Being Generous In Persecution | Pastor Greg Ford Sermon | One Church Columbus

Okay, we're in a series of messages uh in the book of Psalms.

Uh, we're doing five weeks.

This will actually take us through Easter, but what I'm really trying to do is uh set you up for success in terms of understanding the Psalms maybe a little bit better, so that when you come across a psalm, you kind of know what to do with it and how it fits.

And there's a lot of misconceptions about the Psalms, okay?

There's 150 Psalms, and a lot of times people will read a Psalm of the Day or a Proverb of the Day, and each of those, you know, kind of stand alone, but they're actually a part of something that was very organized, very intentional.

And so we started looking in week one how there's actually five books of the Psalms.

Each of those books kind of has an overarching theme, and it's very intentional the journey that the Psalms take us on.

We looked in week one at three different types of psalms.

You have orientation, disorientation, and reorientation psalms.

And the orientation psalms are when life makes sense.

Good things are happening to good people and bad things are happening to bad people, and it's all good.

Praise the Lord.

Uh the second is disorientation when life doesn't make sense.

I did the right thing and it went bad.

Uh, I see what seems to be the wicked prospering.

Uh life gets complicated, and that's the real world.

Life is complicated, it doesn't always make sense.

And in that disorientation, we lose the innocence of orientation and oversimplicity, and we're introduced to the complexity.

And if you'll stay in it and you'll pray and process and persevere, ultimately you develop wisdom and a deeper understanding of the world and even of God and of yourself.

And so uh that's the reorientation Psalms.

Uh last week we looked at the first three books of the Psalms, you have uh really this emphasis on God's covenant with David.

So just as a little refresher, um, there's four covenants.

Anytime you hear about Old Testament covenants, there's four covenants in the Old Testament.

The first is the flood narrative with Noah.

God says, I'm not gonna do that ever again.

Abraham, God says, I'm gonna make a nation out of you.

Look up at the stars.

That's gonna be like your descendants.

And I'm gonna build uh not only, it's not about being national, I want to bless the whole world through you.

And then you have Moses, who brought the children of Israel out of Egyptian bondage to the Mount Sinai.

God gives him the law, and the law is um you know essentially the Torah.

It's three different types of law.

It's it's ceremonial law that helps us uh be in right relationship with God.

The second was the civic law or the civil law, how they you know uh govern themselves.

And then the third was the moral law, right and wrong in relationship.

And so uh that's God's covenant with Moses.

Then you have David, uh, which we looked in uh 2 Samuel chapter 7 last week, that God says, your uh your lineage will last forever.

2 Samuel 7 · chapter mention

Your son ultimately all your your line will will carry on from generation, it will never end.

And so this is where in the book three of the Psalms in chapter 89, they hit major disorientation, major confusion because they have been taken over, and now it seems like God totally broke his promise.

The king has been dethroned.

In fact, if you look at it historically, the the final king that was taken over by the Babylonians, he they not only dethroned him, uh they did it in a traumatic way.

It would have been nationally traumatic.

They killed his children in front of him and then poked out his eyes so he was blind and then led him off to Babylon.

So the last thing he saw with his own human eyes was the death of his children.

And so you want to talk about sending shock waves uh through a nation.

So now you see why in chapter 89 they're going, you, you, you, God, how could you, pointing an accusatory finger at God and saying, But I thought it was gonna last for generations.

You see, in chapter 89, they talk about the the brevity of life and and the mortality of humans and looking at it through the lens of futility.

They're like, What's the point?

Why even make people if we're gonna have to suffer like this?

Why even make people if it's this brief?

And then in chapter 90, uh, after they get through the dark night of the soul, they start working towards some reorientation.

And you see they go back to a psalm of Moses.

So they leapfrog David back to Moses to a time where God was with the nation and God had a powerful relationship with the nation before there was a king, before there was a temple, before there was a capital city and a promised land.

And so they go back, okay, God, you are our refuge.

