Word of Salvation – December 2025
Christ-Centered Evangelism
Sermon by Rev. John Westendorp on Acts 4:1-13
Reading: John 1:1-14; Acts 4:1-13
Singing: BoW.485 Lord, You gave the Great Commission
P/H.412 I love to tell the story
BoW.034 Tell His praise in song and story
BoW.502 O God, You give to all mankind
Theme: Peter’s preaching to the rulers after a cripple is healed focuses on Jesus and is empowered by Him.
Introd: There is a great deal of preaching and witnessing that really does not measure up to the Bible.
I once visited a church where a lay-preacher preached about a dream he had.
He went on an on about this remarkable dream about God.
In the end I was rather thankful that he had had the dream and not me.
I recall US Bishop, the late John Shelby Spong, once coming to Australia to do some “preaching”.
But his message was that in a scientific world we cannot accept the miracles of the NT.
The story of the lame man healed in Acts 3 is a story we must not take literally.
Nor must we take the resurrection of Jesus as a resuscitation occurring inside human history.
And the idea of the cross as a sacrifice for sins was proclaimed by Spong to be a barbaric idea.
Spong preached that way because he did not accept that the Bible is the Word of God.
And if the Bible is not our basis then who decides what message we ought to bring?
In this church we believe that God’s Word is the basis for all faith and conduct.
And also our preaching and our witnessing ought to be according to Scripture.
That’s why we’re (again) opening our Bible at the book of Acts this morning.
We can learn from it how we today should do our evangelism and our witnessing.
To know what the gospel is… and how to bring it.
And our text helps us in both those two areas:
It tells us what the message is… but it also says something about the method.
A] A CHRIST-CENTRED MESSAGE (vs.12).
- Our text makes a good “case study” for bringing the gospel to people who are familiar with the Bible.
There are other stories in Acts where the gospel is brought to folk who don’t know God or the Bible.
But here the gospel is brought to religious people… to folk who are grounded in Scripture.
The audience in Acts 4 is the Jewish authorities.
People familiar with the Old Testament Scriptures and the God of the Bible.
Peter and John bring to them the gospel and they do so quoting the O.T.
It’s a very brief presentation… Luke gives it to us in 90 words in the original Greek language.
That doesn’t mean that Peter’s sermon was only a 90-word long message.
It’s more than likely that Luke has summarised it for us.
But think about it: This is hardly the time for a 25-minute, three point sermon.
Can you imagine Peter saying to these leaders of the Jewish nation:
Now, if you’ll just grab your Isaiah scroll and unroll it to chapter 53…
Then I’ll spend the next half-hour explaining how that points us to Jesus…!
No! Two things stand out about this gospel presentation.
The first thing is its brevity… its conciseness… it gets right to the point.
Even allowing for the fact that Doctor Luke may have summarised it somewhat.
There is a good lesson in that for us.
There will be times when you do not have twenty minutes for long explanations.
Someone at Uni asks a Christian student a question.
But she only has three or four minutes before the next lecture.
Or you’ve just got five minutes during morning coffee break in the factory/office.
In those few moments we need to convey the essentials. What are they?
Well, Luke gives them to us on a platter… a brief and concise summary.
The point is that Peter and John are confronted here by a group of very angry men.
They see their authority flouted and their bit of turf being trodden on.
They are not in a mood to sit down for half a day and calmly discuss the gospel.
And so it seems to me that John and Peter zero in on the bare essentials.
And they can do that because they already have a shared understanding.
Their audience knows the OT Scriptures and the God of the Bible.
That’s a liberating thing to know, isn’t it?
Often when you witness to someone you don’t have to cover Genesis to Revelation.
Especially not when you are dealing with people familiar with the basics.
You can be brief when you talk to someone who grew up in a Christian family.
You can keep it concise when witnessing to someone who once went to Sunday School.
I have often spoken to unbelievers who were reasonably familiar with the Bible.
- A second feature of this gospel presentation is that it is not only brief… it is also Christ-centred.
The heart of the message is about Jesus and that comes to a climax in verse 12.
In verses 8 through 11 there are four key truths that are the heart of the gospel message that we bring:
First… Jesus was put to death by crucifixion.
Second… God raised Him from the dead.
Third… this Jesus is still active… because it was in His name that this cripple was healed.
And fourth… He fulfilled the O.T. Scriptures that you people know so well.
That is the Jesus whom the apostles proclaim… except for one more thing: a fifth point in verse 12.
And this is the crunch point… the climax: Jesus is unique.
There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.
In stressing the uniqueness of Jesus, Peter and John are simply echoing Jesus’ own teaching.
Think of John 14 – where Jesus had spelled it out very clearly:
I am the way and the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me.
That teaching of Jesus runs as an undercurrent through the whole book of Acts.
