Fully Trusting (Acts #15)

Open your Bible to Acts 12. We’re taking verses 1 through 19 today — the story of Peter’s miraculous escape from prison.

About that time Herod the king laid violent hands on some who belonged to the church. He killed James the brother of John with the sword, and when he saw that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter also. This was during the days of Unleavened Bread. And when he had seized him, he put him in prison, delivering him over to four squads of soldiers to guard him, intending after the Passover to bring him out to the people. So Peter was kept in prison, but earnest prayer for him was made to God by the church.

Then comes the rescue — the angel, the light in the cell, the chains falling off, the iron gate swinging open of its own accord. Peter walks one street and the angel vanishes. And Peter says, “Now I am sure that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me.”

He goes to the house where the church is gathered praying, and a servant girl named Rhoda answers the door. She recognizes his voice, and she’s so overjoyed that she runs back inside without opening the gate. The church tells her she’s out of her mind. She insists. They say, “It must be his angel.” Meanwhile Peter is still standing outside, knocking.

It’s such a remarkable story that it’s almost unbelievable. It’s the kind of passage skeptics point at and say, “Yeah, right.” And honestly, I get it — because Peter didn’t think it was really happening either. He’d had that big vision back in Acts 10, so he assumed God was giving him another one. He’s probably wondering what God is about to show him, right up until the angel disappears and he’s standing alone in the street. He is every bit as stunned as any skeptic would be.

The Sermon Everyone Preaches

I’ve heard a number of sermons on this passage, and most of them center on verse 5: Peter was kept in prison, but earnest prayer for him was made to God by the church. The idea being that the reason Peter escapes in verses 6 through 19 is the earnest prayer of the church in verse 5.

I had a moment of doubt about whether I was remembering that correctly — maybe it was just one really good sermon and my memory had multiplied it. So I searched online for sermons on Acts 12:1–19 and scanned the titles. A few were about the events: “When Chains Fell Off.” “God Delivers Peter.” “Peter Miraculously Delivered.” But the majority were clearly built on verse 5: “Earnest Prayer.” “How to Get God to Hear Me.” “The Amazing Power of Prayer.” “What Happens When We Pray.” “Knock, Knock.” “Keep Knocking.”

And I think that’s genuinely wise. If there’s anything the church in America needs, it’s earnest prayer. If there’s anything a follower of Jesus needs, it’s earnest prayer.

The word “earnest” could be translated fervent, intense, even constant. Some of you hear “constant prayer” and immediately think of 1 Thessalonians 5:17 — “pray without ceasing” — which means there’s a decent chance you don’t like that verse, because you don’t do it. And now we’re told the whole church prayed earnestly, and there are pastors everywhere preaching that we should too, and we don’t like that either. Because we don’t pray earnestly. We pray casually. Occasionally. Doubtfully. Pathetically.

Maybe some of you are holier than I am and your prayer life is vibrant year-round. Let me tell you what it’s like for the rest of us. I’ve had seasons where my prayers really were fervent — and then in that earnestness I prayed for something, and God didn’t answer it. Or He didn’t answer the way I wanted, or on the timeline I wanted. And that seeded some doubt. And the doubt turned into why bother, if He isn’t going to give me what I’m asking for? And earnest prayer quietly became occasional prayer, apathetic prayer, weak prayer.

So yes — we need those sermons. But you can tell from the title that I’m not preaching verse 5 today.

The Two Verses Nobody Preaches

Something else jumped out at me this time. Maybe it jumped out because of where I am in life right now. But my greater hope is that it jumped out because at least one of you needs to hear it.

Embedded inside this amazing rescue story is a deeply uncomfortable and absolutely crucial doctrinal truth. Some of us avoid it. Some of us work around it. For some people it’s the thing that drives them out of a church, or out of the faith altogether. And we have to confront it if we’re ever going to fully trust God.

Let me get at it by way of a story.

