Acts 8: Sometimes we pray for people who profess faith, and they receive the Holy Spirit—like we saw last week. Yes, they become Christians. They weren’t Christians before, but now they are, since we’ve prayed for them.
But sometimes we pray for people, and it becomes evident that they’re not Christians. But that, in itself, is an answer to prayer. We’ve dodged a bullet—because it would have been a nightmare if they had joined the church.
And yet we declare: we would have longed to read then that Simon got on his knees and exclaimed that he deserves to perish with his money: “I have sinned.” We hope he would have said, “I am not an apostle. I’ve seen the unique role that you have, and I merely want to do God’s will. I repent of my wickedness. Our Father, I pray that you would forgive me for having such evil thoughts in my heart. Father, I am full of bitterness. Father, I am captive to sin. I’m a slave, and I need release and freedom from sin. Please have mercy on me, a sinner.”
But he didn’t do that, and so Peter and John move on. Having Simon as an example is helpful in terms of expectations. We need to accept that, in the providence of God and his plan, he’s decided that some will just not get it. They will refuse to repent and instead go their own way. And it’s sad. But that in itself is a good lesson…
We are not to waste all our resources on just one person. We can do that very easily in church life. There could be one person, or a few difficult people, who are not believers, they’re refusing to repent, and we could spend all our time on them. But we need to learn from this: Peter and John move on. Someone doesn’t get it, and we leave him. Perhaps Simon came in the end—we don’t know. But Peter and John have work to do. They’ve got preaching the word of the Lord to do. They’ve got testifying about Jesus to do. They’ve got Jerusalem—the epicentre—to return to, because they were the only Christians there, and there would have been new converts who needed looking after up there too. And then there were these Samaritan villages who also needed to hear. So, there was all that work to do.
So, it’s okay to move on. We’re back to the pearls-to-pigs lesson that we had a few months ago. Sometimes it’s right to simply say, “No, we’re moving on now. If you won’t repent, if you won’t trust in Jesus, we’re not going to spend any more time with you. You know what to do. Come back to church when you’re repentant and trusting in Jesus. Until then, we’re going to move on to proclaiming the word of God and testifying about Jesus elsewhere.”
