Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through Acts 4, highlighting the early church's boldness in the face of opposition. He emphasizes that Peter and John, despite being threatened by the Sanhedrin, chose to obey God rather than man, proclaiming that salvation is found only in Jesus. The sermon encourages believers to stand firm in their faith, love others enough to share the gospel, and pray for boldness in their mission, even amidst challenges.
Welcome and Housekeeping
Thank you for listening to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Sermon Audio. For more information, please visit our website, pgbcronda.com, or visit on all social media platforms. Amen. Well, thank you, young people, for that.
I'm glad we can praise the Lord this morning for all of those things that was just mentioned in that song.
If you've got a young person who wants to be dismissed to Children's Church at this time, they can be dismissed. And if you have your Bibles, we're going to go to Acts chapter 4 this morning, Acts chapter 4, as we continue on in our study of the book of Acts.
I do want to remind you again, this Wednesday, we'll be having a combined service at Cool Springs Baptist. I'll be preaching there.
And if you're in the choir, our choir is going to be singing in place for them. And we're going to be doing two songs that we're very familiar with that we've done in the past in Christ alone and another song.
So if you're in the choir, please be there about 630 so we can practice that. And that'll be a wonderful time. Thank you, youth, again, for leading the service. Acts chapter 4.
We're going to read 31 verses today, so it's a longer passage of Scripture. So I'm not going to have you stand for that, but we're going to honor the reading of God's Word as we have the words on the screen as well. Acts chapter 4,
verses 1 through 31, and we'll jump right into the message today. The Bible says, While they were speaking to the people, the priest and the captain of the temple police and the Sadducees confronted them because they were annoyed that they were teaching the people and proclaiming Jesus the resurrection of the dead.
So they seized them and took them into custody until the next day, since it was already evening.
But many of those who heard believed, and the number of men came to about 5,000 men. The next day the rulers and elders and scribes assembled in Jerusalem, and Ananias the high priest, and Caiaphas, John, Alexander, and all the members of the high priestly family.
And after they had Peter and John standing before them, they began to question them, By what power and what name have you done this?
And Peter was filled with the Holy Spirit, and he said to them, Rulers of the people and elders, if we are being examined today about a good deed to a disabled man, by what means was he was healed?
Let it be known to all of you and all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified and who God raised from the dead, by his name this man is standing before you healthy.
The Cornerstone of Salvation
This Jesus is the stone rejected by the builders, which has become the cornerstone.
There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to people by which we must be saved. When they observed the boldness of Peter and John and realized that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were amazed and recognized that they had been with Jesus.
And since they saw this man that had been healed standing with them, they had nothing to say in opposition. After they ordered them to leave the Sanhedrin and conferred among themselves, saying, What should we do with these men? For an obvious sign has been done through them,
clear to everyone living in Jerusalem that we cannot deny it, but so that this does not spread any further among the people, let's threaten them against speaking to anyone else in this name again.
So they called for them and ordered them not to speak or teach in the name of Jesus.
And Peter and John answered them, Whether it is right in the sight of God for us to listen to you rather than God, you decide, for we are unable to stop speaking about what we have seen and heard. After threatening them further, they released them.
They found no way to punish them because the people were all giving glory to God over what had been done. For this sign of healing had been performed on a man over 40 years old.
They were released and they went their own way and reported everything that the chief priests and 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 and 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 these Gentiles rage and the people plot futile things? The kings of the earth take their stand on the rulers assembled together against the Lord and against his Messiah.
For in fact, the city, both Herod and Pontius Pilate and 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 them your servants that may speak your word with all boldness.
And while you stretched out your hand for healing and the signs and wonders were performed through the name of your holy servant, Jesus. And when they had prayed, the place where they assembled was shaken and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak the word of God boldly.
Prayer for Boldness
Let us pray. Lord, we love you. God, we're so thankful for this story this morning, this first church, this gathering with boldness, this gathering with power, this gathering unashamed of your word.