In the early days of Riverwood, a wonderful married couple visited us. They clearly loved Jesus. There was real enthusiasm and joy about them, and I remember thinking how great it would be to have a couple like that in our church. After a few weeks, the wife asked if we could talk. At first I assumed I was heading into some pastoral counseling, but it became clear pretty quickly that she had questions about Riverwood — and mostly about me.

She wanted me to understand where she was coming from, so she told me her story. God had brought her out of a genuinely brutal past. She’d made a lot of destructive decisions. She had come to hate her life and was near the point of ending it, when God overwhelmed her with His love and grace. She gave her life to Christ, and He flooded her with joy.

So what she wanted on a Sunday morning was to celebrate the victory God had given her. She wanted to hear that you can have victory over your sin, victory over your struggles, victory over the things that hold you down — that if you pray earnestly, God will do the miraculous.

Then she said, “You preach that a little bit. But what I hear the most is you talking about the pain in life. And when I come on Sunday, I don’t need reminding about the pain. I see the pain. I live in the pain. I need to be brought out of the pain. I need to be shown that I can have victory over the suffering.”

I know exactly how she would want me to preach this passage. She would want me to tell you that just as the chains fell off Peter, the chains of addiction can fall off you. That just as God walked Peter out of that prison, He can walk you out of your impossible situation. That just as God brought Peter back to the church, He can bring you back to your spouse, your kid, your parent, that broken friendship.

Hear me clearly: I do believe God can free you from addiction. I do believe God restores relationships. I have watched Him do it.

But I do not believe God had Peter thrown in prison and miraculously delivered so that I could give you a clever sermon on getting out of debt. Something deeper is going on here. I don’t think God is handing us a little nugget to claim. I think He is revealing Himself in a bigger way and growing our faith — so that today is less about what you can get from God and more about what God is asking you to give Him.

And in fairness to all those other sermons: of these nineteen verses, seventeen of them are about Peter’s arrest, imprisonment, escape, and aftermath. It makes complete sense to preach the seventeen. Maybe I’m the one making the mistake by taking you back to the first two. But the first two are where the uncomfortable truth lives.

“About That Time”

Verse 1 opens with “about that time” — meaning simultaneously with what we just read.

In chapter 11 we watched the gospel explode into Antioch, roughly three hundred miles north of Jerusalem, about a two-week walk. Christians fleeing the persecution in Jerusalem landed there, and some of them shared the news of Jesus’s resurrection not only with fellow Jews but with Greeks — and many of them believed. The first Gentile church was planted. Revival broke out. It was so significant that the center of gravity for the global church began shifting from Jerusalem to Antioch.

So revival is blazing in the north. And Luke says: about that time, back in Jerusalem, Herod the king laid violent hands on some who belonged to the church.

This is Herod Agrippa I, grandson of Herod the Great — who was reigning when Jesus was born — and both nephew and brother-in-law to Herod Antipas, who was reigning when Jesus was crucified. Family reunions must have been strange. Agrippa is a consummate politician: in Jerusalem he leans into being half Jewish; in Rome, where he was educated, he is thoroughly Roman. That’s precisely what gives him his power.

And out of that power, and his hunger to be a well-loved king, he sees persecution already running against the church and thinks: here’s my opportunity. He joins in, and it makes him more popular still.

What does he do? “He killed James the brother of John with the sword.” That’s another way of saying he had him beheaded.

One Lives. One Dies.

Now put the two halves together. Seventeen verses about Peter’s miraculous escape. One verse about James’s execution.

Peter escapes. James does not. God gives victory to one apostle and permits the death of another.

Why?

I’ll be honest with you: I don’t know. But I do know that whatever the answer is, it’s wrapped up in the sovereignty of God.

The book of Hebrews — we don’t know who wrote it — contains a chapter with a nickname, which very few chapters get. Chapter 11 is called the Hall of Faith. If you follow sports, you know about Halls of Fame. This is the author walking through Old Testament figures and recounting how they exhibited extraordinary faith in God. Abraham and Sarah. Isaac and Jacob. Rahab. And then in verse 32 he says:

And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets — who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. Women received back their dead by resurrection.

