We Pray For His Glory
Pastor Zach Pummill • September 06, 2020
Sermon Overview
ACTS 1:3–9, 12–14
The Church was born out of prayer. After Jesus ascended into heaven they disciples waited as he told them, but they waited in prayer. And then as they were gathered in corporate prayer in the upper room, the Spirit of God comes down at Pentecost, and the final age of history dawns.
Sermon Transcript
Good morning, Rockwall Pres and welcome to any guests that are with us today. If this is your first time, I'm really glad to have you and I'm really glad that you're here with us today, especially in this crazy thing called life that we find ourselves these days. And so I hope that worshiping with us this morning, that Jesus brings a sense of peace to your heart. You find us at the beginning of a new sermon series that we've titled "Pray God Down." And we are using the sermon series this fall as we enter into a season of prayer where we are seeking the face of God together as a church. As we face the uncertainty of our future, and all of its unpredictability, and all of its unknown, we are choosing to reject nominalism within us, choosing to reject any sense of just going through the motions, and instead recognizing that God is at work. And so in light of that, in this season of prayer, we're asking for three essentially, very simple things: we are asking God for more, we are asking God to move and we are asking that God would reveal His glory among us.
And so each week, in this series, we are alternating between John 17 and then a passage in the Book of Acts. And so each week in John 17, we look at a portion of Jesus's prayer to guide us in how we are going to pray and then we follow that up the next week with a passage in the Book of Acts that reveals and shows us what it looks like when Jesus's prayers come to life in the life of God's people.
And so last week in John 17, as we began, we saw that the first thing for which Jesus prayed was His glory. He asked to be glorified in the cross. He said, "Father, the hour has come glorify your Son." Glory is at the heart of Jesus's prayer. And His glory is at the heart of our prayers in this season of prayer, because we too are asking that God would reveal the glory of Christ among us. But just like we asked last week, what does that even mean? What does that really mean to ask that God would reveal His glory among us?
It means that we are asking for the power of the cross to be at work among us. We are asking for the power of the cross to be on full display, to drop its weight on every heart, every home, upon our church, upon our community. We're asking that the power of the cross would reveal and remove those immovable rocks of sin within us. Also, that we might know the full weight of God's love and desire for His people, why? So that we may know Him. So that we may have more of Him and that He would be glorified in us. That was Jesus's prayer for us. And so that is our prayer.
But there's a catch, right? I hinted at it at the end of last week's sermon. Because to pray for the glory of God to be revealed among us means that we have to be willing to wait. To pray is to wait. To pray is to wait upon God. So if we ask for the glory of God to be revealed among us, it means that we have to wait. And if we don't know how to wait, then we will not pray. We don't like waiting in our drive thru, buy it now world. And yet throughout the Bible we see that waiting is that unavoidable space between promise and fulfillment. To pray is to wait.
So this week, we're in Acts 1, because we find the disciples in that very situation. They're in a situation where they too have to wait. The time has come for Jesus to leave this world in His ascension. His bags are packed. He's leaving on a jet plane, they're at the terminal. And here in this passage, we see Jesus's final words to His disciples. So in verse 4, He says, for them "not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait, to wait for the promise of the Father which He said, you will be baptized with the Spirit not many days from now."
So Jesus leaves them with that promise, that even though He is leaving, the spirit is going to come to them. God is going to come down in power, but they have to wait. So just like us, when we find the prospect of waiting before us, we wanna know a little bit more about it. We wanna know what we can expect. We want a few more details. We wanna know what lies around the corner so that we might have some sense of certainty about what lies ahead.
And, well, and so they respond with that question in verse six, and they asked Jesus, they ask Jesus, "Is now when you will restore "the kingdom to Israel?" Is now when you will restore the kingdom to Israel? Now, that's a loaded question in the Bible. That question has a lot of baggage to it. But what they're really asking is essentially this: "Jesus is now when you are going to make Israel a geopolitical power player?" What they are expecting is a political campaign that's going to free them from Roman rule, establish the nation of Israel and make them the most powerful nation in the world. And so if we just paraphrase their question for a second, what they're really asking is: "Jesus, is now when you are going to drop the big rock and crush all the nations of the earth?"
