THE ONE PRAYER THAT DISTURBS HELL
Acts 4:23-31
INTRODUCTION
A. HUMOR: A Baptist Dog
1. A Baptist preacher and his wife decided they needed a dog. Ever mindful of their congregation, they knew the dog must also be Baptist. They visited an expensive kennel and explained their needs to the manager, who assured them he had just the dog for them.
2. When the dog was produced, the manager began giving it commands. "Fetch the Bible," he commanded. The dog bounced to the bookshelf, scrutinized the books, located the Bible, and brought it to the manager.
3. The manager then said, "Find Psalms 23". The dog, showing marvelous dexterity with his paws, leafed thru the Bible, found the correct passage, and pointed to it with his paw.
4. Duly impressed, the preacher and his wife purchased the dog. That evening a group of parishioners came to visit. The preacher and his wife began to show off the dog, having him locate several Bible verses. The visitors were amazed.
5. Finally, one man asked "Can the dog do normal dog tricks too?" "Let's see" said the preacher. Pointing his finger at the dog, he commanded, "Heel!"
6. The dog immediately jumped up on a chair,
placed one paw on the preacher's forehead and began to howl. The preacher turned to his wife and exclaimed, "Good Heavens! We've bought a Pentecostal dog!"
B. TEXT: Acts 4:23-31
23On their release, Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and elders had said to them. 24When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God. "Sovereign Lord," they said, "you made the heaven and the earth and the sea, and everything in them. 25You 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? 26The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his Anointed One.’ 27Indeed 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. 28They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. 29Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. 30Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus."
31After 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.
C. THESIS
I. HELL DOES IT' S BEST TO PUT OUT AN ON-FIRE CHURCH
A. A CHURCH DOING SOMETHING RIGHT
1. When the church gets to the place where God begins to move there supernaturally, and uses its members outside of church to bring healing and deliverance, the devil is threatened.
2. This situation is similar to when Lazarus was raised from the dead by the Lord Jesus and the Pharisees and Sadducees were beside themselves with envy. They made an astute observation, "What are we accomplishing?" they asked. "Here is this man performing many miraculous signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him,(and then the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.)" Jn. 11:47-48.
3. The enemy knows he cannot allow that kind of power to go unstopped or it will have the catastrophic effect of destroying his kingdom.
B. SATAN’S RESPONSE
1. He had the apostles arrested, jailed, forbidden to continue their Christian activities, and threatened. The enemy will do everything within his power to discourage you from following God's will, especially in reaching people.
2. Satan has brought down many an "On-Fire Church" by: division, lethargy, lack of prayer or biblical preaching, focusing on the past instead of the present or future, depending upon the flesh instead of the Spirit, or allowing sin to go unrebuked.
3. The enemy has tried many times, and sometimes succeeded in dampening the fire right here; that’s not unusual, because I don’t know of a church that doesn’t need a heaven-sent revival. We must have fire in us or God will not entrust us with souls.
4. Charles Spurgeon once said, “To put new converts into most churches is like putting live chicks under a dead hen.”
II. A PRAYER THAT DISTURBED HELL
A. THEY WENT TO GOD
1. Charles Finney, great revivalist of the 1700s, told about a church where the fire had totally gone out…no one saved, and even worse, no one cared!
2. It was a dead church, and no one cared…except for one man, and it was not the pastor. It was a blacksmith. He was not much of a talker…he stuttered so badly it was painful to hear him speak.
3. But he had a heart for God, and wanted revival fire again. He was so burdened for the fire, that one day, he closed the doors of his shop, and went home and prayed the rest of the day.
4. The next day he approached the pastor. “I’ve been praying for revival, for God to rekindle the flames around here. Can we schedule some kind of a meeting, some kind of a revival.” The pastor grudgingly agreed, w/ a warning that no one would come.
5. They had the meeting and to the pastor’s surprise, the building was full! He stood up to preach as always, but he felt very different. The power of God was so strong in that place that everyone could feel it.
6. Dozens of people were saved that week…the fire was reignited. Why? It wasn’t methods or programs, activities or organizations. It wasn’t because they had a youth pastor, or a PowerPoint screen! It was because somebody prayed.
B. THEIR PRAYER: UNIFIED, LIFTED UP VOICES
1. They were earnest and unashamed. They didn't care what anybody thought.
2. There was a degree of desperation in their approaching God.
3. NOTHING IS BORN WITHOUT TRAVAIL. This is true in the natural world [childbirth], and also in the spiritual. When God is working and decisions are being made, you can mark it down and take it to the bank: somebody paid the price/travail in prayer!
4. HUMOR: Something better than nothing.
a. After service one Sunday morning, a young boy suddenly announced to his mother, "Mom, I've decided to become a minister when I grow up."
b. "Okay, but what made you decide that?"
c. "Well, I'm going to be in church anyway, so I figure it’ll be more fun to stand up and yell, than to sit down and listen."
5. Prayer brings change of some kind. I'd rather have a handful on fire than a house full that you could hang meat in!
C. THEIR REQUEST
1. “CONSIDER THEIR THREATS.” It is interesting that they did not request protection for themselves! Most of us would have been asking God to put angels around us, to calls the Romans to intervene, or be polishing our guns. But amazingly, there prayer was not selfish. Really, the only thing they requested was strength to bear the persecution!
