Acts 1:12-14 - Waiting in Prayer

On New Year's Eve, eighteen sixty two, Tremont Temple was filled to a capacity of two thousand people gathered there in Boston waiting for a proclamation.

Presiding the gathering was William Cooper Nill.

Frederick Douglass was on the platform.

Ten weeks earlier, September 22nd, President Lincoln had declared that if the Confederate states had not returned to the Union by January 1st, 1863, that every enslaved person within those states would be declared free.

The promise, ten weeks earlier, had been announced.

The promise was dated for January 1st, 1863.

But it hadn't happened yet.

And so people waited for ten long weeks until December 31st.

And people gathered in Tremont Temple on that evening.

Evening came, speeches were made, prayers were offered.

Messengers were stationed just outside uh the signal house in order to run news back to the church.

They still waited.

Felt like agony.

Frederick Douglass said they felt like they were looking into the deep sky, waiting for some signal.

That they were waiting for a dawn that had not yet broken.

That they were yearning and longing for the answer of agonizing prayers over the centuries.

They couldn't do anything but wait.

They couldn't hurry along the news across the wires.

They couldn't push the pen of the president.

They couldn't even produce what could be perhaps the freedom of some three and a half million enslaved people.

All they could do was wait.

That's a kind of waiting that does something to us.

We're not very practiced at it.

We're not even good at the ordinary kind of waiting, you know, waiting for the light to change, right?

You know, waiting for the line to go down so you could be the first one there.

I mean, we have a hard enough time with those kinds of waitings.

But there's a certain kind of waiting that calls for something out of us that's far, far deeper than just waiting for that red light to turn green.

Sometimes we're waiting for test results.

Sometimes we're waiting for some good news about a loved one that's in some far-off place.

Can only imagine what it must have been like for those during times of war longing for news from their loved ones who can't be reached.

It's difficult, that kind of waiting.

It's hard, it's agonizing.

What do you do with your hands when you wait like that?

What do you what do you bring your mind to attention to when you're waiting like that?

You can't hurry anything along.

You can't produce the results you're waiting for.

You just have to wait.

And that kind of waiting calls not for our some simple distraction like we might do while we're waiting for light to change.

It calls for a yearning and an attention and a pressing in, like no other kind of waiting.

Well, the disciples are in that sort of waiting here in Acts chapter 1.

Acts 1 · chapter mention

Some amazing things have just happened over the past month and a half or so.

They've seen Jesus Christ crucified, buried, risen, spending 40 days with them, and they've just watched Jesus ascended, taken up into the heavenlies, and two angels telling them that he's going to come back.

But before Jesus left, he left them with a command.

He left them with a command and a promise that something was about to happen, that the Father's gift was coming, that the Spirit was going to be coming, and that when that did, everything was going to change.

But they had to wait.

It hadn't happened yet.

And so the question that I want us to look at this morning is we look at verses 12 to 14, is that question that's pressing upon the disciples here?

And that also presses in on our hearts.

And it is this what do you do in between?

What do you do in those waiting moments?

The disciples had been given the statement, and yet they had to wait for the fulfillment.

What do we do during those times in which the ticking clock of waiting begins until the time we find the answer?

Well, I think something is told about us in that intervening period.

And we're going to see something about these disciples in this intervening period.

It tells us what they thought about the one who had told them to wait.

And so as we look at this passage of scripture, just three verses, I want us to see these waiting disciples as they put themselves in a posture before the promise that hasn't arrived yet.

And I'd like for us to consider this well, because I think in these little elements that we're going to see in this narrative are some principles for us about how to posture ourselves in our seasons of waiting as we long for the coming day.

Because what God has promised to us, He will give.

And Luke is very precise about this.

I mean, just think about this for a second, these details.

The Mount of Olives, a Sabbath day's journey from the city.

These details and are important.

They're not just giving us texture in the text, they're documenting things about real people in real time, doing real things.

There on that hill, coming down and coming up a short one into the city itself.

These real people are coming back to Jerusalem just as they were told.

They're being obedient.

