Scripture-Based Prayer. Acts 4:23-37
Acts
What we see here is a great example in the
text of how a believer is to base prayer upon Scripture. Foundational to this
is a knowledge of Scripture. It is impressive in these verses how they weave
together different passages of Scripture by way of application.
The importance of prayer: In the New
Testament prayer is emphasized as an on-going habitual pattern in every
believer’s life. Colossians 4:2 NASB “Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with {an attitude
of} thanksgiving.” This was written to the every-day people who were part of
the church in Colosse. This is the Greek verb proskartereo
[proskarterew] and is a present active imperative. A
present imperative verb emphasizing something that should be an ongoing action,
something that should characterize our life on a day-to-day basis; it is to be
a standard operating procedure, a normal characteristic of our life. The verb
here means to continue to do something with an intense effort—something that is
thought about, something that is planned for, something where you set aside
time to accomplish it. It is a priority. So the mandate is to devote yourself
to prayer, keeping alert in it with an attitude of thanksgiving. So our mental
attitude in prayer that is one of gratitude toward God for all that He is doing
and all that He has provided for us in our life.
This word proskartereo is used in other passages
of Scripture that help us to understand its application and use. Acts 1:14 NASB
“These all with one mind were continually devoting themselves to prayer, along
with {the} women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with His brothers.” The
word “continually” has that idea of being devoted to prayer. Romans
Prayer is a
grace provision of the royal priesthood whereby the church age believer has
access and privilege to communicate directly with God. Because Jesus Christ
died for our sins the veil separating us from God is removed, we don’t have to
go to God through an intermediary priesthood; every believer is a priest to
God. Hebrews 4:12. The purpose of this communication is to acknowledge our sin
(confession), to express adoration and praise to God, to give thanks for what
God has provided, and to intercede for others as well as convey our own
personal needs and petitions. Each of those elements can be a prayer in and of
itself, or there can be all of those elements in a prayer.
Notice that
Peter and John “reported all that the chief priests and the elders had said to
them.” Before they prayed they got the facts, they didn’t just get all excited
that Peter and John were back and immediately says let’s pray and start praying
in ignorance. They waited until they had information from Peter and John before
they prayed. So one of the first principles we see related to prayer is that
effective prayer relies on fact and not feeling. The emphasis is on knowledge
and content, not on emotion. Having said that, it is not to say that prayer
isn’t emotional. Verse 24, “after they heard this, they lifted their voices to
God with one accord…” They way we read that in the English makes it seem that
this was something they did very rapidly. They may have done this fairly
rapidly but as we go through the prayer and understand its structure it is not
certain that this was something that was done extemporaneously. That doesn’t
mean there is anything wrong with extemporaneous praying.
In Bible
churches we have this sort of “low church” approach where we pray
extemporaneously. We don’t know any pastors who sit down and write out their
prayers and work on them for four or five hours a week and then come in and
read their prayer on Sunday morning. That is something that is typical in a
high church tradition, but there is nothing wrong with that. In fact it focus
attention on a lot of things and many written prayers of that type are quite
wonderful. For example, the English Book of Common Prayer from about 1760 or
1770 or thereabouts has wonderful prayers and they have tremendous appreciation
for doctrine. So different church groups, different denominations have
different approaches to prayer and they are, we think, all equally valid.
This prayer
in Acts chapter four is one of those that has the appearance of some thought
that went into it. That could just be because they have finally learned how to
pray. Remember, these are the same disciples who went to Jesus and said: “Lord,
teach us how to pray.” This is a prayer that is built off some Old Testament
passages. So to understand it we really need to understand the mechanics of how
they are putting this prayer together. “After they heard this” could be ten
minutes later, an hour later as they sat and thought about this prayer. They
raise their voice to God and in a unity of mind—it could be that one person
leads them, it doesn’t mean they all prayed together although that is implied
by the use of the third person plural, “their voice to God.” That again would
give support to the view that they had written this out so that they are
praying it or reciting it together in unison.
The quotes
in this prayer come from a couple of different passages, one of which is in
Psalm 146. Acts
This phrase
is found in Exodus 20:11 as part of the commandment to observe the Sabbath. It
is also found in 1 Chronicles 16:26 NASB “For all the gods of the
peoples are idols, But the LORD made the heavens.” What are we emphasizing when we emphasize that
God is the creator of everything? His sovereignty. The fact that He is the
creator gives Him the right to dictate the rules for His creation, to run
things the way He sees fit, because He establishes the laws that run the
universe. So it is establishing Him as the ultimate authority. What is the
situation then? It is that Peter and John have been dragged before the
Sanhedrin, threatened and intimidated, and ordered not to proclaim the gospel
anymore. Therefore it is an authority issue. So when they pray the first thing
they do is go to Old Testament phraseology that reinforces the reality of God’s
ultimate authority over the universe and over their circumstances.
