Intro
Some of you might have noticed I wasn’t here last week and that I took a little one week vacation. It was a great week, lots of good time with the family, and a change of pace. But you know how some people come back from vacation and you ask them how it was, and they say, “oh man, it could have been two weeks longer”? They talk about how hard it is to get back into the groove of things? Again, I had a great week, but when I came in on Monday, I just felt on fire! I was so full of energy for what we’re doing here! I’ve never been more excited and hopeful for the church, for this church, for pastoral ministry. The last 4 or 5 months have been full of joy. So on Monday, if any of you had come and sat in these seats, I would have been ready to preach a sermon right then and there. I was like “let me at em! Get me in the game coach, I’m ready to go, let’s get this!”
As we’re going through the book of Acts, one of the big themes so far has been the Gospel going public. This isn’t something you hide behind closed doors.The Jerusalem leaders in Acts 4 try to contain this, they tell the disciples to stop preaching Jesus, but it’s just not going to work! It’s got to get out! When I was a kid growing up in the Christian subculture of the 1990s, my favorite band was Newsboys. If you don’t know Newsboys, ask my kids- they know way too much about 90s music than any kid growing up in the 20s should. And one of the albums that made Newsboys big in the Christian subculture world was “Going Public”, which had lines like “there’s no straddling fences here, we’re going public with this.” Another Christian mega-band was DC Talk, who sang “I don’t really care if they label me a Jesus freak, there ain’t no disguising the truth.”
But the thing that happens when you go public with Jesus is that there is pushback. In the text from last week, the disciples tell the Jewish leaders that salvation is found in Jesus alone. That’s confrontational! That gets people worked up, and it causes opposition! And so the leaders imprison Peter and John for a night and tell them they can’t talk about Jesus anymore (Acts 4:18). In a much smaller way, we have experienced this as a church. For years, we were a bit of a hidden church, worshipping on Sundays at Capilano University. We’d throw up some sandwich boards on a campus where nobody lives and nobody visits on Sundays and just hope that somebody found our website. I mean, we had office space and we didn’t try to be hidden, but that was the reality. Now we’ve built this building and it’s very public. You can’t ignore us! Here’s this living, breathing church meeting right on Deep Cove Road. And there’s some pushback. There are some people who made it publicly and loudly known they’d rather us not be here. That happens.
Nate mentioned last week that he’s very non confrontational. I would argue I’m even more non confrontational than him, but I don’t want to confront him about that. Basically, our next hire is going to need to be an MMA fighter to balance things out on the pastoral team. There’s no part of me that enjoys the pushback and a lot of you can relate. That’s why a lot of us stay silent, because we don’t want people to dislike us, call us names, alienate us, or whatever. The opposition feels overwhelming and we don’t know what to do with it.
So let’s talk about what you do with it. Let’s talk about what the early church did with it.
1. First response: prayer
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.
Acts 4:23-24a
So far in Acts, the church has enjoyed a season of growth and favour. Now they get their first taste of persecution. This isn’t going to be an easy ride. he leaders of Jerusalem aren’t joining the crowds in turning to Christ. So the church gathers together and figure out what they’re going to do. They’ve got to figure out what the strategy is.
Before we look at what they did, what do we usually do in this situation? Imagine you’re together with like-minded people after facing some threat, some injustice. Isn’t your first instinct to complain and rip your opponents to verbal shreds in a safe place? Just take their actions and words apart piece by piece? Or maybe it’s to spiral, to worry and catastrophize and wallow in an impending sense of destruction? Or maybe to begin to strategize your revenge? Start plotting your lawsuit and get lawyered up, maybe hire that MMA fighter we talked about before and get trained up for battle. You’ve got to figure out how you’re going to overcome them, right?
This is what we do. We turn to our own resources, our own thoughts and strategies. We almost all do this intuitively, I’ve seen it again and again in myself and in others, including in Christian leadership.
But it is not at all what the early church does. They come together and they raise their voices together in prayer. The first thing they do is pray. Not complain, not strategize, not spiral. The first response before anything else is to pray.
Like I said, I so often have not done this. But on one occasion I did, it was a night that changed my life forever. I’ve told this story in more detail before, but it was the night that I told Carolyn I liked her. I had a whole Hollywood-quality speech planned out. She clearly wasn’t interested, because as I launched into my epic oration, she began walking to her car. When I arrived at the climax, she turned her car on, rolled down her window, put it into gear and said, “we’re just friends, Craig, and that’s all we’re ever going to be”. And she took off. It was the most stone-cold rejection I’d ever faced. It was brutal!
