Acts 12:14–16

0:00 Good evening, church. Our text, as Greg said, is going to be found in Acts chapter 12, verses 14 to 16. It's on page 921 in your pew Bibles, if you would like to turn there. So, probably like many of you, growing up at Christmas time, I would go over to my grandparents' house. Now, my grandparents were Mennonites. I was raised in Lancaster County, and they were Mennonites. They weren't horse and buggy Mennonites. They had a car, but they were still more on the strict end of Mennonite instead of the more liberal end. And they were very frugal people and always thought, like, what does a child need?

0:32 So every year I would say to my grandparents, this is what I want. I want, like, Legos and a new toy. And every year, without fail, I got socks. I got socks. Every single year from then, Dobby the house elf would have loved my grandparents. He would have been like, man, socks are amazing. And so, yeah, every year we would go and I would get socks. And so for the first, you know, years of my life, I would eagerly ask. I would eagerly expect, you know, something else. And it was just socks and socks. And eventually it came to be the point where I was like, okay, I'm just going to get socks. I'm not going to expect anything else.

1:04 Well, I wonder if that's at least somewhat analogous to your prayer life and to my prayer life. I wonder if when we get saved, we get super excited and we pray and we see God answer and all sorts of things. But as life goes on, there's prayer requests that don't get answered. And we pray them for years and eventually we just come to think, you know, maybe God just has socks for this. Maybe he's not interested in answering some of our prayers. Well, if that's you tonight, or if that resonates with you at all, I think this text is incredibly encouraging to us tonight.

1:35 So let's read this text and dive into it. I'm going to start in verse 12 of Acts chapter 12. When Peter realized this, he went to the house of Mary, the mother of John, whose other name was Mark, where many were gathered together and were praying. And when he knocked at the door of the gateway, a servant girl named Rhoda came to answer. Recognizing Peter's voice, in her joy, she did not open the gate, but ran in and reported that Peter was standing at the gate. They said to her, you are out of your mind.

2:07 But she kept insisting that it was so, and they kept saying, well, it's his angel. But Peter continued knocking, and when they opened, they saw him and were amazed. I think the main idea of this text I want to explore with you tonight is simply this. God hears and answers our prayers. So pray with eager expectation. God hears and answers our prayers, so pray with eager expectation. I'm going to break that down into two points. Point number one, I want to spend some time thinking about our weakness in believing that God hears and answers.

2:39 We saw in the church gathered there just this weakness, just this like, no, he's clearly not answering our prayer requests. So I want to think about that as a church tonight. And then secondly, despite that human weakness, we will, like this church, be amazed at how God answers prayer. So those are our two points. Our weakness in believing that God hears, but despite our human weakness, we will be amazed. So first point, human weakness in believing God in prayer. So the context is pretty simple. If you were to back up to the very beginning of chapter 12, you would see this guy named Herod the King.

3:13 That's not Herod at the birth of Jesus. This is Herod Agrippa I. He reigned from 41 to 44. So this is probably about 10 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Herod just goes on a rampage, and he just starts persecuting the church. And in verse 2, you would see he kills James, the brother of John. That is James, son of Zebedee, one of the first disciples called one of the guys that was up on the Mount of Transfiguration that saw Christ glorified. This is a central pillar in the church. This is a big guy. This is an important guy.

3:44 And he is snuffed out and killed by Herod. And Peter, at the same time, is captured. He's going to be put on trial and probably get the same sentence. So within maybe a short few days, two pillars of the church might be killed. This is how big of a deal this is. This would be awful for this early church. And so what do they do? Verse 5, they make earnest prayer for him. The church goes to war in prayer for Peter as he's in prison with Herod. Well, skip ahead, but Peter basically has this miraculous escape from prison.

4:18 He thinks he's in a dream and ends up, you know, outside of the prison walls. And he's like, that wasn't a dream. I should go to the church. And so he heads over to the house of Mary and begins knocking on the door. And that brings us to our text tonight and what happens. He's knocking on the door, and the story just gets really funny. This is a hilarious story. It's really funny. So it follows these three different lines. First, you have Rhoda. Rhoda's just excited out of her mind. rambunctious Rhoda. She hears the knocking. She goes, and she hears Peter's voice, and she's super excited, right? She's so excited. We all know a Rhoda. She's so excited that she forgets her responsibility to open the gate and just runs into the house, okay? So Rhoda is super excited.

5:00 She runs in, and she starts telling everybody else, hey, Peter is out at the gate. She's a picture of excitement, and she would have been with the church praying, and she's believing. She's like, oh, Peter's here. This is incredible. Forgets to open the gate. But still, she believes that God has answered the prayer. Well, the gathered believers are doubtful. They come up with the reasons why this can't be the case. And first, they just go right at Rhoda and say, you're insane. You're out here in mind. What are you even talking about? That girl crazy.

