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Acts 12:12-17  SIMON PETERS APPEARANCE AT CHURCH 

Introduction:

	Herod Agrippa had first arrested and killed the Apostle James, the brother 
of the Apostle John.  He had also arrested the Apostle Peter intending to kill 
him after the Passover.  On the night preceding the day set for his execution 
God sent an angel to set Simon Peter free from the prison.  In our text today 
the Apostle Peter goes to the home in which the church had gathered to pray for 
Peter.  

I.  Peter knocking at the door

	V. 12, “And when he had considered [the thing], he came to the house of 
Mary the mother of John, whose surname was Mark; where many were gathered 
together praying.”  When Peter was being released from the prison, he was not 
aware that it was real.  He thought it was all a vision --- a dream.  I think we 
are all aware that a dream can seem very real.  When Sis. Davis’s mother was 
living with us after her stroke, she always wanted to go back to her home in 
Golden, but she was unable to make the trip.  One night she dreamed that she 
went back.  The next morning she told us all about her trip back home.  She 
thought it was real.  She continued to think it was real to her.  This was the 
opposite to the experience of the Apostle Peter.  Instead of it being a dream as 
he was thinking, it was real.   
	But when he realized that it was not a dream and that he was really free 
from the prison he had to consider what to do and where to go.  He chose to go 
to the home of Mary, who was the mother of John Mark.  Apparently this was a 
large home where he would expect to find John Mark and other Christians.  He 
probably expected to find a large number of the members of the church gathered 
there.  Churches in those days did not have a church building in which to meet.  
They met in homes or other available places.   Apparently the church had met in 
the home of Mary on other occasions and he would expect to find some of them 
there now in these days of danger at the hand of Herod Agrippa.  
	When Peter arrived at the home of Mary he would find the door locked 
tight.  The Christians inside would be afraid that at any moment they might be 
visited by soldiers from Herod Agrippa and, therefore, they would keep the door 
shut and locked.  Peter would not be surprised that he would have to knock at 
the door and wait for someone to come to let him in.  V.  13, “And as Peter 
knocked at the door of the gate, a damsel came to hearken, named Rhoda.”  Just 
how long Peter knocked before somebody heard him I am not certain.  But anyway 
there was a damsel, a little girl, who came to the door.  She did not open the 
door because she had surely been warned by the adults not to do so until she 
found out who was outside.  The Christians inside did not want to open the door 
and find soldiers there ready to push their way inside.  
	Luke tells us that the little girl’s name was “Rhoda.”  This is a word 
which means “Rose.”  If here name had been translated into the English language 
we would read that her name was “Rose.”    

II.  Rhoda informing the adults

	V. 14, “And when she knew Peter's voice, she opened not the gate for 
gladness, but ran in, and told how Peter stood before the gate.”  The word that 
here is translated “Gate” was not like the gate of a fence or a gate in the wall 
of a city.  Rather, it was a door of an entrance way or vestibule of the house.  
	The little girl recognized the voice of Simon Peter and since she 
recognized his voice she should have opened the door and let him in.  But she 
was so surprised that instead of opening the door she ran to adults and told 
them that Peter was outside.  
	The picture that I get is that the adults were engaged in prayer at the 
time she ran in and that she interrupted their prayer.  She came running in 
yelling “Simon Peter is outside!  He is at the door!  Simon Peter is here!  He’s 
here!”  

