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How do you handle being confronted with a big adjustment? For our family, over the last few weeks, we have certainly been aware of the kinds of adjustments needed as we've welcomed a wonderful and healthy second child into our lives. For many of our families this week, the last week of school at St. Paul’s — and the adjustment that summertime brings — are looming large. For all of us at St. Paul’s in the coming months, adjustments are coming.
Whether you're in the midst of life’s “adjustments” with kids home from school or if those “adjustments” are simply on the horizon, today is an excellent day to remember both the conviction and the comfort that exists in the life-changing adjustment that the Holy Spirit worked through the words of Peter on Pentecost (Acts 2). We are witnesses to the reality that Jesus is Lord, Jesus is the Christ, and that we crucified Him.
When the people of Jerusalem hear Peter's words, they are convicted; they realize that, in their old way of thinking and in their sin, they have brought about the death of God’s Messiah and their Lord. And as we read in Acts 2:37, when they heard that reality, “they were cut to the heart.” They stood pierced by the realization of the full force of what sin had done — in the reality that the Law kills the sinner, condemns the sinner, and crushes the sinner. In that guilt, they ask, “What shall we do?” Again, they hear these convicting words, but now they hear them in a new light, through a new lens. They hear that in Christ, God has made the greatest adjustment in history. This new way of life — God’s life and Jesus’ death for you — is for the forgiveness of your sins.
That, in my view, is the true beauty of Pentecost: that the sinner, the one far off, the child, the broken, the hurting — all receive the glorious reality of the promise, the gift, the reception of what God came to bring for those very people who crucified Him.
On that day of Pentecost, a pivotal adjustment was being made, an adjustment in the hearts of broken, sinful people. That same adjustment happens in our hearts as well. Like them, we are convicted and cut to the heart when we recognize our sin, and yet we are comforted by the reality Jesus brings to our lives. Adjusting our position before God moves us from being condemned to being coheirs with Christ. The old sinful self is dead, and the new creation in Christ has come and is alive. Even as we struggle with sinful hearts, even when those pesky sins continue to creep into our lives, we, like Peter, are all witnesses to the adjustment God’s grace and forgiveness bring.
As new creations in Christ, we are all witnesses to God's grace and forgiveness. Let us use life's adjustments as occasions to be witnesses to the eternal adjustment God's love offers to all people.
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