We are in Acts chapter 4 this morning. The title of the message is Faith on Trial, Acts chapter 4. And by way of introduction, last week we studied the healing of the lame man at the beautiful gate which was near the temple. Peter lifted him up and healed him in the name of Jesus Christ. And Peter and John went into the temple, and he followed them, leaping and praising God. That stirred up a big crowd, and Peter preached the gospel, and it also got the attention of the temple authorities. And that's where we pick up today in chapter four. And the first thing we see is that Peter and John are arrested, verses one through three. And as they spake unto the people, the priest and the captain of the temple and the Sadducees came upon them, being grieved that they taught the people and preached through Jesus the resurrection from the dead. And they laid hands on them and put them in hold until the next day, for it was now eventide." So it was illegal for the Jews to have a trial at night. Now, they had a trial for Jesus at night, but they waited until it was dawn in order to pass judgment. But what they were supposed to do was to wait until the next day, and so that's what they did with Peter and John. Now, Robertson's word pictures in the New Testament gives us a breakdown of this passage. And A.T. Robertson said, 24 bands of Levites guarded the temple, one guard at a time. They watched the gates. The commander of each band was called the captain. And so that's what the passage says, the captain came. And Josephus names this captain of the temple police next to the high priest. Most of the priests were Sadducees now, and all the cheap priests since John Hyrcanus I deserted the Pharisees. The Sadducees were slow to line up with the Pharisees against Jesus, but they now take the lead against Peter and John. So the Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead, but the Sadducees did not. And so the Sadducees who had been slow, because there was a division. It's like Democrats and Republicans. So there had been a division between them, and they had been slow to line up with the Pharisees in condemning Jesus. But the majority now were Sadducees. And so when Peter and John preach the resurrection of the dead through Jesus Christ, the Sadducees who do not believe in the resurrection of the dead are going to shut that down. That was what they were trying to do. And now we see in verse 4 that 5,000 were saved. 5,000 saved. Howbeit many of them which heard the word believed, and the number of the men was about 5,000. Now this is just the men, not the women and children. So there were 5,000 men saved, probably a lot more. And then we see the questioning before the council, verses 5 through 7. And it came to pass on the morrow that their rulers and elders and scribes and Annas, the high priest, and Caiaphas, and John, and Alexander, and as many as were of the kindred of the high priest, were gathered together at Jerusalem. So Annas was actually the former high priest and father-in-law to Caiaphas, who was the current high priest. However, Annas had been the high priest from AD 7 to AD 14, and was still recognized as the high priest. Often, if a former pastor stays in a church, he's still referred to as pastor. And so that's what we had going on here. By Roman law, Caiaphas was the legal high priest, but the Jews recognized his father-in-law. Now, John and Alexander were other leaders of the Sadducees. And the Bible says, and as many as were of the kindred of the high priest were gathered together at Jerusalem. This was a family affair and leadership stayed mainly within the family. So in that sense, it's kind of like a king. that passes it on down to his family. And so you kept all the leadership mainly within the family. There's some churches run like that, too. They're called family churches. And I know of one particular one, and the same family runs the church, and they hire and fire the pastors at will. The church doesn't grow much. but that one family controls the church. And so this is what happened with the high priest and his family. And so you can see that the office of the high priest, more than being a religious office, was a political office, and it was a place of power. They had power. They had their own police force and their own assigned guards, and so it was a place of power. Verse 7, and when they had set them in the midst, they asked, by what power or by what name have you done this? By what power and by what? So the Sadducees are gathered together and they sat. Peter and John and the man they had healed in the middle of them, they circled around them and they said, by what power or by what name have you done this? and they respond that there is no other name but Jesus, verses 8 through 12. Then Peter filled with the Holy Ghost said unto them, ye rulers of the people and elders of Israel, if we this day be examined of the good deed done to the impotent man by what means he is made whole, be it known unto you all and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead, even by him doth this man stand here before you, halt." So they didn't take credit for it. They said it's Christ that has made him halt. This is the stone which was said it not of you builders, which has become the head of the corner. This, looking back to a prophecy in the book of Psalms, Psalm 118.22, which says, the stone which the builders refused has become the headstone of the corner. And Peter makes reference to this in 1 Peter 2.6, wherefore also it is contained in the scripture, behold, I lay in Zion a chief cornerstone, elect, precious, and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded. And so Peter continues his sermon in Acts