Hosanna Restoration Church

I love the presence of God. I love everything that He does. I love it when I hear that there are great things going on at meetings around the world, and I have no problem with people traveling from all over the world to get in on something special. Having said that, I do wonder why rather than going somewhere else we don’t just lift up our voices with one accord wherever we are and ask God to be the same everywhere. After all, He is not limited to one place.

On the other hand, large crowds followed Jesus around in order to receive His touch; then again on the other hand He sat down at the right hand of the Father so that by the Holy Spirit He could be everywhere all the time. There are a lot of other hands that we could mention, but none of this is the point of this message.

The point of this message is what happened when they had prayed. The place where they were assembled was shaken! So why doesn’t God shake every place where people pray? Should we wonder about the way we pray? Do we pray prayers that shake things? Do we pray expecting God to shake things?

As I consider this I am forced to consider my prayers. Just today I asked God’s forgiveness for a lack of diligence in an area of prayer. Oh I could have tried to excuse it under the premise that I just trust God so much that I need not pray so hard, but that is all it would have been is an excuse. I think we all realize that excuses don’t get a lot done. Well of course God forgave me and by His grace I will sin no more when it comes to that particular point of prayer.

I am confident in what God can do. I do know that He hears my prayers, and I do expect Him to answer. However, I also know that if I put nothing into it, I should reap as I sow. So we come back to the fact that when they had prayed the place was shaken. Apparently God liked the prayer they prayed so much that they were all filled with the Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness. When you look at their prayer, they were pretty bold on their way to the shaking.

So what was it that was shaking about the prayer? The first thing I notice is that they recognized the futility of anyone or anything trying to stand against God. We need to be convinced of this when we pray. We need to recognize that everything that comes against us is really coming against God and His plans for us, and we know nothing can stand against God.

Then they turned the whole thing over to God and asked Him to take care of it. They must have expected Him to take care of it, because if not they were really asking Him to get them in more trouble. After all, they were in trouble for talking about Jesus and now they wanted God to make them even bolder and to do more miracles

When they prayed they showed God that they had confidence in God to take care of everything. They did not tell God how tuff they had it and that they wondered if He even cared. They told Him they knew He cared and that it was up to Him to make sure everything came out right. Never underestimate the power of God or His desire to answer your prayers.