Break The Spell

Acts 8:9-11

Every single human being has the chance to have friends and they will either be the same as you or different to you; some have trees as their friends, some have their pets as friends and many of us have human beings as our friends. There are three categories or friends:

1. Comrades – those that come next to you not because they love you but they support what you are against. E g, if I don’t like John Key as the prime-minister, I’ll have friends join me and together we can express our anger but once we finish that mission against John Key, once he is no longer the prime-minister of NZ, our friendship is dead.

2. User friends – those that come to you just because they need something from you, for example (just an example) Ange has a nice hat, and I ask her if I can have it and once I have it, I’m not your friend anymore.

4. Confidant friend – Like David and Jonathon in the Bible, they are friends that tell you the truth and show you the right direction and will accept to die with you or for you. There are very few confidant friends in this life. Most of our friends don’t trust us and we don’t trust them. Jesus Christ who should be our confidant friend, we put Him far away and we stick on those who are not good friends. E.g. in churches, we have comrades who talk negatively about the pastor but we don’t have friends to support us in the right way.

Acts 8:9-11, “Now for some time a man named Simon had practiced sorcery in the city and amazed all the people of Samaria. He boasted that he was someone great, and all the people, both high and low, gave him their attention and exclaimed, “This man is rightly called the Great Power of God.” They followed him because he had amazed them for a long time with his sorcery.”

This man was a great man they say. This book of Acts is very often called the acts of apostles but these are actually acts of God because when the Holy Spirit came down, you see the power of God and you see all the big things that the disciples will do through the Holy Spirit. On that day the Holy Spirit came down, everybody was talking and praying and people were waiting for that promise in Jerusalem. They were not there to watch a movie or to visit great places of Jerusalem but they met there in the room to pray and if they did not pray, they could not have received the Holy Spirit. Some people will tell you that they try to pray but they don’t experience that power of the Holy Spirit in their life and they blame God but the secret is to find time to pray and that power will come on you. If you need it, seek for it. Don’t just sit and wait, seek for it and it won’t cost you anything, just have some time to pray.

Those people in the time of Acts were busy but they chose that time to leave everything behind and to pray because it was an order from God to be there and to wait there and until “I send Him to you’. In churches if you tell people to pray, people will start to count the time. E.g. today, our worship leader prayed; maybe some were complaining in their heart that Ange was praying, people maybe blame her for making the service late. The devil uses the strategy to make Christians lazy in praying and because we hate praying the Holy Spirit is going far from us.

These people in Acts gained a new strength from the Holy Spirit; they were changed. Philip who was shy, came out and talked with power telling people they need to be saved. Prayer can boost your spiritual strength and you will stand up in front of the world and they will listen to you

Sometimes we think we can see but we are blind. When you ask my son a question, he will say, “I don’t know” to any question, “where is such and such?”, “I don’t know”. “Why did you do this? “I don’t know” “Can you do this for me?” “I don’t know”. But if you say there is some food, he will ask, “Where is it?” I don’t know will be applied for important things but those that are easy and will satisfy his needs, he will want to learn about them.

The disciples at that time, they had a commitment to go to Jerusalem to pray every time. They made Jerusalem to be a monument to pray. Many Christians today want to go to Jerusalem to pray so they can become someone. The Spirit doesn’t work like that, the Spirit moves. The Spirit is not stuck in one place but in churches you hear things like, “I was baptized here, so I can’t go to any other church”, or, “my father started this church so I must belong here”.