Devoted
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A Time to Pray
A Time to Pray
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Welcome to our continued series on the importance of prayer, and this special time and calling to prayer for the Church of the Nazarene across the USA & Canada. We have been focusing, not just in preaching, but in practicing our time in prayer. You all have these journals and the specially produced volume of the Holiness Today to help guide you in this time of prayer, and I hope you are taking advantage of these resources. We are focusing our attention on prayer through Pentecost Sunday which is June 5th. Prayer is our connecting point with the God of the universe, the one that created it all wants you to communicate with Him, and He, in turn will communicate with me and you. What an incredible opportunity! If you still need to download one of the resources or the app for the half million mobilization, you can do so by scanning the qr code on the screen.
This morning we are going to look at the question of how committed do we need to be to this concept of prayer? I mean, we pray all the time, right? You probably bow your head to pray every time you sit down to eat a meal. That’s 3 times a day - as an aside, why do we pray for meals, but we don’t pray for God’s blessings on our snacks? Maybe it’s because we inherently know that He isn’t going to bless that Jake Shake to the upbuilding of your body. Anyway, Let’s turn to Acts chapter 2, and to a passage that occurs shortly after the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost.
42 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
43 Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles.
44 All the believers were together and had everything in common.
45 They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.
46 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts,
47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
They devoted themselves
They - who is Luke referring to when he uses the term?
Let’s look at the situation. There were 120 people that had been gathered together waiting in the city of Jerusalem for the coming of the Holy Spirit. We are told that on the Day of Pentecost they were all together, and the Holy Spirit came on them. We will deal specifically with that in a couple of weeks, but after they received the Holy Spirit we are told that they went out among the crowd that had gathered from all across the known world and began to speak to the people in languages that the 120 had never learned. God gave them the gift of being able to communicate with those who had come from all over the world. The result of this miraculous movement of the Holy Spirit is that over 3,000 people were added to their number on that day. So, they started the day with 120 people and ended the day with over 3,120 people. That’s a pretty productive day!
They, in verse 42 refers to these 3000 new converts who had become part of the community of believers. Sometimes we get to thinking that only those that are far along in their faith journey are truly devoted, but this passage tells us that those who had just come to know about Jesus devoted themselves. And we are going to look in a few minutes at what it was that they devoted themselves to doing.
Devoted
The word devoted is pretty straight forward. Look it up in the dictionary and you’ll find something along the lines of “characterized by loyalty and devotion.” Well, that doesn’t help a whole lot, does it?
So I got to thinking about how we use the word. I think for us the word is similar to our understanding of committed, and it involves our feelings. And so, I am devoted to my wife and to my family. I can be devoted or committed to a career or even to a job. I can be devoted to the church. Or, as Olivia Newton John sang in Grease, I can be “hopelessly devoted to you.” As I think about that term in reference to our prayer lives, I believe that if devotion is about love and commitment, then it may fall short of the intention of Luke in this verse.
Devotion - or being devoted goes far beyond emotion and feeling. The NASB captures some of what I am getting at here:
42 They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
The sense of the word used in the Greek is to persevere in some activity or cause to the point of devotion.
It doesn’t mean to perfect, but it means to persevere - to continue doing or practicing.
In Theological Lexicon of the New Testament the word is described this way: “to be firm, endure, persevere, remain faithful to a person or a task;” Spicq, C., & Ernest, J. D. (1994). In Theological lexicon of the New Testament (Vol. 3, p. 191). Hendrickson Publishers.Themselves
Themselves - Nobody else can implement devotion in your life.
We often joke that when somebody doesn’t show up for a meeting that they might be given tasks that others don’t want. That may give you a responsibility, but it doesn’t give you devotion.
Even your family members cannot give you devotion. They might volunteer you for tasks, but only you can devote yourself to the task at hand.
These new believers, we are told, devoted themselves - they gave themselves to these things - they endured and persevered and remained faithful to these things.
To the Apostles’ teaching.