In most circumstances like that, I had spiralled in self-destruction and bitterness. But that night, I went right to my room and cried out to God for healing and His comfort. And He filled me with His Holy Spirit. He gave me peace. He gave me love. And it was because of that, 100% why, that within a week or two Carolyn called me and said “ok, I’m willing to give this a try”. And 9 months later, we were married! Joke’s on her!
But here in Acts 4, they cry out together. It’s a corporate problem, and so they cry out together. This is so, so important. I hope by now you understand how important and central corporate prayer is. Everything good that is happening here at The Bridge is only because of a devotion to humbling ourselves before God in prayer and seeking His face and power. Whenever we face any kind of opposition, prayer has to be our first response.
This is true of individuals, it’s true of churches, it’s true of families. When a crisis hits, pray. When you are overwhelmed, pray. Don’t strategize, don’t plot revenge, don’t spiral, don’t complain. Pray.
2. How they pray
a. Worship
But the strategy in the face of pushback is not prayer in and of itself. It’s how they pray. Notice how they start:
“Sovereign Lord,” they said, “you made the heavens and the earth and the sea, and everything in them.
Acts 4:24b
They start by worshipping God. Sovereign Lord. Sovereign, meaning, He’s in charge. None of this is going to surprise Him. He’s Lord over all, no matter what’s happening. He’s the one who created all things. He’s greater than these threats and these leaders.
This is consistent with the Lord’s prayer, the prayer Jesus gave to disciples who wanted to learn how to pray. “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” Before anything else, we say, this is who you are God. You are our Father, you are holy. This is our desire, to seek your face and know you.
We spend so much time obsessing over our own personal crises, interpersonal stresses, and the issues in the world. Some of us check the news over and over again and are extremely aware of the problems in the world. The disciples are obviously not ignorant of what’s going on. But before they ever make a petition, they fill their heads with thoughts about God’s greatness and sovereignty. And I’m convinced that’s what we need to do as well. Our need is to come to God and worship. We need to recognize who He is no matter what’s happening. Worship gives us the perspective we need. So pray as your first response, but always, always worship.
B. Frame opposition theologically
Here’s where they go next:
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.’ 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.
Acts 4:25-28
You see what they do here? They’ve now turned their attention to the issue at hand. They’re saying, “God, look what’s going on here!” But they’ve framed it all theologically. hey’re looking at it through the lens of the Scriptures. Which, we should say right from the start, is only something you can do if you’re actually growing in your understanding and awareness of the Scriptures.
The early church goes to Psalm 2, a psalm about God’s “anointed one” and the opposition this anointed one faces. For the first readers of the Psalm, they would have applied this to the king in Jerusalem. But later readers understood this to point to a future king, a “Messiah”, which means “anointed”. The Psalm says that the nations rage. The word here was used of horses snorting and pawing the ground in anger. This is the disposition of the nations towards God’s anointed one. The early church saw this fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus is the Messiah, and the nations had come together in Jerusalem, the Jewish leaders along with the Roman leaders, to put Jesus to death.
And just to skip ahead a bit, the disciples now understood that just as the nations raged against the Messiah, they would also rage against the Messiah’s disciples. Which continues to be the case today. This is of course partly because of population growth, but do you know that more Christians died because of their faith in the 20th century than all the centuries before combined? All around the world today, Christians are persecuted for their faith by authorities and groups that are determined to wipe them out.
Why? Because Jesus demands absolute loyalty. His followers will at times simply not go along with the spirit of the age. And when governments or tribes or other groupings become idolatrous and demand that allegiance for themselves, they can’t handle people following Jesus as Lord. That’s why the Chinese government is ok with Christian churches as long as they can control them and claim their allegiance. But it will do anything it can to stamp out the underground church. And the more and more our authorities in the Western world become authorities to themselves, unhitched from any basis in God, we will see more raging and plotting and snorting. More hatred and anger directed towards Christians. Don’t think this is strange or surprising. It’s always been this way.
