Category: Devotions

No need.
Acts 4: 34 that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales

Slow this verse down, read it carefully and ask how does the Church get to this place? It has to be each person decides that others are more important.
At the age of 20 in 336 BC, Alexander the Great inherited his father’s throne of Macedon in Greece. Two years later he was conquering the world. When he died at the age of 33 he had conquered almost all the known ancient world.
One day Alexander and a small company of soldiers approached a strongly defended, walled city. Alexander stood outside the walls. He raised his voice, demanding to see the king. The king, approaching the battlements above the invading army, agreed to hear Alexander demands.
“Surrender to me immediately” commanded Alexander
The king laughed, “Why would I surrender to you?” he asked. He was no threat to the king.
Alexander was ready to answer the challenge. He ordered his men to line up in single file. They were then ordered to start marching. They were marching straight towards a cliff that overlooked rocks hundreds of feet below. The king and his soldiers watched in shock and disbelief. One by one, Alexander’s soldiers marched without hesitation right off the cliff to their deaths. After ten had died, Alexander ordered the rest of his men to stop and return to his side.
The king and his soldiers surrendered on the spot to Alexander the Great.

Oh that we can take away all hesitation to the holding on of our rights, possessions, money and status.

On the 3rd day of her fasting and praying esther went out to die.
Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego went out to be burned to death.
Daniel went out to be eaten alive by lions.

If you stand for Jesus you may lose your life, promotion, friends, family, neighbours. That’s the threat. That’s the possibility. But others are more important.

Grace and Power
Acts 4: 33 “With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all.”

Grace is loving-kindness and favour.
Grace makes you become all that you can become. Grace releases the potential in the person.
“Treat a man as he appears to be and you make him worse. But treat a man as if he already were what he potentially could be, and you make him what he should be.” Goethe.
God doesn’t love us, speak to us, touch our lives, listen to us as we are right now, but according to our potential. As He does that and as we embrace this grace we become what we should be.

What is the worst thing that you have ever done or made plans to do?
How do you recover from that?
When the sin and shame is such that you cannot sweep it under the carpet as in days gone by? Is it over?
Have you lost so much that you might as well quit life altogether? These are real feelings.
But it is NO, for it is at that time that grace steps in.
A grace that is unfair, that seems unjust, a grace that feels like pretence, a cover-up and worst still a grace that would make it look like the bad thing was worthwhile because it turned out so good.

We need great power. When there is no way God will make a way. Through success and failure, a number of options to no options, ill health, redundancy, divorce, heartache after heartache, God will bring you through. But this power is also influence.
The world believes in the power of influence.
It is simply not true that if the cause is good enough, people will automatically buy into it and follow accordingly. People follow people of influence who promote worthwhile causes.
We need the Holy Spirit to so permeate our lives that we become people of influence.
So the prayer is indeed “more grace and more power Lord!”

Community
Acts 4:32 “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.”
This passage is one of the most incredible passages from the New Testament regarding community. They have all been filled with the Spirit again and the outworking was a united church body where no one was in need.
They were one in heart and mind
People are never convenient. If you wait till you feel like it, you will never have genuine fellowship, nor if you wait for things to be perfect. There can be a fantasy of what community should be like.
“He who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter … If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even when there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we keep complaining that everything is paltry and petty, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow.” Bonhoffer. a German pastor who was martyred for resisting the Nazis
no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own.
We have no claim to anything except we are a child of God, a servant to the King. We have no claim on anything we have or title we have gained. All that we have all that we possess belongs to Him. We do not own a penny. But He owns it all.
Plato, the Greek philosopher of the 4thc.BC saw his ideal republic as one devoid of all private ownership. The people reading this were aware of this theory. The description of Luke of the church would have brought an immediate response from the Gentile readers. What was an ideal is now a reality and it is found in the church. That is still true today. The ideals of the world for peace, happiness and love are a reality and they are found in Christ’s body, the church.

Shaken
Acts 4:31

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.

They didn’t pray for the threats to stop or that the threats may not be carried out. They prayed for the continuance of the very activity that produced the hostility in the first place.
Luke says the place was shaken. Maybe this was thunder or an earthquake
They were filled and they spoke the word of God boldly.
Sometimes we just need a shaking to take place. We become trapped maybe by fear or contained by doubt or just the weariness and the cynicism of life. We become settled into accepting the circumstance and we lose the cutting edge we once had. We can lose the sense of the supernatural ability of God. Making an effort will not change this position. A new year’s resolution of commitment will not change this position. Change will not happen without a shaking. There are times God allows for our world to shake. It might not be comfortable. We might not like the shaking but it is for our good.
During that shaking everything is coming loose again, the disturbance is freeing you mind body and spirit and you may lose some precious things and some things you are pleased to get rid of. But there is space for God to fill you again, for His presence to become real, active and important once more. He will give you something to talk about again. He will give you the confidence in the gospel message again. No longer will it be dry and a theory, but it will be a living message, a burning message that you just cannot stop speaking about.
He is sending you out shaken, filled and speaking. Amen!

‘Stretch your hands out’ prayer. Acts 4:30

“Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.”

