Acts 4:23-31

The Believers Pray
23 On their release, Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and the elders had said to them. 24 When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God. “Sovereign Lord,” they said, “you made the heavens and the earth and the sea, and everything in them. 25 You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David:
“‘Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
26 The kings of the earth rise up
and the rulers band together
against the Lord
and against his anointed one.[b]’[c]

27 Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. 28 They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. 29 Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. 30 Stretch out your hand to heal and perform signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.”

31 After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.




Dig Deeper
If you have ever spent much time watching popular television preachers you have probably encountered what is often referred to as the prosperity gospel. The prosperity gospel is one of the modern versions of Christianity that purports that all believers are “kids of the king” and should expect to have the very best that God has to offer. The normal course of life for a Christian, according to this twist on the gospel, is to be wealthy, healthy, and to live like a kid of the king. This teaching has become wildly popular over the last four or five decades in the United States behind such well known moguls as Kenneth Copeland, Frederick KC Price, Joyce Meyer, Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar, TD Jakes, Joseph Prince, Robert Tilton, and many others. Sadly, this twisted gospel is quickly becoming popular outside of the United States as well and has seemingly become the United States’ leading spiritual export of late. At the heart of this version of the gospel is the idea that the Christian who is living faithfully will have only good things come to then, including wealth. Those who experience anything less than constant victories and wealth are those who lack in faith. These teachers, then, encourage people to pray constantly for deliverance from difficult times and for victories in every area of life. They appeal to the idea that “God wouldn’t want his children to fail would he?”

As logical as that may seem it does presume that difficulties or trials or always bad and undesirable. Yet, the Bible seems to contradict that fundamental idea with passages like James 1:2-4 that urges believers to consider trials as “pure joy” because they produce perseverance in us and allow Christians to go through the transforming process and become the people that God wants us to become. We certainly don’t have time here to thoroughly refute what theologian Gordon Fee calls the “disease of the health and wealth gospel.” But a look at passages such as this one in Acts certainly demonstrate a very different mindset among the early church. When faced with hardships, they did not appeal to God for relief and victory. In fact, they did something that would be almost unimaginable to most Christians in our world today.

After being threatened with dire consequences and then released, Peter and John returned to “their own people.” This was a phrase that normally would have referred to someone’s family group or tribe and is no coincidence that Luke used it to describe the Christian community. Acts is Luke’s attempt to show the formation of the promised family of God. It is phrases like “their own people” that continue to demonstrate that the early Christians saw themselves as God’s new family, the new and restored humanity that were created by God to fulfill his will in the world (see passages like John 20:22 which is a clear echo of the original creation account in Genesis 2:7 and Matthew 28:18-20 which bears strong allusions to the great commission of the creation account in Genesis 1:28). Early church leader Clement of Alexandria demonstrated this belief that God was creating a new humanity, formed to do God’s will, when he stated that “God brought our race into communion by first imparting what was his own.” The early church did not denigrate other human beings or see them as lesser, but they did believe that sin was dehumanizing and that by being brought into God’s family, the people who had their sins dealt with and would be blessed, and that they were being created into the people that would be able to be God’s true image bearers and fulfill the purpose for which God made humanity. They were, thus, a new “race.”

What Luke gives us a clear picture of is two men who were threatened with certain persecution if they continued to speak and act in the name of Jesus but who were hardly dissuaded by that. Rather than cowering in fear as they had before the resurrection and the coming of the Spirit, they returned to their family of believers where they lifted their voices in unity to praise their Father.

The same Holy Spirit that was directing their community and giving them strength was the one who inspired David, they believed, to write Psalm 2, which they turned to in verses 25-26 as part of their prayer. Psalm 2 was one of a handful of Psalms that had particular importance for the early church. The Psalm wonders why the people of the earth would reject and fight against the Messiah, and of course, the early church would add to that the Messiah’s people. Why would they do such a thing when God had clearly declared the Messiah to be his true Son, the one that he had enthroned. God would scoff and deal with those who opposed his Son, said David, so the only wise course of events would be to join those who numbered themselves among the Messiah’s people rather than fighting against them. David ends the Psalm by declaring that the kings of the world had better “Kiss his son, or he will be angry and your way will lead to your destruction, for his wrath can flare up in a moment. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.”