Jesus didn't give them a suggestion, he gave them a command.

Go back to Jerusalem.

Don't leave it until the Father's promise comes.

And so they waited.

They waited.

Now, they, when they saw Jesus leave, had some decisions to make.

They could have stayed on the Mount of Olives, they could have gone back to Jerusalem as they were told, or they could have done as they did, as Peter did, particularly after the crucifixion and the burial of Christ.

Let's go pick up our fishing nets and let's just go back to our job.

They didn't do that.

The choice they made, they went back to the city.

Now I know that sounds small and the distance is small.

It's only about three-quarters of a mile.

That's not very far away.

But I want us to see this: that the promise of Pentecost is not falling on people who are just doing whatever they want.

It's not falling on people who are scattered throughout Galilee going about their business, taking back up the tack, the money-changing table, or taking back up the boats and the fish, fishing nets.

These people are positioned in obedience.

Now let's be quick to say that they are not hastening the spirits coming by their obedience, but their obedience is positioning themselves for what's about to come.

And notice this: the one who had commanded them is no longer visible.

Jesus has gone up into heaven and he is not around them anymore.

He's not looking over their shoulder to see what their decision is about what they're about to do.

They're left alone on Mount Olive.

What are we going to do now?

And they decide, let's do what Jesus told us to do.

Because they believe that the one that told them to go back to Jerusalem and wait is the very same one who rose from the dead on the third day.

And believing that he could rise from the dead, that they could obey what he said to do, because he knew that they had a Lord who was Lord over life and death.

And so they followed him.

So this, I think, is one of the things that we can understand from this as we wait, to position ourselves in a place of obedience, of looking at the things the Lord has called us to do and trusting him for the time frame of his answers, and obeying him in the meantime while we wait.

And so I pray that whatever situation you might be in, and I know many of your situations, the difficulties that lay upon your heart, and the agonizing circumstances that you're in.

And there is always a time of waiting and longing and hoping and wrestling with those things which are in front of you that you can't force, you can't make happen, you can't turn to a better side.

Let me encourage you with this.

Continue to wait in a posture of obedience.

Continue to wait in a posture of trust.

The Lord who's put you into this compressed season of waiting is the same one who resides over all of your life and all life.

He is the God who rose from the dead.

And so we as a church also wait, don't we?

We wait for the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.

We call it a blessed hope.

We long for the day, just as Peter said in 2 Peter chapter 3, we wait for a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.

2 Peter 3 · chapter mention

We yearn in this world.

We long in the middle of our days for a better day, for a future in which all the troubles of this life are not going to be.

When all the sin and its effects and all the tragedy that comes into human existence are finally wiped off of this earth and a new one is made.

We wait.

But what are we supposed to do while we wait?

What God told us to do.

Continue in his word, continue to come to his table, continue to gather in prayer, continue to share the gospel with others, continue to encourage, to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep, to continue to teach our children the things of God so that they might grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ Himself.

We continue to obey.

These things will not generate the Lord's coming or an answer to his prayers, but the Christ who ascended into heaven has called us to do what the church needs to do.

And so we don't withdraw and retreat as some do.

Oh, this world is so bad.

Let's just sort of gather up into our castle and get up into our safe places and just agonize over how bad the world is.

And we'll just wring our hands and say, Oh, Lord, please come.

It's terrible out there.

Guess who got elected president?

He's like, What are you doing?

Obey me.

Do what the church should be doing.

This is a season of obedience.

But I want us to move on.

Verses 13 and 14.

They're not only gathered in a posture of obedience, but they're gathered as a community that only the resurrection could build.

Look at verses 13 and 14.

And again, Luke is laying down quite a few details here.

When they arrived, they went to the room upstairs where they were staying: Peter, John, James, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, James, the son of Alpheus, Simon the zealot, and Judas the son of James.

They were all continually united in prayer, along with the women, including Mary, the mother of Jesus, and his brothers.

That's a lot of detail, right?

Here we have eleven names.

You might have counted them.

That's twelve minus one.

