Acts 4:23-31.
This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on Sunday morning August 28, 2022.
Last week, we saw that Peter and John were severely threatened not to teach in the name of Jesus, and they were released from custody. With the response that Peter gave them, they can’t hope too much that these men will actually stop. However, it will buy them some time to craft a plan for dealing with them just as they did with Jesus.
We are going to see the importance of prayer today. These men were full of the Holy Spirit, but they were not a source unto themselves. In fact, the Holy Spirit was poured out upon them during a prayer meeting. Instead of responding to the threats of the rulers with threats themselves, they responded to the threats with more prayer to God.
May we never forget that all our doing must have a foundation of prayer underneath it, so that God is evident within it.
Upon their release, Peter and John go to their companions to describe the actions of the rulers of Israel.
After hearing about the threats, the disciples turn to God in prayer. Notice that we have that phrase again “in one accord.” Remember that this means they were all singularly focused with a passion for reaching God in prayer.
It is hard enough to get ourself singularly focused with passion on one thing, much less a whole group of people. This really is a miraculous move of God that is happening among these early Christians. O, that believers today would be moved upon by the Lord to be in one accord about reaching God through prayer.
Let’s take a look at how they pray and then how God responds.
They start out glorifying God by declaring that He is the One who created everything. He created the heavens, the earth, and the seas, and then He filled each of these domains. Salient to the moment, God is the Creator of those people giving them threats. Essentially, they are appealing to the higher authority. The men who have threatened them are accountable to a higher power, just as the disciples are.
Prayer is never about telling God something that He doesn’t know. It is more about demonstrating that we know who He is. Prayer is not getting God to the place where He will do what you want, it is about getting ourselves to a place where we can truly serve Him.
To glorify God is to lift our own spirits up out of the squalor of this world, and the clouds of confusion. It is to come out of ourselves and into the presence of One who is greater than us. It is to focus our heart and mind upon the only One who can sustain us and enable us. Prayer gives us God’s perspective about our life and the things that bother us. If we spent more time in prayer, then we would have a better perspective on life when we get up off of our knees and go about our day.
God is not only the One who created these men threatening them, but He has also spoken things through the prophets about just such men. Through the prophet David, God said this very thing would happen.
Psalm 2 is a powerful psalm that clearly depicts God making His Anointed One (Messiah, Christ) to be king over the nations at the protest of their rulers. Those rulers will attempt to throw off his rule, but God in heaven will laugh at their attempts to reject His decision. “I have set My King upon My Holy Hill!” The rulers are then warned that if they do not turn to the Anointed One in fealty, then they will perish when his wrath is kindled just a little.
It ends declaring, “Blessed are those who put their trust in Him.” This is similar to the message Jesus sends back to John the Baptist, “Blessed is he who does not fall away because of me.” Really these are flip sides of the same coin, one positive and one negative. To trust in Jesus is not to fall away. Not to fall away because of Jesus is to put your faith in him.
These disciples of Jesus are actually seeing Psalm 2 happening in real time. In fact, we are seeing the same thing today in our world. The rulers of the world are set on casting off the “bonds” of God and His Christ. This is what it looks like.
The question today is, “Whom do you fear, God and His Messiah, or the powerful rulers of the earth? Our response will set the position that we will be in in the day of His wrath.
Verse 28 holds a nugget of powerful understanding that we must get ahold of and never let go. No matter what the enemies of Christ may do, they can only accomplish what God has purposed ahead of time. This does not mean that they are doing a good thing. They have the power to choose wickedness, but they don’t also have the power to choose where that path will take them. God is truth and reality. You can’t fight reality without paying a price of your decision.
Thus, all beings in the universe will do the will of God. Some will accomplish His will by choosing to cooperate with His purposes and being transformed into His righteousness. Others, will accomplish His will by refusing to cooperate with His purposes. They become something far worse than they ever imagined, but in so doing, also accomplish the will of God.
Only God is the Sovereign over all that happens, and it is His Providence that is before us. Christians must never think that becoming so grants us sovereignty over our own life. The best that we can do in this life is to cooperate with the will of God and thereby to be transformed into the image of Jesus. Yes, some of the path ahead is revealed to us through prophecy, but all of us must learn to trust God with our today. If God had allowed Jesus to die in order to do something greater, then God may choose to do the same thing with Peter and John. They have no guarantee exactly what following Jesus will look like, only that Christ will be with them all the way. What matters in life is doing the will of God regardless of what the future may hold, and that will take a lot of time in prayer tuning our hearts to the heart of God.
Though they have been glorifying God, they are also building a case, asking God for His help. They first ask that God would grant them to speak His word with all boldness. A “grant” is in keeping with coming to a great King, but this is more than getting a title to some land. They are asking for God’s help in doing what they know must be done. God, whatever you have to do in me in order to do this thing that must be done, then please do it!
The content of our speech to this world and to one another needs to be the Word of God. Yet, the boldness cannot come from a place of our flesh. The Sadducees and the Pharisees had a boldness that came from much study, and the accolades of an intellectual system. In fact, it takes a lot of boldness to put the Lord Jesus Christ to death even though it didn’t square with the Law of God. Fleshly boldness will not work to lead us in what God is doing. It only made things worse.