I pray that this would be an example for us. I pray that we would take this miracle, these things that happened and that we would apply it to our hearts, that we would leave energized, that we would leave emboldened by your spirit this morning. We thank you for what you've done.
In your name we pray. Amen. Amen. And this is the point in the story of Acts where everything so far had been going really, really good. The church was starting.
Jesus had given this command, this mission. People were preaching. Peter was preaching. And thousands upon thousands were coming to know Jesus. But in this moment in chapter four, we begin to see the face of opposition against the church.
The church had a moment in this instance of this time in history where they had to make a decision.
What were they going to do when opposition came? Were they going to respond the right way or the wrong way? And of course, we know the end of the story. But I want to give another illustration as we start about boldness that happens. And this is a recent story.
It happened in February of 2015. I want you to see this picture. The world was shaken by a horrific event. The video was released and you can see the video. I'm not going to show it this morning. But 21 Christian men, most of them were Egyptian,
knelt on a Liberian beach, dressed in orange jumpsuits, and the ISIS militants standing behind them. And you can see it in the picture. They were dressed and these men had been kidnapped because of one simple reason.
They had faith in Jesus Christ. The terrorists demanded that they renounce Jesus and renounce Christ.
And one by one, they refused. Each and every one, their last words were this, Yah, Rabbi, Yahshua, which interpreted, Oh, my Lord Jesus.
And when they said that one by one, they executed them by cutting their heads off.
What many doesn't know or don't know until after the fact was there was one man in this picture in this lineup. This man was not a Christian. This man was not even Egyptian. He was an outsider from Chad that was just part of this construction team.
Not a believer when he was captured, yet as he witnessed unwavering faith of each of these men, he was moved. And when the terrorists demanded that he renounce Christ,
he made a decision that would cost him his life. He looked at the man that was standing behind them and he said this, Their God is my God.
Why would someone choose to face death and choose to believe?
The boldness of Christ that we see in this story and in the story that I just gave is contagious. Seeing faithfulness, seeing real faith,
seeing even in the midst of suffering, in the midst of heartaches, in the midst of all types of distress that we can imagine, it moves our heart and it moves our mind to get closer to Christ. And this is what we begin to see in Acts chapter four.
Peter and John are arrested for preaching. They stand before the most powerful religious leaders of their day.
They are threatened. They're commanded to stop. And yet they stand boldly and proclaim the gospel. And just like those Egyptian Christians, their faith inspired others. The church grows stronger. It did not grow weaker. It continued to multiply. And thousands upon thousands began to grow in their faith in Jesus.
If our faith were put to the test this morning, church, would we be as bold as those Egyptians?
This is not some story that was pulled out of the 1800s or the 1500s or even the very beginning of the church.
This was in the 2000s, in 2015, where these Egyptian men stood before their accusers and they lived the point of their life to the point where they said, I'm going to point to Christ no matter what, no matter the difficulty, no matter the situations that happen in my life.
In today's passage, we begin to see the church in the face of opposition, what begins to happen?
The early church not only grew in numbers, but they began to grow in boldness. They began to step out by faith. They began to step out and do things that ultimately would grow the church larger than it ever thought would be possible.
Standing Firm in Faith
They faced external opposition and internal challenges, and yet that did not push them to shrink back.
I believe ultimately as we look through this, the key thought is that when we stand firm in our faith, the Lord blesses even when the world pushes back against us. We will always face opposition.
There will always be someone that stands against you that says what you're saying is wrong, and I believe I'm right.
There's always going to be someone with a different opinion, a different attitude, a different philosophy. But what we must understand is in our life and in our Christianity, in our own personal Christianity, is you have to ask yourself, are you going to be bold like the apostles in this story?
As we jump into the passage this morning, it is a lengthier passage, and I've tried to condense it a little bit. We're going to break it into five ultimate points.
The first one, as we see, is the interruption that happens. It says while they were speaking to the people,
it would be like me up here preaching, and while I was preaching, people came through the back doors, police officers came in, or the FBI came in, and they shut the service down. They came up on stage, and they began accusing and attacking me to my face here in this auditorium.