Because the disciples are under the impression that Jesus's kingdom will be established by means of earthly power, by means of strength and force, and sword, according to the systems and patterns of this world. They think that His kingdom will be established in the same way that earthly kingdoms will be established. So Jesus answers them and reminds them once again that that is not how His kingdom operates. He says in verse 7, He says, "It is not for you to know the times and the seasons that the Father has fixed by His own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all of Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."
And so here in Jesus's final words to His disciples, He doesn't really give them any details. Instead, He wants them to wait with a bigger vision of His kingdom. He wants them to wait with a bigger vision of His kingdom because their vision of His kingdom is far too small. He wants them to wait with a bigger vision of His kingdom. Because He's reminding them once again that His kingdom is not of this world. It will break into this world through the power of the cross.
It doesn't spread by power or by force. It doesn't grow by voting blocks. It's not affected or thwarted by earthly governments or rulers, there are no laws of any land that can stop it. There's no persecution of any people that can subdue it. Because this kingdom is driven by an otherworldly power. It's built on the power of the Spirit coming down to empower His people to bear witness to the ends of the earth. And through that witness, God will drop the weight and glory of the cross on the whole world. He invites them into a bigger vision of His kingdom.
And so in short He's saying to them very simply, “No, you are not going to crush the nations. You're gonna convert them.” This kingdom does not spread by warfare, it spreads by you bearing witness in the power of the Spirit. Jesus wants them to hold fast to that truth. He wants them to have a bigger vision of His kingdom and see that they are a part of something that is filled with far more power and is far bigger than anything that they could possibly imagine. Because to participate in His purposes, requires a bigger vision of His kingdom. And sometimes we lose sight of that. Sometimes we lose sight of this bigger vision of His kingdom, to which we are invited.
And so what happens when we lose that bigger vision of the kingdom? Well, then we have a small vision of the kingdom. And when we have a small vision of the kingdom, then we begin to think just like they do, where we think that this kingdom will be established through earthly systems by the values of this world according to the principles and systems that we see at work in the world. And so when we have a small view of the kingdom, it leads to all sorts of different mistakes that we can make. And so we start to think that whenever there's persecution, we think that we're losing the battle. Or we start to worry more about who's in power instead of the power of God that is at work in the world. And we think that spreading the gospel comes down to a strategy or a formula, or attraction, or entertainment, instead of being a work of the spirits and the work of the Spirit alone. Or when we have a small view of the kingdom, we start to think in terms of us versus them, instead of us for them. That we exist for the life of the world, this kingdom is not established by us sacrificing them, it's established by us sacrificing ourselves for them. So a bigger vision of the kingdom shapes how you see everyone and every thing and every situation and every circumstance around you. A bigger vision of the kingdom is how we view the world.
There was a young man living in Iran named Masood. And Masood was going to visit his brother Reza, who was on Death Row and scheduled to be executed the next day. And when he got to the prison, he walked into the room expecting to see his brother Reza just distraught, distracted, depressed by the fact that he was going to be executed the following day. But when he walked into the room, that's not what he found. He saw something he never seen in his brother. He saw his brother Reza joyful, smiling, hopeful and at peace. And so they only had a few minutes and so Masood asked his brother Reza, he said, what's going on? And Reza very quickly he said, you'll never guess. There's a man in here named Pastor Amir that told me about Jesus. And in Him, I am forgiven and I am set free. And I'm at peace with tomorrow because I wanna go be with him.
And that was all the time they had and the guards came and they took Reza, and they took him away and he was executed the next day. And so Masood left in that moment with his brother shook him to his core and he started to search and investigate and look into this Jesus that his brother Reza had found. He was a drug addict, he was a drug dealer, and in the course of his search, he became a Christian and he trusted in Jesus.
