The God of Half-Hearted Prayers - Ben Stuart

Well, if you ever want to write a story about a hero, or if you just like reading or watching movies about stories of heroes, you start to pick up that there's key beats in the journey that you need to hit, critical moments that a protagonist has to move through. There's the obvious call to adventure and accepting of the invitation and then the training of the mentor and the trials and tests, and then, of course, there's always the big climactic moment in the third act. But there's also a critical moment before that, that often we have trouble naming or even identifying, but when we think about it, we know it's there. And different authors call it different things. Often it's referred to as the dark moment, the moment in the protagonist's story when everything goes wrong and all hope is lost, right? Lord of the Rings, Frodo's best friend Sam is gone and he realized Gollum betrayed him and so he's in a cave in the dark in a foreign land alone and he's scared, right? Braveheart, William Wallace is betrayed by Robert the Bruce and his army is wrecked and he falls to his knees in despair. I think the dream is over. T'Challa is pitched off the waterfall. The best guy we know, we just lost him and chaos now reigns. Han Solo's been encased in carbonite. C-3PO's thrashed and Luke's lightsaber hand just got ripped off and Vader's his daddy. And they ended the movie at the dark moment, right? Bane breaks your back, Batman, and throws you down a well. Can you rise again? Thanos snaps his finger and you got to watch your best friends turn to dust, right? Robert McGee who wrote the book Story, which is about the classic architecture of the story, called this moment the crisis. And he calls it that, he says, because the protagonist finds themself at the end of the line. This is the moment of dangerous opportunity. It's the point of greatest tension in the story as both the protagonist

and audience sense the question, how will this turn out? And that will be answered by the next action. This is the scene when the protagonist will be face to face with their most focused, powerful forces of antagonism in existence. And so it's expectation mingled with uncertainty. What the protagonist chooses to do here will give us the most penetrating view of his character. What we learn in the moment of crisis is what you value. Now, why do we always have those moment in hero stories? Simply this, because we have them in our stories. They're coming. We all hit moments where everything seems to go wrong, everything is dark, and we wonder did all hope just disappear, did all light go out, and what do we do then, right? Your parents divorce, and this is the end of the innocence. You get rejected by every school you had hoped for, and you have no vision for your future. You realize the thing you went to for comfort has become a full-blown of addiction, and you can't stop it. Many of us have been in that moment where we're scared, the unraveling, and you wonder did all hope just get snuffed out. Why am I talking about this? Because at some level I feel like we are in this interesting inflection point. It's hard to know the moment you're in in history, but I think as we look at our culture right now, there are signs of concern. Gallup did a poll this last February on pessimism, and they indicated that the percentage of Americans who are optimistic about their future has declined to 59%, the lowest level since measurement began two decades ago. Massive percentage of America is not optimistic about their future, and at the same time Pew Research did a poll on prayer, and they reported that half less than half of Americans, 44%, say they pray every day, that that's a substantial decline from the first religious landscape study conducted in 2007,

when 58% of Americans said they had prayed at least once a day. Interestingly, the decline in prayer occurred most acutely between 2015 and 2021, and if you're not following along kids, that's when we all got iPhones. And suddenly when we used to be alone in our beds and used to be alone in our cars and would talk to the almighty, now we just read the headlines, and I was collecting headlines before last night and just looking at what do we feed our minds with, and I just pulled the first ones that came up on my feed. The rising cost of fertilizer and fuels pushes farmers to the brink. Gmail accounts are under attack. Internships are more crucial than ever and harder to find. Even without social media, phones have a subtle damaging effect on our mental health. There's an existential crisis in the crossword community. New report shows 44% of the U.S. population is exposed to harmful pollution. U.S. gambling addiction is out of control, and I didn't even get into rising violence in our city and around the world. Iran, AI taking our jobs, out of control debt. We are just bombarded with despair. Has all light gone out? And what do you do when you hit the dark moment? I say all that because that's where we are, in the Book of Acts. If you've been following along in the Book of Acts, it's the birth of the Christian church, and really, if you follow along, we're in a moment that's called an interchange. Donna made a chart for us here, that if you look through the first couple chapters of the Book of Acts, where we've been