And nowhere is it spelled out more clearly than here in Acts 4:12.
This is a central element in all gospel proclamation in the book of Acts.
There is always this assumption: that the person of Jesus is unique.
His name still stands in stark contrast to the name of every other founder of a religion.
You can take Mohammed, or Buddha, or Joseph Smith or Mary Baker Eddy…
And they may have been great moral teachers and leaders.
They may have founded great religions with millions of followers.
But we cannot say about them what the apostles said about Jesus:
He died by crucifixion and was raised to life again by God to fulfil the Scriptures.
Jesus is unique.
That means: You have not yet shared the gospel when you talk to someone about the church.
You have not even yet shared the gospel when you talk to someone about God.
Those things are important… but the gospel is about this unique person: Jesus Christ.
- But notice furthermore that this unique person of Jesus is then linked to a unique salvation.
The apostles didn’t just say that there is no one like Jesus… full stop!
They said that there is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved.
It is in this unique Jesus that we find the security we need for our eternal destiny.
The disciples talk about that in the context of a lame man made to walk – back in chapter 3.
And in their language there was a very natural link from that healing to salvation.
The same word was actually used for both the healing and for salvation.
So whether it is wholeness of body or wholeness of soul… the answer lies in Jesus.
In fact the miracle of healing takes place to support this gospel message.
Remember – this is a time when the NT Scriptures had not yet been written.
So this miracle is a sign that, as it were, underwrites the claims of the apostle.
And we see that a little later… the authorities are left speechless.
Because the healed man is standing there before them and they cannot deny the miracle.
So the gospel is not only about Jesus but it is about Jesus as our only Saviour.
That was a radical claim to lay on these rulers in Jerusalem.
They were familiar with the idea of salvation.
They knew about sin and the need for forgiveness.
They believed that the God of the OT… Yahweh… was a saving God.
But what Peter and John now tell them is that salvation comes only through Jesus.
Central to the Christian message is this teaching:
Your only hope with God rests on your relationship with Jesus Christ.
Your eternal destiny is based on what you do with this unique person, Jesus.
- Today this teaching makes people very uncomfortable.
Christianity is at root intolerant… and that’s not very politically correct in our day and age.
We are extremely conscious of that in our society, which puts tolerance as the highest virtue.
Peter Jensen (Archbishop) once took Prime Minister Howard to task for not saying sorry to Aboriginals.
Philip Adams (Australia’s leading atheist) replied: Jensen needs to put his own house in order.
Because he (and all evangelical Christians)… and we… practise a far worse discrimination!
That only those who believe in Jesus… IOW only Christians will be in heaven.
While all who do not believe in Jesus are damned to an eternity in hell.
Today we are very conscious of our claims to exclusiveness… and it often embarrasses us.
In our multicultural society dare we still say that Jesus is the only way to the Father?
Are we still willing to say:
“There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved”?
We are confronted today by a bewildering variety of religious claims.
Why shouldn’t we say, as so many do: Well, at least we all worship the same God?
Must we really accept that Christianity is a very discriminatory, intolerant religion?
Yes! This is why we need to focus on this gospel presentations in the book of Acts.
The apostles too faced other religious claims.
These very rulers were ones who strongly held to the Law of Moses and the OT Scriptures.
But they couldn’t handle claims that Jesus was actually the One who fulfilled those Scriptures.
Later Paul and Silas face all sorts of competing religious claims from Roman and Greek gods..
But they never waver from this central truth… painful as it is:
There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.
So even while we allow God to be the final judge we ultimately have to say it: there is no other name!
Often we will say it with much pain in our hearts for loved one who will not believe that.
We say it with anguish in our soul for a Dad or Mum… a husband or wife… who rejects Jesus.
But we cannot get away from this truth.
If there were other ways to be saved there would have been no need for Jesus to come.
And no need for His terrible suffering and death if God could have done it another way.
So there is an implied appeal: Stop fighting Jesus! Believe in Him and be saved.
B] A CHRIST-CENTRED MOTIVATION (vs.13).
- In our text we not only find the heart of the gospel message but also how that message is brought.
Not only is the message Christ centred – the whole method and approach is too.
The message centres on a unique Saviour and unique salvation.
But that message is brought in the same way Jesus brought it.
It is brought out of a close relationship to Him and His power.
That is obvious in this whole sermon but especially in verse 13.
First of all, the disciples, in their method, follow Jesus by not being ‘respecters of persons’.
What I mean is that they brought the message without fear or favour.
They didn’t think that some did not deserve to hear it while others did.
They had already told the outcast cripple who was healed… that it was Jesus.
Now they tell essentially the same message to these Jerusalem rulers.
Let’s take that a step further… these people were the very ones who had crucified Jesus.
And Peter even reminds them of it.