I know.

You like amazing insight, Pastor.

Who's missing?

Judas is missing.

But look at verse 14.

Who else is added?

Mary, the women, and his brothers.

Now, why is Luke bothering to name these guys?

Well, partly because the whole group are real people.

They're identifiable people by name, people that soon were going to be seen going into all the world and witnessing about the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

But this list is doing something more than just giving us historical happenings.

It's showing us all the various people that are in that room together.

And I want you to think about these particular people.

We'll begin with the 11.

Peter.

That he's there.

What about Thomas?

Even after the resurrection, where others had came and spoke with eyewitness testimony that they had seen the Lord.

He's like, not me.

Until I can touch and put my fingers in the wounds, I'm not going to believe.

The rest of them?

Soon as Gethsemane was over, they're gone.

These are the men in this room.

But here's another detail.

Jesus brothers.

Every mention of Jesus brothers in the gospels shows them as people who don't believe.

John 7 5 says very plainly, his brothers did not believe in him.

You catch that?

They thought Jesus had lost his mind.

They weren't in the inner circle.

They weren't at the Last Supper.

They weren't waiting at the foot of the cross.

They were watching everything that Jesus did from a posture of distance that was skeptical and unmoved.

Why are they here?

Why are the brothers of Jesus here?

There's only one thing that made the difference.

And you know what that difference is?

The resurrection.

That's what made the difference.

Listen to what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15.

I passed unto you that which I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures.

The gospel, the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, foretold in the Old Testament prophets, now realized in Jesus Christ.

And it says, He appeared to Cephas and then to the twelve.

Now listen, then he appeared to over 500 brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, but some have fallen asleep.

Then he appeared to James and then to all the apostles.

James, the oldest brother after Jesus, who did not believe.

James.

James, who is, as we read in Acts chapter 12, is now the one.

Acts 12 · chapter mention

Peter says, report these things to James.

This is the leader of the church in Jerusalem.

This is the author of the book that we read after Hebrews.

This is the man who was eventually martyred, thrown off of the temple wall, and lived, and then was stoned to death by those to kill him.

This is James.

The last person you would expect to find in this room is him and his brothers.

Unless the resurrection.

Until Jesus showed up in his presence, resurrected.

And now he's here.

This room is not a room of faithful people.

This is not a room of people who have always been believing, who are always doing those things that they should have been doing.

These are people that are changed people.

This is why they're in the room together.

Not because of how good they are, because the resurrection of Jesus Christ has done something to them.

That's why.

Not the upper room where they are or were, but this room.

There's some of us in this room who are here, and if we were to ask some of our friends about us, they would say that something absolutely miraculous must have happened to us in order to get us into a room like this.

Right?

I can testify to that.

I was just sharing with one of the lovely ladies who comes to our church just a few days ago.

That when I went to church for the first time, I had an ounce of hash in my pockets.

And that was just my private stash.

I was in Florida in December last year with two of my old Air Force buddies.

And boy, did they have stories.

And Royal's six feet away, and I'm just hoping they don't bring them all up.

Some of you were the doubting sibling, the James who refused to believe.

Until God, the resurrected Christ, met you.

Some of you came into this room skeptical.

Fearful, uncertain.

But you're not skeptical, fearful, or uncertain now.

What's happened to you?

You're a changed person.

That's what's happened.

The same Jesus who appeared to James and changed him completely is not done appearing to people in his grace.

Awakening them to their sin, transforming their lives, bringing them into a gathering of people that they would never have ever been numbered among before.

He's still doing that.

And while we wait, we position ourselves not only in obedience, but we position ourselves among the gathered people of God and we wait and we sing and we praise together.

Because we are a people of everlasting hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

One last thing I want us to see here is they positioned themselves in prayer, not only obedience, but not only gathered people in the hope of the resurrection, but also in prayer.

They returned to Jerusalem, and in verse 14 it says they were all continually united in prayer, along with the women, including Mary, the mother of Jesus, and his brothers.

Notice that word that Luke reaches for: united.

United.

