You can watch this post on You Tube here: https://youtu.be/JdaBWg7Bvws

Acts 4: 23-31 If you haven’t read this passage yet, you can find it here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%204%3A23-31&version=NLT

This is such a fun passage. Peter and John got off with a warning (because the leaders were too scared to arrest them when they were so loved by the crowds) and so they went to tell their friends what happened. The response is a prayer meeting in which they start by saying, God you are amazing and end by saying, please keep giving us boldness.

That bit in the middle that looks like a poem about the nations and kings conspiring together against God and his Messiah is a direct quote from Psalm 2.  It was written some thousand years before Jesus was born and it was basically a song about how people think they can outsmart God and it never works.  As the disciples of Jesus are praying, they quote it because they recognize it’s exactly what has happened. Every political and religious power in the area worked together to kill Jesus, and he just rose from the dead anyways, because that was always God’s plan.  Pilate and the leaders thought they were plotting against Jesus but all they actually were doing was following the script God wrote for them before time began.  

It’s actually such a great pattern for prayer when we know we are facing big odds.   Before we freak out, or at least once we are done freaking out, it really helps to remind ourselves who we are talking to.  When we ask God for help, we are talking to the one who actually has the resources to do anything.  In the history of time, no one has ever, even once stopped him from doing what he has chosen to do.  So when we pray and ask him to do something, if he wants it to happen, it’s happening.  They ask him to empower them to share the message of Jesus with boldness, and to heal and work other miracles in his name.  God’s “Yes” is so big that the whole place shakes and his Spirit fills those who are gathered. 

Now all of them are speaking boldly, which if we recall was definitely not the plan the temple leaders had in mind, but it was always exactly what God had planned.