in sort of season one of Acts, it really, the camera sort of focuses on the Apostle Peter as he leads the charge to establish the church in Jerusalem and we're watching the essential character, the DNA gets set of what the people of Jesus are like. And then we've hit this interchange moment where who kind of gets to be the lead on a given episode is changing as we're watching the gospel begin to break out of its banks into a wider and wider scope of a community. And you see a guy named Saul, who will later be called Paul, appear. That's persecuting the church, but then goes through this conversion. And then you watch Stephen get martyred, but that death leads to the propagation of the gospel. And Philip goes and begins to spread the gospel. But what Luke has been doing in this section is he's been interchanging Peter and Saul, Peter and Saul, Peter and Saul. And then finally, we're gonna get to Saul in Acts chapter 13, whose name is changed to Paul. And through the rest of the book, we will follow Paul as he takes the gospel to the ends of the earth. And so where we are right now in Acts chapter 12 is really our last focused look at the church in Jerusalem. The last time Peter will be the main character. They'll make some cameos later in season two. But we see them here in this moment

and we're gonna look at Jerusalem in trouble. And we're gonna look at the church in trouble. And what do they do? When the foundations are shaken, what do the righteous do, right? And so to begin, verse one, it says, about that time, Herod the king laid violent hands on those who belonged to the church. He killed James, the brother of John, with a sword. I'll stop there in that, about that time is sort of like, meanwhile, back at the ranch. We've been talking about the expansion of the gospel. Now we're turning back to Jerusalem. And what we find is persecution has just become public policy, right? If you wanted a summary sentence for the first paragraph, it's this, everything gets worse. I want you to notice here, it says Herod the king. Now that's a different Herod than the one that tried to kill Jesus when Jesus was a baby. That Herod was called Herod the great. This is his grandson, Herod Agrippa the first. The first Herod, Herod the great, was so great that his name became an honorific title, sort of like Caesar. They wanted to grab that name to grab that energy. But when Herod the great died, he didn't trust any of his direct successors. So he kind of split up his power among multiple different successors.

And so it wasn't until later that Herod Agrippa here, his grandson, who had been sent off to school in Rome, and while at school, made some little buddies that became emperors of Rome. When he grew up and came back home, Caligula gave him more power than any had had before him since Herod the great. And then Claudius, the emperor who we met last week, gave him all the power back that Herod the great had. Herod the great who was paranoid about his power, Herod the great that when he heard there was rumors of a messiah, he killed every baby under two in that region so that the messiah would be snuffed out. Herod who would kill the old family members if they were rivals to his power. So now suddenly, we got Herod energy back. We got Herod Agrippa here. And he's come and he's got the power of his father. And what has he decided to do with that power? Lay violent hands on those who belong to the church. And he kills James, the brother of John, with the sword. This is not Jesus' brother James who wrote the book of James. We'll meet him later. This is John's brother James, which incidentally, if you're following along, he's one of the top three. Jesus had 12 disciples, but Jesus often peeled off Peter, James, and John

to go with him on little special adventures. This is one of the top guys. And really, right here at the outset of the church, he's snuffed out. And it says it's with the sword. Why that detail? Because Stephen, who had been in the leadership, but at a lower level of the church, was killed in a angry moment by a mob with rocks, right? Because the sword belonged only in the hands of the state. And so now you have someone with the power of Rome using the power of the sword to take out the top levels of leadership at the church. Everything gets worse. This is now public policy. There's no one looking out for us, right? And so James is killed with the sword. And when, verse three, Herod saw that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter also. This was during the Days of Unleavened Bread. And when he had seized him, he put him in prison, delivering him over to force. or squads of soldiers to guard him, intending after the Passover to bring him out to the people. Now, important note here. When it says the Jews here, this is the first time it says the Jews in a negative sense. This is not a shot at all ethnic Jewish people, right? James, who just got killed, was Jewish.