Not just in the same room, united.

He uses this word over and over again in the book of Acts.

We'll see it several times.

This is not just people occupying the same space.

These are people that are postured and bent toward the same thing.

They're praying together, united in prayer.

And notice how the verb tense gives it.

They are continually united.

Continually united in prayer.

This is not just an afternoon prayer meeting one time.

This is the same word that Paul uses in the next chapter, which we'll read, where it says they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship and the breaking of bread and prayer.

These people were not just together, they were united together in prayer.

This was a sustained posture that they had, an orientation to the God who wouldn't stop doing great and wonderful things.

This is perhaps a little different than what many prayer meetings are like in churches, where prayer is just perfunctory, dry and stale, occasional.

What Luke is describing here is a defining activity of the people as they wait.

Yes, they're obedient, they go back to Jerusalem, and yes, they're gathered, but they are united continually in prayer.

As they're waiting, prayer is the key thing that they're doing.

We'll see more of what they do here soon, but they're united in prayer together, without ceasing, with one mind.

Why prayer?

Because they're bringing themselves before the God of heaven to do things that they could not do themselves.

They couldn't produce Pentecost, they couldn't make that happen, they couldn't call down the spirit, they couldn't, by any effort or creativity, bring about what only the risen Christ could do.

What could they do?

Put themselves in a posture of dependence and pray.

And so they prayed.

They prayed together and they prayed persistently together with one voice.

This is not a new thing.

Evan Roberts, at the start of the 1904 Welsh Revival, kept saying this one thing: bend the church and God will save the world.

What was he saying?

If there's going to be any increase in our area for gospel advance, it has to come through prayer.

William Carey, expect great things from God.

Attempt great things for God.

What is the expect great things from God but prayer?

It's prayer.

Martin Lloyd Jones, watching the church trade committee meeting or prayer meetings for committee meetings, said the call of the church is not so much to organize as it is to agonize.

We're not a people who collect our heads together.

Oh, what a sight that would be.

We are people who call to the very mind of God Himself.

And so here the disciples are not generating Pentecost by the sheer determination and intensity of their prayers, as if their prayers were somehow the lever release for what God was about to do.

No, God was going to do it, and they wait in prayer.

Prayer is the express posture of a people that know God and only God can do what's about to happen.

So this is the third way that they posture themselves.

They obey, they gather as a people of resurrection hope, and they pray.

Now I want to take a moment here, just sort of as an aside, because I think this is a good place to do this and to stop.

And for us to have a bit of a family moment.

And some of you have been at this church long enough to know what I'm about to say.

And others of you perhaps have not heard the story and need to hear it.

But as we sit with this text, I think this is a good moment for us to talk about this.

Fourteen years ago, before Micah came, and 13 and a half years ago before I did, this church was in a difficult situation.

It was extremely difficult.

The church was, as Kevin Cooney put it, to me more than a few times.

He said to me, he said, when we went off to every tribe and to begin our training, we didn't know if we'd have a church to go back home to.

Because they couldn't make it better.

They had tried, and it only got worse.

They prayed.

They prayed.

And they knew that if the Lord didn't act, this place would not be here anymore.

And I want to tell you, for those of you who've been here for just a little bit of time, everything you see right now, and everything you experience right now, there's an invisible foundation underneath it.

And it is a people postured in dependent prayer and a God who graciously acts.

But it's not just a 14-year-old story.

There's something happening here, and I want you to see it.

When I first came here, we would have our prayer meetings in the back, and we'd set up one table, sometimes two tables.

There would be anywhere from seven to a dozen people gathered in prayer on a Wednesday night.

And it just seemed like for a long time it wouldn't get any more.

You come on a Wednesday night now, there are tables set up, and the table is full.

There are chairs wrapped around the back of the wall, and most times those are full.

And there are even times when people are sitting out in the in the entryway with the doors wide open because there's no room for them to get in.

People in prayer.

Elder council meetings.

We spend a lot of time in prayer.

A lot of time in prayer.

The missions team.

You know what they do?

