Jesus 4 Everybody: A Movement of Prayer

One, it's in your bulletin. It's also going to be on the screen behind me, and we read God's word aloud together. So if you could find that with me. You ready?

After they were released, they went to their own people and reported everything the chief priests and the elders had said to them. When they heard this, they raised their voices together to God and said, "Master, you are the one who made the heaven, the earth, and the sea, and everything in them. You said through the Holy Spirit by the mouth of our father David, your servant, 'Why do the Gentiles rage and the peoples plot futile things? The kings of the earth take their stand, and the rulers assemble together against the Lord and his Messiah.' For in fact, in this city, both Herod and Pontius Pilate with the Gentiles and the people of Israel assembled together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed to do whatever your hand and your will had predestined to take place. And now, Lord, consider their threats and grant that your servants may speak your word with all boldness while you stretch out your hand for healing, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy spirit, Jesus." When they prayed, the place where they were assembled was shaken, and they were all filled with the holy spirit and began to speak the word of God boldly. — Acts 4:23-31

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

I want you to think about what we do when we are here on a Sunday morning. We read a passage that's from history. We read about historical circumstances. But what are we really doing? Is this a reenactment? Are we LARPing—live action role play?

You know, I had a friend in seminary whose younger brother was into civil war reenactment. He would travel around the region on weekends, dress up in a wool civil war union uniform, and spend the weekend on the ground in a tent in these elaborate reenactments of civil war battles. Is that what we're doing? Reenacting something that happened long ago?

Or are we reliving the glory days? I was in a fraternity in college and it was always annoying when it was alumni weekend because all these middle-aged balding guys would show up and want to party with the brothers, reliving the good old days. Is that what we're doing here? Are we reliving the good old days of the church?

What are we doing here? We study this summer the book of Acts, which is history, and yet it's neither one of those things. We're neither reenacting something that happened one time in the past that we're like, "That was amazing. Remember back then," nor are we reliving just the good old days of the church like those were the real times. Something else is going on.

The Holy Spirit in Acts

This summer we're looking through the book of Acts, and the reason we're doing this is we are looking particularly at the person and the work of the Holy Spirit—what he does, and not just what he did, but what he is doing now and here and today.

I want to remind you of this: this book was titled in many of your Bibles as "Acts of the Apostle," but that was not original to the Bible. That wasn't actually what was written down. This was Luke—Luke, the gospel writer—and this was just part two. That's what he called it. The title "Acts" was added in the second century, and that phrase "acts of the apostles" is not what Luke intended for this book. The apostles were never the main idea. This book is not about Peter and Paul. It's about the Holy Spirit.

In fact, he begins his book talking about, "In my former book, I talked about what Jesus did when he began to teach," and the inference is, this is what he's continuing to do after his death, after his resurrection. After Jesus is physically gone, this is what Jesus is continuing to do. The Spirit is the main character.

I want to remind you, we recite the Apostles' Creed regularly in our church. We say, "I believe in the Holy Spirit" or "the Holy Ghost." But I want to remind you: what do we actually believe about the Holy Spirit?

The Holy Spirit is not an "it." Sometimes when we think about the Holy Spirit, the word "spirit" or "ghost" makes it sound like it's something else—an it. The Holy Spirit in the Bible is always "he." It's always used with a pronoun that symbolizes personhood. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are not three different forms of the same thing.

You know, if you ever grew up and went to VBS, you may have heard this actually heretical teaching. They show you water and they say, "This is how God is like. God is like steam, and he's like ice cubes, and he's like liquid water. There are three modes of the same thing."

That's actually an ancient heresy called modalism. God is not three forms of the same thing. He is three persons. Three persons who share this unity of relationship with one another. God the Father who creates and sustains all things, who will bring everything to a close in the new heavens and new earth. Jesus, the Son, who died on the cross, came in human flesh, died on the cross, resurrected from the dead, now ascended up into heaven, sitting at God's right hand.