The interruption happens, and ultimately we see truth when truth confronts power.
Peter and John were preaching about Jesus and the resurrection, and the Sadducees were disturbed, and they were mad, and they wanted them to deny Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus. You see, opposition often arises when the gospel challenges people's beliefs.
They challenge their traditions, or they challenge their power. When the gospel begins to change how we fundamentally live our lives, it begins to allow us to push back.
I have a small podcast that we run, and we talk about the freedom that God gives us, and I sort of share my story of my background, of the legalism that I grew up in, and I share some
of the history of my life, and how going through church, and going through things, and how when I really begin to discover my faith for myself,
okay, you get this moment in your life where these things come in, and they just don't jive with what you've been told with your whole life, and a couple of things happen.
You're gonna push back and deny it, or you're gonna allow it to change who you are, and this is what we begin to see here. When opposition came, despite the arrest,
the Bible says that 5,000 men, this is not counting women and children, believed and grew in the church.
Imagine a business built on deception, and all of a sudden, someone exposes the truth of that business that was built on deception.
The owners will do everything they can to silence those people around them, and this is what's happening here. The religious leaders were trying to suppress the truth of the gospel.
They were trying to suppress because people were leaving what they were doing and coming to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and coming to this new organization, the church, and they were trying to maintain their authority,
and so they came in, and they were gonna show their power, and they interrupted the church, and they interrupted this message, all to prove that they were more powerful. And oftentimes in our life, as we begin to see this, we begin to see that we face resistance,
maybe not because of something that we did wrong, but because people resist truth.
Responding to Cultural Challenges
And we have to ask ourselves, how are we going to respond? How are we going to handle opposition opposition when we share Christ, and we share the gospel in today's culture?
Today is a difficult thing, and I dare to say that it's just as difficult today to share the gospel as it was 50 years ago. It's probably just as difficult to share the gospel today as it was even maybe 150 years ago.
I would say, and you may differ on me this, but I believe it's easier to share the gospel today than it is any time else in human history. We have the opportunity with cell phones and social media and the internet where we can share with the comfort of our own home.
We can share when the Lord does something great for us just by sending a message out on Facebook or Instagram or X or Twitter, whatever it is, and we can share the goodness of God
without ever having to leave the comfort of our house.
You see, if Peter and John and Paul and the apostles wanted to share the goodness of God, they would have to leave their house. They would have to go somewhere to the central square, to the town square, and share what was going on in their life. They would face immediate opposition.
Sometimes the worst we get is someone begins to be a keyboard warrior and begins to fight with us on the internet. And so I believe that we have the easiest opportunity to share the gospel in today's society because we have so many avenues to share it.
And yet oftentimes we recoil back because we're afraid of what someone may say, think, or do against us. But what happens after the interruption? We begin to see in verses five through 12, the boldness began to be unleashed.
They were fearless in their faith. They were bold and they were fearless. They were so greatly empowered that they said that the next day, Peter and John stood before the Sanhedrin.
This would have been the most powerful Jewish council. This would have been the same people who condemned Jesus to death. This same council was only six or eight months later and after Jesus had just been crucified.
The same council that came before them was the same one that came before Jesus. You better believe that Peter remembered him standing in the courtyard and cursing Jesus. Peter standing there knowing that I rejected Jesus in that moment.
John standing there with him knowing that I forsook Jesus in the garden and yet I still came back to the cross and this same council was standing there. And in that moment, I'm sure that the overwhelming emotions would have came up.
Maybe they would have even began to think, are they gonna do the same thing to me that they did to Jesus? A false trial,
a sham trial and they're gonna bring me for the people and what are the people gonna say? And in this moment, you must understand that this was bigger than just standing up, knowing the end of the story, right? We know what's gonna happen.
We know that they did not know the end of the story by them standing up in this moment. They were literally standing up in opposition of the religious leaders
and saying, I'm ready to die for Jesus. And yet they didn't back down. Why didn't they back down? I believe there's three reasons why they didn't. Verse 10 lays out the reality of the resurrection. Peter and John were bold because they knew that Jesus was alive. They knew that Jesus had lived.