III.  The disbelief of the adults

	Now try to put yourself in the place of those adult Christians and see 
what kind of reaction you would expect from them.  You would expect that 
somebody would run for the door to let Peter in.  You would expect that they 
would all say something like, “Thank the Lord!  He has answered our prayer!  
Peter is safe!  He’s safe!”  But instead they said, “Rhoda, you’re crazy, girl!  
He can’t be here!”  
	You might wonder, “Well, what in the world have they been praying for?  
Why would they pray for Peter to be set free if they are so certain that God was 
not going to set him free?  Was it because they thought that God just could not 
set him free?”
	Listen, there are two extremes to which people can go when they pray.  One 
extreme is that people can pray and expect that just because they have prayed 
and asked for a certain thing that this is a sure guarantee that God is going to 
grant their request.  I had a lady to tell me one time when my brother was dying 
with cancer, “I know that your brother is going to get well, because I have 
prayed that he will get well.”  She thought that anything she would ask God to 
do for her that God obligated to do it.  He didn’t do it in the case of my 
brother.  My brother died.  God has granted Christians the privilege of asking 
God for anything they want to ask.  But God has reserved for Himself the 
privilege of making the final decision of whether or not to grant our request.  
We are told specifically in the Scripture that we may ask and not receive 
because we ask amiss.  When we ask amiss we will not receive what we ask for.  
And the truth is that sometimes we all ask amiss.  
	The other extreme is that people may pray for something and not at all 
expect God to grant their request.  That was apparently what the Christians did 
in our text.  They were praying that God would keep Simon Peter safe, but what 
they  were really expecting to happen was that Simon Peter was a goner.  They 
thought he would be executed shortly after daylight the next morning.  And 
really what they were doing in this prayer meeting was grieving for him whom 
they were certain in their minds was about to die.  
	So instead of running to the door to let Simon Peter in and instead of 
thanking God for rescuing him, they concluded that Rhoda had lost her mind.  V. 
15, “And they said unto her, Thou art mad. But she constantly affirmed that it 
was even so.”  Even after Rhoda insisted that the Apostle Peter was standing at 
the door they just as strongly insisted that he was not.  (V. 15), “...Then said 
they, It is his angel.”

IV.  Surprise!  Peter at the door

	In the meantime there is the Apostle Peter left standing outside banging 
on the door and identifying himself to them saying, “Hey, fellows!  It’s me!  
It’s Simon Peter!  How about letting me in!”  V. 16, “But Peter continued 
knocking: and when they had opened [the door], and saw him, they were 
astonished.”  Finally somebody opened the door to see who was out there.  I 
guess he thought,  “It cannot be the Apostle Peter.  It must be his angel, but I 
guess I might as well let his angel in.”  When the door was opened they all got 
the shock of their life.  Of all people, there stood the Apostle Peter!
	Can you imagine the clamor that took place then?  Everybody talking at the 
same time wanting to know that happened, how he got out and all about it.   V. 
17, “But he beckoning unto them with the hand to hold their peace, declared unto 
them how the Lord had brought him out of the prison...”  Finally Peter got them 
to quieten down and he told them about his deliverance from prison by an angel 
from God.  

V.  The news sent to James and the other brethren

	Apparently not all of the Christians were present.  Some of them were 
either upstairs and unaware that he had arrived or else they were at some other 
home.   (V. 17), “...And he said, Go shew these things unto James, and to the 
brethren...”  Peter said, “Go and tell James.”  He, of course, was not talking 
about James, the brother of the Apostle John.  Herod Agrippa had already killed 
that James.  It appears that the James who is under consideration here is James, 
the brother of Jesus.  It is believed by many Bible students that by this time 
James had become the leader of the Jerusalem church.  That is, it is believed 
that this James was now the pastor of the Jerusalem church.  At the very least, 
James, the brother of Jesus, had become a prominent leader in the Jerusalem 
church and the Apostle Peter thought that he and other brethren who were not 
present ought to be informed.  

VI.  Peter’s flight to safety

	Once the people present had been assured that this was really the Apostle 
Peter and not an angel and once Peter had given instructions to notify James and 
the other brethren, Simon Peter left.  (V. 17), “... And he departed, and went 
into another place.”  He could not stay there at the home of Mary.  This would 
be one of the first places that the soldiers would come looking for him.  Luke 
does not tell us where he went.  But it seems to me that he would not stay 
anywhere in Jerusalem.  I suspect that he left Jerusalem that night and went to 
some other city where he would take refuge among Christians.  He probably never 
returned to Jerusalem as long as Herod Agrippa lived, which was not really very 
long.  