But Psalm 2, and the disciples’ prayer out of it, says that the nations plot in vain. In fact, Psalm 2 says a couple of verses later that God laughs and scoffs at their rage. The nations have their purposes to destroy God’s faithful people, but God will turn that and use it for His own purposes. I’ve never done martial arts- some of you are going, yeah, I can tell- but I know that in jiu jitsu, you use the force of your opponent against them. God has a triple black belt in spiritual jiu jitsu. And this was most clearly the case at the cross. The nations conspired to kill the Messiah, but God used his death as an atonement for sin, so that all who trust in Jesus can be forgiven and reconciled to Him. They put the Messiah in the grave, but God used that to demonstrate His power over death and raise Jesus to life. Humanity was ultimately powerless in its rage.
And now the disciples can understand their own situation. Yes, they face pushback and hatred and opposition. Yes, from a human perspective there is danger, there is a crisis. But they know that God can use this to further His Kingdom and display His glory. They know as followers of Jesus they are living into the story of Jesus, and they know how that story leads from crucifixion to resurrection. They’ve reframed the situation biblically.
I’ve got a little story from my own life here. Believe it or not, not everybody always agrees with everything I say. Sometimes people don’t like what I have to say, they don’t like what I’m like, and they do like to tell me that. And far too often, I’ve let that destroy me. It almost happened again recently. I was made aware of some criticism and I experienced this wave of accusation and doubt and despair in my heart and mind. I began sliding down this old familiar slope. And then suddenly I realized, I know what this is. I know from the Bible that Satan seeks to kill and destroy, and that he is the accuser. I know that he will do anything he can to get a foothold and stop God’s work in His people. And I know from the Bible that my triumph over him has nothing to do with my own abilities, but by what Jesus has done and my faith in him. That’s Revelation 12:10-11 if you’re wanting to dig in more.
So I went for a walk and just started preaching at the devil. That might sound really, really weird to some of you. It probably seemed really weird to the guy who rounded a turn in the path ahead as I was mid-spiritual takedown. But I just said, you might be right. I might fall well short, I might fail in this way and that, and if it was just about me, you’d obliterate me. But Jesus has overcome you! He triumphed over you by the resurrection! And I stand with him! So you have nothing on me! You can come at me again and again, but my faith is in him, and he’s already beaten you!
Man, I was pumped up! And it was such a moment of victory, going from the brink of despair to joy. Instead of just obsessing over the words of a human, I understood from the Scriptures what evil was trying to do in me. And I understood from the Scriptures where my victory would come from. My situation was reframed by God’s word.
C. Make the request
How do they pray? They start with worship, then frame their situation biblically. In these next verses, these followers of Jesus finally make the request:
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 wondersthrough the name of your holy servant Jesus.”
Acts 4:29-30
There are essentially three requests here. The first is that God would consider the threats of these leaders. What this means is that they are giving up any right to judgment or justice into God’s hands. It’s like Paul says in Romans 12:17-20: live at peace, return evil for good and don’t take revenge, because God says “it is mine to avenge, I will repay”. Whatever God wants to do with their opponents, that’s up to him.
Their heart is more clearly revealed in the next two requests: that God would empower them to speak boldly and that God would do signs and wonders. Notice that these are the exact two things that have landed them in hot water. More signs and wonders? It was the dramatic healing of the man who had been born lame in Acts 3 that led to the arrest and the trial. Speaking with boldness? The Sanhedrin, the Jewish court, had just ordered them not to talk about Jesus anymore. But that’s what they’re asking for! They’re saying to God, “hey, you know those things that are making life more difficult for us? More, please! We want more of that, we want you to keep doing those things!”
Why? Because for the early church, priority #1 is not their own safety and comfort. Not even close, not by a long shot. Their priority is the Kingdom of God. Their priority is that people know Jesus and the life that comes in him. They are so energized by this that they want to keep moving forward. Persecution, opposition, pushback, they don’t want any of that to pull them off course. But they know that it could. They know that on their own, they don’t have that boldness. The disciples sure know they can’t do any “wonders” on their own. They know that to go forward requires the strength and power of God. Which is why they cry out to Him for it.
I want to tell you about two groups of people who went opposite ways on exactly this question. I’ve shared before that I come from a Mennonite background, related to the slightly more famous Amish people. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, I didn’t grow up with a chinstrap beard and a horse and buggy, my ancestors “modernized” a century ago. I grew up with a Ford Aerostar. But the early history of the Mennonites and groups like them is so appealing. They were passionate followers of Jesus who were determined to tell everyone they met about him. However, they were pacifists and were unwilling to fight in the military. They were also convinced baptism was for adults, not babies, which meant they didn’t co-operate with the process of citizenship in Europe at the time.