People will only stand for the truth when they know it's true. Last year, I shared the illustration of the disciples and I compared the disciples to Nixon and the Watergate scandal. 12 men, both in the same area here. 12 men were for Nixon.
12 men were for Jesus. And the 12 men that were for Jesus went to their death defending that Jesus rose from the dead. The 12 men that were with Nixon, and within 12 hours, I believe, if I remember the story correctly, all came forward and said, yeah, we were wrong.
Yeah, we did some things wrong. They were not willing to die for that because they knew that it was false and what they were doing was wrong.
When we have the reality of the resurrection and we understand that it's not just a doctrine, but it's the foundation of what we believe, and it's the foundation for our courage that we believe that Jesus conquered death,
church, what do we have to fear? What is out there that's going to come against us that is not more powerful than the person that overcomes death? It's the person that overcomes all of our suffering, all of our shame. Jesus stands before us and he says, I have overcome it all.
And we began to see the reality that the resurrection gives us boldness and gives us power to stand for what is right. But in verse nine, we see the love for their neighbor.
We began to see as they looked out and they said, we're going to be an example to the ones that did good deeds. And they began to show the love and the care for this crippled man. And the boldness isn't about proving a point.
And oftentimes in my younger days, I was bold and I was bold to the way that I wanted to be right.
How many of us asked you, you want to be bold so that you're right? I can remember vividly, I was in fifth grade
and I became friends with the sort of a group of guys we eat lunch with. And as a good Baptist, I believe in baptism is a outward sign of our inward faith.
And I began to sit down with a guy of a different religion. I don't know exactly what denomination, I think it may be it was Methodist or Presbyterian or church, I think it was Church of God if I remember correctly. And he began coming and he began saying,
no, no, no, baptism is a way of salvation. And I remember sitting there, I'm like, no, no, this is not right. You're wrong. And so I went to one of the deacons in my church, his name is Melvin Deal, he just passed away.
And I said, Melvin, I said, I need all the ammunition that I can get to go after this guy. I got to prove he's wrong.
And so he began going through and I had, and the next day at lunch, I remember I sat down. I mean, I was ready. I had my notes out, I was ready to go. We sat down, I began the conversation.
He came at me, I came at him. And within moments, I mean, we're like yelling at each other in this lunch table. I'm right.
He's up and he's yelling at me. And he began standing up on the chair. And finally, one of the teachers came over and was like,
guys, what's going on? Took us out in the hallway and was like, you guys are going crazy. What is going on? And I'm like, well, I'm right. I'm a Baptist.
I believe this. And I began going at him. And the teacher looked at me, I'll never forget this. She said, you're making an example out of something that's so minuscule.
And you're beginning to look at everyone around you and they're looking at you in a way where you have no care for one another. And in my fifth grade mind, I began to sit back and just think,
do I even care about being right or do I just care about being bold and in that moment? And I began to think, where is our love?
Am I just here to mock this person? Am I just here to make him look bad? Or am I here to lift up Christ? And in that moment, as a fifth, sixth grade old boy, I began to change, even in that moment, my mindset of, I don't always have to be right.
Now, my wife will tell you that I think I always have to be right no matter what. But she has proved me wrong many, many times.
But my ultimate thought is, do we love people enough to tell them the truth even when it's unpopular? Do we love people enough to tell them the truth even when it's unpopular?
And then ultimately we see in verse 12, the exclusivity of the gospel. Peter begins to declare that salvation is found in no one else but Jesus Christ.
Now, you have to understand, this was an offense to them. Hmm, it's offensive today, and yet it's still true.
They would have looked and said, no, no, no, no, no, no. Listen, the Old Testament doesn't say anything about Jesus. It says that we've got to do all these things in order to get to heaven. We've got to make the sacrifices.
We've got to live right. We've got to eat by the right rules. We've got all these things that this is the way of salvation.