So, what's the Holy Spirit? Who is the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit does so many things. The Holy Spirit takes what Jesus did on the cross and applies that to the life of an individual person. The Holy Spirit is one who flips the light switch on in a person's life. This is called regeneration or new birth—makes a person go from spiritual death to spiritually alive so that person can say, "Oh, Jesus, I see now. He's for real, and I want Him."

The Holy Spirit is the permanent possession of every Christian. The moment of salvation, the Holy Spirit is poured out into your life, and nothing makes Him go away. He gifts, he convicts us of our sin on the inside, makes us feel guilty and bad when we do things. He convicts us of truth, he leads us in truth, he helps us discern what's truth from error. He gives gifts for ministry. He empowers people to do things they normally would not want to do. He encourages. He's the comforter. The Holy Spirit has this whole litany of things that he does in the lives of individual people and in the church.

That's what we're spending our summer looking at. And so it is: every person who's a Christian has the Spirit. One of the main job descriptions for every Christian is learning how to lay hold of and access and connect to and understand and communicate with and be empowered by the Holy Spirit. This is not automatic for us. It's skills we can learn. And so that's what we're doing this summer. We're learning about this.

Today's passage is about how you attach the plug into the socket. It's about how the gas gets to the engine. It's how the power of the Spirit is accessed in the life of a Christian, and that critical connection is through praying. I know prayer is really hard for many of us. I would guess if we took a poll this morning, anybody feel really good at praying? Most people would say, "No, I don't know what to do when I'm praying," and to be honest, most of us aren't that motivated to learn how to do it better. It's hard. It feels weird. It's like if you're right-handed learning to eat and write with your left hand, or if you're left-handed trying to do that with your right hand. It feels odd to us, but this is so important, and we actually miss out on things that the Bible communicates to us about prayer.

The Backstory

Now, here's the backstory to what we just read this morning. In chapter three, Peter and John are on their way to go to the temple to pray. And as they are walking down the road, there's a man who has no money and food, who's lame and disabled, and he's begging for help. They turn to him and engage him. They say, "We don't have any money, but in the name of Jesus, stand up and walk." And the man where he is stands up and walks.

The religious leaders hear about this and they are very unhappy about it because they say "in the name of Jesus, stand up and walk." The religious leaders had just executed Jesus. His name is a bad word. Nobody wants to hear anymore among the religious leaders about Jesus. So they bring Peter and John before them and they charge them explicitly: "You may not preach. Don't say anything more about this name." And Peter and John are like, "We can't obey you. We got to obey God." And they go back, and this is where this passage picks up. They go back among the early church where they're gathered in a room and they pray together.

You know, the book of Acts—28 chapters—it says 33 times that the people got together and prayed. And yet, this is the only time—what we just read this morning, what you just read out loud to me, what we read out loud together—is the only time we're told exactly what they prayed. And so I think this is really important for us to listen to. Luke, who's not shy about writing dialogue in this book, makes sure we know the content of those prayers. He wants us to know exactly what they prayed so that we can pattern ourselves after this, so we can emulate, understand, and practice what it means to take the plug and stick it in the wall, how the gas gets to the engine, how the people of God lay hold of the power of the Holy Spirit.

Now, here's how I'm going to frame our sermon this morning. Do you know what an accelerant is with a fire? An accelerant, like the name says, accelerates. It makes something go faster, right? So it makes a fire burn bigger, faster, and hotter. And so things that are accelerants are like gasoline, kerosene, diesel fuel.

You pour it on a fire and it makes it pop up. And I want to look at four accelerants with you in prayer and here's what they are: praying together, praying God's character, praying God's word, praying for boldness. Let's look at this together and how these accelerate.

The First Accelerant: Praying Together

The first one is praying together. Now, one of Luke's favorite words—and I'm thinking it's probably one of our favorite words too—it's all through his writing: the word together. We know what this is like. We don't like the word alone that much. Some of you like alone, and alone is good for an afternoon. Alone is good maybe for an evening or a weekend every once in a while, but dining alone? Anybody love regularly dining alone? No. I heard a comedian say recently: you see a middle-aged guy dining alone, traveling by yourself, and you're like, something's wrong with that guy, right? You see a middle-aged woman dining, traveling, and you're like, go. That's alright. Go for that. You're awesome, right?

