Pure Life Ministries Podcast

Tongues of Fire: The Early Church Part 2

When the early church began to experience massive growth, persecution was not far behind. But the believers, knowing their weakness, prayed earnestly for boldness and God gave them the power to endure. This is Part 2 of our short series, “Tongues of Fire: The Early Church.”

Broadcast on:: 12 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: other

Hey, this is Patrick with Pure Life Ministries. When our hearts are truly transformed by God, significant changes should be occurring in our lifestyle. But this goes far beyond just stopping porn use or avoiding illicit scenes in movies. How we spend our time, where we go, what we pursue in life, everything, should be radically altered as we begin to walk on the narrow way. And many Christians just don't think deeply enough about the way they live, and it's not uncommon for those in the church to base their daily decisions off the media and the culture rather than on the moral principles of Scripture. We want to see that change. Please join us on Saturday, October 12th at 10am Eastern on our YouTube channel for another episode of Pure Life Live. I'll be sitting down with Pure Life's President and Founder Steve Gallagher and our Executive Director of Counseling Programs, Jordan Yoshimine, to discuss the influence of the media we ingest, the limits we should put on our devices, the impact of spiritual atmospheres in and out of the home, and much more. Our hope is that this will help you learn to lead a lifestyle that honors God and helps you get free or stay free from sexual sin. We'd also love to respond to your questions about this topic, so send those to live@purelifeministries.org. When the early church began to experience massive growth, persecution was not far behind. But the believers, knowing their weakness, prayed earnestly for boldness, and God gave them the power to endure. This is part two of our short series, Tongues of Fire, the Early Church. Here we go. Steve, we want to continue our discussions in the early church. I want to ask you in this message that you shared with our staff in this series about the early church. You covered Acts 3 and 4. Talk about the backdrop of these two chapters. Well, I mean, it may sound obvious, but the backdrop is chapter 2, and in chapter 2 we had the enormous revival that hit Jerusalem, and 3,000 souls came to the Lord in one day, plus who knows what happened in the weeks and months after that. But you got to think about what was going on with the disciples during this period of time. All of a sudden, they go from a church of 120 to a church of 3,000 people. I mean, if that isn't enough, an enormous challenge on top of that, you're talking about every one of them, a brand new believer who needs to be discipled. But beyond that is the fact that they have years of indoctrination in rabid Phariseeism, Judaism, ritualism, and all the traditions and so on, that they had to be worked out of that. I believe that during that time, the Lord was using the disciples to just bring the church along and help these new believers get more established in the faith. Then when the Lord felt like, okay, now it's time to move forward again, another step forward, then this thing happened there at the temple. Well, you don't have time to share all of the details, but can you tell us in a nutshell what happens in these two chapters? Well, basically John and Peter are going up to the temple to pray. There's a crippled man there begging, and Peter somehow got a sense from the Lord that that man needed to be healed, saw that he had faith. The Lord healed him through Peter. The man gets up, he is ecstatic as one can imagine someone who's been crippled all their life, and he's running and leaping and praising the Lord, it says. And so that creates a whole stir, and all kinds of people come rushing in to find out what is this. And it's a miracle, it's obvious it's a tremendous miracle. So Peter seizes the opportunity to begin to preach to the people right there at the temple. And while he's preaching, he's interrupted by the guards from the Sanhedrin who were sent in to break the meeting up and haul them in to answer for what in the world they were doing there. As I was going over your notes on this chapter, I couldn't help but think back, man, this is like instant replay of what happened with Jesus. Why did the Sanhedrin react again this way? You would think maybe they'd learn by now. Yeah, and you're referring to the blind man who got healed right there at the same basic place in the temple. You know, the bottom line, I think, was that there was an enormous amount of pride in that Sanhedrin. Still. They felt like they were the experts, they were the religious leaders. And so in the case of these guys, these are just upstarts, who are they, they're fishermen from Galilee. And I think there's a couple of factors involved there. One is that they had put themselves in the position of being the people's teachers. And they positioned themselves right there at the temple. I mean, in a sense, you could understand how the religious leaders would feel. It's almost like usurping their authority. You know, it's one thing to be teaching out somewhere in the streets or something, but to right there at the temple, you know, so I think that was part of it. But also for the Sadducees who ran the Sanhedrin, they did not believe in the resurrection. And that is the message that Peter was preaching forth boldly, was that, you know, Jesus Christ has been resurrected and the Sadducees didn't take kindly to that a bit. Well, how did Peter and John handle the antagonism that they were getting here? Well, you could imagine how intimidating of a setting this must have been for Peter and John to be hauled in in front of the 70 religious leaders of the country. But instead of the timidity that Peter had shown a few months before, right before the crucifixion, a holy boldness overtakes Peter and he just begins preaching his heart out and not only preaching his heart out, but he puts his finger right in their face and calls them the murderers of the Messiah. Wow, you know, unbelievable that he could do what he did. He didn't back down one inch. Yeah. It's very telling. I think what Peter and John did when they were released, very telling what they did. Yeah, they went right into a prayer meeting. They went back to the disciples and their close friends. They started seeking the Lord, but what is really interesting to me is that what they were praying for. They weren't praying for protection. They weren't praying that God would defeat their adversaries or whatever. They were praying that God would give them holy boldness no matter what it cost them. You know, and God really responded to that prayer. Yeah. How much do we need that today? You know, we'd look at what's going on around us. We'd look at the attack on the church, the attack on our faith, on Christianity. Really, we ought to be praying for, as they did, a holy boldness in us as believers to be a witness in the midst of all of it. Yeah, because from there they went out after that. And really everything that you see unfold in the book of Acts is an answer to that prayer that day, but also, you know, you know that that was the way they were praying, and you just see it keep unfolding, unfolding, unfolding under these great events that occur through the book of Acts in the days following. And I know for ourselves here at Pure Life, Mike, that when we get on our faces before the Lord, and we really start seeking Him, that we have seen God move in really wonderful ways. But we are human beings, and we are not built in ourselves to seek the Lord at that level all the time. You know, that's just the reality of our fallen nature is we're not built that way. So we tend to need to do it on occasions, but make those special occasions where today we really seek the Lord, not just our normal time of seeking, but an extended time and impassioned time. And when we do that, God never fails to follow through with His power. All right, that's it for part two of Tongues of Fire, the early church. God bless. We'll see you next time. [MUSIC]