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The sermon presents salvation as comprehensive restoration from humanity’s fallen, guilty condition, culminating in eternal glory. It insists that salvation is found exclusively in Jesus Christ and cannot be obtained through moral effort, religious sincerity, or partial reliance on Christ. Christ’s sinless life, substitutionary death, and resurrection provide the sufficient ground for forgiveness and justification. The appropriate response is urgent, personal faith: sinners must abandon self-reliance and trust Christ, who is able to save even the worst sinner.
Theological center: Jesus Christ alone saves through His sufficient atoning death and victorious resurrection, received by faith rather than earned by works.
Applications: Trust wholly in Christ · Come to the cross · Reject self-salvation · Consider salvation’s fullness
Primary texts: Acts 4:12 · Acts 16:31 · Hebrews 7:25
“Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” Acts 4:12 IT is a very happy circumstance when the servants of God are able to turn everything to account in their ministry. Now, the apostle Peter was summoned before the priests and Sadducees, the chief of his nation, to answer for having restored a man who was lame from his mother’s womb. While accounting for this case of healing, or if I may use the expression, for this case of temporal salvation, the apostle Peter had this thought suggested to him, “While I am accounting for the salvation of this man from lameness, I now have a fine opportunity of showing these people, who otherwise will not listen to us, the way of the salvation of the soul.” So he proceeds from the less to the greater, from the healing of a man’s limb to the healing of a man’s spirit, and having informed them once that it was through the name of Jesus Christ that the impotent man had been made whole, he now announces that salvation—the great salvation, must be wrought by the selfsame means, “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” What a great word that word “salvation” is! It includes the cleansing of our conscience from all past guilt, the delivery of our soul from all those propensities to evil which now so strongly predominate in us. It takes in, in fact, the undoing of all that Adam did. Salvation is the total restoration of man from his fallen estate, and yet it is something more than that, for God’s salvation fixes our standing more secure than it was before we fell. It finds us broken in pieces by the sin of our first parent, defiled, stained, accursed. It first heals our wounds, it removes our diseases, it takes away our curse, it puts our feet upon the rock Christ Jesus, and having thus done, at last it lifts our heads far above all principalities and powers, to be crowned forever with Jesus Christ, the King of heaven. Some people, when they use the word “salvation” understand nothing more by it than deliverance from hell and admittance into heaven. Now, that is not salvation—those two things are the effects of salvation. We are redeemed from hell because we are saved, and we enter heaven because we have been saved beforehand. Our everlasting state is the effect of salvation in this life. Salvation, it is true, includes all that, because salvation is the mother of it and carries it within its bowels, but still it were wrong for us to imagine that that is all…