Alone is not necessarily a good word. Robert Putnam in the nineties was cataloging the decline of American friendship by observing bowling leagues. He said bowling leagues used to be something super regular in America. Anybody here belong to a bowling league? We got one out of everybody in the room, okay. Bowling leagues used to be a regular American activity. They are no more. And his book, Bowling Alone, is about the increase of alone and the decline of together. He's like, this is what's happening for us.

So together is a good word, but we don't even use together the way Luke does. When he talks about together, he doesn't just mean, "Hey, I'm with Chris. We know each other. We're walking together." He means something way bigger, and the word in the Greek—okay, I'm going to give you a Greek word this morning so you sound smart, right?—it comes from two words. Homo means alike, one and the same. Thumos, which means temperament and emotion of mind, principle of life.

And here are all the things that he uses this word for in his writings: same emotion, same passion, same one persuasion, same desire, same mind, one accord, one purpose, one impulse, altogether, unanimously, unanimous consent, simultaneously as one. In other words, this is together on steroids, on the juice, right? This is really together. This is together in a way that—like when you've been on a sports team with somebody and you've really, really worked hard, that kind of together. You have walked through suffering with someone. You've been on a mission trip and you have bonded really hardcore. We have experiences of together. We don't have regular experiences of this kind of together. But Luke says this kind of together is an accelerant in prayer. They come together to pray.

Now, there is something that happens even in our church when we pray together. We have two weekly prayer meetings. I don't know if you know—we have a 5:30 a.m. Zoom call prayer meeting, 5:36 a.m. with Mount Pleasant on Wednesday mornings. We have an 8:30 to 9 prayer meeting downstairs in the Youth Room every Sunday at Mount Pleasant. And we come together, and I want to just testify this morning about me, okay? I'm not talking about everybody else who shows up, but I regularly show up grumpy. I regularly show up discouraged. I regularly show up disheartened. I regularly show up self-focused. Maybe it's just me. But I show up at that meeting and something happens.

There's nothing magical about those meetings. I mean, you all know Zoom calls. It is not exciting to be on a Zoom call at 5:30 in the morning. I'm barely awake. And yet I walk away from that time together in prayer different every time. And I can tell you, I walk in and I have all those feelings, and when I'm with other people, this is what happens: I'm buoyed up. I'm lifted up by other people's faith. I'm reminded of what's true. I hear people say things and I'm like, oh my word, yes. Actually, yes. That's real. And I'm reminded over and over again because I'm borrowing from my brothers and sisters' faith in ways that I'm weak. Something happens when we pray together.

Maybe you've ever been on a trampoline with somebody? You know how to double bounce someone? You double bounce. What happens to that other person? They go way up, right? You get a guy like me on the double bounce end of it. Your kid is going up really high. That's what happens when we pray together. Something happens when we're double bouncing, when we agree together.

You know, when you say the word amen, do you know what it means? It's not just like, "I now add a magic Hebrew word." It means, "May it be so." When we come together to pray, when you do this in your programs, I want you to start doing this. Would you just start talking?

You know, I'm sorry, a majority white church, we're really quiet when we pray. But like, if you go, when somebody else pray, yes. You know what that does when we pray together? It encourages. It's an accelerant. They're like, oh, you're with me right now. I thought I was all by myself out here praying. No, you're with me. When you say I'm in, may it be so, that's not a magic word. You're just saying, I'm with you. When we pray together, there is an accessing of the spirit that is a multiplier. It's an accelerant. It makes what's inside of us burn faster and hotter and bigger. Praying together.

Praying God's Character

Second, praying God's character. Notice how in this passage, they begin their praying. Now, I don't like the way that this begins because the translation for their opening word to God is master. But in Greek, that word is despotes which is where we get our word despot from. What it means is, mister in charge. That's how they begin their prayer. Mister in charge of the universe. That's how they're opening up their prayer to God.