And even when the king is out of the way, now we can see the king of kings.

And now they go back to their mortality, and instead of seeing futility, they say, Lord, bless the work of our hands.

Yes, we understand life is finite.

We understand life is temporal, but that doesn't mean our work doesn't matter.

Lord, bless the work of our hands.

And then uh what you see here is I added one, okay.

This is the fifth covenant you see in the Bible.

This is the new covenant through Jesus into the New Testament.

So let's let's look real quick and look at these.

This uh I'm gonna look at Psalm 2, and I want to go back to this.

We mentioned this in week one, but I want you to go back to this thinking about this psalm through the lens of a of a people who have gone into exile and and don't have a king anymore.

Psalm two is a coronation psalm.

In other words, when a king is becoming king, they would read this psalm to the to the king at his coronation.

Why do the nations conspire and people plot in vain?

The kings of the earth rise up and rulers band together against the Lord and against his anointed.

Again, in this context, the anointed is God's king.

So they're telling the king, you're the anointed one, saying, Let us uh break their chains and throw off their shackles.

The one enthroned in heaven, Yahweh, laughs.

The Lord scoffs at them, he rebukes them in his anger and terrifies them in his wrath, saying, I have installed my king in Zion, my holy mountain.

I will proclaim the Lord's decree.

He said to me, You are my son.

Okay, so again, this is language they would use at a coronation for a king.

Not saying that the king is deity, but saying, using the father-son language as saying the king and God have a special relationship.

Today I have become your father.

Ask me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession.

Okay, so if we really get our bearings in 500 BC, you have been exiled to Babylon and then eventually to Persia.

You have no king, your king's been dethroned, your temple's been burned down.

What in the world do you do with Psalm 2?

Because this says, ask and I'll give the nations to you, and it's talking about a king that doesn't exist.

And what you see is that the nation of Israel, instead of taking these psalms, that they were still in some disorientation, instead of throwing them out, they kept them in this uh compilation of psalms.

And they stepped back from those psalms, and once their emotions came down and the dust settled on their disappointment, they said, Let's take a fresh look at this because we know that God is good, we know that God is powerful, we know that God is just, and we know that God is faithful.

But what do we do with the fact of where we are?

And so now what happens is it starts to take on a futuristic messianic hope.

They start to relook at the Psalms with a hope of a future king or a future Messiah.

Now, at the time, the idea of a Messiah, the word Messiah means anointed one, which is again what we see in the Psalms references to the king, that there is a coming king, that there is a king that will come.

And of course, we know now through hindsight that that fulfillment is Jesus, who's the King of kings and Lord of Lords.

All of the covenants will be fulfilled through Jesus, but in their mind, they don't quite get that.

They're looking for a Davidic, somebody to come through the line of David that someday will come back and restore the kingdom.

So this is where now in the New Testament, if you kind of get into the New Testament, you're gonna see a ton of footnotes, and those footnotes are going to say Psalms.

There's not all of them, but a bunch of them.

Psalms is the most quoted book in the New Testament.

Jesus and the apostles quote a Psalm over and over.

It's 95 direct quotations and then a bunch more illusions.

Essentially, they're not quoting it word for word, but they're referencing something from the Psalms.

So now let's, again, let's think critically.

Your New Testament writers, your gospel writers and the writers of the epistles are using the Psalms because these are texts that they had rallied around in community while they were in exile with a messianic hope.

So they're going, there is a king to come, and now the New Testament writers are referencing, they're calling back to those cross references to present Jesus as the Messiah, as the one who fulfilled that.

And one of the people that does that is Jesus himself.

So I'm gonna just show you a little bit of this, but trust me, if you if you want to go study on your own, there's a bunch more where this came from, but I'm gonna show you one.

Okay, Psalm 110.

This is in book four of the Psalms.

Psalm 110 is the most quoted Old Testament chapter in the New Testament, the most often quoted.

