27 January 2026
Peter's Pentecost sermon reaches its centre this week, as Harry traces the case he builds for Jesus — moving from the prophecies of Joel, Ezekiel and Jeremiah through to the crowd's stunned response: "Brothers, what shall we do?" Along the way the session turns from the content of the sermon itself to a quieter, more personal question: not just what was said that day, but whether we have ever truly learned to listen. If the first disciples took months, even years, to grasp who Jesus was, what does that say about the kind of patience — and the kind of Spirit-given hearing — that real faith requires?
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 opened by noting that remarkable things happen when the Spirit is on the move, and that we mustn't quench the Spirit — he pointed to the Toronto Blessing as a modern instance of the kind of Spirit-filled scenes that can look strange, even excessive, from the outside. That was exactly the accusation levelled at the disciples on the day of Pentecost: that they were drunk. Harry observed that the same thing still happens today — when believers demonstrate the joy of the Lord, people can react with confusion, asking "what are you on?" The answer, he said, is the same one Peter gave: turn to Scripture. Peter quoted Joel's prophecy, and Harry read it through: "In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy. I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" (Acts 2:17–21, quoting Joel 2:28–32).
Harry then widened the frame, showing that the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost had been promised long before, through the prophets. He read Ezekiel's promise: "And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 36:26), alongside its close parallel a few chapters earlier (Ezekiel 11:19). The same promise runs through Jeremiah: "For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people" (Jeremiah 31:33), echoed again in Jeremiah 24:7, where God promises "a heart to know me." Together, Harry said, these prophecies show that Pentecost wasn't an isolated spectacle but the fulfilment of a promise God had been making for centuries — a promise about changed hearts, not merely changed behaviour.
With that Old Testament background laid, Harry returned to Peter's sermon and walked through its central argument. Peter told the crowd that Jesus of Nazareth had been "a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs," that he had been handed over "by God's deliberate plan and foreknowledge," and that they themselves, "with the help of wicked men," had put him to death by nailing him to the cross — but God raised him, "freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him" (Acts 2:22–24).
Peter then turned to David, quoting his words: "I saw the Lord always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken... you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead, you will not let your holy one see decay." Harry pointed out Peter's shrewd move here: since David had died and was buried — "his tomb is here to this day" — David could not have been speaking of himself when he wrote of one whose body would not see decay. He was a prophet, speaking ahead of time about the resurrection of the Messiah. Peter's conclusion was direct: "God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it." Exalted to the right hand of God, Jesus had received the promised Holy Spirit from the Father and "poured out what you now see and hear" — the very scene the crowd had just witnessed. Peter clinched the point with a second quotation from David, "The Lord said to my Lord: 'Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet,'" noting that this could not refer to David himself, since David never ascended to heaven. His summary charge to the crowd: "God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah" (Acts 2:25–36).
The response, Harry noted, was immediate and visceral: the crowd "were cut to the heart" and cried out, "Brothers, what shall we do?" Peter's answer was direct — "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." He stressed that this promise was not confined to that generation or that place: it was "for you and your children and for all who are far off — for all whom the Lord our God will call." Peter went on pleading with the crowd, warning them, urging them to "save yourselves from this corrupt generation" — and about three thousand were added to their number that day (Acts 2:37–41).
Harry then shifted from the content of the sermon to something more personal: the discipline of actually listening. He shared candidly that he used to be a terrible listener — making all the right noises while someone spoke to him, murmuring "mmm," "ooh," "wow," saying "yes," "no," "really," while not taking anything in at all, already thinking ahead to what he would say next. He recalled the Lord teaching him, early in his Christian life, to genuinely listen, and referred back to his own experience in Manchester's Central Reference Library as part of that learning.
He tied this back into the sermon itself, noting how Peter had opened his address by raising his voice and telling the crowd, "let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say" (Acts 2:14). Listening, Harry said, works on two levels: there is listening with the physical ears, and there is listening with the spiritual ears. He cited Jesus's own words about the crowds who heard his parables: "The reason I use parables in talking to them is that they look, but do not see, and they listen, but do not hear or understand" (Matthew 13:13). That spiritual hearing, Harry stressed, is not something we can manufacture for ourselves — it depends entirely on the Holy Spirit. He quoted Paul: "The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit" (1 Corinthians 2:14), and went on to Paul's fuller explanation of how it works — that God reveals "what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard" through his Spirit, who "searches all things, even the deep things of God," so that what is spoken is taught not by human wisdom "but in words taught by the Spirit" (1 Corinthians 2:9–13).
Harry closed by observing that learning who Jesus truly is takes time — a lifetime, in fact — and illustrated this by tracing how long it took the very first disciples to come to faith. He began with John the Baptist's testimony to the priests and Levites sent from Jerusalem, where John denied being the Messiah, Elijah, or "the Prophet," identifying himself instead as "the voice of one calling in the wilderness" and pointing to one among them whose sandal straps he was "not worthy to untie" (John 1:19–27). The next day, John pointed his own followers directly to Jesus: "Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" — testifying that he had seen the Spirit descend like a dove and remain on him, marking him out as "the one who will baptise with the Holy Spirit" and "God's Chosen One" (John 1:29–34).
From there the message spread person to person: Andrew found his brother Simon and told him, "We have found the Messiah" (John 1:40–41); Philip found Nathanael and told him they had found "the one Moses wrote about in the Law... Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph" (John 1:44–46). Harry noted how quickly Nathanael, despite his sceptical "Can anything good come from Nazareth?", came to faith once Jesus told him he had seen him under the fig tree — declaring, "Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the king of Israel" (John 1:47–51).
But Harry was equally honest about the slower, harder side of that same journey. Even those closest to Jesus needed correcting for their lack of faith — we can know all the right teaching in our heads, he said, while our hearts remain far from God, quoting Jesus's rebuke of the religious leaders of his day: "These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules" (Matthew 15:8–9). What matters, Harry stressed, isn't what everyone else says about Jesus but what we ourselves believe — the very question Jesus put to his own disciples at Caesarea Philippi: "But what about you? Who do you say I am?" When Peter answered, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God," Jesus told him that this had been "revealed... not by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven" (Matthew 16:13–20). Finally, Harry pointed to Thomas, who refused to believe the other disciples' report of the resurrection until he had touched Jesus's wounds himself — and who, a week later, confessed, "My Lord and my God!", prompting Jesus's words: "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" (John 20:24–29).
Underneath the sermon exposition and the string of Gospel stories, Harry was making a single, personal point: hearing about Jesus and truly listening to him are not the same thing, and the gap between the two can only be closed by the Holy Spirit. He wanted the class to see themselves in every character that morning's reading put in front of them — in the crowd who needed the Old Testament reopened before the cross made sense to them, in his own younger self who nodded along and made the right noises without taking anything in, in Nathanael who believed almost at once, and in Thomas who needed to touch the wounds before he would. His own confession — that God had to teach him, patiently, how to actually listen — was the model he wanted the class to carry away: don't assume that having heard the facts about Jesus means you have received them into your heart. Ask the Spirit to do what only the Spirit can do, and be honest that for most of us, as it was for the first disciples, that kind of hearing rarely arrives all at once — it grows, gradually, over a lifetime.
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.