Now, a lot of times when we get together to pray, we sort of think that we need to have lots of fancy words. We don't even talk that way. These guys are getting to the point. They are in trouble with the authorities. They have been arrested and brought up before the people who had just killed their rabbi Jesus. They are scared. And so what do they pray? Despot, mister in charge of the universe, that's who we're talking to this morning.

And I want to connect this to you. I want you to understand how important it is that how we think of and how we address God, how we address God's character in the way we pray. See, they say in here, God, you spoke, you decided, you predestined, you made it happen, and they're doing something in that.

Now, our church is what's called a reformed church, which means doesn't mean anything about recovering from alcoholism. That was a joke. When I went to seminary, first year in seminary, I didn't know why I was at a reformed seminary. I didn't know what that meant. And maybe y'all don't know what that is. What it means is this is a church that has a really big picture of God's power in salvation. God is sovereign and predestining and foreordaining and large and in charge. That's what we believe. We believe in a big, big God who's that in control of lots of things.

And I understand. Some of you are like, I don't know if I like that. It creates kind of a philosophical catch-22 for people to figure out like what if God is in control of all things, why would we even pray? Why are we asking God to do anything? If He is foreordained, everything has come to pass. If He has mapped it all out, why would I even ask? I'm so glad you asked that question this morning.

Because if you look at this passage, it works the opposite way for them. They're like, God, you are Mr. In charge, you are despot. Therefore, we pray. Therefore, we come together and pray. Instead of making them go like, oh, well, it's all mapped out, who cares? Blind fate. They're like, no. God is so big. God is so in charge. Of course, we're going to ask him to work. Of course, we're going to lay this before him. It works exactly the opposite. Rather than extinguishing their prayers, it's an accelerant. It fuels their prayers.

And this is what they're doing and I just want to make sure you get this. They are taking, they're connecting—I'm going to use this—the character of God to their hearts. They're connecting what they know of God's character to the weaknesses of their hearts in prayer.

Now, if you want to do a study on this, this is all over your Bible. I'm going give you three examples from the Psalms this morning and you can do the rest on your own. So, Psalm 139, David feels really alone. He feels abandoned. Some of us know what that's like. So, in prayer, he remembers, he connects. God is ever present. He is always here, the ever-present nature of God. It connects that to the weakness of his heart—feeling abandoned and alone. See, connect the terminals and what happens? Psalm 139, he suddenly talks himself into, wow, God is with me.

Let's try another one. When David is under attack, he's under assault. He's fearful. Literally, people are hunting him. In this one Psalm, he describes himself being in the crosshairs. People are shooting at him and he does this. He feels scared and he feels vulnerable. Anybody ever felt that way before? He takes, this is what he does. In prayer, he remembers, God sees everything. God is the righteous judge and I'm fearful and afraid but God is a refuge. See how he's connecting the terminals of his heart affections over here, where he is, to the character of who God is.

— Psalm 11

When David, he's been betrayed by someone really close to him. I mean, this doesn't hurt. It hurts.

You might know what it feels like to be betrayed by somebody close to you? Anybody here know what that feels like? And this is what he's completely overwhelmed. He's overcome with shock and grief and sadness and fear. And what does he do? Again, in prayer, he reminds himself: cast your burden on the Lord. God is on the throne. God is on the throne, so I can connect the wires of my heart weakness, my sense of betrayal to the character of God.

Cast your burden on the Lord — Psalm 55

This is what David does over and over again. In each of these situations, what are these people doing with scripture? They're taking the character of God and plugging it into their heart issues, their heart weaknesses. This is just like you do with jumper cables. You've got a car with a dead battery right here and you've got a car that's battery is good. You plug the little cable over here on the terminal and you put it on this one, and then lo and behold, you can crank up this engine off of this one.

Brothers and sisters, we need this so bad. We need to crank up our heart engines off of the character of God because our hearts are constantly in places of need and lack and fear and betrayal and all those things. This is one of the most important things that we see happening in this passage. The disciples have every reason to be afraid. They just watched these same people kill their rabbi. And they take the attributes of God and they heal their hearts by connecting them to their heart affections.