So Psalm 110, verse 1 says, The Lord says to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.

Psalms 110:1

Okay, so that's a little weird way to come out of the gate in verse 1.

The Lord says to my Lord, what does that even mean?

Well, if if you look under this the superscription, so essentially the the little heading under uh where it says Psalm 110, it says a psalm of David.

So David is the one saying this.

So David says, the Lord, and the Hebrew for the first Lord here is the word Yahweh, which is the personal name of God, uh the God of the covenant.

So he says, Yahweh says to my Adonai, and Adonai is another term for Lord, and it's used sometimes in the Old Testament to refer to God, and sometimes it's referred to a human being.

So, like even um Sarah in the Old Testament refers to Abraham as when you'll read in English, she'll say, My Lord this, my lord that.

She's saying, Adonai.

So it's a term of respect, it's a term of authority given by one person to another.

So here you have David saying, Yahweh says to my Adonai, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.

Okay, so they would have looked at this as a uh as a prophecy, as ultimately a um a messianic, hopeful text.

So Jesus in Matthew 22 quotes this.

So Matthew 22, 41 uh says, While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them, What do you think about the Messiah?

Whose son is he?

The son of David, they replied.

He said to them, Well, how is it then that David, speaking by the Spirit, calls him Lord?

For he says, The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.

If David calls him Lord, how can he be his son?

And no one could say a word in reply.

From that day on, no one dared ask him any more questions.

Um, Jesus, just to be clear, Jesus is not denying that the Messiah is coming from the line of David, right?

What he's doing is he's pressing them to see that the Messiah is more than merely David's descendant.

He's trying to find out what is their messianic expectation.

Okay, of course it's going to come through the line of David and be a descendant of David, but to be David's Lord is essentially saying that he's greater than David, that he's exalted by God, that he's sharing a status that no merely earthly king would be able to claim.

And so Jesus is challenging their small view of the Messiah so that they could see what God was actually up to, right?

They were looking for a political, royal, nationalistic, uh Davidic type of ruler.

Um and Jesus is ultimately shows up as a transcendent authority.

My kingdom is not of this world.

He uses political language, but he uses it to subvert it, not to become a king.

In fact, at one point they tried to make him king, and he gave him the swim move and said thanks, but no thanks.

He disappeared from their presence so that they wouldn't make him that.

And so again, Jesus references that to show uh his messianic fulfillment.

Um, okay, let's go back to Psalm 110 because I can tell you're into this, you guys are digging this.

Verse 4.

Verse 4 says something that's a bit of a head scratcher.

It says, uh Psalm 110, 4 says, The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind.

You are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.

Which is like, what's that mean?

A priest in the order of Melchizedek.

Okay, so in the um in the system, in the Old Testament Jewish system, the kings came through one of the twelve tribes, the tribe of Judah.

The kings always came through the tribe of Judah.

And the priests came through the tribe of Levi, so they were the Levites.

Okay, so again, in a human system, you've got the king that leads and is held accountable by a priest who helps people connect to God.

And so this prophecy in Psalm 110:4 says that the Messiah will be a king in the order of Melchizedek.

Psalms 110:4

Essentially, he will be both a priest and a king.

He will be one who not only rules the people and is the king of the kingdom, but also helps people to navigate atonement and be in right relationship with God.

So be a priest-king.

So in the book of Hebrews, and Hebrews, by the way, if you want, if you want to see a lot of Psalms in the Hebrews, 18 plus references from the Psalms in the book of Hebrews, Hebrews 5, 5 and 6 says, in the same way, Christ did not take upon himself the glory of becoming a high priest, but God said to him, now look, this is going to be familiar, you are my son, today I have become your father, right?

So your footnote will take you to Psalm 2, because that's the king passage.

So saying you're a king.

And then in another place he says, you are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.

So that's the footnote there takes you to Psalm 110, which is again the idea of a priest king.