But he also began a search for Pastor Amir because he was no longer in the prison and so he was trying to find this pastor that witnessed to his brother to find out what happened with his brother. And he searched for years to try and find Pastor Amir but he never did. So he'd given up the search, and a few years later, he took a trip to Turkey. And he actually encountered a bunch of Iranian Christians that had fled Turkey, they had fled Iran, and we're now living in Turkey. And the more he got to know them, he found out that they knew Pastor Amir. And he found out that Pastor Amir, when he got out of prison, fled Iran and went to Turkey, but he was no longer with them.
And so one of the men said, why are you asking about Pastor Amir? How do you know him? And he said, well, my brother was converted by him in prison. And the man said, oh, you mean Reza? And he said, yeah, that's my brother. How do you know about Reza? And he said, Pastor Amir talked about Reza all the time. And finally Masood was able to learn about what happened to his brother.
Pastor Amir said that Reza was the most uncontrollable and violent inmate in the entire prison. And everyone kept their distance from him. But Pastor Amir went to him and befriended him and loved him. And Reza finally got so annoyed with it that he said, what are you even doing in here? You're good man. Why are you in here? I'm a murderer, I'm supposed to be in here. Why are you even here? And Pastor Amir said, I'm in here for you. Jesus sent me to you in this prison so that you might be saved and set free. And Reza said, why would He even care about me? And Pastor Amir told him about, you know, the criminal on another Death Row and how he came to know Jesus hanging on across in his last moments of life.
And it was through that witness that Reza became a Christian and he spent the next two days of his life before his execution apologizing and asking for forgiveness to all the inmates in the prison, and he was at peace. Masood finally learned the story of his brother. And he went back to Iran and started telling all of his friends and his friends and his family that were Muslims became Christians. And he never met Pastor Amir, but through Pastor Amir, he met Jesus because he bore witness.
Because Pastor Amir had a bigger vision of the kingdom. He had a bigger vision of a kingdom that was not shaped by his situation, or his circumstances, and he wasn't just waiting around in prison for what lied ahead, he waited with purpose. That this kingdom isn't just for the big halls of power, it's also found at work in the deepest, darkest prison cells of this world. And he believed in a bigger vision of the kingdom and it's through that bigger vision that we open our lives to the power of God and His purposes.
And really, it's a bigger vision of the kingdom that gives us hope, and should give us hope. That no matter how bad things get, no matter how difficult the world finds itself, whatever predicament that it's in, no matter how bad things get around us, we are a part of a bigger kingdom that cannot be stopped or shaken or satisfied until all things are made new. And this world has no power over the power of this kingdom because this kingdom is not driven or affected by this world, because it is not of this world. And that was the vision that Jesus left His disciples with.
And with these final words, He ascends to his everlasting throne. And then the disciples are left behind, and they step into an unknown future and they wait. And they wait. And they wait. But what does it look like to wait with a bigger vision of the kingdom? Well, in verse 12, we see them return to Jerusalem and wait as Jesus had told them. But it's how they waited, that makes all the difference in the world. And so before we consider what they actually did, let's just think about and consider what they didn't do.
Because Jesus told them that "it's not for them to know the times and the seasons that the Father has set by His own authority, but they will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon them." And so in light of that, how easy would it have been for them to say, "Well, you know, God's sovereign, He's gonna do whatever He wants to do anyways", and then they go into the upper room and wait around, get out some board games, play a little chess, play a little hand of cards, or some of them say, "You know, I guess it this is gonna happen, it's gonna happen, you know, it doesn't really depend on what I do. So maybe I'm gonna go check out the sights of the city, take a little tour of Jerusalem while I'm here." Then maybe another says, "Well, you go do that and have fun, I'm gonna go and find a little project to keep busy. Maybe make a little money while we stay here in Jerusalem, I'll see you around."