VII.  The difficulty of convincing people of the truth

	There are many lessons that we can learn from our text today.  One of the 
things that I want to point out to you is that it is difficult to convince 
people of the truth.  Actually, when the Apostle Peter came to the door of the 
home where the Christians had gathered, the child, Rhoda, was the easiest person 
to convince that he was actually there.  He attracted her attention by knocking 
at the door and she was convinced that somebody was at the door.  Then when she 
inquired who was at the door he surely identified himself by name to her.  But 
it the thing that convinced Rhoda that it was really Simon Peter was that she 
recognized his voice.  There was no doubt in Rhoda’s mind that it was the 
Apostle Peter.  But child like, she did not open the door and let him in.  
Rather she ran to the adults and told them that Peter was at the door.  
	But when Rhoda told the adults that Peter was at the door the adults did 
not believe her.  She was telling them the truth, but they were hard to 
convince.  They did not believe her.  Peter kept banging on the door, but even 
that did not convince the adults.  They said, “It must be his angel at the 
door.”  Now what kind of thinking was that?  An angel would not have needed 
somebody to open the door for him to come in.  He could walk through the door or 
he could have banged the door down.  It appears that the adults did not really 
believe that it was Simon Peter until somebody finally opened the door and there 
he stood.  	
	We can also observe the disbelief of the Jewish people concerning Jesus 
being the Christ.  We can particularly note the disbelief of the Jewish leaders.  
The thing that they refused to believe is that Jesus is the Christ of God and 
that Jesus had risen from the grave.  Now Jesus had performed great miracles 
even raising the dead back to life again.  He had raised Lazarus from the grave 
at Bethany.  Hundreds of people were witnesses to the fact that Lazarus had 
truly been raised from the dead.  This should have convinced everybody that 
Jesus is the Christ, but it didn’t.  Many just shrugged off such miracles and 
said, “He does these miracles by the power of Beelzebub.”  The Jewish leaders 
had locked up the twelve apostles and an angel of God released them from their 
prison, but the Jewish leaders refused to see this as evidence that the apostles 
were God’s men and that God was responsible for their release from prison.  Now 
Herod Agrippa had imprisoned the Apostle Peter and made him as secure as was 
humanly possible, but the Apostle Peter just disappeared leaving behind the 
chains which had bound him and leaving the prison doors and prison gate open and 
leaving the guards dumbfounded by what had happened.  Yet they all failed to 
recognize that God had a hand in the release of Simon Peter.  It would seem that 
they could easily see that God was responsible for his release.  
	But let us take a look at ourselves.  I am going to confess to you that 
when I first heard it said that I could go to heaven if I would only repent of 
my sin and ask Jesus Christ to save my soul I just simply did not believe.  I 
had always believed that you have to work for your salvation.  In my thinking 
our  right to enter heaven depended on how much we work for God.  I  stubbornly 
held on to that idea.  I was just hard to convince as stubborn as the adult 
Christians were when Rhoda told them that Simon Peter was at the door.  They did 
not believe that Peter was at the door and I did not believe that anybody could 
get to heaven by trusting in Jesus Christ to take him there.  I still believed 
that one has to work for his salvation.  But by the grace of God  and the 
testimony of Christian friends plus the preaching of the word of God finally got 
through to me that Jesus Christ would hear my plea for mercy if I were to ask 
Him to save me.  So I called on Jesus and , bless your heart, Jesus saved my 
soul!  But I was a hard one to convince.  
	I suspect that the most of you who are now saved can testify that you were 
pretty hard to convince yourself.  I suspect that you were hard to convince that 
you could  be saved by trusting Jesus Christ to save your soul.  Furthermore, I 
suspect that even after you believed that you could be saved by calling on Jesus 
and trusting in Him to save you that you were hard to convince to actually call 
on Him and ask Him to save you.  Aren’t you glad you did?    
	The sad thing is that the great majority of people will never in this 
lifetime be convinced to stake their eternal destiny entirely in the hands of 
Jesus Christ.  They keep holding to the idea that they must work and earn their 
way to heaven.  Like those Christian people who would not be convinced that 
Simon Peter was at the door until they could see him standing there, the great 
majority of people will not be convinced until they stand before Him in 
judgment.  The problem is that by then it will be too late for them to call on 
Him and ask Him for mercy and for salvation.  The Bible teaches that now in this 
life is the accepted time.  Now is the accepted time!  Now is the accepted time!  
Now is the accepted time!  Furthermore,  the Bible teaches that today is the 
only time that you can be sure of that you will have an opportunity to be saved.  

Conclusion:

	I want to call upon you right now in the accepted time to call upon Jesus 
Christ right now in the accepted time to ask Jesus to save your soul.  Will you 
do that ---- right now?  
	I also want to call upon you who are saved to give your life to Jesus and 
serve the Lord Jesus Christ.  If you will, it will be a great blessing to many 
people.  It will be a great blessing to you.