Scripture Introduction
One mark of a church filled with the Holy Spirit is devotion to prayer. We considered this last Sunday; it certainly is worthy of addressing again. I concluded last week’s sermon with this challenge from Leonard Ravenhill, a pastor well known for decades of fruitful evangelistic ministry: “The church has many organizers, but few agonizers; many who pay, but few who pray; many resters, but few wrestlers; many who are enterprising, but few who are interceding. The secret of praying is praying in secret. A worldly Christian will stop praying and a praying Christian will stop worldliness. If we are weak in prayer, we are weak everywhere. Tithes may build a church, but tears give it life. That is the difference between the modern church and the early church. In the matter of effective praying, never have so many left so much to so few. Brethren, let us pray.”
Chapter four of Acts describes the first persecution of Christians. The religious leaders and rulers of the city, “greatly annoyed” (Acts 4.2) by the teaching of Peter and John, arrest and try these men. The apostles give a defense; but the conclusion is an order not to again speak or teach in the name of Jesus, along with the threat of physical violence should they refuse to comply (Acts 4.18, 21).
So the apostles and church pray. They do not organize a protest or call a committee meeting or march on Rome or write Caesar. They pray. A Spirit filled church considers prayer, not the last hope of a desperate man, but the first assault against a rebellious world. Today we study their prayer in Acts 4. [Read Acts 4.23-31. Pray.]
Introduction
The story is told that in a certain cotton factory, the management posted a sign that said, “If You Get Your Threads Tangled, Send For The Boss.” It did not take a new worker long to get her threads tangled; but she was ashamed and tried to untangle them herself. The more she tried, the more worse the problem became. When she finally realized that she could not handle the problem, she sent for the boss. He came in, looked at the threads, and asked why she did not send for him when her threads first got tangled? She said she had done her best to untangle them herself. He responded, “No you didn’t. Because doing your best was sending for me.”
“Doing your best was sending for me.” How often we try to unknot our tangles and found them knottier. God pleads with us: “Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me” (Psalm 50.15). “Doing our best” is calling on the Lord for help because such glorifies him. John Piper observes: “Prayer humbles us as needy and exalts God as wealthy” (Desiring God, 161).
It is my guess that prayer is the good work we most struggle to walk in precisely because it most humbles us. “Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (John 14.13). God is glorified in the posture of need we exhibit on our knees. Our best is calling on the Lord for help because in answering prayer, he is proven both generous and wealthy. My sin nature resists this, however, because I like to think of myself as wealthy. But when I own my need, God owns my deliverance and is proven mighty to save.
In his novel, Daniel Defoe has Robinson Crusoe converted through Psalm 50.15. In a sermon entitled, “Robinson Crusoe’s Text,” Charles Spurgeon notes, “Robinson Crusoe has been wrecked. He is left in the desert island all alone. His case is a very pitiable one. He goes to his bed, and he is smitten with fever. This fever lasts upon him long, and he has no one to wait upon him—none even to bring him a drink of cold water. He is ready to perish. He had been accustomed to sin, and had all the vices of a sailor; but his hard case brought him to think. He opens a Bible which he finds in his chest, and he lights upon this passage, ‘Call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.’ That night he prayed for the first time in his life, and ever after there was in him a hope in God, which marked the birth of the heavenly life.”
Spurgeon then applies the text: “Here God and the praying man take shares…. First, here is your share: ‘Call upon me in the day of trouble.’ Secondly, here is God’s share: ‘I will deliver thee.’ Again, you take a share — for you shall be delivered. And then again it is the Lord’s turn — ‘Thou shalt glorify me.’ Here is a compact, a covenant that God enters into with you who pray to him, and whom he helps. He says, ‘You shall have the deliverance, but I must have the glory. You shall pray; I will bless, and then you shall honor my holy name.’ Here is a delightful partnership: we obtain that which we so greatly need, and all that God getteth is the glory which is due unto his name.”
The Bible teaches that God’s glory and your happiness are united in answered prayer. “Prayer humbles us as needy and exalts God as wealthy.” This must be why so many wise teachers claim a person’s prayer-life is the barometer of his or her soul.
J. I. Packer: “I believe that prayer is the measure of the man, spiritually, in a way that nothing else is, so that how we pray is as important a question as we can ever face” (My Path of Prayer, 56).
Robert Murray M’Cheyne, “What a man is alone on his knees before God, that he is, and no more.”