So this is prove this is the uh the New Testament writers making the case to their contemporaries and of course to us as well, that Jesus is the fulfillment of all of those Psalms and all those Old Testament passages.

Okay, so here's what we're gonna do uh with the rest of our time today.

Um we're gonna look at, through Jesus, the new covenant, we're gonna look at Acts chapter 4.

Acts 4 · chapter mention

So if you have your Bibles, go there, and we're going to see a really powerful case study where you have a new covenant community that gathers around an old covenant text.

So they're gonna gather around a psalm in a critical moment, and we're gonna see how a new covenant community handles an old covenant text appropriately, because we are a new covenant community and we handle lots of old covenant texts, and so we're gonna learn, we're we got a lot to learn today.

So here we go.

Acts 4.

Uh I'll start reading in verse 13 in just a moment, but here's what's happened.

Peter, the Apostle Peter, has just healed a man in chapter 3 who was lame since birth, and everybody in the community knew him.

So this is a bona fide miracle.

There's no sleight of hand, there's no grifting.

This isn't like Peter brought some guy from another town nobody knew, and the guy was on a mat, and all of a sudden he popped up.

This is a guy everybody knew all of his life, and for decades he had not been able to walk, and then he's able to walk.

And everybody's like, How in the world did you do that?

In whose name did you do that?

And he says, Funny, you should ask.

Jesus, whom you all killed.

Okay, but just so you know, there's really good news.

He rose from the dead.

Okay?

So you killed him.

Everybody saw him killed, uh, and yet he rose from the dead.

And this is a huge problem because uh the power structure that killed Jesus was a combination of the Roman government and the Jewish Sanhedrin.

Okay, so when you go to chapter four, you're gonna see the word Sanhedrin.

All right, that is the Jewish council that did not only uh made civic decisions, but they were the religious elite.

So think of it like this Rome, who is the biggest machine in the world.

They are, in the eyes of most people, the closest thing to all powerful, omnipotent you can imagine.

Okay, they they are full of firepower.

They have appointed the Sanhedrin to essentially kind of be governors over their own people.

You can kind of rule your own people.

It's your job to keep order.

If things get out of order, then we're gonna show up.

So you keep your people under control.

So when Jesus, okay, was talking about good news, a Yuan Gilean, a new king and a new kingdom, okay, they accused him of sedition.

So it's the idea that what do you mean a new kingdom?

Rome is the empire.

And so the Sanhedrin gladly gave him up because if we upset Rome, they're gonna they're gonna come and flatten the place.

They're gonna kill everybody.

So when you now have a miracle that's undeniable, and everybody's like, how did that happen?

And they go, the guy you in Rome killed came back and he's alive, and now people are believing this, and now the Sanhedrin have a big problem on their hands.

So here we go, verse 13.

It said, when they saw the courage, by the way, this is our vocabulary word, this is our Greek vocabulary word for the day, the word courage is the word paroisia.

And the word parocia means open, frank, courageous speech.

And this would have been a uh a word that in the Greco-Roman world was uh was a prized trait of philosophers committed to the truth over public opinion.

In other words, if you have somebody who's a thought leader and they can stand up in the public forum and they can say, take a commonly held belief, maybe something people hold tightly, and have the boldness to say the opposite of what other people are saying, okay, this is considered a prized trait of a deft and gifted philosopher.

But in the early church, this was spirit-empowered fearlessness.

So you have Peter and John stand in front of the Sanhedrin with courage, and it said they realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, and they were astonished that they took notes that these men had been with Jesus.

But since they could see the man who had been healed standing there with them, there was nothing they could say.

So they ordered them to withdraw from the Sanhedrin.

In other words, you guys get out of here and we're gonna talk about this.

Verse 16.

When they were alone, the Sanhedrin was alone with themselves, they said, What are we gonna do with these men?

They asked.

Everyone living in Jerusalem knows that they've performed a notable sign, and we cannot deny it.

But to stop this thing from spreading any further among the people, we must warn them to speak no longer in to anyone in this name.

