Acts 12
Read: Acts 12
Here we see that James has already been killed by King Herod. For those who have read the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), it is clear that though Jesus had twelve apostles, there were three that he invested in to greater extent. These three men were Peter, James, and John. All of the apostles except for John were eventually martyred for their faith. James is the only one recorded in the New Testament, but other historical records document the rest. Clearly these men believed in this message or they wouldn’t have died for it.
A simple, yet difficult truth that we all need to come to grips with is that following Jesus is dangerous… In the west, we tend to think of hippy Jesus and expect God to serve us and save us from everything that is happening in our lives. God could do that, but he might not… Sometimes it is hard to trust God when we ask him to do something, and he does not answer in the way we would like. This sort of thinking does not take into account who this God is that we are praying to. There are over 7.5 billion people in the world today, and we want to boss around the God who rules over all of that? It is amazing that God even listens to our prayers! We are all dust and like insects to God, yet for some reason he cares for us. We need to approach God remembering what a privilege it is to have a relationship with such a being and not get so caught up in our circumstances that we blame God for not responding to our demands in the way we desire.
There are at least two things we can take away from this passage about prayer. First, we should pray with reverence and remember what an amazing being God is before we open our mouths. Secondly, we should pray with faith that God can do what we are asking him to do. In this passage, James is killed and Peter is imprisoned. The church prays fervently for Peter and God delivers him from his imprisonment and likely execution. God answered their prayers. Then when Peter knocks on the door where people have been praying for him, they don’t believe it is him! I pray that we would not be oblivious to answered prayers… I pray we would expect God to answer us and rejoice knowing that we serve an amazing God who owes us nothing; yet he cares for us and answers our prayers even when our faith is small.