J. C. Ryle: “Prayer is the most important subject in practical religion” (Prayer, 1).
E. M. Bounds, The Weapon of Prayer, 1: “Nothing is more important to God than prayer in dealing with mankind. But it is likewise all-important to man to pray. Failure to pray is failure along the whole line of life. It is failure of duty, service, and spiritual progress. God must help man by prayer. He who does not pray, therefore, robs himself of God’s help and places God where he cannot help man.”
John Piper: “We do not glorify God by providing his needs, but by praying that he would provide ours—and trusting him to answer.”
This is precisely the action of the church in Acts 4.
1. We Glorify God In Believing Prayer (Acts 4.23-24)
The first word in this prayer is [despotaes], and it means, “one who has legal control and authority over persons, such as subjects or slaves; i.e., lord or master.” We get our English word, despot, from the Greek. It did not have the negative connotation back then, but it clearly meant an absolute ruler, a sovereign lord, an authority of unchallengeable power. The political and religious rulers might make their threats, but their authority was subject to the rule of the Almighty One.
When I am threatened with trials and troubles, that is precisely when I doubt God’s sovereign control. Not these folks! They believe the Bible; they know God “upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1.3). They understand that he who keeps them will neither slumber nor sleep (Psalm 121.4). They relish the fact that “God is not looking for people to work for him, so much as he is looking for people who will let him work for them” (John Piper, Desiring God, 171). They are thrilled to hang out their help-wanted sign and cast their anxieties on the Lord. They believe, and glorify God in believing prayer.
John Calvin: “Here are two lessons to derive from this narrative: when the disciples of Christ hear that their enemies are pressing hard and threateningly upon them, being touched with fear they fly to seek help at the hands of God; yet further, they are not dismayed and do not collapse into such terror as might divert them from their duty, but through prayer to God they seek after a constancy that will not be overthrown” (123).
If we are not a praying people, then do we believe that God is almighty over all?
2. We Glorify God In Biblical Prayer (Acts 4.25-26)
This church recognizes that the cause of the Gospel is threatened. The kings of earth insist that Jesus not be preached. And since this matter is addressed directly in Psalm 2, they pray the promise of God back to him. Psalm 2 guarantees God’s exaltation of his Son, and God’s propagation of his rule. So they pray Psalm 2: “they ask nothing but what God has promised to perform” (Calvin, 124).
Beloved of the Lord, your Father in heaven gives you “precious and great promises,” in the his holy word, and this “golden fruit is plucked by the hand of prayer” (Bounds, 153).
Let us mine the promises of Scripture and hold these treasures of gold and precious stones before the face of God in prayer, that he would be honored in responding to his word.
3. We Glorify God In Submissive Prayer (Acts 4.27-28)
The Westminster Catechism asks: “What are the decrees of God?” The answer is: “The decrees of God are his eternal plan, based on the purpose of his will, by which, for his own glory, he has foreordained everything that happens.”
We have great sympathy on those suffering in Iowa as a result of the spring flooding. Without diminishing in any way their troubles, was it not an apt illustration of the weakness of mankind that with thousands of volunteers and tens of thousands of sandbags, we could not stop the rising waters? In the end, everyone submitted to their power. The church prays along those lines: whatever your hand and plan predestines, Lord, will come to pass.
King Nebuchadnezzar finally understood that: “I blessed the Most High, and praised and honored him who lives forever, for his dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation; all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, ‘What have you done?’” (Daniel 4.34-35).
We cannot stay the hand of God; but how will we react to it? Some are angry; they fight and rage; they “kick against the goads,” (as Jesus describes Paul’s attitude before his conversion). A goad was a long, pointed pole used to force oxen to go the direction desired by the owner. Paul went, because God foreordains everything that comes to pass; but it was hard on him. Herod and Pilate and the Gentiles and Jews fulfilled God’s plan, but not with joy in believing.
When you stand in the ocean, large waves slam against your body and move you. No one holds back the ocean. What the church of Acts 4 is doing (if I may use an inadequate illustration) is more like body surfing. They are running with the waves, placing themselves in the path and power of the almighty. We see this in the utter lack of complaint in their prayers. They are not whining over the threat of persecution; they are not crying and pleading for protection; they are not loudly demanding health and wealth. They are praying, “Not my will, but yours, be done.” Submissive prayer glorifies God.