Sometimes we use the terms apostle and disciple synonymously. Although they are similar, they are not the same. Generally, a disciple is anybody that follows the teachings of Jesus. Yes, the scripture tells us that he selected a few from among the followers to be His disciples and to learn from Him. There were others that followed Him while He was here on earth, but He selected 12. Today, that term disciple is us! That is why we refer to Nazarene Discipleship International - we grow as disciples and we have a responsibility to pass along discipleship to the coming generations.
Apostle on the other hand, is reserved for those who were directly sent out by Jesus. It is a synonym of the term envoy, which is defined as: “a person delegated to represent one government in its dealings with another.” Clearly, government is where we think of this term most often, but it certainly fits here. The apostles were envoys that were sent out directly by Jesus to be His representatives in the world. In the scripture it is usually saved for the 12 selected by Jesus.
These new believers had determined to learn and follow the teaching of these apostles. If you are devoted to a teaching, it implies much more than just learning the facts - If I am devoted to learning about cooking, but I never spend any time doing it, I am not devoted to the teaching that I am learning. In effect, they were committed to learn and follow the teachings of Jesus. For us, that means we will be devoted to the Word of God, not just occasionally reading it, or even daily reading - it is a matter of devotion to living what we learn when we read it since these apostles were envoys of Jesus. These first new believers were also devoted:
To the Fellowship
God has placed us into a fellowship of believers, and there are great benefits to being part of that fellowship, not just loosely affiliated, but devoted to the fellowship.
I encourage you to be devoted to the fellowship of believers as well. If we are going to become the church that God wants us to be, it will be because of our devotion to the fellowship. We grow in our walk with Jesus, not just by individual commitment and study, but through spending time with and encouraging one another.
The truth is that we really do need each other. We need to encourage one another on this journey of faith. Fellowship is not just about eating together or talking after church, although we love to do both of those things. Fellowship implies communion or partnership. As we do life together and as we encourage one another in the faith, we grow into the person and the church that God wants us to be.
To the Breaking of Bread.
Authenticity and health in a congregation are surely seen in the way they eat together, but this is more than fellowship. This “breaking of bread” seems to allude to the Lord’s Supper, faith and community fed by the sacrament.
It is true that the early church gathered more often than we do today - we are told that they gathered together daily, and they ate together, but breaking the bread implies remembering the Last Supper, when Jesus broke the bread and gave it to His disciples to eat.
As we celebrate communion together, we are reminded that we are one body - we are drawn together and devoted to living the life that Christ calls us to live as we participate together in this means of grace.
To prayer
Some translations take this phrase to be “and to the prayers.”
There were clearly some prayers that were learned and practiced by the early church. They took the prayer that Jesus taught His disciples as an example to pray and they practiced the idea of saying this prayer. We can find within the Lord’s Prayer the design that our prayers are to take. When we repeat this prayer, we are tempted to just say the words because we know them so well, but if we will take the time to focus on what we are saying, we will be transformed by the words of this prayer.
Perhaps the prayers also referred to the Psalms and the corporate prayers that are included in the writings of Paul. All of these are models of prayers that will help to build the intimacy that prayer involves.
We are called, though, not just to repeat prayers by memory, but to pray as a means of grace, meaning that God works in our lives as we spend time in prayer. Every single major movement of the Spirit of God in history has begun with a devotion to prayer! Why? Because prayer changes things, yes. I believe that prayer does make a difference in our lives - Things happen when we pray.
There is a song that I played right before this service of worship started that describes what happens when we seriously devote ourselves to prayer as the church of Jesus.
People hurting, people broken
Beaten down and feeling hopeless
Wonder if it's gonna always be this way
Who will speak up for the captive
Show some love and heal a past that
Binds the wounds we think will never go away
But what if we could be a people on our knees
As one before the King
'Cause we believe
All the world starts changing
When the church starts praying
Strongholds start to break
Oh, when we pray
Prison walls start shaking
At the sound of praising
Nothing stays the same
Oh, when we pray
Oh, when we pray, oh
But even more than changing our circumstances, what I have found is that when I spend time and am truly devoted to a life of prayer, what really changes is me. Prayer changes us even more than it changes our circumstances.
That, ultimately, is why we have been called to a life of prayer!