Peter is Jewish. The church in Jerusalem was Jewish. This is a shorthand way of talking about the leadership. It's the same way we use it today when we say the Russians attacked. We don't mean all of them. We made the Russian leadership made a decision to do some particular action. We do this all the time. So this is talking about the leadership, the Sanhedrin. Of that time in Jerusalem, the religious leadership did not like this church and their claims that Jesus was the Messiah, but now they have the power of the state behind them. And so when Herod sees, oh, I got an opportunity to get this group that has the social and religious power on my side by wiping out some of their enemies, I'll keep going. So after killing James, he now grabs Peter, but he doesn't kill Peter right away because now we're at the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which incidentally was the exact same time of year that Jesus was arrested. But it's not cool to kill people during religious celebrations. So that's why Peter gets this moment in prison. Let me hold him till the feasts are over and then I'll kill him. And so it's ominous, there's a sense of doom. I've got Peter in prison and he makes a show of it.

I don't know if you noticed that. Four squads are guarding Peter. A squad had four men, four times four, 16 people. He's got 16 people guarding one guy. That's not necessary for one guy. Unless you're scared that his community will try to foment an insurrection, or you just wanna make a point, right? That I got tight coverage and there's no escape here, right? And so it says here that he is bound up. And the question then kind of comes to mind for us, what will the people of Jesus do when they're under pressure? Think everything just got worse. What do you do? What are your options? Well, politically, assassination or insurrection, right? Which I'm not just making those up. Those were the Roman and the Jewish options at the time. Rome, if you didn't like a political leader, you attempted to kill them, right? Claudius became emperor because Caligula was assassinated. Nero will become emperor because Claudius was assassinated. If we don't like the emperor, somebody just put something in their soup, right? That's kind of how they did it in Rome and it created great instability in Rome, always scared. In the Jewish leadership at the time, they would just riot. If Rome tried to do something in the city of Jerusalem, the Jewish leadership would burn buildings, go crazy,

attack soldiers, they would just go nuts in the streets. What does the Christian do when we don't like what's happening in the world around us? We get the Christian answer in verse five. So Peter was kept in prison, but earnest prayer for him was made to God by the church. Earnest prayer. How lame. Thoughts and prayers. What's that gonna do? Herod, the king. Thoughts and prayers. Now, when Herod was about to bring him out, on that very night, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers bound with two chains. Now, that's two chains the first, centuries before the one, you know, from Georgia. But they're in there, and centuries before the door, we're guarding the prison. Verse seven, and behold, an angel of the Lord stood next to him and a light shone in the cell. So at the very last moment, the very night before Peter's judgment, God dispatches an angel. An angel, singular. What is a singular angel gonna do against four squads? Not one squad, four squads. Four times four, 16 soldiers.

What is one messenger from God gonna do? Answer, anything he wants. So he struck Peter on the side and woke him up. Said, get up, quickly, and chains fell off his hands. The angel said to him, dress yourself, put on your sandals, and he did so. And he said to him, wrap your cloak around you and follow me. And he went out and he followed him. He did not know that what was being done by the angel was real. He thought it was a vision. When they had passed the first and second guard, they came to the iron gate leading into the city, and it opened for them of its own accord. And they went out and went along one street. Immediately, the angel left him. And when Peter came to himself, he said, now I'm sure that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from the hand of Herod and from all the Jewish people were expecting. Interesting, Peter is not expecting to be rescued. How do you know that? Because he's asleep, stripped down with his shoes off. He's not packed up sitting at the door. He's between two soldiers, he's chained, and there's sentries at the door. And then Luke writes us with behold an angel shows up this was not expected and the angel has to strike him That's literally the word in Greek hit hard The angel has to wake him up like I wake up the kids not like Donna does I don't hit the kids, but Donna