Nehemiah 9:6
NASB “You alone are the LORD. You have made the heavens, The heaven of heavens with all their
host, The earth and all that is on it, The seas and all that is in them. You
give life to all of them And the heavenly host bows down before You.” Again at
the beginning of prayer it takes our mindset and focuses it on just who God is:
the God who is over everything. The bigger God appears in our thinking the smaller our problems will appear.
There are
four verses in the Psalms that reiterate the same idea. Psalm 121:2 NASB
“My help {comes} from the LORD, Who made heaven and earth.” Psalm 124:8 NASB “Our
help is in the name of the LORD, Who made heaven and earth.” Psalm 134:3 NASB “May the
LORD bless you from
How is the
God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob identified? He is identified again and again
and again as the God who made the heavens, the earth, the seas and all that is
in them. It is creation. If we believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
and are going to be consistent with that belief, which comes only from Genesis
12-50, we cannot throw out Genesis 1-11 unless we just don’t like being
consistent. Genesis 12 with the call of Abram, that God is going to make of him
a special people through his seed (Isaac and Jacob), is built on the
historicity and the truth of Genesis 1-11, which begins with creation. The
creator God who made the heavens and the earth and the seas is not an option.
Creation isn’t optional if we are going to believe anything in the Bible from
Genesis 12 to the end of Revelation. It is all built on the historicity of
Genesis 1-11. That is why there is such an assault on that. But we can’t escape
the emphasis throughout the Old Testament on the God who made the heavens and
the earth and the seas. The God of the Bible is defined as the God who made the
heavens and the earth and the seas and all that is in them.
Isaiah 37:16
NASB “O LORD of
hosts, the God of Israel, who is enthroned {above} the cherubim, You are the
God, You alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and
earth.”
Jeremiah
32:17 NASB “Ah Lord GOD! Behold, You have made the heavens and the earth by Your great
power and by Your outstretched arm! Nothing is too difficult for You.” That is
the point that Peter and John are making here in this prayer. This just focuses
thei9r attention on who God is and His omniscience.
It might be
illuminating to look at the whole context of Psalm 146. This is a tremendous
praise psalm. If someone wants to learn to truly praise God and sing a praise
to God in a way that has depth and significance then this would be one of the
psalms to begin with, to take the verbiage and the structure of this psalm and
to see how that develops and compares to some of the songs and choruses that
are sung today.
This is a
praise psalm which is not attributed to any particular author. The psalmist in
a praise psalm calls his listeners to praise the Lord. He is going to explain
why we should praise the Lord and then he is going to express his own praise to
God. He begins with a command: Psalm 146:1 NASB “Praise the LORD! Praise the LORD,
O my soul!” In the Hebrew
“Praise the Lord” is hallelujah—hallelu is the second person
plural command to praise; jah is the first syllable in the name of Yahweh.
Literally it is “Praise Yahweh,” a command to those who are listening to
praise Yahweh. There are 150 psalms. The last five, 146-150, are called “the
great hallel.” There are a couple of different hallel groups. There is the
Egyptian hallel which was sung at Passover—Psalms 113-118. The final collection
of praise psalms is 146-150. Praise the LORD,
O my soul!” is referring
to himself, calling upon himself to praise the Lord and focus the attention of
people.
Then there
is a declaration of praise where the psalmist vows to sing praise to God. Psalm
146:2 NASB “I will praise the LORD while I live; I will sing praises to my God while I have my
being.” We can see that there is a synonymous parallelism here. The first line
is mirrored in the second line.
Then having
made his declaration or his vow of praise he begins to express in the next two
verses his convictions about praise and why God is worthy of praise. This is
seen specifically in vv. 3-5. Why is God worthy of praise? Psalm 146:3 NASB
“Do not trust in princes, In mortal man, in whom there is no salvation.” He is
worthy of praise because only God is immutable and all-powerful. He is
contrasted to the fallibility and finitude of human beings. Don’t put your
trust in mortal man, there is no salvation. All the promises that politicians
make cannot provide health and happiness. They can only do what the US
Constitution says, and that is to provide an environment where the individual
citizen in utilizing his own personal volition can decide to pursue his own
path for health and happiness. The government can’t provide it.