They had met up with those who would fight the Messiah in vain and would persecute his people but rather than complaining about it or decrying it as something that should not be, they recognized that this was part of God’s plan all along. The kings would rage against God’s Son and they, as his disciples, would feel the brunt of that rage, just as Jesus had during his life. That did not mean that he was not the anointed one or that they were not his people, quite the opposite, in fact.

As they continued in prayer and praise of God, the disciples pointed out that what was happening to them was indeed nothing new. Herod and Pilate were kings, in a sense, that had conspired against Jesus and that raging against the Messiah and his people would only continue and get worse. But none of this was of any surprise to God and so it shouldn’t be shocking to the believing community. The opposition that Jesus and his people would face at every turn was part of God’s plan not unfortunate opposition to it. That doesn’t mean that God has predestined or forced some to oppose him but he certainly allows it and it serves a purpose. Just as one is limited in their strength if they don’t ever have resistance or weights to work with, so would God’s people be limited in their growth and development without opposition. The idea that God’s people should have nothing but blessing come into their life is completely foreign to the true gospel.

As we examine this prayer following the threatened persecution from the Jewish leaders, let’s stop and really think about it for a moment. What would you pray for in this situation. Two of your most important leaders had just been taken into custody and warned by the leaders of your land to stop speaking publicly about Jesus or anyone who did would face dire consequences. Would you pray for protection and deliverance? Would you pray that God would provide blessing for the community so that you would not be persecuted but would instead experience great material and spiritual success on every level? Of course, the question must be asked what real success is in the eyes of God. Whatever we might pray in that situation, the prayer of the early church is inspiring and challenging, for they prayed for none of those things.

They did not pray for deliverance. They did not pray for safety. They did not pray for prosperity. They prayed for boldness. Can you believe that? They didn’t pray that God would put out the fire but that he would give them courage as they ran into it. They knew that the way of the Messiah was the path of rejection, persecution, and suffering for the benefit of others. They knew that when the nations began to rage the way of life they had chosen was to die to their desires and will and living life for their own benefit and to allow God to work through them. They understood that God’s plan to bless them was to call them into his family of all nations that had had their sins dealt with in the Messiah. The obligation of that family would be to live as the king lived which was not a life of prestige, popularity, and prosperity, but a life of suffering, seclusion, and sacrifice.

There is another important element in this section that we should not miss, though. They did not just pray and then sit back and wait for God to do it all. I wonder how many of us can identify with that? How many times have we prayed for victory over a sin and then taken little to no action to actually overcome it? How many times have we prayed to be evangelistically successful but then taken no steps to partner with God to make that happen? I’m sure that the list of examples could go on and on. They did not just pray for boldness in the face of persecution and opposition, they gave God something to bless. They prayed until the Holy Spirit had empowered them afresh and anew and given them the strength because they knew that they could not accomplish the task on their own. But they also knew that this would be a partnership. The text tells us that they prayed AND spoke the work of God boldly. They acted on their prayers. They partnered with the Holy Spirit. They walked the way that Jesus did (cf. 1 Jn. 2:6). They gave God obedient actions so that he actually had something in their life to bless. They did not fear the authorities. They went out and spoke so that through the power of the Spirit, their speaking would be bold words of the kingdom.

God is always in control no matter how dire the situation may seem for his people. What we must always remember is to not be swayed by fine sounding human arguments that beckon us to comfort and physical blessing. God called his Son to sacrifice and die for the benefit of others and he calls us to do the same. When God’s people truly give God something to bless, we will find out that he will do just that, not in blessings of this material age but in the blessings of his kingdom.


Devotional Thought
God certainly did call his Son to sacrifice and die for the benefit of others and he calls us to do the same. For us, though, that usually involves dying to ourselves and truly embracing the will of God as our life’s calling. Can you honestly say that you have embraced this as your way of life? When faced with difficult circumstances do you pray for deliverance or for boldness in advancing God’s kingdom?