At each point along the way, God in His mercy gave them opportunity to jump off this confidence in their own righteousness. Nicodemus jumped off. Even the Apostle Paul saw the light and turn around to the point that he later says that he considered all that previous boasting as rubbish, garbage, in the face of knowing Jesus. The problem is not that God is wanting us to get rid of everything. The problem is in my heart. I so easily try to hold onto fleshly things that give me confidence instead of only holding on to the Lord. Eventually, you will have to choose. If something is getting in between you and Jesus, just know this. There will come a day when it will be to hard to hold onto both. Like a man trying to hold two horses together going in opposite directions, you will either let go or be destroyed.
The boldness they wanted could only come from the Holy Spirit within them and speaking in the moment. This is only granted as we daily come to God in prayer, seeking Him, and seeking His will.
They also ask that God would stretch forth His hand to heal and give signs and wonders in the name of Jesus. We see this again that they are fully aware that any miracles would be by the hand of God. They would simply be faithful servants whom God worked through.
We are called to be a blessing to the sick and the hurting. These things will then be signs pointing people back to Psalm 2. We must make our peace with Jesus today because the day is coming when his complete rule will be established.
It is clear from history that God has granted seasons of healings, and signs and wonders. It is not our job to know either way, but to pray for God to move and to work. No number of miracles can save a person’s life. People need Jesus, not miracles. Perhaps the greatest miracle they will ever see is a man or woman of God coming out of the wilderness and speaking the word of God to them by the power of the Holy Spirit.
They were not praying for miracles because they wanted to be wowed again. No, it is a wicked and adulterous generation that seeks for signs and miracles. No, they are praying for God to confirm that they are from Him through these miracles. Only God can help us to make it to that pure place where we are praying for Him to move in our time, but we are not seeking things rather than Him. They are not asking miracles for themselves, but to be done among the people in order to draw them to Jesus.
Verse 31 tells us that there was a response from heaven. They would get up off of their knees that day knowing that God had heard them because the place was shaken with an earthquake. We do not know how widespread it was. It seems to be more for them than Jerusalem. Of course, the skeptic will say it is only a coincidence. However, such a person was not there to see the lame man dancing in the temple, nor the ministry of Jesus before.
So why did God shake the place that they were at? In Psalm 18:6,7 it says, “In my distress I called upon the LORD, and cried out to my God; He heard my voice from His temple, and my cry came before Him, even to His ears. Then, the earth shook and trembled; the foundations of the hills also quaked and were shaken, because He was angry.”
This is David recognizing that his victories over Saul, and the nations surrounding Israel, were not about his great ability. It was always about God answering his cry. This imagery is used throughout the Psalms and the prophetic literature. When God is stirred up to judgment, the natural order is practically unable to stand it (Hills melting like wax, etc.). It is a sign that God is angry and is not to be messed with.
This can be seen at Sinai as well. The powerful demonstration of quaking, thundering, lightening, fire and smoke demonstrates that God is legislating the righteousness that they should be doing. The law is a scary thing without the mercy and grace of God. Thankfully, it was not without mercy and grace.
The Bible says that the righteous are a people who cannot be shaken, and consequently destroyed. Here, God shakes the place to show that He is rising up, just as David spoke of it, to stand on their behalf before these rulers. He is not happy with their actions, though He will use them for His purposes. When we are in right relationship with God, we need not fear His judgments around us.
This is shown in Hebrews 12, where God promises to shake the heavens and the earth. This great day of shaking no wicked person will survive. The only way to survive it is to become an unshakeable person. Only God can make us an unshakeable person by the power of His Holy Spirit.
Perhaps, we should remind ourselves that Satan tries to shake us as well. In this mortal flesh, we will be tested. As long as we hang on to faith in Jesus, we cannot be destroyed. In fact, the devil will only succeed in making you stronger. Yet, if we let go of faith in Christ, then we can be destroyed. Let us receive an unshakeable faith by the help of the Holy Spirit.
They were then all filled with the Holy Spirit. As we have mentioned before, being filled with the Holy Spirit is not a one-time event. There is a fresh pouring out of the Holy Spirit in response to their prayer. We must see this and pay attention to it. God wants to fill you, but He does so in the relationship of prayer.
Public prayer times with other believers has its place, but the foundation of our walk with Christ is our private prayer time. We cannot skip these private times of prayer and expect that the Holy Spirit will just always be there to back our fleshly minds up. God help us to desire to be a people of prayer because it was God’s desire first, and it is His Holy Spirit even now stirring you up to want to pray. You won’t be able to run the marathon tomorrow, but if you get up and start a little at a time, each day, over time you will develop a strong foundation of prayer that your flesh resisted at first. Prayer is hard. There is no lime-light, no accolades. Our flesh shrinks back from it, but we must master ourselves and turn to God in prayer, if we want to know Him and the power of His resurrection.
It ends by saying, “and they spoke the word of God with boldness.” I believe this is simply saying that God answered their prayer and this was the hallmark of their activity moving forward.
O friend, we need to speak the word of God boldly. It is the only hope that people have, whether they know it or not. However, that kind of power is only found in a place of prayer seeking God’s help. Let’s get to it!