3 February 2026
Peter's Pentecost sermon reaches its point: the very people listening had a hand in crucifying Jesus, yet God has made this same crucified Jesus both Lord and Messiah. The crowd's response — being "cut to the heart" and crying out "what shall we do?" — becomes the hinge on which the whole passage turns, as Peter's answer opens onto three thousand baptisms and the first description of the church's shared life. Harry used the session to press into what real conviction, repentance and baptism actually involve, not just as events in Acts but as things his hearers would still need to reckon with themselves.
Editor's note: This article is a written summary based on the substance of Harry's Bible study on this passage. It is not a verbatim transcript, and while it aims to reflect the heart of the teaching faithfully, it cannot fully convey the warmth, care, and encouragement of the class itself.
Opening Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of your word and for the privilege of gathering together in the Name of your Son, Jesus Christ. As we open the Scriptures today, we ask that your Holy Spirit would illuminate our minds and soften our hearts, that we might hear your voice, grow in the knowledge of you, and be equipped to live and speak for Christ. We commit this time of study into your hands, in Jesus' Name, Amen.
Harry began by urging the group always to ask, when they meet a "therefore" in Scripture, what it is there for. Here it draws together everything Peter has been building since he first addressed "fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem" (Acts 2:14) and "fellow Israelites" (Acts 2:22, 29). Peter had started gently, meeting people where they were — some in the crowd had mocked the disciples as drunk ("They have had too much wine," Acts 2:13) — and Harry noted that this is the right instinct: when people are negative or dismissive towards the gospel, the answer is to lovingly put the positive message of Jesus Christ, because there is no more positive news in the world than this.
But having started gently, Peter then became very direct, telling his hearers plainly that they themselves were responsible: "This man was handed over to you by God's deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross" (Acts 2:23). Harry quoted the old hymn line — "Was it the nails, O Saviour, that bound Thee to the tree? Nay, 'twas Thine everlasting love, Thy love for me, for me" — to make the point that it was not merely "them" but all of us, himself included, whose sin made the cross necessary.
From there Harry turned to the theme of honest confession. Christianity, he said, will not work if we hide things from Jesus — he already knows anyway, but it is good for us to confess our sins to him. He told of a woman in her mid-sixties who, during a powerful move of the Spirit in a meeting, was finally able to lay down forty years of guilt over an abortion; as she again asked forgiveness, she sensed the Lord tell her that he had forgiven her the very first time she asked, many years before, and that her child was with him in heaven. She left that meeting visibly lighter, carrying joy instead of guilt.
Harry balanced this with two contrasting stories about corporate confession. At a meeting at Charterhouse, his own confession of having got drunk that weekend opened the door for a number of others to confess their own sins and shortcomings — with one notable exception who, it later emerged, was wrestling with something far more difficult. But he also warned that this can be pushed too far, recalling a meeting in southern Ireland where a chair was placed in the middle of the room and the meeting could not begin until someone sat in it and confessed something — a practice he suspected had spilled over from the emphasis on confession in the Roman Catholic tradition. The lesson was one of balance: confession is good and healthy, but it should not become a manufactured requirement.
Harry then widened the lens to God's sovereignty over even the worst human sin. However wickedly people treat us, he said, if we walk with the Lord and do things his way we will see the victory in the end — just as wicked men, inspired by Satan himself, put Jesus to death, echoing Luke's account of how "Satan entered Judas" and the chief priests plotted to betray Jesus (Luke 22:1–6). The worst sin in the world could not derail God's sovereign plan; instead, God raised Jesus from the dead, seated him at his right hand, and made him both Lord and Messiah.
This raised the question of what Peter actually means by "made" Jesus Lord and Messiah — wasn't he already both? Harry explained that the Greek verb behind "made" (poieō) carries the sense of showing, establishing or bringing about something through action — making evident what was already true. Had Jesus shirked the cross, Harry said, he would not have been "made" Lord and Messiah in this sense; the mission had to be completed. He connected this to Paul's description of Jesus as the Son of God "declared with power... by his resurrection from the dead" (Romans 1:2–4), and to Paul's extended argument in 1 Corinthians 15:12–22 that the whole Christian faith stands or falls on the reality of the resurrection — without it, our preaching is useless, our faith is futile, and we are still in our sins. Harry stressed that the cross is central to our faith, but so is the resurrection, and so is the outpouring of the Spirit; we can easily over-emphasise one to the neglect of the others. He compared it to the human body: imagine having only a heart and no brain — you would be in trouble. All three belong together.
