rubbing in their faces. Peter is saying, "You crucified the Lord of glory, the Lord of life, the Author of life. You put him to death with the help of Romans, with the help of Pontius Pilate, even when he offered you somebody, he offered you his freedom, you chose a murderer instead." It's a shocking national disgrace that he's presenting them with. "What have you done? The horror, the cosmic level of your treason, it stinks. What have you done as a city? It stinks to high heaven. It's terrible. You should expect war from heaven. Cities have been obliterated for less."

And this whole crowd watching Peter, listening to him preach, are aware that they... it's like they carry the hammers and nails in their pockets. They know that they are to blame. They know they did wrong. Isn't it remarkable that it's to that crowd, those people, that Peter is saying, "Your sins may be blotted away." How awesome. Humanity at its worst is offered God at his most gracious. This is exactly what he wants them to see. "Yeah, we have a prophet in Jesus, we have a priest as well as a king. We have a priest." What is a priest? A priest is the one who wins acceptance with God the Father. A priest is the one who forgives. A priest is the one who finds a way for us into the presence of God. Through what? Through the offering of blood.

Through the offering of blood, and the priests were given in the Old Testament, and they would take animals, they would slay animals, they would sprinkle blood on the altar, and it was Israel's way of saying, "We're sorry." And it was God's kind gift to Israel to present a system, a priesthood by which they could come into relationship with the God they'd offended. But all the priests, just like all the prophets and all the kings, were flawed men in themselves. They had their own sins to deal with. They had their own flaws. They had to repent and confess their own sins, so none of them could be the true priest. They only pointed to the priest to come. When they presented an animal, they used to present it on an altar, and one of the things they had to inspect it for was faults. "Has it got a fault in it? Is there any fault in this animal?" And if it was a faultless animal, if it was blameless, then it could be offered on the altar.

How striking that when Pontius Pilate had Jesus stood before him as a criminal, stripped of his clothes, beaten to the point of not being recognizable, with a crown of thorns on his head, Pontius Pilate said, "I find no fault in him." It took a Roman governor to say what the priest was supposed to say, "There's no fault in this one." Jesus, the only truly faultless man, the only innocent who ever lived, he was "crushed for our iniquities." He was taken away, sacrificed like a lamb, taken away.

The Blameless Lamb

Friends, why? Why? Because each of us needs to have our sins blotted out. And if Peter could say to that generation, "You could have your sins blotted out," friends, he can say it to you, at your most sinful, at your worst, at your worst day. Maybe some of you are looking back on a week where you feel, "I've done so badly." Maybe you're living with guilt and shame that none of us know about. Maybe you've even just done the worst thing you're ever going to do, and you're terrified that you're excluded, there's no chance. But friends, these people, they did the worst thing that could possibly be done. What does Peter say? "Your sins can be blotted out."

This is what Jesus is to us. He is a prophet, he is a king. He's a priest. He is so wonderful. What a mediator we have in Jesus. We're going to come to him now and take bread and wine. We're going to celebrate who he is. It may be that you're not yet a Christian. I don't know what situation each one of us is in. You are so welcome, I'm so glad you're here. For many of you, you're ready to come to the table straight away, and we welcome you. As soon as we get up to sing and bring our worship, just come. You don't need to wait. Just come, take bread, take wine, celebrate the gift of Jesus, the body, the blood given for you. Receive, receive this mediator for yourself, receive the grace of God freely. You think, "Well, I don't deserve it. I can't... what have I done to deserve Jesus?" Nothing. We're all beggars, right? If the lame man is a visual aid, then that's what I am—I'm a lame beggar, and so are you. With nothing to claim, I'm a beggar before God. You come to the table with all your sin. You come with all your failure. You receive grace.