True prayer is top down. Rev. Joseph Wheat preaches on Acts 4:23-31 in chapel at RTS Jackson. I remember spending a lot of time in this chapel 25 years ago being instructed by professors and being a part of chapels. I spent a lot of time in this chapel praying alone, and even in the last four years, this is just a great place to come to. I’m sure you have lots to pray about, maybe before a test the chapel is filled with petitioners here. But it’s good to be here, and I really want to thank the seminary for the invitation to come and open God’s Word this morning. I’d like you to turn to Acts 4:23–31 (NIV):
On their release, Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priest and the elders had said to them. 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. 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? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his anointed one.’ 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. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.” 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.Let’s pray. We praise you King Jesus, for in your utter humility, unfathomable condescension, you came to earth at just the right time. You lived among us; you lived on our behalf. You died on the cross and took our punishment and you ascended into heaven. We praise you that even now you reign and rule at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty. Lord, would you, by the power of your Holy Spirit, open this word to us, to be able to raise our eyes to the reality of your kingship and what that means not only to us but to your ministry as you move your kingdom forward? We pray these things in Jesus’s name, Amen. I’ve learned over the years that leadership in God’s kingdom is a great privilege, and it’s a great joy. At different times that joy and that privilege is refreshed in my heart. But I’ve also learned that it is a great challenge and very difficult. We tend to celebrate leaders of growing churches. It’s probably because we love to see the kingdom come. We love to see what God is doing. We want to see more and more folks come to know the Lord. But sometimes it kind of feels like the quality of Christian leadership is determined by statistics. This passage would tell us that it is not. An older pastor, maybe in this chapel, I don’t remember, told a bunch of us seminary students some 20-something years ago, he said, “I’ll tell you something. There will come a time, if God put you in a place of leadership, that you will be greatly tested far beyond your ability. And it will be at that moment that we see what the man is made of.” He went on to describe how people in church history that we would want to emulate had all gone through incredible crises and great opposition and difficulty and sometimes persecution and how their trust in God and their patience and their endurance and coming through those things transformed them. They became more and more the leader that God wanted them to be. What do leaders do when there is significant opposition? And I promise you, brothers, there will be. What do leaders do when there is even persecution? In the beginning of Acts, a growing church in Jerusalem is only a part of the story. It’s a very important part of the story as the Holy Spirit comes down on the believers there in Acts 2. The church grows immediately to 3,000 people, maybe 3,000 men plus women and children. I don’t know. Not long after that, the church grows to 5,000. But it’s not the only story going on here. And it’s not the only story of the power of the Holy Spirit going on in these early chapters of Acts. You see there is persecution to this church that is growing so rapidly. We read Acts 2:42–47. It has become for many of us a thumbnail sketch of the beauty of what the leadership of the Holy Spirit looks like in a local church. They continued in the apostles’ doctrine, and they were filled with awe and wonder. They met in the Temple Courts to praise God. They met from house to house. They had all things in common. This is kind of the church you want to pastor one day: filled with a sense of God, filled with a sense of ministry, a love for the truth, a merciful church. They sold their possessions and goods and gave to anyone as they had need. Every day they broke bread in their homes, ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God, enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who are being saved. It’s a beautiful thing to read about the church just growing and the power of the Spirit and the beauty of what the gospel lived out in the church looks like. But I will tell you, opposition and persecution are growing exponentially as well as the church growing exponentially. Our adversary, the devil, does not like it when leaders are consecrated to God and they hold forth the truth in the context of the grace and love of God and real community and the reality of Jesus lived out among us is happening. He does not like that. He opposes that. There is great persecution going on at this time as well. In fact in this chapter, the apostles have been imprisoned. They’ve been hauled before the Sanhedrin. They have been released. They are told never to preach in the name of Jesus again. They courageously defy and say, “We’re going to preach in the name of Jesus,” in a wonderful text. But this is only the beginning of more persecution. In the next chapter, they’re going to be arrested again. It’s going to get violent. Then Stephen is stoned to death. There are all kinds of people running for their lives from Jerusalem to Damascus, and Saul of Tarsus, breathing murderous threats, is right after them. The mark of leadership isn’t just: is the church growing? But what do we do with the opposition as Christian leaders? [epq-quote align="align-left"]A great way to not have is to not pray and to not ask.[/epq-quote]What did they do? Well, it says here they went back to their church, their own. I love the word. The Greek word is “friends.” What a great way of thinking about your church. They went back to their friends. And what did they do? Well, I’ll tell you what they did. They had a massive strategy session, and they started whiteboarding, brainstorming, and reviewing their tactics to make sure that they were doing everything right. Is that what they did? Now, there’s nothing wrong with brainstorming sessions. That is not, however, what leaders do first when there is opposition. No, they took it to God. It says, “Together they raised their voices in prayer.” There is this instant desire. There is this kind of community. The apostles begin to lead in prayer, and the apostles’ prayer recorded here in Acts 4 is simply one of my favorite prayers recorded in the Bible. And when we read what they prayed that day, it challenges us to be men and women of prayer. It challenges us to see God in the way he should be seen and therefore see the issues at hand in the way that God would want for us to see them. Very important, this prayer. This prayer teaches us a couple of things about prayer. It teaches us that prayer is not just to God; it’s about God.