We don't see that. Because God's sovereignty doesn't cause them to fall into this fatalistic mindset where they just passively wait around. No, they wanted to participate. And so they respond by faith. And faith moves them to action. They waited in readiness. In verse 13, it says "they all went into the upper room and with one, and all these with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer." All of them with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer. All the men, all the women, all of them, with the crazy kids, the crying babies, as one holy chaotic family, devoting themselves together in corporate, consistent, prevailing, ongoing prayer. They devoted themselves to corporate prayer. And when it says that all of them were of "one accord", a better way of understanding that is saying that they all had one passion. They were of one mind. They were of one desire that devoted themselves to prayer together, why? Because they wanted more. They were ready for more. They were ready for the glory of God that was promised to them.
And God's sovereignty didn't cause them to just kind of shrug their shoulders and say, "I guess we'll see what happens." It was the very incentive that drove them into prayer. Because if what Jesus said was true, then this kingdom cannot be fabricated, it can't be manipulated or contrived, this kingdom can only be received. And so they wait by entering into a season of prayer to align their hearts with the will and purposes of God. And it's in this season of prayer where they are saying, as one people, "If God's sovereign hand is at work, then we want to be a part of it. We want what God wants."
And it's here in this moment that we see the power of corporate prayer. Because corporate prayer is how God's people display their readiness and desire for His kingdom. And so I ask, do you see what's going on here? Do you see what's happening here in this moment? It's in corporate prayer that the disciples are embodying the very invitation or 2 Chronicle 7: "If my people pray, and seek my face, then my eyes and my heart will be with them for all time." We said last week that Jesus embodied that very invitation in His prayer. And here this week we see His people doing the same thing, holding fast to the sovereign purposes of God in Jesus Christ, and that drives them to seek His face in this promise of a God that wants to come down and dwell with His people. They wanted more, and it was through corporate prayer that they said, "We are ready.”
And so when we look at chapter 2, it should make all the sense in the world. How 50 days later, they were still together in prayer. And then they hear a sound of rushing wind from heaven, and the place in which they prayed was shaken because God came down in Pentecost. And it shouldn't surprise us that it was out of a corporate prayer meeting that the Church was born. "If my people pray, and seek my face..." And when God came down, they bore witness. And through them, the spirit dropped the power of the cross on 3,000 souls that day and the glory of God was revealed. It's having a bigger vision of the kingdom that reminds us that God comes down so that God can go out. And if we don't want to go out, then we shouldn't expect that God will come down.
Because all throughout the book of Acts, you see this same thing happen over and over again, time and time again. That God moves through the corporate prayer of His people time and time again. It's corporate prayer that lies at the heartbeat of their participation in the mission and purposes of God. It's through corporate prayer that God time after time drops the power of the cross and reveals His glory. And yet do we see that same thing in our day? It was so prevalent in the Book of Acts. Is it prevalent among the church in our time and place?
George Barna did a nationwide survey asking pastors about what it was that they felt was essential to the life of their church. And of course, there were a number of good answers in that. But what he pointed out was that only 3% of pastors said that corporate prayer was essential to the life of their church. 3%, but here's the thing, that survey was done in 1976. 50 years ago. Does it seem like much has changed? Do we see a church that's committed to a bigger vision of the kingdom and a recognition of our need for the power of the Spirit? Or are we operating by a different set of values?
Now, we've already spent some time talking about the state of the Church in our present day, and just this week, another report came out that said, one-in-five churches is facing closure in the next 18 months. Our churches, our communities, our country, our world, needs a Church that is committed to seeking the face of God in corporate prayer. And if not now, then when? If not now, then when is a good time? Because throughout history, we see over and over again that God moves through prevailing corporate prayer. In times of distress and hardship, God moves when His people are unified in seeking His will and they're open to His purposes. We've seen the power prayer in our country's history.
In 1857, a Dutch Reformed pastor began a daytime prayer meeting in New York City, in the midst of economic collapse, and in the midst of a season in which there was incredible disenfranchisement with the church. And Charles Finney said that spiritual awakening is impossible in New York City, because they were too wealthy and too rich. And yet within six months, this prayer meeting had grown to over 10,000 people praying each day throughout the churches of New York City. And it's estimated that between the years of 1857 and 1859, that in two years, over 2 million people came to know Christ in New York City alone.