Opens their door and rubs their back and sings a little song wake up wake up. I go Gaga boom get up, right? Angels got to do it like me He walks in and goes get up and then did you notice the frequent commands get your clothes on where your shoes man? Let's go and The angel has to keep saying this to him Is it possible? to know God intimately and Be clueless when God is working Yes the whole time it's happening Peter thinks it's a dream Is it possible to be in the middle of an answered prayer and not realize it It's possible The chains are falling off. You just don't know it pass one guard pass to guard to the gate and you still don't know It's interesting it's not till he hits the streets That Peter gives his commentary on the events. I Think the Lord is protecting me Yeah, man He who is in you is greater than he who's in the world Now look we love to make fun like oh silly Peter But it keeps going verse 12 when he realized this he went to the house of Mary the mother of John whose other name was Mark they dropped that name like you know, and we'll talk about him in a minute And it says in many were gathered together and were praying so Luke's gonna keep on this subject This is at night, this is late at night, but he's asleep in the jailhouse So this is not your normal church gathering time. This is a late-night earnest prayer meeting for the deliverance of the Apostle Peter and in the midst of their earnest prayer God is answering that prayer and yet verse 13 when he knocked at the door of the gateway a Servant girl named Rhoda came to answer and recognizing Peter's voice and her joy She did not open the gate, but ran in and reported that Peter was standing at the gate sweet Rhoda. Just leaves him outside

Which is not ideal because he's still a wanted man right, but she's excited so she runs to tell the group Okay, and so bless her heart wrote his amp. She tells everybody Prayers have been answered and what do they say as we knew they would Rhoda? Because our God is faithful our God is stronger our God is higher, right? Now what do they say in verse 15? You're out of your mind That's a quote that that's that's coin a Greek from centuries ago You're out of your mind And then did you notice the verbs are in the imperfect which means they keep going she kept insisting it was so and They kept saying it's his angel, but Peter kept knocking And that interesting and then when they opened the door they were amazed They think it's more plausible that she saw a ghost That's what they were saying to her. No you just saw his ghost Rhoda. They think that's more likely than Peters outside Which begs the question? What were you praying for? That he'd be courageous as he died maybe But at some level they're probably praying God do something God move God save God Restore, and then when God did it like now you're crazy That's what crazy people say stop it Rhoda Is It possible to pray earnestly and fail to realize your prayers being answered Is it possible to pray earnestly and just think you won't do it That's what's happening here This is what's been breaking my heart this week is because I think the reason why less and less of us are praying is because We just don't really think it's gonna change anything What are we gonna do man look at the news AI is gonna take us debts gonna ravage things. We can't buy a house Money's gonna be gone the robots will kill us So let's just loot and plunder and not give a crap about anybody but ourselves Let's let selfishness reign and descend into chaos give up all hope cuz the lights gone out Who talks like that not God?

God's not scared of Herod. He's not scared of chains. He's not scared of squads And yet we pray like but God it's Herod And here God's just wanting to show us Jerusalem, and here's the thing they believe Jesus rose from the dead These are the same people that when persecution broke out they prayed so hard the room shook But then when it came to something personal they just didn't think God would show up And some of us are like that. You trust God boldly in some areas of your life, but when it gets to that family member and their addiction, God, I just hope they, I don't know, die peacefully. When it comes to that addiction in your life, God, just manage the implications and I pray they don't mess up my career. Is that the heights we're gonna scale? We just pray half-hearted prayers. You know what's crazy about it? That's half-hearted praying, that they're amazed when Peter shows up. But guess what? Peter showed up. So what does that tell you about God? Tells you God is the God of half-hearted prayers. So I wanna encourage you to pray with more faith. That's today. But even if it's kinda lame, he'll take on us. I debated trying to show this and if you're watching online, sorry, might get taken down. We'll have to cut it. But I was moved today by, or this week,

