Join us as we read the scriptures and a daily devotion written by Don Crisp. We pray these messages will bless us all at this time.
Friday 18 September: Acts chapter 4:24-31:
Categories: Don’s Daily Devotions
Friday 18 September: Acts chapter 4:24-31:
V24: How will the believers respond in the face of the authorities’ threats? ( How would we have done? ) They come straight to prayer, acknowledging God’s sovereignty in creation…
V25-26: … and from the OT recognising how He has foretold and purposed all that is happening now, to which they apply the words of Psalm 2:1-2 These verses were fulfilled in the rejection of God’s Anointed Christ…
V27-28: …and in the ruling authorities of both Jews and Gentiles, Herod and Pilate, but representing how Jew and Gentile alike have set themselves against God and His Christ. Yet they have done nothing that God has not planned and purposed. In it all His sovereign will is being worked out.
V29: And in response to the threat they face, the early church prays not for safety or deliverance, but for a Holy boldness to speak God’s Word without fear or favour. Would this have been our response? Please God it would be – indeed, if things get even harder for believers in coming days, that it will be!
V30-31: So, they pray that God will continue to glorify His Name, and His Son, in further works of power – not for their own sake, but in demonstration that the gospel claims of and about the Lord Jesus are true. God’s response is immediate, in a further manifestation of His presence and power, and a renewed experience of the fullness of the Holy Spirit. He is indeed given to believers once for all, but how we need surely to know such times of renewal, by the grace of God. And they go out and speak God’s Word boldly. May we know this same uncompromising boldness in our own day.