5:30 This is nuts. They don't believe that God would answer their prayer request for some reason. It's just ruled out of the possibility. It can't be the case that Peter's at the gate. So they kind of pick on poor Rhoda, right? But Rhoda is tenacious. She ain't going to give up that quick. And so she starts insisting, no, he's really out at the gate. To which they then turn, as we see in our text, to begin to think, well, no, it's not Peter, it's his angel. Well, I don't know exactly what that means. That might be linked to Matthew 18 and ideas of guardian angel, but I don't think that's the point.

6:04 I think the point of the text is just to say that these disciples, these Christians just are refusing to believe that the Lord would actually answer their prayer. For one, they pick on Rhoda. For two, they just come up with the theory that it's an angel. They're just not willing to admit that God might do it. Meanwhile, all this is happening. Peter, the leader of the church, probably the most important guy in the church, is left outside of this gate just knocking away at the door. Just knock, knock, knock, knock, knock. He's just keeping on.

6:34 And meanwhile, the church seems to be inside deliberating and making task force and subcommittees to discuss the possibility of whether or not Peter has actually been released from jail. It's a hilarious story. It's a funny story because it's just so common. It's just so us. We know rotas. We know doubters. We know that sometimes we're just wildly incompetent with our responses to things, and that's why the story just gets into us because it's us. It speaks to us, and we understand it. The church is filled with the positive eager. It's filled with the doubting.

7:05 It's filled with even incompetence sometimes. So that's the story, and that's what's going on. But I want to double-click on this particular point of just their weakness to believe. Why is it that the church just doesn't think that God is going to answer? Well, this text doesn't tell us specifically why. But I think as you think about your own life, you can come up with reasons that they might be thinking. I mean, to be fair to them, James is, in fact, dead. And that is a really big deal. And that would cause a certain amount of doubt for them, for sure.

7:38 But I think in your life and mine, we have our own reasons as well why we don't think God will answer prayer. We might think, well, you know, God probably has more important things to worry about. I mean, there's wars and rumors of wars. There's governmental things. There's all sorts of things. And so why would God be concerned about me or my friends or my family? He's got bigger fish to fry. Or maybe a big one is, well, he hasn't answered so far. He hasn't answered in the past. It's been years that I've been praying. And so if he just continues that pattern, he's not going to answer now.

8:11 So maybe I'll pray, but I'm not going to expect much. I'm not going to eagerly lean in and hope that he does. Maybe straight up he just doesn't care. Maybe you've started to believe the lie that God just doesn't care. Or you think, you know, I'm just not the sort of Christian that God would even care to listen to. I'm not as obedient as I should be, and so he's just ignoring me. All of these things can come up as to reasons why we don't expect God to answer or why we don't even pray.

8:43 But Scripture really leans in here and tells us, no, you should go to God, and you should go to God expectantly. You should go to God eagerly. You should think of God in different ways than what you're thinking of him. And maybe the most profound statement of this is Jesus in Matthew chapter 11. He says this, if you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your father, who is in heaven, give good things to those who ask him? Like, I'm an evil dad, according to this text, but I figure it out sometimes and give good gifts to my kids, right?

9:20 Sometimes we leave baseball and I buy them ice cream, and now they just eagerly expect that they get ice cream every single time we leave baseball. Sometimes I figure it out. but I'm evil. God is perfect and good, and you're a father, and he knows how to give you good things to those who ask. It completely reorients how you think about God, which would completely reorient how you think about prayer and your posture towards God in prayer. Look, obviously scripture does not make the promise that every prayer request that you make will be answered exactly how you ask and when you ask. God is not a genie. You don't just rub the bottle, he pops out, you ask him what you want, he gives it to you, and then you put him back in the lamp, put him on the shelf for the next time that you need him. That's not God. God is God. He is enthroned above, we are of earth. His ways are not our ways, his thoughts are not our thoughts. He's not a genie that we just pull out, but scripture does teach that God is your father. He adopted you into his family if

10:21 you are a Christian and he loves you and knows you and he knows what is best for you and invites you to come to him in prayer. And therefore you should bring your requests to God and you should bring them eagerly, expectantly. Pray and watch and look and see that God is good. I mean this applies in a thousand different ways. Brother, sister, keep praying for your wayward children. I've talked to some of you. And it's decades of prayer. And that's on one front, just super encouraging to many of us. Some of you have been praying for wayward children longer than I've been alive.

10:57 And that's amazing. But I want to encourage you, keep praying. The Lord could get Peter out of jail instantly. The Lord can save your children. Keep praying. Keep praying for parents. Keep praying for healing of disease. Keep praying for your friends. Keep praying that the gospel would go forth and that missionaries would be bold and God would send more. Keep praying that God would help you put sin to death in your life as well. These are all things we should pray for as a church and for one another. You know, as I was studying this text and looking into it, I just felt burdened to pray for you, for this church, that we would learn to be a church that prays all the more. I was thinking, actually, my mind was taken to Luke 12, verse 1, this incredibly humble moment where the disciples come to Jesus, and they just ask, Jesus, teach us how to pray.