And it would have been unpopular and it would have been offensive for them to get up and say, the only way to God is through Jesus. And yet it's still true. Imagine for me a moment, there's a burden building
and there's one exit to this building. It's the only way out. It's the only way for salvation. The firefighter comes in and the firefighter goes, you know,
pick whichever way you want to get out. I'm not going to tell you which way to go. I don't want to hurt someone's feeling.
They may think that this way up here is really good, but ultimately they're going to go into a fiery pit. I don't want to tell them that going over here and going out to the basement where the fire started, I don't want to tell them not to go down there.
They may really want to go down there. No, the firefighter is going to get up and he's going to say, people, the only way for salvation is out the back door. Get there.
With urgency, he's going to tell them with all that he has to point them to the only way for them to get to safety. Not caring the people he's going to offend, not caring the people that he's going to make mad. He just wants to see them being saved.
You see, the world offers many different paths, but yet we have the only way. We must get up and we must proclaim Jesus as the only way.
And how often do we fail to boldly to care Christ and boldly show love and humility and show them that Christ is the one that died for their salvation. There is no other way, as Peter says,
to salvation, but through the name of Jesus. But then we begin to see the religious establishment begin to buck up. Verses 13 through 18, they made this statement. They were unqualified, but yet they were unstoppable.
The Sanhedrin was stunned by their boldness. They were stunned by the boldness of Peter and John, and they realized in verse 13, they were uneducated, ordinary men. And I'm here to tell you today, boldness doesn't come from some theological training that you have. Boldness doesn't come from some lecture that you sit under.
There's one reason and one reason only that boldness comes.
And this is at the end of verse 13. Why don't you read it with me? It says, they were amazed and recognized that they had three words, been with Jesus.
Boldness comes because we've been with Jesus. Boldness comes because we are so close to Jesus that the world cannot deny that there is something supernaturally different about us because we have been with Jesus.
Throughout all of human history, in the modern era of the church, we see church leader after church leader after church leader who made impacts, who were maybe not the most educated, maybe not even the ones that we would pick to be the right leader.
But yet as we look through history, D.L. Moody and even the songwriters of our day and even Billy Graham, who was just a young, uneducated man who lived just a couple of miles from here in Charlotte, who maybe didn't have a lot to him, began to
do some great things. My mind went to D.L. Moody. D.L.
Moody had a fifth grade education. He was not an educated man by any means. And the world in the historical documents said that he grabbed Europe and America with his right hand, his left hand, and he shook them for the glory of God.
And revival broke out on two different continents because of his preaching and because he was so consumed with Jesus that revival spread as crazy as it would be in that time.
I'm here to tell you, if you spend time with Jesus, he will equip you for whatever he's calling you in your life to do.
When we spend time with Jesus, it doesn't matter our ethnicity, it doesn't matter our age, it doesn't matter anything that we're doing as long as we are close to Jesus. As we begin to get closer and closer to him,
the boldness begins to happen more and more. I wrote down this one question even last night as I was meditating, what would happen if our church
became known as a people who had been with Jesus? What would happen if we went through the community and someone said, now what church you go to again?
Go to Pleasant Grove, right down the road there in Clingdon. Those people, they know Jesus.
I met so-and-so the other day. I can't explain what was going on in their life, but all I can say is Jesus transformed their life and there's nothing the world can say, there's nothing that this life can say, but the only thing I can say is something radically has changed with them.
The only thing I can think of is Jesus. And what would happen if people after people after people began to have this radical transformation where we were so in love with Jesus that everyone around us, everyone that came in contact with us had the same answer of who is this Jesus that you're talking about?
Who is this Jesus that is transforming these lives? Who is this man named Jesus who's giving you boldness to stand up in the face of opposition, to stand up when times are tough, to stand up when the world says there's no way of surviving this?
You're standing for Jesus and Jesus has given you that strength. Jesus has given you the power to press on. The religious establishment didn't understand it and now they turned to the only thing they could think of, the threats. They threatened Jesus
and when they threatened Jesus, they knew that he had a multitude of people following him. And the moment they threatened Jesus, what happened? All of his disciples left. And so they said, you know what? It worked one time. Let's do it again.
