Acts 4:23-24 (ESV Strong's)
The Believers Pray for Boldness
23 When they were released, they went to their friends and reported what the chief priests and the elders had said to them. 24 And when they heard it, they lifted their voices together to God and said, “Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them,
Prayer Begins With God’s Sovereignty
Peter and John have just had a very impactful event happened to them. They experienced their first miracle (a lame man was giving his ability to walk back ... 4:1-12) and they were brought before the highest religious leaders of the day. The religious leaders were taken aback by them:
Acts 4:13 (ESV Strong's)
13 Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus.
There credentials were both the lame man “standing” beside them and that they had been with Jesus. However, being strictly warned by the established power of the land, they left them and returned to their brothers and sisters in Christ, to pray. Their prayer starts out where all prayer should start out, recognizing the sovereignty of God. Unbeknownst to them, the apostles were about to start a movement that would revolutionize the world. They would not imagine what was about to happen. Yet, Peter’s sermon, the day he was arrested by the chief religious rulers, saw 5,000 souls come to Christ. That was probably 5,000 Jewish souls who would be sent out of the synagogue and rejected by their families. In our society today we do not have an equivalent of that, not in mass. This is the reason for appealing to a sovereign God. Only God knew what was happening to them and what would be happening. When we come to God in prayer we need to rejoice in the fact that God is sovereign and He has the knowledge and power to intervene upon our behalf.
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