11:54 Teach us how to pray. That's one, one. That's a humble prayer. Like, we're not even good enough to know how to pray on our own. We have to ask God to help us learn how to talk to him. That's incredibly humbling to think how bad we are. But Lord, teach us to pray. You should look around this room and you should think, I want that brother to learn how to pray. I want that sister to learn how to pray. I want this church to learn how to pray all the more. I think we are a praying church. But brother, sister, pray. Take time this week. Take time this month. Pray that this church would learn to lean on God and to pray for one another. It would be a great prayer request to pray to God.

12:35 Well, that brings us to our second point. Despite all this human weakness that we see in the first one and all our doubts and everything, there actually will come a time, we see in this text, there actually will come a time when you will be absolutely amazed at how God answers prayer. Going back to the text, for all the doubt and excuse-making that they have, they actually do get around to opening this door. Somebody eventually apparently raises their hand in this meeting and he's like, you know, we could just go to the gate and open it and see what happens.

13:06 I mean, you know, it doesn't seem like it's that complex. And so they head out there and they open up this gate and what they find absolutely amazes these Christians. Peter, like a flesh and bone Peter, not an angelic Peter, like the real Peter is actually standing there. And it's a clear testimony that God has answered their prayers. They've earnestly prayed for God to deliver him and he's there. Brother and sister, do you know that God loves to answer prayers even despite our weaknesses?

13:40 And that is, in fact, his kindness to us. But this brings up another thing too, this tension that we have in Scripture and even in this scene to some degree of what do we do with unanswered prayer? What do we do with that? It's hard. It's hard to think through this. And so I think we could think to some degree of the Psalms. I'm thinking of psalms where the author will say they'll ask the Lord to deliver from the pit or from Sheol, the realm of the dead. And you have to ask the question, okay, did God answer that prayer? Well, maybe in that scene he did, but as far as I'm aware, everybody who wrote the psalms is dead.

14:15 They're in the pit. They're in Sheol, if you will. They all died, as Hebrews even says, they died without seeing the promises. And so in one sense, it's like, well, God didn't answer that prayer. But in another sense, like seriously, will God answer that prayer? Will God answer those prayers? And the answer, once you look at the whole Bible, is absolutely yes and amen. He will raise them and they will be amazed and stand before his face. I think the thing that we need to learn about with prayer is that we need to have a mindset that's just bigger than the next five minutes or the next five days or the next five weeks or the next five years.

14:54 God's intent is to bring you joy for eternity. His plan is far bigger than yours and mine, and he sees far more than what you and I see. Brother, sister, there is nothing, nothing that you are bringing to God in prayer that you will not one day see his absolute goodness and his absolute glory and his absolute kindness to you. There is not a single thing that you will not see his goodness and glory and kindness to you in. nothing. Because if it weren't that case, then heaven would be filled with all of us walking around saying, this is great, but God, I wish you would have. We would be walking around saying, God, if you would have just. But heaven's not that. Heaven is every tear wiped away.

15:41 Heaven is God fulfilling all of his promises to his people in absolute goodness. Brother, sister, you will see, one day, you will see and you will be amazed and you will have joy before the face of God. So pray. So pray with eager expectation. Go back to God and go back to a God who promises to absolutely blow your socks off with his goodness. He will not fail you. Go to him in prayer. Two last brief thoughts about that. We're about to go to the Lord's Supper and the Lord's supper is a reminder of a lot of things, but one thing that it's a reminder of that relates to what we're talking about is Jesus really does intend to give you all good things. Like, it's actually Jesus's purpose to save and bring you full satisfaction and joy. You will actually one day feast with God on his holy mountain, and he will not withhold one good thing from you. So when you come to the table tonight, be reminded of that. God intends to give you good. He who did not spare

16:44 his own son? Will he not also graciously give you all things? Remember that at the table tonight. Secondly, if you're here with us tonight and you don't consider yourself a Christian, I hope you see something here that might pique your curiosity just a little bit. Christianity, Christians, the Bible teaches that you can know God, that you can have a relationship with God. That's an insane claim. You can, the creator of heaven and earth, the one who was and is and who has to come, you can know him, and you can come to him in prayer. That's like a crazy claim. But the problem is, is that sin has separated you from God. You don't have a relationship with God because there is a wall between you and God, and that is your sin. And God has dealt with that wall by sending Jesus Christ to die on the cross for your sins and to rise again to bring you to God. And what happens when you place your faith in Christ, when you repent of your sins and turn, it's like Jesus takes you and walks you into the very throne room

17:45 of God and points to the high king of heaven and says, that's now your dad. And you can go to him about anything. This is what Christians call the gospel. It's forgiveness from sin and a relationship with God. And it's offered to you tonight if you repent and believe. You should come to him and find that he is so good to you. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this text. We thank you for the humor of this text and just how it reminds us of who we are. Father, we ask that you would teach us to be a church that prays.

18:19 Father, we ask that you would teach us to lean on you, rely on you, love you, and understand that you do have purposes and plans to bring us joy. Father, we pray that you would do that good work in us tonight. We pray it all in Jesus' name. Amen.