4. We Glorify God In Kingdom Prayer (Acts 4.29-30)
This is amazing! Boldness and miracles? The very things that got them in trouble yesterday, they want more of? Are they mad?
John Calvin: “When one miracle had caused such anger among their enemies, how is it that they desire to see fresh miracles performed daily? They regard the glory of God as of such account that they regard everything else as of little consequence. They are conscious only that through miracles the power of God is displayed. So miracles are always to be desired by the godly although their adversaries may burst forth and the whole of hell break out in fury. They same is true of boldness in speaking…. Therefore, the more we are aware of being helped by the Lord, we should learn to ask for still greater progress” (127).
There is clearly place for prayer for our daily needs. No hurt or fear is too small to carry to your loving Father. But if our prayers never reach beyond the cares and concerns of our own sphere of need, then our hearts will shrivel and our hopes will fail. Our needs are not grand enough for the greatness of God’s grace. Our concerns are not vast enough to view the power of God.
John Piper, Let the Nation’s Be Glad, 62-63: “The missionary purpose of God is as invincible as the fact that he is God. He will achieve this purpose by creating white-hot worshipers from every people, tongue, tribe and nation. And he will be engaged to do it through prayer…. Prayer is God’s instrument to release the power of the gospel.”
I so long for us to devote ourselves to prayer for the advancement of the kingdom.
5. We Glorify God In Answered Prayer (Acts 4.31)
Why does God make the spread of the gospel depend on our work? Why must the church labor to preach Christ in word and deed? Why not simply have the Holy Spirit convert the elect and bring in the kingdom?
John 15.16: “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you.”
We have a great commission, a call from God to make disciples by evangelizing and teaching, so that we will pray and God will be glorified in answering.
E. M. Bounds, The Reality of Prayer: “The whole force of Bible statement is to increase our faith in the doctrine that prayer affects God and secures favors from God which can be secured in no other way, and which will not be bestowed by God if we do not pray. The whole canon of Bible teaching is to illustrate the great truth that God hears and answers prayer. Our one great business is prayer.”
Will we pray?
6. Conclusion
One of the means God has used in the past is the “Concert of Prayer.” These are special services of prayer. Every quarter, one month has five Sundays. It is my hope that we, as a congregation, might schedule four (one per quarter) Concerts of Prayer each year. It is not much, but it is a start.
From Piper, Desiring God]: J. Edwin Orr tells what began, “On 1st July, 1857, Jeremiah Lanphier took up an appointment as a City Missionary in downtown New York for a church that was dying. He was to visit people in the neighborhood to enlisting church attendance. He decided to pray. He printed up flyers:
HOW OFTEN SHALL WE PRAY? As often as the language of prayer is in my heart; as often as I see my need of help; as often as I feel the power of temptation; as often as I am made sensible of any spiritual declension or feel the aggression of a worldly spirit. In prayer we leave the business of time for that of eternity, and intercourse with men for intercourse with God. A day Prayer Meeting is held every Wednesday, from 12 to 1 o’clock, in the Consistory building in the rear of the North Dutch Church…. This meeting is intended to give merchants, mechanics, clerks, strangers, and businessmen generally an opportunity to stop and call upon God amid the perplexities incident to their respective avocations. It will continue for one hour; but it is also designed for those who may find it inconvenient to remain more than five or ten minutes, as well as for those who can spare the whole hour.
At noon, 23rd September, 1857 the door opened and Lanphier took his seat to await the response to his invitation.... Five minutes went by. No one appeared. The missionary paced the room in a conflict of fear and faith. Ten minutes elapsed. Still no one came. Fifteen minutes passed. Lanphier was yet alone. Twenty minutes; twenty-five; thirty; and then at 12:30 a step was heard on the stairs, and the first person appeared, then another, and another and another, until six people were present and the prayer meeting began. On the following Wednesday . . . there were forty intercessors.
Thus in the first week of October 1857, it was decided to hold a meeting daily instead of weekly…. Within six months, ten thousand businessmen were gathering daily for prayer in New York, and within two years, a million converts were added to the American churches…. Undoubtedly the greatest revival in New York’s colorful history was sweeping the city, and it was of such an order to make the whole nation curious. There was no fanaticism, no hysteria, simply an incredible movement of the people to pray. And the joy of Jeremiah Lanphier was very great. ‘Ask and you will receive, that your joy may be full.’”