Okay?

You would think that when you see a miracle like that, that you can't deny that it would cause you maybe to repent and rethink.

But here's what we see the Sanhedrin, their true belief was revealed.

Even though they had been in the law and the prophets, even though they had been in uh the Old Testament and the Scripture, in their minds, the most omnipotent force in the world is the Roman government.

And if we upset the Roman government, okay, they're gonna take us out.

And so their fear of the Roman government caused them to shut down the move of God that was right in front of them.

Verse 18, then they called them in again and command commanded them not to speak or teach in the name of Jesus.

But Peter and John replied, which is right in God's eyes, to listen to you or to him, you be the judges.

As for us, we cannot help but speak about what we have seen and heard.

In other words, we know what we know, and we're gonna talk about it, and ultimately, if we upset you, do your worst.

We're in God's hands.

Verse 21, after further threats, they let them go.

Now, let's be very clear.

If you're Peter and John, you are extremely sober about the threats that have just been made.

The Sanhedrin, coupled with the Roman government, are the ones who just killed Jesus.

They just killed your leader in front of you.

They don't make empty threats, they follow through.

Uh you're expendable, especially if you're coming out here trying to convince people that the guy they just killed came back to life and that he was right all along.

Okay?

So the idea that they there was no mistaking the threats.

At worst, you die, and at best, they savage your reputation, they seize your property, they take your job, you're radioactive, nobody can work with you, they make an example of you, and everybody sees you homeless and destitute because you mess with the wrong empire.

So when they receive these threats, they received it from a group of people that were terrifying.

So it says in verse 23 on their release.

Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests, these would be the Sadducees and the elders had said to them.

When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God.

Sovereign Lord, they said, You made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything in them.

Alright, now I'm gonna just I'm gonna just take this apart as we go, okay?

Because this is a master class in how a new covenant believer and a new covenant community handles bona fide threats.

The first thing they do is invocation in verse 24.

In other words, they call out to God, sovereign Lord.

Think about this.

Think about what the this New Testament, New Covenant Church does as compared to the Sanhedrin.

When the Sanhedrin felt threatened, they appealed to the government.

They appealed to the empire, to Rome.

When the New Covenant, New Testament, early church felt threat, they went to the sovereign almighty Lord.

I'm not here to try to uh make anybody feel bad for anything.

I I just think it would be good for us to be honest with ourselves to ask, when you find yourself under threat, where's the first place you turn?

Do you go to leverage the human power?

Do you immediately start plotting and planning?

Do you try to figure out how I can turn who who's the most powerful person man-made?

Think about Psalm 121 that says, I when I'm in trouble, he says, I don't look to the hills.

And when they say the hills, they're talking about Jerusalem, right?

Is the city on the hill.

He said, I don't look to the hills for my help.

Where does my help come from?

He says, My help comes from the Lord, the one who made the hill.

Now there's a man-made thing going on on the hill.

There's a man-made structure on the hill, but I don't look at the man-made structure, I look at the one that made the heavens and the earth.

And so the this new covenant community gives us the playbook.

When your heart is overwhelmed, when you are intimidated, when you know you need help, when the threats are real, we are not naive enough to think that Rome isn't Rome.

But when I'm in that situation, where do I go?

The Sanhedrin looked to the human power structure.

The early church looked to the sovereign Lord.

So we start with invocation.

Sovereign Lord, you made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything in them.

Then the second part is quotation.

So here's where we they go to the scripture.

They go to Psalm 2.

It says, look, you spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant David.

Why do the nations rage and the people plot in vain?

The kings of the earth rise up, and the rulers band together against the Lord and against his anointed one.

Now, this is where it's about to get good.

Because in this portion, what they do is they take an old covenant text and they recast the characters in a new covenant mindset.

So in the old covenant, in the old mindset, who are the nations that rage and the people that plot in vain, who is that?