They don't spend time strategizing about missions so much as they spend time praying for missionaries.

We've started a congregational prayer meeting right after the first Sunday of each month, in which we go downstairs for a little time with the elders and break up into little rooms and we pray for our missionaries.

And many of you are showing up to that.

And then to say nothing of what these pews are.

How many times I've walked in here and seen people in small little groups praying, or talking to someone up here and another person up here, and then finally leaving and seeing little pockets of people gathered together and praying together.

Or watching the door open there on the side and people coming out, wiping tears off of their face because they've been praying together.

This is what Luke is describing here.

A people who are weak, frail, they're not impressive, but they're doing what the Lord told them to do, and they're gathering together, as only the resurrection could do, and they're praying because they're asking God, the only one who can do what needs to happen, to do those things.

And so this is not a coincidence, what you see here.

This is definitely not about the abilities and the organizational expertise or the whimsical, wonderful, attractive personality I have.

Just ask Royal.

I bore her to tears.

And the only thing that He's calling us to do is to be His people, to obey His word, and to pray for Him to work.

So if you've been here as one of the ones that have been here before Mike and I arrived, and you know you knew what I was about to talk about.

Keep doing it.

Keep praying.

And if you're one of the newer ones who's come in since then, don't witness this from the outside or just alongside of it.

Join in.

Be a part of the prayers that we have.

Come alongside people.

Be one of those who are continually united in prayer, just as it says here.

And just one last thing I want to say.

If you're here this morning and you don't know Christ as your Savior, let me just bring these people back out one more time.

They are asking God to do something they can't do.

They're waiting for something that only God can accomplish.

They know that they can't bring anything about from their own power.

But God can.

And so they position themselves in this kind of dependent prayer.

Salvation is exactly like that.

You can't make yourself a believer by the intensity of your prayers, or by the focus of turning your life over, or even by showing up here.

You can't make yourself a new creation in Christ.

Only God does that.

But here's what I want to say to you: this salvation is given by the crucified, buried, and risen Christ to all those who come to Him with empty hands, who say, I have no hope of saving myself.

My only rescue is you and you alone, Christ.

Save me.

Save me from myself.

Deliver me, Lord.

I trust you to save me.

Because only He can.

You can't do it yourself.

And if you're here this morning and you feel the conviction of sin upon your heart, you feel the Lord drawing you to yourself, don't resist him.

Because he is a God who will do things in your life you can't even begin to imagine.

You will find yourself filled with a hope that nothing in this world can ever, ever, ever come even close to.

You can find yourself with a joy in the middle of troubles that would break anybody.

And you could say, I trust him.

And you can find yourself in the middle of a tempest and a storm of life and say, My soul's at peace.

You can kiss loved ones goodbye as you lower them in the grave.

And you can say, See you later.

Only God can do that.

You can't make that happen.

And I urge you, go to Christ.

Call out to him.

Believe on him.

He receives all who do.

Let's pray.

Father, as we've sat with this short and often overlooked passage of scripture, we thank you for the lessons that are learned in it.

Father, calling us to simple obedience, you, the resurrected Christ, have given us things that we are to be about.

While we wait for that blessed hope, the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.

May we be a church, Father, who are active in our obedience, pursuing those things that are right and pleasing in your sight, being fruitful in every good work.

We pray, Father, that you would watch over those whose personal lives are filled with the gnawing, difficult season of waiting.

That you would strengthen their hearts and secure them in hope, the same kind of hope that the resurrection has brought us all, and the reason why we gathered today.

And Father, we pray that you would continue to impress upon us just how wondrous and great you are as a generous and giving God, and that we are not here to devise or to scheme, but to pray and to seek you, to do things that only you can do.

And Father, we pray for those in this room or those who will hear this message at some point in time who don't know Christ, that you and your mercy might draw them and awaken them to a new life in Jesus.

And may this be the day in which they say, This is my emancipation day.

This is my day of freedom.

This is the day when I've been, the chains have been broken from my soul.

And Father, we ask this in Christ's name.

Amen.