to the Sadducees, and he says, neither is there salvation in any other. For there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved. So he's preached to them the gospel. He's preached the crucifixion of Christ, the burial, and the resurrection of Christ, and now he's preached faith to them. So he preaches the gospel to them. And then we see the warning, verses 13 through 18. And when they saw the boldness of Peter and John and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marveled and they took knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus. Keep in mind that Peter and John were fishermen. They never went to the rabbinical schools, as did the Pharisees and the Sadducees. And in our way of speaking, they were simple blue-collar workers. They weren't college graduates. But they had been with Jesus, so they knew the scriptures. And they knew them better than the Sadducees, who had been trained in the rabbinical schools. William Tyndale, who translated the New Testament into English, once said to a Catholic scholar, He was having dinner and the Catholic scholar said to him, it would be better to be without God's law than to be without the Pope's. To which Tyndale said, I defy the Pope and all his laws and if God lets me live long enough, I will make it so a boy who drives the plow understands more scripture than you do. And indeed he did. In fact, the Tyndale New Testaments were smuggled into England in bales of cotton, and they were tiny, and they were smuggled in so people could get them. So Peter and John are just common men, uneducated, but they have been with Jesus, and they know the scriptures, and that's what's important. And beholding the man which was healed standing with them, they could say nothing against it. And remember that this man had just been healed. He had been unable to walk from birth, and he was more than 40 years old. So this was truly miraculous. So there wasn't anything that they could say against it. And the Sadducees denied miracles, and they denied The resurrection of the dead and yet there's a miracle taking place so they can't say anything against it They don't they don't know a way to to do anything about this But when they had commanded them to go aside out of the council they conferred among themselves Saying what shall we do to these men? For that indeed a notable miracle had been done by them as manifest to all them that dwell in Jerusalem, and we cannot deny it. But that it spread no further among the people, let us straightly threaten them that they speak henceforth to no man in this name. And they called them and commanded them not to speak at all nor teach in the name of Jesus. But in verses 19 through 20, we see that Peter and John said, we will still speak. But Peter and John answered and said to them, whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye. For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard. And then we see that Peter and John are let go in verses 21 through 22. So when they had further threatened them, they let them go, finding nothing how they might punish them because of the people. For all men glorified God for that which was done. Well, we studied this morning in Sunday school how the people influence King Saul to disobey God. But here the people are a, or at least that's what Saul said, but here we see that the people are a force for good. And the Sadducees who are corrupt are scared of the people. And they said, They further threatened them and they let them go, finding nothing how they might punish them because of the people. For all men glorified God for that which was done, for the man was above forty years old on whom this miracle of healing was showed. And so a miracle takes place and opposition comes. Now anytime that God is working somewhere, opposition will come. It always comes. And there isn't much that we can do about that. But the fact that opposition comes is a sign that God is at work. I get attacked with discouragement a lot of times, and most people don't understand. Pastors get on Facebook and whine all the time about how hard it is to be a pastor. And it is hard, but it's also hard to do a lot of things. One of the things that a lot of people don't understand about being a pastor is they think that what this is is it's like preparing a Sunday school lesson. So you get up once a week, and you do this little lesson, and that that's all there is to it. What they don't understand is that throughout the week, the devil battles your mind all week with discouragement and with, you know, you're a terrible person, you're this and you're that, and look at the church and how nobody comes and people leave the church, and you miss the fact. In fact, I was complaining to my wife the other day, and she said, you need to decide whether or not you're going to be a pastor to the people you have. and do what God wants you to do or whether you're going to just get upset every time somebody doesn't come to church and focus on that. And so that's the truth and that's what your spouse is for. She's there to give you hard medicine. But yeah, I get attacked throughout the week and it is a battle and a struggle to put together. And after I preach a message, I'm exhausted. And then we have other attacks going on in the church as well. We often lament that people don't come to church. And we're mostly a church of older folks. And I'm not middle aged in older folks, OK? And I'm not trying to be insulting. I'm just telling you what it is. And most of our folks are retired. Now, some of you retired folks work harder than people that work. And I don't want retirement like that. And if I can figure out how to avoid that, I will. But at any rate, you