2. "GRANT [US] BOLDNESS." (KJV). The Greek word "boldness" is made up of two words, "all" and "speech," but came to mean "freedom of speech, the absence of fear in speaking”, and hence, “confidence, courage, boldness", without any connection necessarily with speech. But amazingly, the early believers added an extra word, "All" in front of it. So their request was for “ALL BOLDNESS.”
Instead of allowing themselves to feel fear and trepidation, they asked God to make them even more bold and obedient than they had been before. They wanted boldness to speak God’s Word in every area: in declaring Christ 1) To the Jewish leaders, 2) To each other, 3) And even into their own lives, taking authority over their own strongholds and weaknesses, and declaring that they were what Jesus said they were in His Word.
3. "PERFORM MIRACULOUS SIGNS & WONDERS." Their daily prayer was “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth." To them, the Kingdom of God was the manifestation of His power and rule in this present age. When God is manifested, people will sense it, see it, feel it and realize that God is real and has a plan/purpose for their lives.
The largest part of Jesus' ministry had been healing the sick and casting out devils. They had seen the results and knew that Jesus had not changed; He was doing the same things after his ascension, through the Spirit, that He had been doing before. It was and is God's will for the miraculous to occur 1) To meet human need, 2) To glorify God, 3) To confirm God’s Word to unbelievers, and 4) To accomplish God’s purposes.
III. GOD’S ANSWER
A. "THE PLACE... WAS SHAKEN"
1. This "shaking" may have been an earthquake or have been a purely spiritual shockwave of the Spirit’s breakthrough into the natural realm. This same shockwave reverberated throughout the prison where Paul and Silas were held in Acts 16:26, causing the prison doors to open and their chains to fall off.
2. HUMOR. We could stand some shaking! One usher asked some kids, "And why is it necessary to be quiet in church?"A bright little girl replied, "Because people are sleeping."
3. When God's people cry out to Him, He arises to answer, and everything shakes; 2 Samuel 22:7-8. God’s shaking action is not finished (Mt. 24:29; Mk. 13:25; Lk. 21:26).
4. A final meaning of God's "shaking" is to get the bad out of us and the good into us. Job 38:13 says that God will "take the earth by its edges and shake the wicked out of it." When God shakes us up, He’s attempting to get wickedness out of us and the Holy Spirit into us!
B. "ALL FILLED WITH... HOLY SPIRIT"
1. The disciples had already been filled with the Holy Spirit a few days before, so why this refilling? Because one filling isn't enough; we leak! The Holy Spirit flows from us out to others, thus, we need many fillings, and should seek to be filled regularly (Eph. 5:18).
2. Jesus told the apostles, "But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you and you will be my witnesses" (Acts 1:8). The inflowing of the Holy Spirit was the answer for their need of power, both to be courageous when speaking the Word, and for the working of the miraculous as they tended to the needs of the sick and oppressed.
3. This is why it is so essential to be filled with the Holy Spirit because He gives us the power to do God's work. We need this same power today!
C. "SPOKE THE WORD... BOLDLY"
1. The confirmation they received from God by His shaking the place and filling them with the spirit gave them the divine validation and authorization to be afraid of no one, nor to doubt that they were in the center of God's will even if they died for the cause of Christ. It didn't matter if they upset their neighbors or local officials by their actions in spreading the gospel, they had a divine command to do what they were doing.
2. We need to have this same confidence and determination to be unafraid to cross cultural taboos and violate etiquette, taking the chance of offending people or being in violation of some ordinance in order to pass out Bibles, pray for people as God leads us, or to defend the rights of the oppressed we encounter.
3. Vance Havner: “Evangelism is to Christianity what veins are to our bodies. You can cut a true Christian anywhere and they will bleed evangelism.”
4. One denomination’s slogan is, “We major on evangelism.” Duh! That’s like a doctor saying he majors on healing…that’s our business!! The best remedy for a sick church is to put it on a soul-winning diet!
5. R.G. Lee, “God never intended for the church to be a refrigerator in which to preserve perishable piety…He intended it to be an incubator in which to hatch our converts.”
IV. THE EFFECT OF THIS PRAYER
A. THE BELIEVERS WERE UNIFIED(32)
B. THEY ABANDONED MATERIALISM(32)
C. THE APOSTLES TESTIFIED WITH POWER(33)
D. GREAT GRACE WAS UPON THEM(33)
CONCLUSION
A. ILLUSTRATION
1. James Bryant came out of a drunken home, where both his mother and his father were alcoholics. It wasn't long until he himself became an alcoholic. After he was married and a son was born, he tried to break away from alcohol in his own strength, but failed miserably.
2. A missionary persuaded him to attend a street meeting. James told the missionary of his utter helplessness and hopelessness.
3. The missionary replied with two Scriptures: "When we were with out strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly," and then added, "As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name." The missionary said, "These Scriptures are the key to your deliverance!"
4. Jim said to himself "If it is true, then there is a way out." At home he knelt in prayer, repeating those Scriptures, but nothing happened.
5. At three o'clock in the morning he began to get desperate and went down on his knees and repeated those verses and added, "Oh God, deliver me from this curse. Give me the power to become a child of God!"
6. James said, "In that very moment, God broke the power of canceled sin and set the prisoner free. It was instantaneous. I arose from my knees a new creature, born again by God's Holy Spirit."
7. That was one of those prayers that disturbs hell! What do you say we come up to these altars and disturb hell for awhile?
B. ALTAR CALL
1. Salvation
2. God shake this place! Fill us up! Give us boldness!