That’s a rousing passage. Miracles. Victory. Faith rewarded in visible, dramatic ways.

And then, almost mid-thought, the author turns:

Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated.

Same chapter. Same faith. Radically different outcomes. Exactly like Peter and James.

This makes a lot of us profoundly uncomfortable. James wasn’t a minor figure. He was one of the big three — Peter, James, and John — part of the inner circle around Jesus. He isn’t the anonymous crewman who beams down and never comes back. This is a named, central character. And if that’s how God treats one of His most loyal servants, why would I serve a God like that?

“But James Asked for This”

Some people push back here: James brought it on himself.

Back in Matthew 20, James and his brother John come to Jesus — and they bring their mother along. She bows and asks whether, when Jesus comes into His kingdom, her two sons could sit at His right hand and His left: the positions of prominence and power. In their minds, Jesus has come to overthrow Rome and reestablish Israel as a sovereign nation. When He takes the throne, wouldn’t it be something if the Sons of Thunder were seated beside Him?

Jesus doesn’t answer the mother. He looks at the boys and asks, “Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?”

That cup is the cup of suffering — the cup of God’s wrath against sin. The cup of pain, of sorrow, of death. It’s the same cup Jesus will beg the Father to remove in Gethsemane, because to drink it meant the cross.

They want their names in the Hall of Faith. They want to be men. So they say, “Yes, we are able.”

And Jesus, knowing exactly what is coming, tells them the truth: you will. For John, the cup wasn’t death but isolation — exile on the island of Patmos. For James, the cup is Acts 12:2. He drinks it, and he dies.

So why did God let James die and Peter live?

Someone will want to answer, “It’s right there in verse 5 — earnest prayer. God answers the prayers of His people. That’s why Peter escapes.”

I saw some heads nodding. But think about that for a second. Do you really believe the church shrugged about James? “Eh, he’ll be fine”? Everything we’ve watched in Acts tells us these are people of prayer. When persecution erupted back in chapter 8 and believers were fleeing for their lives, you can be certain they were on their knees praying their faces off.

I’ll admit that’s an argument from silence — the text doesn’t say it. But I’m confident they prayed for James. I don’t know that they expected him to die. But they prayed for his release and his safety and for God to act.

And here’s what’s genuinely remarkable. They prayed for James. God did not answer the way they wanted. And then in verse 5 they have the audacity to pray earnestly for Peter anyway.

They are far more spiritually mature than I am. I pray for something, God doesn’t grant it, and I start drifting toward “why bother.” They watched God say no in the most final way imaginable, and they kept praying.

Why? Because they understood the sovereignty of God.

My Grace Is Sufficient

In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul tells the church in Corinth about a thorn in the flesh. We don’t know exactly what it was — some scholars think his eyesight was failing, others suspect chronic pain. What we know is that he prayed three times for God to remove it, and God said no.

Notice what that no was not. It wasn’t punishment. It wasn’t a verdict that Paul lacked faith. It wasn’t that he failed to say the magic words. This is the man God used to carry the gospel to the nations and to write much of the New Testament we’re still living on.

And God’s answer is: My grace is sufficient for you. I am enough.

Could God have healed him? Absolutely. Paul knew that. And God’s reply amounts to: I have something better.

Which is why Paul can then say he will boast all the more gladly about his weaknesses. If God can use my pain to accomplish something great — so be it.

How does anyone get to that place?

Two things have to be true for you. First, you have to genuinely believe this life is not all there is. Second, you have to understand the heart of God.

If this life is all there is, your frustration with God is entirely justified. If James thought this life was everything, then God letting such a loyal servant be executed by a political opportunist is simply cruel. But because this life is not all there is, I have a strong suspicion that when James drew his first breath in heaven, what he said was thank you.

And how could Paul glorify God when God refused to remove his thorn? Because he knew God’s heart. He knew Jesus went to a cross and died for his sins. God did not wait for us to clean up our act first. Romans 5 says that while we were still sinners — while we were His enemies — Christ died for us. He loved His enemies all the way to the cross.

