Acts 12

The title above is a link from the blog to this passage on http://www.biblegateway.com/. If you are reading this in an email, click the title to get to the blog and then click it again to get to the passage.

Consider the irony. The disciples are in the home of John Mark (author of the gospel of Mark) and they are praying, “Lord, deliver Peter. Don’t let Herod execute him. Would you get him out of that jail?”

Then Rhoda goes to the door and comes back, “Peter is at the door!”

“Rhoda, calm down. Come back and pray with us. We need to trust God to deliver Peter.”

“Then who is the guy who looks like Peter, says he is Peter, and is waiting outside the door?”

“Hmm, I wonder who it could be? Peter is in prison. It must be his angel”

Knock, knock, knock

This must be one of the greatest memories of those early believers. You could only imagine the horror of losing James, the brother of John. He was the first one of the twelve to be martyred. He was one of the three who went with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. Losing Steven was surely difficult, but James was at the center of the leadership of that early church.

I am sure that the irony was not lost on them. The very thing that they were praying for had been answered by God, but their faith did not have the capacity to believe it. Do you believe God well enough to have the kind of vision to see the answers to your prayers? Sometime we mouth our prayers and congratulate ourselves for the result, OR we complain about the unwanted side effects of God’s answer.

Our hearts just simply do not have the capacity to appreciate the power, generosity and goodness of God. Our attention to the way he responds to our prayers has the potential to expand that capacity. Have you tried tracking your prayer life? Write down specific prayers and then look back on what you prayed for. Write your prayer on a post-it note and put it on your calendar. Look for the answer. Do you keep a list? Do you check off answers to your prayers as you go?

Notes: Observe the abundance of details that bring credibility to this history. You get to hear the details that Peter experienced like getting slapped in the face by the angel, having to put his clothes on, etc. You can imagine Luke sitting with Peter and writing the details of this story down word for word. More than that, this chapter is a “who’s who” of the New Testament. Eleven specific names are included in this chapter. These would have been people who were well known in the church of these days. These would have been people that the original readers of the gospel would have known about and could have been asked regarding the validity of this miracle