by a clip from Theo Vaughn. I don't know if you're familiar with Theo Vaughn. He's a comedian that has very much had some difficulties lately with his addiction to drugs. And he has a podcast that's done pretty well and I'm not necessarily recommending his podcast. He says some very inappropriate things. So kids, skip it. But I just wanna play you a moment that matters because he's on the tail end of some pretty self-destructive choices. And in a moment of honesty on his podcast, he just apologizes a couple times because he doesn't realize he's saying probably one of the realest things that hit the airwaves this week. So I wanna play you this clip and we'll talk about it. I'll try to share, you know, I've been struggling, man. The past like couple of years I've had, you know, it's been a struggle in certain ways with certain behaviors that I'm just not proud of, right? Or really just behaviors that I didn't wanna do anymore. And I couldn't change it. I couldn't change the cycle. And even as I say this, I'm afraid that I'll fall back into those behaviors. But I'll tell you what for me has been helpful recently. And I'm sorry if I sound a little animated. I just, I've been like going through this in my own life recently

and it's on the tip of my thoughts and feelings. You know, sometimes I realized for myself, I would pray to God to help me get away from certain behaviors in my life. But at the same time that I was praying, there would be a part of me that knew I was probably gonna do those things again. You know, that I was probably gonna do those things again. Like I beg God, please help me. I don't wanna do this anymore. I don't wanna have this behavior. But there'll be a little part of me that was like, I know even as I ask for God's help that I'm gonna do it again. I would know that. So I started praying like this. I started praying like, God, please help me with this. You know, this is a broken part of me that I bring to you. I need help with it. And then I would add to my prayer. I would say, and even God, even as I pray to you right now, there's a part of me that knows I'm probably lying to you. There's a part of me that knows I'm gonna do that behavior again. So can you come into that part of me and help me there? Help me in the part of me that knows as I pray that I'm lying.

I think God loves that prayer. I think the reason why we have Acts 12 is because in the first parts of Acts, it's just Jerusalem winning, winning, winning, can't stop winning. And yet they hit a moment where they just hit the right combination of walls that they think we're not getting around this one. And you see them offer up some half-hearted prayers. And then God shows up. Every way they expect, not necessarily. God doesn't give you everything you want. James is dead. Others will die too. And yet Luke gives us this moment to show you God has his purposes, he's accomplishing, and he's blessing his people, and he's good, and he will condescend to hear half-hearted prayers. C.S. Lewis, the Oxford Don, who was an atheist, and proudly so, wrote in his book, Surprised by Joy, as he reflected on his own journey, he said, really, a young atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Danger lies in wait up for him on every side. Because he said, I didn't believe there's a God, but then I started to question. and where virtue comes from, and started to question his own life. And he says something profound in the book. He says, for the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose.

What I found there appalled me. A zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, and a harem of fondled hatreds. My name is Legion. And he describes the moment in his room where he just couldn't fake fine anymore, and had to deal honestly with the God he did not want to meet, and he wrote, you must picture me alone in that room in Magdalene. Night after night, feeling whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of him who I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity term of 1929, I gave in. I admitted that God was God. I knelt, and I prayed. Perhaps that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing, the divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The prodigal son at least walked home on his own two feet. But who can duly adore the love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who's brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men

that we shudder at them. But properly understood, they plumb the depths of divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men. His compulsion, our liberation. He said, behold the kindness of God. My prayers were barely half-hearted, and yet he saved my life. He's the God of half-hearted prayers. He's real, and he answers them. In the mid-1700s, the Puritan dream was dying in the colonies. People had come to the U.S. northern seaboard to try to establish a pure church, but then they had kids. And in the midst of that, they had, well, as is described by historians, a spirit of prayer greatly diminished. Regular services on Sunday became dull and void of spiritual zeal, and daily life began to get affected. It's interesting, Jonathan Edwards, who was a pastor in Massachusetts at the time, wrote about what it was like in February of 1728. He said, it seemed to be a time of extraordinary dullness in religion. Licentiousness, for some years, greatly prevailed among the youth of the town. They were, many of them, addicted to night walking. They would frequent the tavern, lewd practices,