Well, that's the surrounding Gentile nations, the oppressors and the empires.

Okay, and then when they say that they they plot against or they rise up against the Lord and against his anointed one, who was the anointed one, but was the king of Israel and was Israel itself.

So in the new covenant, what they do is look what they say in verse 27.

Okay, they're as they're praying, they're saying, indeed, Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city.

So they're saying, not only Rome, but our own Sanhedrin to conspire against your holy servant Jesus whom you anointed.

So what they're doing is recasting the characters through a new covenant mindset.

Now, the idea of the nations that rage are not just some Babylonian empire somewhere.

It's actually an archetype of not only what could be a physical empire, but any power structure that opposes God's anointed one, who is the anointed one but Christ.

And so now they get their bearings in the story.

So they appeal to the eternal, and then they ground themselves in the historic, and then they place themselves in the proper place in the story, and then from there, okay, so that third part's application in verses 27 and 28, and then in 29 and 30 they make petition.

In other words, they're asking God for something.

And in verse 29, it says, Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great parocia.

Allow us to speak with boldness.

Notice, they don't ask God to scorch their enemy, they don't ask God to take them out of suffering, they don't ask God to make it easy, they ask God to give them boldness.

To give them boldness.

Lord, help us to not cave.

A few verses ago, we had all kinds of paroisia.

We stood up boldly to the Sanhedrin and said, you know, it was the cornerstone that you rejected.

It was the one who you killed.

You guys, you were in the wrong part of the story, and they stood boldly and they were warned, and they continue to be bold.

And they said, Lord, whatever happens, help us to not lose our boldness.

Help us to continue to be faithful.

It's gonna get worse when you flip into the next chapter.

They start now dealing with physical, okay, uh uh state-sanctioned persecution.

So it gets physical.

But they say, Lord, they they they say, Lord, help us to continue to be faithful.

So again, this is the playbook.

Invocation.

In other words, grounding yourself in something eternal.

Going from just seeing your finite life as futile.

Finite is not futile.

Lord, bless the work of our hands.

Lord, help us to sense the purpose of our work.

I know I'm a person, I'm not gonna last forever, my days are numbered, but in these days, Lord, I want to be connected to what you're doing.

I want to be connected to your heart.

I want to walk in your plan.

So I'm not gonna let anybody intimidate me.

Yeah, maybe I live to be 40, maybe I live to be 80.

It's all kind of fleeting.

But while I'm here, God, I want to be connected to what you're doing.

And so that eternal mindset, that connection to the sovereign causes the machine of Rome to lose its intimidation factor.

Lord, give me the boldness.

Lord, help me to be bold.

And so as they do this, then they start to stir this up among their community, right?

And and Lord, stretch out your hand so that we can continue to do your work.

Now, here's what beautiful what happens.

Verse 32.

After they pray this prayer, they ground themselves in the eternal, they ground themselves in the historic, they find themselves in the text, they recast the characters, orient themselves, and pray for boldness.

It says in verse 32, all the believers were in one heart and mind, they were unified.

No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they they shared everything they had.

With great power, the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.

In other words, they continued with that paroisia, that bold proclamation of Jesus Christ as Lord, and God's grace was so powerfully at work in them that there was no needy persons among them.

Now, this is what's incredible about this.

History has a funny way of repeating itself.

This is why they say if you don't know history, you're probably doomed to repeat it.

Because why is history so repetitive is because it's full of human beings.

And human beings have brains that are wired first and foremost to survive.

Your brain is consciously and subconsciously working right now to keep you alive.

And if you think you're under threat, the only thing that will matter to you, if you just let nature take its course, is your own survival.

So when people are under threat, the tendency is to go selfish, the tendency is to put up walls, the tendency is to be self-protective.

We have other parts of our brain that are designed for connection, they're designed for community, but I promise you, if you think you're under threat, community takes a back seat to your own personal survival.

