Nothing can stop prayer (First part)
Verse of the day: Acts 12:10 “They passed the first and second guards and came to the iron gate leading to the city. It opened for them by itself, and they went through it. When they had walked the length of one street, suddenly the angel left him”
Every human being who lives in this world must have needs that he cannot get by himself. That’s why we all need prayer. Sometime it happens that we are in a situation when we need a simple assistance from God because we believe we have all it takes. For example if we have to pass an exam and we are well prepared and we got everything in control, we only pray for God’s assistance but we are confident because of our natural intelligence.
However, there are some situations when we are simply unable to find the solution by ourselves without the Lord’s intervention. Those are the situations where we feel like being in a prison and only God can save us from disaster. It’s this worse situation that we will talk about during the entire week.
We will essentially meditate on Chapter 12 of the book of Acts. The passage talks about events that marked the life of apostles during the worst period of tribulations of the Church history.
In the beginning of the chapter, we hear about king Herod who just executed Apostle James the brother of John by killing him with a sword and since it pleased the Jews, he arrested Peter (Acts 12:3). Knowing the power and the authority of the king, it’s obvious that Peter had to be executed like James. I got an opportunity to deeply meditate on this scripture for a better description of Peter imprisonment:
Peter was put in prison and guarded by four squads of four soldiers each (Acts 12:4), which means that he was guarded by sixteen soldiers. In the second part, we will see how he was bound with two chains sleeping between two soldiers. All these show us how King Herod has used the best of his power to make sure Peter would not run away. Therefore, we can conclude that Peter’s imprisonment was extremely important to the king’s eyes.
This is the same for Christians to Satan’s eyes because he tries to imprison us in order to stop us doing the will of God that destroys his plans. It’s very interesting to notice that on the fifth verse it’s said that while Peter was kept in prison, the church was earnestly praying to God for him (Acts 12:5).
To be continued in the second part.
Chris Ndikumana