take a young family, and church attendance has been dropping. I read a study which was not written about church attendance. It was written by a secular organization that was studying different trends in America. And one of the trends that they studied was that church attendance had been falling since the 1980s. It had been gradually falling down. And we don't know why. And they couldn't figure out why. They just said it had been falling. But if you take your average young family today, And you have folks who both people have to work in order to pay for a house and a car and to support their kids, and they're exhausted by the end of the week. The only day they can get anything done in the house is Saturday, so they work Saturday. Well, what day do they have off? Sunday. So how are they going to come to church? It's very hard to get people to come to church. And we don't think about that. And that's why most pastors of small churches spend their time calling people and just, will you please come to church? Will you please come to church? And then they get discouraged because people don't come to church. But it's a real issue. And it's why the bigger churches have started having alternative days for church, like Thursday night or Saturday night or different days, because People's day off is Sunday. And for years we preached against people going hunting and going to the lake and doing all this stuff on Sunday. And that's back when I was full-time in the ministry at the other church and I was professional in the ministry and I didn't understand what people were going through. Well, now that I work, and have been working for years in addition to pastoring a church, when Sunday comes, I don't want to go to church either half the time. And you shouldn't say that as a pastor. But the truth is, I'm like, this is the only day that I have to spend with my kids. So you think about the fact that I love preaching, love it. And I love this church. And you think about the fact that if I'm the pastor, and this is not every Sunday, obviously, but there are Sundays where I do not want to get up and come into church. And I think, when am I going to have time to get X and Y and Z done that I need to get done? So you think about that if I feel this way, how a person who's not the pastor of a church who has kids and they're trying to raise their kids and on Sunday morning they're exhausted and they want to sleep in and how hard it is for them to come to church. And so that's why we as a church need to pray about what do we do to meet the culture as it is because We can't necessarily take, this church is great for middle-aged and up that have grandkids at this point in time. And we have those folks coming to church, but what do we do to reach younger people? And we have to look at these things. We can say, well, what about this church down the road that's big and has lots of young people at it? Well, that's true, but they still have the same struggles that we do. It's just that they're not so small that if you lose one family, they don't really notice it. Every church has these problems. If you have 1,000 people in church, they lose 100 families a month that go out, but they don't notice it because they're so big. But we're small, so we really notice it. If one person doesn't show up, I notice it because of the size of the congregation. And so we pray about what we do. And there is an answer, and it's in Scripture. And as we study through this book of Acts, then we're gonna see what those answers are. In this case, in the story that we studied today, Peter and John went and faced opposition. They faced opposition the first time when Pentecost happened in chapter two, there was no opposition. There were miracles, people were saved, 3,000 people saved, all these people getting baptized, they didn't have any opposition. But Satan did not let that go unchecked. And so you go forward just a little bit in time and they preach the gospel. And yes, 5,000 men got saved and a lot more people than got saved at Pentecost, but there was opposition. They got arrested and threatened. from the religious leaders, because that's what happens. As we read the book of Acts, we see, in summary, that when you preach the Bible and preach the gospel of Jesus Christ especially, there will be opposition. But when there's opposition, you do like Peter and John did, and you say, We cannot but speak the things that we have seen and heard. So we do not back down in the face of opposition, but we continue to preach the Word of God and we continue to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. And as we do that, people will get saved. God will grow the church. For as I said last week, Jesus Christ said upon this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And if God wants to build this church with just a bunch of middle-aged and up, then that's fine, if that's what God wants to do. And he can do that, absolutely. And I believe if he did do that, that there would be some people that eventually brought grandkids and those grandkids would make up a youth ministry. We have no business telling God how he builds his church, but we do have the business to preach the gospel and to see people saved. And so we praise the Lord for that. Let's go to the Lord in prayer. Heavenly Father, I thank you for these people and I thank you for the work you're doing in this place. And I do pray you'd forgive me for my sins, fill me with your Holy Spirit and help us, give us strength. And just give us the ability to preach and to teach and to be faithful. And we do pray that you would bless harmony and we pray you'd send many people in to hear the gospel. We ask it in Jesus' name, amen.