We're gonna threaten you. We're gonna tell you not to do these things. We're gonna tell you we're gonna lock you up. We're gonna tell you we're gonna do these things and we're gonna punish you and we're gonna do these things. And Peter and John responded with this statement.
We must obey God rather than man. Obedience over comfort.
They refused to compromise knowing that their obedience to God is more important than avoiding suffering.
It would have been really easy for them to say, okay, Sanhedrin, only give us one day to preach the gospel. We'll take that one day. We won't share in the streets. We won't go into these neighborhoods.
You want us to be confined to this area. Okay, we'll do that. We'll listen to you. Just don't hurt us. No, the church said, do what you wanna do.
Do what you're able to do, but we are unable to stop speaking about what we have seen and heard. We're gonna continue on.
We're gonna do what God's called us to do. No matter the opposition, no matter the pain, no matter the suffering that we're going to, we are going to continue on no matter what. My mind goes to a soldier who's following orders,
who stands at the front of the line. They were talking, Don was talking yesterday about Edward, how he was sitting there in between the North and South Korean.
He could see the North Korean army going up and down the line. If the commanding officer would have radioed to that command and said, hey, someone's breaching the line. We need you to arm up and we need you to go to that line. Edward and those men would have had no second thought.
They'd have grabbed their gun. They'd have grabbed what they needed and they would immediately took action. Not fearing for any of their own safety, but only to serve at the pleasure of the person that was commanding them. And we in the same way are soldiers of Christ. And Christ is our commanding officer.
And he tells us in Acts chapter one, go into all the world, preaching and teaching and telling others of Jesus, not worrying about what's going to happen to us, not worrying about the face of physical persecution, but only understanding that we are going to continue to tell others about Christ no matter what.
And we must get to that place where we are more,
we must get to a place where we are not more afraid of what people are saying and be more afraid of disobeying God. God has given us a command and he tells us to go in my name. It doesn't say go if you want to. He said, go in my name.
Make disciples, preaching and teaching to all those that are around us. And oftentimes, even myself included, we'll sometimes be more afraid of consequences,
more afraid of what people may say, think or do against us than obeying the almighty Jesus who came to this world and sacrificed his life for us so that we could have eternal life with him, not regarding his own safety, not regarding his own persecution that was going to happen to himself.
The threats came. They're going to continue to come.
The Church Under Attack
The church is going to always be under attack. Until Christ comes to take his church away, the church will always be under attack.
And that is why it is so important for us to take the examples of Peter and John and say, I'm going to do what's right in the sight of God. And if you want to do something against me, then by all means, do something against me. But I'm going to still follow Christ.
The threats will always be there for the church, which leads us to number five, the church, unshaken in its prayer. Peter and John returned
and they were released. And what did they do? They went to their own people. They went to the church and they said that they began to tell them all that had happened and all that were going on around them. And it was an example of how we should live our life.
And they said, we want you to know what's out there. We want you to know what's coming up. And maybe you signed up for this, not knowing that persecution was going to happen. Because up until now, there hadn't been persecution. Up until now, everything was great, right?
Thousands of people were coming to know Jesus. People were selling what they had and they were given to this church and they were like, man, this is a cool movement. I want to be a part of that.
And Peter and John came back and said, hey, I want to tell you, we almost lost our life today.
They came before us. They gave us threats. They told us to stop. They told us to deny Jesus. They told us to stop doing what we're doing in Jerusalem. We're here to tell you that it's going to happen. It's coming.
You need to be prepared for it. And what did the church say? The church responded with joyful gladness.
They raised their voices and they said, Master who made heaven and earth and sea and everything in them, you are the one that is greater than all these things. And they began to praise God and glorify God in all of these things. There's only one way this happens.
It's when trials and adversaries come against us, when circumstances come against us, we turn to Jesus and give him glory for everything that's been done because it goes back to verse 13, they had been with Jesus.