And you see the power of corporate prayer when you look at the world around us. Look at the church in Asia, look at the church in Africa, in India, in China. Places where the church is exploding. If you wanna see the passion of the churches in the deep forest, just ask them to start praying. And it's like somebody just lit a fire in the room. Where you see a thriving church, you will find corporate prayer.
And we've seen the power of corporate prayer in our church. Eight years ago, in the spring of 2012, this church entered into a season of prayer, just like the one in which we are in now. We entered into a season of prayer where we wanted to ask for big things that only a big God can do. We wanted more. And so we began to pray what we called kingdom prayers, and asked that God would open doors for us. That God would give us opportunities. That God would pave the way. That God would lead us in the way that we would go. He would open doors and opportunities and that He would use us and that He would reveal His glory among us.
And I went back and looked at some of those original posts from 2012 and at that time, this church was barely 100 people. We didn't know how God would answer those prayers. But He did. 'Cause six months later, we took our first trip to India. Is out of that season of corporate prayer that God gave India as a precious gift to this church. And make no mistake, there is no bigger influence on the culture of this church than what India has provided for us. It has been a means by which we have seen God reveal His glory, time and time again. And God answered those corporate prayers year after year.
Are you one of the 70 people that has gone to India? You were an answer to those prayers.
Are you one of the people that has given financially over the years? You were an answer to those prayers. Not just ours, but theirs. For churches to be built. For churches to be established. For churches to be planted. For water wells, for a new children's home, for sponsorships, for preschools, for salvations and for spiritual awakening.
Are you one of the people that could never go yet you still feel a heart to pray for India? Well, can know that your prayers are heard and your prayers are being answered. And they are simply kindling on the fire.
Because last Monday, our India campaign for this year came to an end. We had the goal of raising $32,000 for thousands of people during this COVID-tide. And we saw our God move once again and $33,000 was raised. And we have seen time and time again that God has revealed His glory among us. And since 2012, that $33,000 brings the total to half a million dollars in eight years.
God, 10 years later, continues to answer the corporate prayers of His people. Yet, of course He does, because He's the God that says, "If my people pray and seek my face, I will come down." So let us not be a church that's surprised that when we seek the will and purposes and glory of God, He works and He moves.
So I've said that this fall, we are going to pray corporately. And we are. We're going to enter into corporate prayer together. And as a church, we're gonna ask God for more and ask that he would align our hearts, our collective heart, with His purposes and His desires and His mission because if God is doing something, then the most logical question in the world is, can we be a part of it? And might we desire that together.
So over the next three months, we're going to have four prayer gatherings. And the first one is gonna be in two weeks. We're going to have our first ever men's prayer night. And that's how we're going to begin. And I'm calling on the men of this church to lead the way. To set the tone, to be an example. To set the pace of prayer in your family, in your marriage, and in this church. I'm calling on you to lead. And then two weeks after that, at the end of this month, we're gonna pray corporately as a church. And then after that, we're gonna gather our women together for a woman's night of prayer. And then in November, we're gonna have a corporate night of prayer where we are going to pray into some things that we've never done before as a church.
And as we do, we're going to blanket our lives and our families, our church, our community, and our world in prayer. And we're gonna pray with a bigger vision of the kingdom. We're gonna wait in readiness. We're gonna ask God to move, we're gonna ask Him for more and we're gonna ask that His glory would be revealed among us. Because as we face the uncertainty of the future, all the more might we rest in the certainty of a kingdom that cannot be stopped or shaken.
And it's a bigger vision of that kingdom in which we are invited to pray and wait. And after all that we have seen, does it not really just stand as one big invitation? All the ways that we have seen God move thus far?
And does not Moses show us the way, that when you see the power of God, the most logical thing you can do is draw near and ask for more of Him – all to the glory of His name.