4 words that are so powerful in the Bible, ‘Stretch out your hand’.
It might be that today you need to pray this simple prayer.
You might need figuratively for the earth to swallow the enemy that you are facing right now (Exodus 15:12) or for its authority to be reduced (Exodus 16:27).
You might need saving (Psalm 138:7)
Do not underestimate the hand of God, it has the ability to wipe away nations of people, (Exodus 9:15)
Even Satan knows the power of Gods hand, though he hadn’t anticipated Job’s resolve.

But maybe your prayer should be about agreeing to stretch out your own hand in faith? Maybe God is asking you to believe that His hand can cause your hand to do what may seem unlikely?
God told Moses to stretch out his hand seven times in the deliverance of His people.
To the man with a withered hand Jesus commands him to stretch out his hand for healing (Matthew 12:13)

Finally, maybe the stretching of your hand is not about miracles and your faith doing what cannot be done. But maybe it is about the surrender of your life? Maybe it is about giving to God everything, your very last breath even?
Prophesying how Peter will die, Jesus said he would stretch out his hands at the end of his life. (John 21:18)

So what will your prayer be?
Stretch out your hand.
Is that for God to move powerfully? Or for you to do something that you haven’t done before? Or is that to agree to the surrender of your life?
Whatever it is, the four words will be powerful when you pray and however you pray them.

‘More Lord’ Praying Acts 4:29

“Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness.”

Now, Lord …
How challenging these 2 important words are.
On its own ‘Now’ can be quite childish and immature, demanding, wanting, self-pitying.
I want it now!
But ‘Now, Lord’ is wanting and perhaps wanting in a fervent way but wanting it under the Lordship of Christ, under His rule.

The Church today may have prayed ‘Stop the persecution now’ or ‘God we can’t take anymore, look on us now’ and maybe we would be more spiritual by praying ‘Change their hearts, bring them to your knees’ (but in this scenario we would still be benefiting, a lot of our prayers are sadly for our benefit and not His). A ‘More Lord’ prayer is often prayed with a desire to have more of God. But there is new level of prayer which is higher and more glorifying to God still using the ‘More Lord’ words.

It is seen in how the early Church prays? “Now Lord, Help us to keep going, to keep speaking, but to be even more effective”. More Lord. No thought of themselves. This is praying the will of God.
Adjusting our praying is part of our discipleship journey.
Try a different prayer today.
Amen.

God was before it happened Acts 4: 28

“They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.”

The word power is what the Old Testament continually uses but as the ‘hand of God’. So many of the stories of the Bible have God’s hand being stretched out to change a circumstance, to make something happen. His hand moves according to what He has purposed before. He never does anything that does not comply to what His good and perfect will strategically planned beforehand. Sometimes His hand is moving forward, sometimes it is pulled away to allow an event to take place for His glory and sometimes patiently still, strengthening those within the event. But nevertheless His hand is there, His power is with us.
So now, whoever the enemy is, whoever is your Herod or Pilate, a person, a circumstance, an illness, it was decided beforehand. Not by some devil but by your God. Decided upon by His power and will.
Can you say this:
God allowed this and God will sustain me in it or He will move powerfully to change it. Can you say that today?
I’m not interested in any devil. My focus is on Him.
He is far more involved in my life than any devil.

Retelling in prayer Acts 4:27

“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.”

Picture this: you arrange to meet a friend over coffee to go over the whole story. You don’t leave anything out. This is a story of all stories of what people have done to you, what they have said, the abuse, the misrepresentation, the lies, the list goes on! You know this scenario well, because you do this often. You chew the cud. You mull it over. You go over it with a fine tooth comb. You get it off your chest. Sometimes we leave those coffee meetings better for receiving a listening ear or some wise counsel. Other times we leave worse for the retelling of the story.
Read the verse again.
The Church are praying and they are retelling the story to God. Does he not know? Has he not seen? Is this new news? Of course not!
There are times when we need to come into prayer and just go over what has happened, to just tell God the circumstance and what took place.
Prayer is not only for asking, it is for setting things in order, getting clarity of what has happened.
So go ahead re-tell the story and see what happens next.
Amen.

Never alone Acts 4:26

“The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his Anointed One.'”

The Church quoting Psalm 2 in prayer attribute the suffering of Peter and John as being what David experienced as the anointed one. And of course they see down David’s line seeing the Anointed One, God’s Christ, as being the one who the kings and rulers are against.

Friends, whatever you are facing this year it is comforting to know that there have been saints who have faced the same things as you and probably still are. This is not an unknown path you are going down. Even more comforting is that the Saviour has not just walked where you are walking but He is there now walking with you.

You don’t face anything alone. Whatever ruler or king is trying to control you. No matter what is against you. The Anointed One is with you. What gets thrown at you is thrown at Him. He takes the hits for you.

Confident prayer Acts 4:25

“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?”

So they align their earth with God’s outlook of His earth. They do this by bringing the Word of God positively into their prayer.
They use Psalm 2. A Psalm prophesying of the Messiah to come. Everyone knew the Psalm, they could quote a few verses and everyone would know what the whole of it said. How God is enthroned in heaven that He is High and exalted over the nations of the earth. That when the earth flexes its muscle at Him He laughs. That He has installed His King, King Jesus. That He has made King Jesus King over all and has given Him the nations of the earth as His inheritance, the ends of the earth as His possession. He ushers a warning on the earth that King Jesus rules.

When you are facing suffering and you pray this kind of prayer, how confident are you going to feel?! Try it today.