This meant that at the same time that there was rapid growth, there was also increasing persecution. They were hunted down, imprisoned, and in some cases killed. And so, at the end of the 16th century and into the 17th, a kind of compromise was reached. The Mennonites agreed to keep their convictions to themselves if the governing authorities would leave them alone. They became known as the “quiet in the land”. They lived in somewhat closed communities with very little contact with the world around them, and therefore very little impact. I promise you they did not pray this prayer.
The other group is the underground church in China that I mentioned before. A biography I’ve quoted often is The Heavenly Man, about Brother Yun, a leader in the Chinese church. In one quote that’s always stuck with me, he says:
“That is why I correct Western Christians who tell me, ‘I’ve been praying for years that the Communist government in China will collapse, so we can live in freedom.’ This is not what we pray!…Instead of focusing our prayers against any political system, we pray that regardless of what happens to us, we will be pleasing to God. Don’t pray for the persecution to stop! We shouldn’t pray for a lighter load to carry, but a stronger back to endure! Then the world will see that God is with us, empowering us to live in a way that reflects his love and power.”
Brother Yun
That is consistent with Acts 4. Isn’t that a challenge to us in the modern West? We want everything to come easy. We resist persecution as much as we can. We have a lot more in common with the 17th century Mennonites- so show it and grow those chinstrap beards! Instead, Brother Yun says they don’t pray for a lighter load, they pray for stronger backs. They pray for empowerment to display the power and love of God. In essence, they pray Acts 4. And despite the significant persecution in China, the growth of the church there in the last half a century is one of the greatest stories in church history. Pray for boldness and pray for God’s power to do signs and wonders. On our own, we shrink back. But by praying this prayer, we are praying not for our comfort but for the Kingdom of God, no matter what the cost. Is this a prayer that God honors? Here’s verse 31.
3. The result
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.
Acts 4:31
Does God honor this prayer? Obviously, He does. The place where they were meeting was shaken. Can you imagine that, in the midst of a prayer meeting? You’d assume we were finally receiving “the big one”, that massive earthquake! But I wonder if the disciples, who were learning to reframe situations biblically, would have thought about Psalm 99:1, “The Lord reigns, let the nations tremble; he sits enthroned between the cherubim, let the earth shake.” In Acts 4, the shaking of the house is a sign and a reminder that God is king, and that He is with them. Which means that no matter how much they feel outnumbered and outgunned, they’re ok, because they’ve got the king! Do you know that this morning? If you’re a devoted follower of Jesus, you may feel like an overwhelming minority in this city. You might feel intimidated, you might doubt because of that. But you’ve got the King, the Creator of all things, with you!
And not only with you, but within you! The disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit. Remember, these are some of the same people who were at Pentecost in Acts 2, filled with the Holy Spirit. Peter was there. We read earlier in Acts 4:8 that Peter was filled with the Holy Spirit before speaking to the Sanhedrin. And now here they are, again filled with the Spirit. It turns out that being filled with the Spirit is a regular need for the people of Jesus. It’s not a one time event. We have a need to be continually filled and refreshed by the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit. You need it if there’s going to be an answer to that prayer for signs and wonders and boldness of speech.
Which is exactly what happens here. The final outcome of the prayer is that in the face of persecution and threats to stop talking about Jesus, the early church speaks the word of God boldly. Because of God’s presence with them and within them, they go forward. The book of Acts, and the whole history of the growth of the church in the first century on, depends on this. Depends on prayers like this one.
Here’s how one writer from a couple of hundred years ago put it:
“Satan dreads nothing but prayer. His one concern is to keep the saints from praying. He fears nothing from prayerless studies, prayerless work, prayerless religion. He laughs at our toil, he mocks our wisdom, but he trembles when we pray.”
Samuel Chadwick
Satan trembles when we pray. He trembles when we pray like this. Because when we pray like this, we acknowledge our own weakness and instead trust God’s power. And that’s when He moves! That’s when the Kingdom breaks in!
So pray! When you face a crisis, a spiritual attack, some kind of threat, pray! Pray with your eyes on the character of God, pray by worshipping. Pray biblically, framing all that you are experiencing through the lens of the Scriptures. And pray with a heart for the Kingdom of God, asking for Him to do what only He can. Don’t pray for comfort. Don’t pray for your own advancement. Pray for the advancement of the Gospel regardless of the cost to yourself. And we will see it! This church, this community, this city, this world will be shaken if we pray like this!