And what we see in this story, the reason that empires continue, there's a new one all the time that's coming in, and people are manipulated in their flesh and the way that we're wired for selfishness, that we see here that this community, when they oriented themselves in the divine, when they found themselves in the text, when they encouraged one another and prayed for boldness, the craziest, most unlikely thing happened.

That these people who were under real threat became generous.

When you're under threat, generosity is not your instinct.

When you're afraid that if we tick off the wrong person, I'm gonna be radioactive in business.

I'm gonna lose my home, I'm gonna lose all my money, I'm gonna lose my reputation.

When you are afraid of losing everything, you become self, you don't become generous, you hold on to everything because you're scared.

But within this community, when the threat of the biggest, baddest machine out there was threatening them, they didn't look to the hill, they looked above the hill, they went to the sovereign creator and called upon his name.

They went to history and said, We've been here before.

They understood that their lives were finite but not futile.

Lord, bless the work of our hands, and then they prayed not to be airlifted out of difficulty, but to find boldness in the middle of it.

Lord, bless our work.

And in the middle of that, because they were not intimidated by the threat, they became a generous community when humans are usually not generous in that situation.

And it was that generosity that the spirit was moving, and they actually, the text says became like one mind, they became unified.

And friend, I would just say I think this is about as relevant as it gets in terms of a new covenant community dealing with real threats.

You look around, you don't have to look far into the headlines, there's all kinds of crazy stuff going on in the world.

I think it feels a little bit unstable.

Um, there's things happening, whether it's geopolitically, whether it's nationally, whether it's locally, and and that's to say some of you have your own custom stories of what's happening in your business and what's happening in your environment.

So when it comes to threats, there are some that we're all kind of looking at with some uncertainty of where this is all going.

But aside from that, there's there's always threats.

And sometimes they're very real.

And so, in those moments, what do we do as a new covenant believer and a new covenant community?

We learn it straight from Acts 4.

We we retrain our instinct instead of grasping for human power, we call upon the name of the sovereign one.

We put our eyes to him and we we we worship him and we connect with him, and then we find our place in the story, and then we encourage one another, and then we continue on faithfully.

Continue on faithfully.

I want to take a moment today, and whatever you're going through, I want to pray with you and uh let's just put this into practice right now.

Let's bow our heads and close our eyes.

Before I start into prayer, I'm gonna invite our prayer team to come forward at this time.

And I'm gonna just pray for a minute or so here.

But as I do, if for any reason you'd like someone to pray with you, whether it maybe something in today's message struck a chord with where you are, or maybe there's something unrelated, but we're here to pray for you.

So if any at any point from now on that you want to move, feel free to come down and receive ministry.

Lord, we take a moment right now, and we do as they did in Acts 4.

We call upon your name, sovereign Lord.

No matter what we see, you're the one that made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything in them.

And Lord, sometimes when uh there are human structures in front of us, it can be overwhelming, and at times it can be the thing that feels the most powerful and the most real, and yet, Lord, it's moments like this that we turn to you, Lord.

I pray that you would help us, God, to uh to find our peace in you, to find our hope in you, to find our confidence in you.

And Lord, we've got kind of a cool thing like the Acts 4 church, they got to look back at Psalm 2, but we get to look at Psalm 2 and Acts 4.

We've seen your faithfulness, Lord, for generation to generation.

And so we're not going to uh we're not gonna fall apart when the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain, when the kings of the earth rise up and the rulers band together against the Lord and against his anointed one.

Lord, we're gonna stand firm.

So we ask for boldness.

We ask you to give us pariah, the ability to say what we need to say and for stand for what's true.

And Lord, give us wisdom and discernment.

Help us orient ourselves appropriately in this moment.

And Lord, I pray that you would continue to stretch out your hand to bring healing and for people to find you.

And that, Lord, that even in difficult times, that you would help us as a new covenant community to find generosity and one mind and one heart when human instinct is to self protect.

We praise you, we love you, we thank you in Jesus' name.

Everybody said amen.