Praying God's Word

This is what we do in prayer. The third accelerant is praying God's word. This is really important. They connect their situation to the promises of scripture. In my Bible, some of what we just read from Acts chapter four is in bold font because it shows everything in bold to be a quote from somewhere back here in the Bible. They're quoting Psalm chapter two.

Why do the nations rage? Why do the peoples plot in vain? Why do the rulers of Earth raise up their fist against the Lord and his holy one? But the Lord is in his temple. The Lord in heaven laughs. He knows what is to come. — Psalm 2

They're quoting that because what they're doing is they're saying, our circumstances remind me of other circumstances in the Bible. And they go back and they pray the Bible. They go back and they pray scripture. They pray something from the past into their present.

This is a skill we can develop. The Bible is not magic words like incantations or spells where we read them and something magic happens. But in your situation, praying God's word is doing several things. It is cutting with the grain. It is going with the flow. It is going with the groove. You are in the zone when you do this. Here is why: because the Spirit wrote this book. We read in the New Testament that faithful people were carried along by the Spirit. That's how this stuff got written down. So when we read and pray God's word back to God, we're quoting his own lyrics to him. We're quoting back to him things that God himself said in prayer.

Let me give you eight ways, eight things to do to pray God's word.

Number one: Realize there's a direct connection between the degree to which our minds are shaped by scripture and the way our prayers are answered. Jesus said:

If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you will and it shall be done for you. — John 15:7

When you pray God's word, you're allowing his word to shape even what you ask for.

Number two: Remember, as D.M. McIntyre says, God answers petitions that he wrote himself. He answers the prayers that he wrote himself. First John says:

If we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. — 1 John 5:14

We're very confident when we pray God's word. We're standing. We know exactly what he thinks. We're asking him to do exactly what he says he would do.

Number three: When you pray God's word, take it and restate it in first person terms. Don't pray "God, pray you" because you're talking to God. Don't pray "Sovereign Lord, pray you, Father, you, Sovereign Lord. Father." Thank you that you are always good, that your love to me endures forever.

That's a paraphrase of First Chronicles 16:34, right? You take it and you personalize it. You change the pronoun so it fits like you're talking to Him, praying His word back to Him.

Number four, talk to God about passages you don't understand. You read something, and you're like, I'm going to pray this Psalm to God this morning, but I don't get it. You can ask God. You can say this to Him:

Lord, help me to understand. Your word says, "Whoever claims to live in him has walked as Jesus did." God, I don't know what to do with that. Please help me understand.

Number five, write it down. Now, this isn't something they did in Acts chapter four, so this is just a little Jeff Bradford throw-in. This isn't from the Bible, okay? But I find when I write it out, something happens in my heart. Just like when you study for a test and they make you take notes—you remember things differently than if you just try to remember what the professor said. You write it out.

Number six, ask God for what you need. "Lord, I do believe, help me with my unbelief."

Number seven, confess sin and ask God to change your life. "Father, I know that you hate pride and arrogance." That's from Proverbs. If you read Proverbs, I see the ugly face of pride in my life. "Help me, Father. Teach me today what it means to be compassionate and humble."

Pray, praise God with your paraphrase of the words of Scripture. "I know, Lord, that you are indescribably great. You're greater than all the gods of this world."

This is a discipline. But if you practice this, if in your daily reading of God's Word you take what you read and you write it out in first person terms, you even break it down into little sections and write out under each one what it makes you think of—you're learning to pray God's words back to Him. This is an accelerant that we see at work here. They're taking God's words and riffing them back to Him.

The Prayer for Boldness

The last accelerant is this: they pray for boldness. This is kind of profound. This baby church, these gathered Christians, were in a place of indescribable danger and risk. In prayer, though, they don't ask to be protected. Now, that doesn't mean it's wrong to pray for spiritual protection, but they connected with something greater. There was some greater thing going on that they really needed to pray for in that moment, and they prayed for boldness.

