All these with one accord or devoting themselves to prayer together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus and his brothers.
– Acts 1:14
What a verse! If you remember the scene in Acts 1, Jesus has just ascended into heaven and gathered with his disciples after dying on the cross. Rising from the dead, he ascends into heaven. And an angel from heaven says, “He’s coming back”. And they gather together in Jerusalem just like he had told them to do. Jesus had said, “You’re going to receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you’re going to be my witnesses from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria to the ends of the earth.”
Acts 1:14 Shows Us How the Early Church Prioritized Prayer
So they gather together in Jerusalem, in or we call the upper room and they devote themselves to prayer. This is the first of three different times in these initial chapters and Acts that we see this phrase “devoted to prayer”. Acts 1, Acts 2:42. We’ll talk about how the church was devoted to prayer. In Acts 6, the leaders of the church say, “We need to devote ourselves to prayer and the ministry of the word”.
And I just want you to get this picture. Here are these disciples. Jesus has left them. He’s ascended to heaven. And he’s just given them this global commission. “Go and make disciples of the nations”. “Be witnesses to the ends of the earth”. So they gather together. And the Bible doesn’t say they devote themselves to planning. They don’t devote themselves to whiteboarding out a strategy to get the gospel to the ends of the earth.
They devote themselves to praying. And I want to lead us to pray according to this verse, really out of the overflow of conviction in my own heart this week, with some things that I’ve been walking through in my own life where I’ve been doing a lot of strategizing and a lot of planning. And I was convicted specifically this morning that I was doing a lot more planning and strategizing and thinking through all kinds of factors. I was spending hours doing that and relative minutes praying. And in the process, I was missing the point.
Acts 1:14 Encourages Us to Imitate this Devotion to Prayer
I just want to encourage you. As you think about your life. And as you think about your family. As you think about all that God has put on your plate. Are you devoted to praying over and above planning, and preparing? I’m not saying planning or preparing or strategizing is bad by any means. But if we are not devoting ourselves to praying, we’re missing the point. And we will miss the power we need to do all that God has called us to do in this world, in our lives, in our families, and in the work he’s called us to.
So God, please help us to devote ourselves to prayer. God, we pray that you would guard us from our tendency to plan and strategize and work and do all kinds of things apart from devotion to prayer. God, we pray that we can realize our powerlessness, our total inability to do what you’ve called us to do. We think about these disciples in Acts 1. There was no way they could have done what you had entrusted them to do, be witnesses to the ends of the earth. They knew they needed your power, and you showed it. You showed your power in such an awesome way in Acts 2 as they were praying.
Praying for the Janjua Jat People
And so God, teach us to pray like this in ways that depend on, are desperate for your power and lead to experiencing your power and our lives and our marriages and our families, and the work that you call us to do whatever that looks like, and in being witnesses to people around us today to the ends of the earth. God, we pray today for the Janjua Jat people of Pakistan, 158,000 of them, no known followers of Jesus, and they won’t be reached, God, by people trying to reach them in the flesh and our own power.
They can only be reached by witnesses who are devoted to prayer. So God help us, teach us to pray. We pray that our first resort in everything in our lives would be devotion to prayer that then drives everything else we do. In Jesus name, we pray according to Acts 1:14. Amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