So if you find yourself doubting the heart of God, look at the cross. Paul did. And when God said “not this time,” Paul could say, “Then I trust You.”

Where Are You?

This is worth some honest self-reflection, because this doctrine lands differently depending on where you’re standing.

Some of you, if you’re honest, have gotten casual. You haven’t abandoned anything. You still know Jesus died on the cross; it’s still somewhere near the core of your identity. But it’s become a side thing, a Sunday thing. And you know it, because your prayers aren’t earnest. They’re apathetic and occasional. They’re not intense and fervent. You’ve gone casual.

Some of you are angry. You are genuinely furious with God, because you don’t know why He let your loved one die. You don’t know why He’s allowing this physical pain, this emotional pain, this mental pain. You don’t know why He won’t give you the job, or the spouse, or the child. And you’re finding yourself doubting His goodness, His power, maybe His existence.

Some of you are avoiding this whole idea. It makes you uncomfortable. You don’t like a sovereign God who will always do what He knows is best, because you have some very good ideas about what ought to happen. And confronting it means admitting God will do what God will do — which makes you wonder if you’ve done something wrong, or if you’re praying incorrectly. So rather than risk a crisis of faith, you look away and keep moving.

And for a few of you, this doctrine is the specific thing keeping you from giving your life to God at all.

I had a friend years ago who was spiritually searching. He started coming to our church back in Cedar Rapids and got involved, but he wouldn’t commit his life to Christ. Over lunch one day he laid out what was holding him back, and near the top was exactly this — the idea that God would be in control. He was a black-and-white kind of guy with firm convictions about what was right and wrong, and the more he learned about the Bible, the more he saw God doing things differently than he thought they should be done. And when he looked at other people’s lives, he realized God might do something to him that he didn’t want. That doctrine was one of the last walls standing.

He got over it eventually. He follows Christ to this day. But it took a long time.

Will You Trust Me?

Whichever category you’re in — casual, angry, avoiding, or holding back — I think God is asking you a question today.

Will you fully trust Me? Will you trust My heart? My plan? My wisdom? My sovereignty?

I don’t pretend to stand up here as the voice of God. I’m one man stumbling through faith like everyone else. But I know this much: God loves you. God knows you. God is for you. So you can trust Him.

I don’t know why He let James die and Peter live. I don’t know why some heroes of the faith saw miracles while others were tortured and killed. I don’t know why the person in your life seems so relentlessly blessed while you keep suffering.

What I know is that God loves you, He is for you, and He is able to work through the pain — that what the enemy intends for your destruction, God can use for your joy and His glory.

That is exactly why He invites you to fully trust Him.

Not My Will, But Yours

As we come to communion, go back to Gethsemane with me.

When Jesus walked into that garden with His disciples, He asked them to pray earnestly. And they were just like us — they fell asleep. Meanwhile Jesus is crying out, sweating blood, knowing exactly what is ahead. And He says the very thing James and John didn’t understand they were volunteering for: take this cup from Me.

But He doesn’t stop there. Because Jesus knew the plan. He knew the Father’s wisdom. He knew why He had come. So He finishes the sentence: nevertheless, not My will, but Yours be done.

God is sovereign. His plan is perfect. And even the things designed for our destruction — even designed for our death — cannot thwart His heart for you or what He is able to do through you.

My friend wanted me to preach victory. So let me: there is victory. But that victory so often comes through the suffering, through the trial, through the pain. We would have no resurrection to celebrate without the cross.

So if you’re carrying your own cross right now — if something is difficult, something hurts, something is heavy — bring it and throw it down at the feet of Jesus. If you’ve been wrestling with doubt, bring it; He can handle it. If you’ve been angry, bring that. If you’ve simply been lost, bring that.

Because as you bring it and lay it down, you create the opening for God to do what only He can do. But it doesn’t happen without you coming to Him.

Lord, help us to trust Your sovereignty. Help us believe.