When we're with Jesus, it doesn't matter what the world does. As Paul says in his letter to the Philippians, it is, if I die and go to heaven, that's great, but if I stay here, that's even great as well because I get to continue preaching the gospel.
We must begin to ask ourselves, how are we living our life? And ultimately, they lay out three things because prayer is ultimate in everything they're doing. Prayer was rooted in God's attributes. They acknowledge God's sovereignty first.
They acknowledge that God is in control and they begin to, even in my mind, they begin to think back to Job. Blessed be the God of our salvation who gives and takes away. And who am I to raise my voice against God because he is the one who gives us grace.
Imagine a child for a moment facing a storm. The uncertainty of life, maybe the winds are blowing, the rains are crashing against the window and they wake up and they hear these things and they're scared at night and they run into the room and they grab dad and they say, dad, I'm scared. I don't know what's going on.
And the dad picks that kid up, puts him in his lap. And in that moment, the kid just has this overwhelming amount of peace that comes over them because they're connected to dad.
They know dad's going to take care of them. They know dad's going to, just going to fight off any enemy that comes. And even though dad can't do anything in that moment, the kid is safe in the father's arms. In church this morning, when we face difficulty,
who do we look to first for our problems? We're looking toward the world or the things of this world or we look into God and saying, God, you're my heavenly father. I can't take another step without you.
I can't go another moment without you. I need you in this moment. I need you to come in. I need you to work in my life.
Remembering God's power in the face of opposition will always bring us comfort because we know that he is the creator of everything that's ever been and everything that will ever be.
And he is the one that holds everything together. God's attributes, God's sovereignty should remind us and should encourage us even in our darkest moments.
But not only were they rooted in God's attributes, they were rooted in scripture. Verses 25 and 28 through 28, they began to quote Psalms chapter two. They began to quote a portion of scripture to understand the opposition that was coming at them.
Knowing that this was part of God's plan, they were reminded of scripture, they were reminded that someone else has been through this, that David has went through this in Psalms chapter two. This is no different than David.
This is no different than what we are going through as well. And so we must use this as an encouragement. We must use this as a way to grow our faith. Imagine with me an athlete who trains.
They use playbooks, they use different things to prepare them for the game that is at hand.
And then the game time comes. I'm coaching a little flag football right now and I give some incentives for my defense. If they get interceptions, I get them a milkshake from cookout. If they get a pick six, which is an interception to a touchdown, then I buy them a meal on Friday. And I give them encouragement.
I want to encourage them. And they ask me a practice coach. If I get an interception on this play, will you bring me a milkshake on Friday? And I'll say, is it game time?
No, but I think I can get it today. I said, I tell you what, if you practice it here, it'll happen on game day.
Because how you practice is how you perform when game time comes. You see, when we come in here today, when we come in to a Sunday school meeting with our wonderful teachers and we come into a preaching with, eh, it's not that great.
When we come in, we're encouraged by these young people that get up and sing. It's a moment of practice and prepare for when the moment and the game time comes.
We've prepared our hearts, we've prepared our minds, we've prepared our bodies for when this comes and the battle comes that we know Scripture and Scripture's gonna be there to help us.
And the more we align our prayers with Scripture and our hearts with God, we begin to be encouraged to know that He's in control.
I tell people often in the counseling room, take a passage of Scripture, meditate on it, pray through it, and just say, God, give me peace through this passage. Help me to understand this passage more because Scripture is there for our edification and our growth.
To not only was their prayer rooted in God's attributes, not only was it rooted in Scripture, but it was rooted in their mission over their comfort.
Prayer Amidst Persecution
They didn't pray for persecution to stop. Nowhere in this prayer did they say, God, we need you to take this away. The persecution's too much,
the Sadducees is too much, the Pharisees are overbearing on us, we don't have the freedom that we used to have, we don't have the things that we used to have, God, just take it away from us. No, they looked at it and they said, God, give us more boldness.