where some, by their example, exceedingly corrupted others. And then he goes into details to describe something that was happening in their city. He said, large groups of youth would get together at night, congregate late, get drunk, and things would get out of control. People were getting hurt. And he said, meanwhile, the parents weren't raising these kids, and the leadership of the town was so divided and at each other, no one was caring for these kids. He said, and we were watching ourselves unravel. What do you do? You despair. Something interestingly happened in that day. People got scared enough to start to pray. God, will you do something? And in the midst of that, something strange started popping off in different places, not really controlled, not really organized, a bit chaotic, where suddenly a deep and heartfelt conviction began to land in the hearts of people. One person, two, three, four people began to attend prayer meetings, began to pray over their families, began to repent of sin publicly, began to step forward and repent that I've been at church for years, but I don't really believe any of this, and I never did.

I've been playing a game, and I don't wanna play the game anymore. I've been praying, but I've been lying, and I don't wanna lie anymore. I wanna be real. I want this to be real. I wanna be honest. And there was an outpouring of heart level, guttural confession of sin, and it ushered in what we call in your history books the Great Awakening, a massive revival in America that changed the nature of our country in its earliest days. And it's fascinating, you know, people have been talking about God popping off and working in interesting ways among young people as they see that the world is not working for them in some key ways, and what's being offered to them on social media has not led to human flourishing, but led to destruction, and so they're searching for paths and answers, and my hope is that we will begin to see, yeah, there is a lot of darkness in the world, but this is our crisis moment. where we can say, you know what, am I just gonna give in and let the darkness win? Or am I gonna believe there's really a God up there who changes stories? And he's not afraid of Herod's,

and he can break chains, and he can open gates, and he can end addictions, and he can revive families, and he can change hearts, and he can change countries. Nothing's too big for him. I'm not gonna tell him how scary Herod is. He tells Herod to sit down. That's where the story goes. I won't preach it all. We'll cover it further in on our podcast later. But you read it earlier. When Herod steps up and claims to be God, it's interesting, other historians covered this. Josephus talked about it. He sat on a throne of silver, claiming to be God, and then Josephus said, at that moment, he developed a stomach ailment that excruciatingly killed him over the next five days. Luke says, worms ate him, then he died. In that order. Bleh. You can't control it if people think you're a god, okay? Happens sometimes. It'll happen to Peter later, or excuse me, to Paul later. You can decide if you believe it or not. And God doesn't kill everybody for their sin, but with Herod, God's like, that's enough, you're done. And you see in this moment where a passage began, Herod rules, and Peter's a prisoner. Peter's free, and Herod's dead. Why?

Because there's a god in our story, and he does whatever he wants. That doesn't mean he gives you everything you want. But at the end, what happens? The gospel goes out. The good news goes out. That's the point, that it's a broken world, but there's a god who's on the move. And so for His people, what do I wanna do? I wanna pray to a god like that, even if the best we can offer is half-hearted prayers. It's interesting, just studying this passage. Last week, I knew the outline on Monday morning. This one, I'm like, I don't know. I know what the passage says. I don't know how we're gonna do it. But as I'm praying and thinking on this back porch that I sit on, I left the screen door open, so all these bugs started flying in. Bees and assortment of nature's wonders. That realized they're limited, and they wanna get back up into the wild blue yonder. And so while I'm sitting there studying, I just hear this. Bzz, bzz, bzz, bzz, bzz, bzz, bzz, bzz, bzz. And I just watched for hours, every single day, as these bees just rammed themselves against something they didn't understand, glass. And as they, day after day, began to panic and hit this barrier that's keeping them