This is really helpful for us as a church because we're a little church in a little city, right? We're not a significant group of people. This isn't a powerful church. We're not running for public office that I know of or trying to move major things. We're just regular people with regular pressures. It's not wrong to pray for protection, but listen to what they do. They lean into the fear and they lean into the risk and they lean into the uncertainty, and they pray for God to do even more. They pray for boldness.

God answers this prayer. What happened in the community in Acts chapter four? The place where they were meeting—what does it say? It was shaken.

One of my professors used to say this. He talked about Pentecost being like an earthquake. Pentecost is this big moment where God pours out His Spirit, very obvious to all kinds of people outside the church. All these people come to faith. He's like, you know what we expect when we read the Bible? Not just, "Oh, that was a great story about an earthquake," but what happens so commonly after earthquakes all the time is aftershocks. He says, this is what we expect. The book of Acts prepares us not to say, "Well, God did something great back then." It's looking for His continued aftershocks in our lives today. Looking for what He continues to do.

One writer, John Chrysostom, said of this shaking: "There was a shaking of them that made them all the more unshakable."

As they prayed for boldness, we should be asking: How does God want to shake us in this place? What does God want to continue to do? Because remember, friends, it ain't over. This isn't one and done. This isn't a story of the past that God did one time—glad He did—now we're looking for what God by the Holy Spirit is continuing to do today through His church.

The Frog and Toad

Let me close with this. When our kids were growing up, we read them lots of the Frog and Toad books. You might know Frog and Toad, right? The story is about two friends. One day, Frog is out with his garden and Toad comes by and he's like, "I want a garden." So Frog gives Toad a pack of seeds, and Toad takes them home and plants them in the garden. The seeds don't do anything, and he gets really frustrated. So he talks to the seeds. And he talks to the seeds and he talks to the seeds. What happens? Nothing happens.

So he gets really frustrated and decides he's going to start yelling at the seeds. He yells and yells and yells—nothing happens. So he decides he's going to read stories to the seeds. He reads story after story—nothing happens. He plays music to the seeds, calling out, "Come on seeds, grow, grow!"—nothing happens. And finally, Toad, frustrated, falls asleep. He's awakened by his buddy Frog. Frog wakes him up and says, "Look, Toad, your garden is growing. You're now going to have a beautiful garden." And Toad says, "Yeah, you were right, Frog. It was very hard work."

Of course, the story is about what Toad did—he just sowed it and then nothing else. Brothers and sisters, when we pray, this is what the word entrusts to us: sowing. We can't make things happen. We are, by definition, weak and powerless, as much as we try to pretend that we are not. But God invites us, just like Toad in the story, to come sow seeds of prayer and then wait and see what he will do. We do this because God is the one who makes things grow. God is the one who speaks things into existence.

And God said... and it was so. — Genesis 1

Don't we read in the first chapter of Genesis where that refrain repeats? Over and over, God speaks things into existence. When we sow, we're tying ourselves into the power of the Holy Spirit and we're resting in that. We're asking the Spirit to do what only the Spirit can do—he makes dead things alive. People, circumstances, institutions—he's the one who brings about life out of death. He's the one who makes things grow, and we look to him.

A Call to Sow Seeds

Brothers and sisters, here's my call for you this morning: sow some seeds. Sow seeds in prayer. Come together in prayer together. The accelerant of praying together. The accelerant of calling on God's character and naming that to match your heart condition. The accelerant of praying God's word. And the accelerant, finally, of praying in boldness. We can plant the seeds. Only God can make them grow.

Let's go to him together. Father, we thank you for your word. There's nothing like your word. We pray that you would encourage us, Father, in what is unseen. What is unseen is hard for us. So much of our faith is what is unseen—the Spirit, your power, your work among us, even what your Spirit does through our prayers. Lord, we pray, Father, that you would grant us more faith today. Accelerate in us the work of the Spirit, Father, that we might participate in sowing seeds that you might grow your kingdom. We pray this all in Christ's name. Amen.

Let's stand and respond to God's word together in song.