One thing I can guarantee you: if you follow Christ, it’s eventually going to get you in trouble.  There are many in situations of authority and influence who do not follow Christ.  They do not want to know that you follow Christ; they do not want you to be a Christ follower.  About a decade ago, British Airways insisted that a flight attendant not wear a cross visibly while at work.  More recently, atheists in Florida, claiming emotional harm, sued a city in that state for holding a prayer vigil.  A person born female but living as a man shot her way into a Christian school in Nashville to kill whoever happened to be available to kill.  There were those in the media who were of the opinion that, because of the school’s intolerant, hateful faith, it brought those deaths upon itself.  There are, as you might expect, additional examples.

Being a Christ follower—being known to be one—will mark us because following Christ means something you and I don’t get to define.  We either keep striving to live up to it or we don’t.  We’re always doing both.  The grace and the glory is that God knows it and keeps counseling, guiding, and shaping us.  Far from abandoning us, He empowers us, encourages us, and urges us to keep going.  You and I are going somewhere.  Half of those with no particular religion still believe in heaven, as do around one in four agnostics.[1]  Four out of ten Americans believe that going to heaven need not depend upon any belief in God.[2]  Where do those around you Monday through Saturday think they are going, ultimately?  Why?  Based on what?

Because you and I know we are going somewhere, and why we are, because we have the blessed assurance that we are, our hearts and hands are freed for doing things here.  People don’t mind when Christians do nice things, things that help—as those people define nice and help.  They begin to mind, get rubbed the wrong way, when what we do out there, and in here, calls to Christ, calls for the turn to Christ and living this life on God’s terms, according to all God’s Word.  That turn highlights a clash of values.

Peter and John knew all about it.  They had healed a man at the Temple.  Let’s be clear about this, though, because those apostles certainly wanted to be clear: the man who had no strength to walk was healed by the power of Jesus Christ, alive and at work through the ones he had called and claimed—believers.  Faith heals.  The Spirit was for testimony.  It wasn’t the chief priests or lifelong students of the law who healed anyone.  Didn’t they have the Spirit?  It was the uneducated, uncultured, unacceptable fishermen from far, rough, rude Galilee.  It was the ones who knew and loved Jesus, and believed in him, who pointed out the healing way.  They did not claim love for God while ignoring or reconceiving this and that part of God’s Word.  Their faith was not a matter of the prevailing politico-cultural winds of the day.

The religious authorities—the ones who spoke for God, as it were—sternly ordered Peter and John to stop: stop preaching, stop proclaiming, stop healing.  That amounted to stop obeying Jesus.  Listen to the authorities.  Remember who’s in charge here!  Don’t challenge us.  Don’t challenge what we say.  And they did have authority, and could and would use it.  It gets serious when you get thrown in jail.  It gets serious when you’re flogged.  Would you really be ready to go to jail for Jesus?  Some pastors in Canada are: The True North, strong and free!

After the clear and final warning of the authorities, “Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and the elders had said to them” (4:23).  Their own people.  That’s interesting.  Luke doesn’t group the apostles or the church together with the priests, the scribes, and those who went along under their authority, their worldview.  Luke groups Peter and John with “their own people”: a separate, new people.  Separate how, by virtue of what?  It wasn’t separate by skin color, language, or country of origin.  It wasn’t separate by income or occupation.  Jesus had set the apostles apart and given them the Holy Spirit both to lead the people of God and for testimony.  Indeed, leadership was in testifying.  The religious officials and high theologians had become fixated upon a set of values, a body of beliefs, that would not provide salvation.  The people of God follow Jesus; it is evident that they are Jesus followers because they keep striving to do what Jesus did, living as he taught and showed them.  Perfectly, no.  Faithfully, yes.  Faith isn’t just for successes.

I haven’t done any miracle healings.  I don’t expect to.  That was what the apostles did.  I am bold enough to hope that I have brought and shared a Word for healing, and hope, and help, sight for blind eyes, hearing for deafened ears, support and strength for those whose walk feels feeble—like mine!  Every Jesus follower has every right to share in this same bold hope that they bring and share true help.  Jesus is power for new life.  He does not redefine disobedience as obedience.  He did not disobey God’s law: he fulfilled it.  Jesus does not revise Scripture to make certain sins sacrosanct.  He speaks, serves, suffers and sacrifices to change lives, to open the way for life on God’s terms.  The apostles noticed, and followed; let us do likewise.

The religious authorities command Peter and John to stop—no more of this new life, changed life stuff.  No more undermining the established order’s elite status and compelling sense of their own visionary, prophetic significance.  So long as the apostles speak and act, they are depriving the religious authorities of faith authority.  The apostles, by their faithful words and faithful actions, reveal that God had withdrawn His Spirit from the self-significant elite long before.  There had always been a trap built into the priesthood.  By the time of Jesus, the priests had become completely blind to it.  All that trap talk: nonsense!  The authorities were on the right side of history; they knew it.