from the freedom they long for, strewn about them in the ground as the dead bodies of their failed friends. Pretty grim. And yet the craziest thing about it for me is, I left the screen open. It's right there. At any point, you can go. But what they couldn't understand, is they're like, I'm trying to get there. Yeah, but to get there, you gotta pass through the door, which is down here. Because in a bee mind, it just felt counterintuitive. Wait, the way up is down? The way high is low? I gotta come down in order to get into the freedom? I'm made for? Yeah, because that's where the open door is. And for the church, it's, yeah, you're not gonna politics your way out of this, and you're not gonna riot your way out of this. But the way high is low. And the way up is down. To say, God, you set up kings and you depose them. You rule heritage, you're not scared of them. I got four squads on my back and chains on me. This addiction's held my parents before me, and it's got me too. These tragedies around me, I can't control, and they scare me.

But maybe in the most half-hearted way, I can start to believe the way high is low, and they don't scare you. And in nations past, you kicked off revivals. A great awakening took fire in America, took a fire in Europe, and from the seeds of that awakening came the emancipation of slaves across England. Hospitals, literacy for kids, a Europe that was sinking in alcohol and despair found hope. And I just don't think anything, any one of us is too far gone. And I know there's some areas where you believe that, but I just think for some of us, there is that deep part of you where you don't really think you'll change that. And so as we close, family, I just wanna invite you to pray. And look, we do this every week, that there's places to kneel up front, and I really hope. Some of you will take the advantage of that. We're not late, but we got time. If you wanna come down and kneel up front, I just, I wanna challenge you, church, to pray for that thing you don't think will really change. Maybe ask Him, God, where is pessimism set in for me? I think the country's doomed.

I think kids are doomed. I think I'll never get over this addiction. I think this will never, just, where are you starting to believe the voice of despair? And I'm not advocating presumption. God does whatever He wants, but I'm just advocating faith. When Jesus went to the cross, the whole world seemed out of control to His disciples. That's my King on a cross. Yet God was using it. That implement of death was the instrument of our forgiveness, that by His stripes we're healed, that he who knew no sin became sin for us. And it's wild, we didn't get to it in this passage. Why all the detail at the end? Because Jesus's brother James takes over leading the church in Jerusalem, and it thrives. Peter gets set loose to run and take the gospel to Rome. Paul is set up to take the gospel across the world, and little John Mark, who's gonna prove to be a mess, will get loved on by sweet Barnabas, and Mark will record the first gospel, the story of Jesus, we get. That what looked like a chaotic moment was the seeds of a revival and a revolution. And I don't know what feels like chaos for you now, but I'm praying for revival and revolution in you. Maybe some of you, it's just you need to believe that the chains really can break, the prison doors can really fly open,

and the tragedies that have controlled your family don't need to control you. Some of you, it's just your day to say yes to Jesus for the first time, that you're a sinner, and you're realizing you don't earn it. The way to the freedom of a child of God is to go low and to bow down in humility and say, Jesus, forgive me, heal me, restore me, and then he turns you loose to be something you could never be on your own. I just wanna encourage you, church, before we walk out of here, what's the thing, what's your Herod that you've just been scared to even pray for, because you don't think he'll answer it? Just, just offer it, because he's the God of half-hearted prayers. If you want someone to pray with you, for you, our access team's down front. We're gonna sing in just a moment, but some of you, you need to sing, maybe some of you need to pray with the person who brought you. Maybe it's a spouse, and it's something going on in y'all's marriage, something going on with your kids. Or maybe you just go, I barely have enough faith to pray, and let me see if one of these people with a lanyard on will pray for me. That works, too. But let's not just read about prayer and not do it. Hey, some of us prayed half-hearted prayers

at the beginning, and maybe we need to circle back and go, God, that prayer for America, I didn't really mean it. But maybe I got a little bit of faith that you're in the business of revival. God, let it start here in our hearts. Let it start here at the Lincoln Theater. Let it start here in Washington, D.C. Bring hope in Jesus' name. A light when light seems to go out. May this be our hero moment. May we meet the crisis with faith. King Jesus.