The reason
is explained. Psalm 146:4 NASB “His spirit departs, he returns to
the earth; In that very day his thoughts perish.” Man doesn’t live forever. He
is going to die and his spirit will leave the body. Man is finite; he is only
here, as Moses said in Psalm 90, for three-score and ten. His life is like a
vapor; his thoughts perish. This is not saying that there is no life after
death, it is saying that as far as the impact that any of us is going to have
on this earth it ends the day we die.
But in
contrast. Psalm 146:5 NASB “How blessed is he whose help is the God
of Jacob…” It is the God of Jacob who preserved the family of Jacob by bringing
them down to
Then the
quote that Peter and John pick up in Acts chapter four. This God is defined. He is not just the God
of Jacob, He is the God—
Psalm 146:6 NASB
“Who made heaven and earth, The sea and all that is in them…” That means
everything. Peter and John go to this verse because it is emphasizing the
authority of God over His creation—which includes the Sanhedrin and the
religious leaders in Jerusalem who are threatening them and are in opposition
to them. But there is something else that goes on as we read through the rest
of this psalm. We begin to see ten things that the psalmist emphasizes about
what God provides for us. And this is a great lesson for us on how to pray from
the psalms and how to be reminded of God’s character, His attributes, and
connect this to other promises.
The first
thing he says after he has made the identification in verse 6 is, “… Who keeps
faith [truth] forever.” That means He is faithful. He holds to the truth; He
doesn’t vary. He is the one who keeps faith or keeps truth forever. The word emeth
[truth] is a word that could mean faithful, meaning stable, non-changing, and
truth also has that idea of that which is eternal and never changes. This reminds
us of Lamentations 3:21-23, written by Jeremiah after the first temple was
destroyed. NASB “This I recall to my mind, Therefore I have hope.
The LORD’S
lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, For His compassions never fail. {They} are
new every morning; Great is Your faithfulness.” Hope doesn’t come from our
emotions, it comes from what we are thinking about—eternal truth.
The next
attribute mention is in the first part of Psalm 146:7 NASB “Who executes
justice for the oppressed…” A reminder of Psalm 37:5, 6 NASB “Commit
your way to the LORD, Trust also
in Him, and He will do it. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light
And your judgment [righteousness] as the noonday.” The idea here is that there
is the oppressed who are being treated unjustly but God is the one who will
take a stand for us and bring forth our righteousness. The second thing: “…Who
gives food to the hungry.” He provides the physical sustenance that we need. E.g.
Elijah at the brook Cherith, the feeding of the five thousand, the supply of
manna for
Psalm 146:8 NASB
“The LORD opens {the
eyes of} the blind…” (Cf. Ephesians 1:18 NASB “{I pray that} the
eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope
of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the
saints.”) “…The LORD raises up
those who are bowed down,” those who are depressed, overwhelmed by their circumstances.
He is the God who encourages and gives us real comfort from His Word. (2
Corinthians 1:3, 4 NASB “Blessed {be} the God and Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in
all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any
affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”) “The LORD loves the righteous.” His love is not based on who we are but on
who He is. (Romans 5:8 NASB “But God demonstrates His own love
toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”)
Psalm 146:9 NASB
“The LORD protects
the strangers; He supports the fatherless and the widow, But He thwarts the way
of the wicked.”
The Lord is
the one who protects us. He watches over us and those
who cannot protect themselves. (Psalm 18:2, 3 NASB “The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, My God, my rock, in
whom I take refuge; My shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. I
call upon the LORD, who is
worthy to be praised, And I am saved from my enemies.” Psalm 71:3, 4 NASB
“Be to me a rock of habitation to which I may continually come; You have given
commandment to save me, For You are my rock and my fortress. Rescue me, O my
God, out of the hand of the wicked, Out of the grasp of the wrongdoer and
ruthless man”)
Psalm 146:10
NASB “The LORD will reign forever, Your God, O Zion, to all generations. Praise
the LORD!”
The focal
point of the opening part of the prayer ion Acts 4 is on God’s power. Isaiah
46:9, 10 NASB “Remember the former things long past, For I am God,
and there is no other; {I am} God, and there is no one like Me, Declaring the
end from the beginning, And from ancient times things which have not been done,
Saying, ‘My purpose will be established, And I will accomplish all My good
pleasure.’”
When we say
God is the God who creat5ed the heavens, the earth and the seas and all that is
in them, that sets the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob apart from all other
gods and goddesses that human beings invented, because this God is not a God of
human invention.
Their focus
is on who God is on who God is and that God is bigger than their problems.