Their hatred of Jesus was so great that they had schemed to get rid of Christ.
They had wrangled it so that Pontius Pilate had little choice but to execute Him.
And now Peter and John are standing before those very same authorities.
Can you imagine their rage? They thought they were done with Jesus of Nazareth.
But already 3000 have been converted and become His followers.
And these apostles keep on spreading the news that Jesus is alive.
Yet Peter and John are not silent… not even before these men who handed Jesus over to death.
They even reach out with the gospel to these angry rulers and elders and teachers of the law.
- That brings out another way in which they were like Jesus – they were courageous.
The authorities noted their fearlessness… their courage… their boldness.
Despite such a daunting audience…!
They were fearless in speaking what they knew to be true even to the authorities.
They didn’t water down the message.
They told it as it was… the unpalatable truth that there is salvation in no one else.
They followed the same bold methodology as Jesus did… who called a spade a spade.
Jesus spoke with authority… so did the apostles.
Jesus spoke without concern for his own life… so did the apostles.
So we not only have a Christ-centred message… we also have a Christ-centred method.
It’s interesting that the word for boldness is actually mentioned three times in this chapter.
It is translated as ‘courage’ in vs.13 as the authorities recognise their boldness.
In vs.29 the apostles pray for boldness recognising that this doesn’t come naturally.
And in vs.31 we read that they spoke boldly as they were filled with the Holy Spirit.
I can imagine that it is just at this point many of us have our major problem.
Our problem is not really that we don’t know what to say. It’s not hard to say these five things:
Jesus died on the cross… God raised Him from the dead… He is still at work…
He fulfils the Scriptures… and salvation is found in no one else.
What is hard for us is to say that boldly and courageously in our society.
We know beforehand the kind of objections we are going to get.
That we discriminate in this way – eternally – against every other religion.
Why should we be the only ones that are right?
Well, if you have trouble with boldness, stay tuned. I’ll come back to that in a moment.
Because there is a fine solution to that problem… one that was noted by the Jewish leaders.
- Perhaps you’ll find the next bit in vs.13 easier to relate to.
The religious leaders not only noted the boldness of Peter and John.
They also noted that they were unschooled, ordinary men.
They were in fact ordinary fisherman. They had no theology degrees behind their names.
They had not been trained in the art of oratory… public speaking.
They had never been in a debating team or in a Toastmaster’s Club.
Literally, it says they were ‘unlettered’… they hadn’t been to school.
Some people want to take this as meaning that they hadn’t been to theological college.
They hadn’t sat at the feet of Jewish Rabbis like Gamaliel… these were laymen.
But I’d like to take this literally… they were not well schooled. Full stop!
Maybe they had just learned the basics… a bit of reading and writing.
And perhaps a bit of elementary maths…
so that they could figure out how many shekels of tax they had to pay.
Actually they said something similar about Jesus in John 715:
How did this man get such learning without having studied?
Surely, we should find this very encouraging:
Acts begins… in Acts 1:8… by reminding us that we are called to be witnesses.
Not first theologians or teachers… but witnesses, simply telling what we have seen and heard.
And you don’t need a degree in theology to state what you have seen and heard.
A witness can speak with boldness… because he knows it is true.
Incidentally, I’ve heard this text used as an argument against theological education?
Someone who didn’t have a high regard of seminary training once put it to me like this:
”If John and Peter were unschooled why should we want to go to a theological cemetery”
And he spoke of it as a cemetery because students have lost faith under teachers like Spong.
- The answer lies in the last words of our text: they noted that these men had been with Jesus.
Actually the language is a little stronger than that.
They seized on the fact that these men had been with Jesus.
It’s as if the authorities were too puzzled by the boldness of these unschooled fishermen.
They just couldn’t work it out.
Until they started thinking about the kind of person Jesus had been.
And then they saw the connection: these men have been with Jesus.
That’s the answer isn’t it… also the answer to our lack of boldness?
These men had spent three years with Jesus… often on a daily basis.
They had had the best Trainer in the world… the best theological education ever.
They knew the gospel message intimately… they were eyewitnesses to all Jesus had done.
And they had learned both from the teachings of Jesus and the methods of Jesus.
At this point we mustn’t think that this could only be true of the apostles and not of us.
Those men… and they alone had the privilege of being with Jesus…!
No! In a sense we today are even more privileged.
Many of us have spent 30 or 40 years or more with Jesus. What a blessing!
We have talked with Him daily… we have listened to Him through His Word.
Sunday by Sunday He has instructed and taught us through gospel preaching.
And the more we know Jesus… the clearer we will be about the message
And the more time we spend with Him… the more we will model His method.
He has even promised that He will give us the words and the wisdom that we need.
Let’s then bring the message of Jesus with Christ-like boldness. Amen