The people of the church, hearing what Peter and John tell them, “raised their voices together in prayer to God. ‘Sovereign Lord,’ they said, ‘you made the heavens and the earth and the sea, and everything in them” (4:24).  God has all authority and God’s Word is authoritative.  When the authority of those in power on this earth is in opposition to the authoritative Word of God, you and I must know which authority to obey.  There’s a price, a cost.  The people address God as “Sovereign Lord.”  Sovereign is one of those Bible words we don’t use much outside of church, or even inside.  There seem to be a lot of those!  The sovereign is the one who has all power: the one who speaks and it is so; the inescapable, unavoidable one; the one to whom all must ultimately answer.

A clash of powers is a clash of values.  Many of the priests were Sadducees, which doesn’t mean much to us but meant much, then.  It meant they did not believe in a Resurrection.  To them, therefore, the Risen Christ was an impossibility, inconceivable.  Consider the consequences of their thinking.  If there was no resurrection, the most we could hope for would be indications of God’s blessing and favor in this life.  The priests were a rather wealthy class, prestigious, connected, elite—highly credentialed—it was clear to them, and to many outside their group, that the priests had God’s favor.  If anyone enjoyed the Good Life in that part of the world at that time, it was the priestly caste.  How could they, then, regard the message of Jesus, the message of the cross, with any seriousness, or remorse?  To be who they were, they must reject Christ.  They loved and served God by rejecting His Word, you see.  The world always holds out self-assured temptation together with that prerequisite.

And God is sovereign.  That little group of Christ followers, praying together, in that big, hostile world, recalled the words of David: “Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?  The kings of the earth rise up and the rulers band together against the Lord and against his anointed one” (4:25-26 [Ps 2]).  Those whom the Spirit called and claimed realized—filled as they were with wonder, many questions, and growing trust—that all that had happened had been under the hand of God, according to His sovereign will.  Yes, the whole world seemed to be against that little group of Jesus followers, yet these Jesus followers had each of them come out of that same world.  There was hope, there was help, because there was God.  Jesus led people to see, hear, and feel this God; the Spirit was with that little band of believers to fill them with all hope and give them all help: God was with them; He would not abandon them.

So, what sort of help were they praying for, that day?  Lord, keep hurt far from us?  Lord, make us happy?  Lord, make us healthy again?  Lord, help us have enough money this month to pay the bills?  Sweet baby Jesus, make preacher’s sermons shorter?  Not quite.  Here’s the first part of what they prayed for: “enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness” (4:29).  Give us courage, courage to speak with boldness, great boldness.  Because we know we’re going to need it!  Father, we can see clearly that our testifying is going to get us in trouble.  Oh, they can do all kinds of things to us, legally!  Therefore, Father, keep us testifying!  Here comes the rejection.  Here comes the scorn.  Here comes the abuse.  Father, keep us testifying!

They go on to pray that God would “Stretch out [His] hand to heal and perform signs and wonders through the name of [His] holy servant Jesus” (4:30).  Faith heals.  Physical healing is blessing, oh, yes!  God gave these bodies the ability to heal, to the praise of His name.  The healing for which those disciples are praying is the healing that restores sinners to God, the healing of the sin-sick soul.  Don’t you see it, out there: souls sick with sin, no health in them, ruined lives?  Not just the obvious disasters.  No desire for God?  No interest in Jesus?  Sin-sick souls.

The signs and wonders for which those believers are praying are signs of healing, the wonder of healing: God Almighty, bring the healing! reconciliation, redemption, salvation, faith—how could anyone as far gone as that ever come back?!  By Jesus.  Who could ever put such a shattered life back together?  Jesus.  Who could make someone as blind as that see the light, as deaf as that hear the Word?  Jesus.  Jesus through you.  Jesus through me.  Jesus in me.  Jesus in you.  It is no longer I who live, but Christ Jesus in me, for this very purpose: to restore to life.  To be restored to life is to be healed.  Faith heals.

I love this next verse: “After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken.  And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly” (4:31).  God answers their prayer.  He will today, too.  Maybe not with an earthquake.  We can imagine a tremor that day long ago.  Maybe you’ve lived through an earthquake or two.  In my case, both came in the night, once in San Diego, and then a few years later in Portland—not renowned for earthquakes —volcanoes but not earthquakes.  Oh, I was shook, for sure, right out of a pretty decent sleep.  To be shaken as those believers were is to be awakened by an outside power.  When Luke says the place was shaken, I take him deep down to mean the Spirit was at work, grabbing hold of the faithful in a more profound way, awakening them to the glory of God.  We talk a lot about the power of God; I worry that not enough people, even in the churches, have ever felt that power, or know that they have.  What could it feel like?  What does it feel like?  As Luke tells us, the power of God feels like speaking “the word of God boldly.”  The Spirit is with us to heal us; we are being healed to speak, boldly.  We are being healed so others may, too.

Now to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.

               [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/11/23/views-on-the-afterlife/

               [2] As above.