In the face of opposition, give me boldness to stand for truth, give me boldness to stand for righteousness,
give me boldness to encourage those that are around me. And it says at the end of verse 31, they begin to speak the word of God even more boldly than before because they were praying that God would fill them with a amount of boldness that was greater than this world has ever seen.
My mind went to missionary Jim Elliott. Jim Elliott, he knew the risks, he went into an African jungle to tell them about Jesus and when he went in to tell this uneducated group of people about Jesus, he lost his life. They killed him. They said, we don't want you coming over here.
We don't want you coming and telling us what these things of this Jesus person and so they took his life and he knew going into that mission that his life would be taken. He went with a group of people and these other group, all the men lost their life
and years later, it's recorded that Jim Elliott's wife and those other wives said,
we've got to go tell these people about Jesus that killed our husbands and so they boarded a plane, they boarded a boat and they went over to this African jungle and they began telling these people that killed their husbands,
hey, I know you did some things to my husband and we forgive you but will you turn and turn and repent to Jesus?
And it said that because of their faith and because of their boldness, even in the opposition that they knew was there, a church began there where Jim Elliott and his friends had died because of the boldness of their wives in the face of persecution.
You see, are we praying for boldness just as this church did? Are we saying, God,
give me boldness or are we like I often am and we're saying, God, remove these things from my life?
I don't know if I can handle it, God, take it away from me. Are we saying, God, give me boldness to stand for what is true? Give me boldness to stand for what is right. Do our prayers focus more on avoiding difficulty or fulfilling God's mission.
Invitation to Boldness
As Terry comes in place for our invitation, I want us to think, are we unshaken or are we unstoppable? Are we unshaken by what's going on
or are we going to be unstoppable as well and say, I don't care what happens, I don't care if things are easy, I don't care if things go the right way or the wrong way, I'm going to continue to grow because we grow when times are difficult.
Allison's been working on her benching lately and lifting more weights and she came home last night and she said, James, my shoulders are hurting. Oh, they're hurting so bad. Can you give me a massage? Can you help me out? And I'm like, okay, whatever.
So Birdie jumps up on her back and he's helping her out and he's beating her back and she's like, oh, it feels so good. But I understand when you lift weights, there has to be some tension that happens.
There has to be some opposition that happens in order for you to grow. And if we're never confronted with opposition, we'll never grow. If things are always easy, we'll always stay where things are easy because we like easy. But when things get tough, when times get hard,
when we begin to dig into what we believe and we begin to say, God, I know you're more faithful than my trials. I know you're more faithful than what I'm going to go through. I'm just going to trust in you. I'm going to stand up in the opposition.
I'm just going to proclaim your name bolder than I ever have. That's when we begin to grow in our faith.
They grew because they were bold in the face of opposition. Imagine with me for a moment that the church did these three things. The church of today stood firm in truth even when it was costly.
They said, this is what God has said. I'm going to proclaim what God has said. I don't care what it costs me. I don't care what they take away from me. I'm just going to stand and proclaim truth. Imagine if we began to love people enough to tell them about Jesus.
If we looked at them and we said, I love you too much not to tell you about this man named Jesus. I love you too much to not give you the cure for your sin.
And so I'm going to tell you I don't care what happens. I don't care what if you unfriend me on Facebook or if you disown me as a family. I've just got to tell you about this man named Jesus. Imagine church if we prayed with confidence in God's sovereignty.
If we prayed knowing and trusting that God is the maker of heaven and earth and he is the master of everything and everything that is within it and he is in control of everything.
No matter what happens no matter the difficulties that happen in our life we just trust in God.
Church, will we be a church that prays for this boldness even in the face of opposition. Let us pray. Lord, we love you. We thank you for what you've done. Lord, give us boldness.
Lord, give us the strength that we need when times are tough, when opposition comes, when trials hit our ways. Help us to trust in you more than we ever have.
Not revert back to the easy life but to push forward, to grow closer to you so that people would look at us and say they've been with Jesus.
help that be our prayer that people would say that about us this morning. We love you. We thank you for what you've done. In your name we pray. Amen.
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