Turning to the crowd's reaction, Harry unpacked the verb behind "cut to the heart" (Acts 2:37), noting it describes a sharp, stabbing pain often tied to strong emotion — rendered variously as "acutely distressed" (NET), "pierced to the heart" (NASB), "convicted them deeply" (NLT), and "pricked in their heart" (KJV). This, he said, can be a good thing: it is precisely what drove people who had a hand in Christ's crucifixion to ask the apostles, "Brothers, what shall we do?"
Harry shared two personal experiences of the Spirit doing this kind of deep work in his own heart, both leading him to sob uncontrollably. The first was during a time at BCW, when the Spirit showed him something more of the Father's love; a well-meaning woman sitting near him tried to console him as if something were wrong, but he had to gently explain that he simply needed to be left alone to let the Spirit finish what he had started. The second was at a church in Norfolk, where he found himself unexpectedly at the front for prayer and began weeping with a sadness he could not explain. The visiting preacher assumed he was an unconverted man weeping over his sin and began leading him in the sinner's prayer; when Harry explained he had been a Christian for over ten years, the preacher — apparently undeterred — offered instead to pray a prayer of deliverance from a demon. Harry drew the lesson that when the Spirit is clearly moving in someone, the better approach is simply to ask what is going on inside them and what kind of prayer they actually need, rather than assuming.
Harry linked the crowd's "what shall we do?" to a very similar exchange with John the Baptist, where crowds, tax collectors and soldiers each asked in turn "what should we do?" and received specific, practical answers about sharing possessions and dealing honestly (Luke 3:7–14). He suggested this passage offers a useful test: if people humbly accept a hard truth about themselves, the Spirit is clearly at work and they are ready to repent, believe and be baptised; but if they react with anger and go on the defensive, they are not yet ready.
Peter's answer to the crowd — "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit" (Acts 2:38–39) — Harry identified as containing three gifts from God: repentance, forgiveness, and the Holy Spirit itself. Even repentance, he emphasised, is something God gives rather than something we simply muster up, pointing to Acts 11:18, where the Jerusalem believers concluded that "even to Gentiles God has granted repentance that leads to life."
He explained that repentance literally means a change of mind, a change in the inner being — a change of direction for someone who has been going their own way, even the devil's way, without realising it, and who now turns to go Jesus' way. He noted this is one of Luke's favourite terms across Acts, listing further occurrences (Acts 2:38; 3:19; 8:22; 17:30; 26:20) and its frequent pairing with forgiveness (Acts 2:38; 3:19; 5:31; 8:22; 26:18, 20; Luke 3:3; 24:47) — material he flagged the group would return to as they progressed through Acts. Repentance and faith, he said, are two sides of the same coin, and the proof of genuine repentance is the fruit that follows it, as John the Baptist had already taught: "Produce fruit in keeping with repentance" (Luke 3:8).
On baptism, Harry drew attention to Peter's phrase "every one of you" — every believer should be baptised. Baptism "in the name of Jesus Christ" distinguished this from John's baptism, which had caused confusion in some circles; he pointed to the account in Ephesus where Paul found disciples who had only received John's baptism and had not even heard of the Holy Spirit, and who were then baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus and received the Spirit (Acts 19:1–7). He also addressed a point some churches make of baptising only "in the name of Jesus": while Acts speaks this way, the church in fact baptises in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, following Jesus' own Great Commission (Matthew 28:18–20). Harry offered a light-hearted picture of how our spiritual focus can move through different phases over time — a season fixed on Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, then on the Spirit, then on the Father, before settling into a mature awareness of Father, Son and Holy Spirit together. He invited each person in the group to share briefly about the time they were baptised, before the passage closed with the description of the three thousand who were added that day and devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread and prayer — verses Harry flagged for closer attention in a coming session.
Underneath the word studies and the stories, Harry was pressing the group towards something quite personal: that real faith cannot stay comfortable. Peter did not let his hearers off with a vague, generalised gospel — he told them directly that their sin had put Jesus on the cross, and it was that specific, named confrontation that cut them to the heart and moved them to ask what to do. Harry's own stories of confession, of weeping under the Spirit's touch, and of being met by God in the exact place of his shame, were all offered as evidence that this is not merely ancient history — the same kind of conviction, the same kind of costly honesty about our worst sins, and the same kind of decisive turning are still how God meets people today. His point was that repentance, forgiveness and the Spirit are gifts to be received rather than achievements to be managed, but receiving them means being willing to be genuinely searched and cut to the heart, rather than staying safely at arm's length from our own sin.
Closing Prayer
Heavenly Father, thank you that we are gathered here in the Name of your Son, Jesus Christ. Father, by the power of your Holy Spirit, open up our hearts and our minds that we might understand your words in the Scriptures and get to know you more, that we might live holy lives, and that we might share the Good News about Jesus in the power of your Spirit, for the building of your Church and the extending of your Kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven, in and through Jesus Christ, Amen.
