Powerful Prayers - Unleashing Heaven’s Fire

By: Dr. Robert Petterson

Sep 27, 2009

Winning battles in spiritual realms against spiritual forces requires spiritual power produced by spiritual prayer. Certainly, the First Church of Jerusalem had to discover that truth. All hell broke loose the day the Apostles were dragged before a kangaroo court. The authorities who had instituted that "witch hunt" told them that if they didn't stop preaching, they would crush the followers of Jesus. When the Apostles reported these death threats, the church went into action by praying powerful prayers.

Sermon Text:

[Text: Acts 4]

Do you remember that opening scene in the Hollywood blockbuster, Gladiator? A wolf runs through the ghostly mists of the Black Forest, and an eerie silence belies the horror that is about to be unleashed.

On one side are the legions of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, commanded by his trusted general, Maximus. As banners flutter in the breeze, legionnaires frantically pour oil out of jars, wrap oil-soaked rags around arrow tips and set fire to wicker balls poised in their catapults.

On the other side, hidden in the deep thickets of the forest are hoards of Germanic warriors who vastly outnumber the forces of Maximus. These barbarians are fearsomely-gigantic men, faces painted in vivid colors and beating on huge shields with battle axes and massive swords. The thunderous sound of their pounding cascades out of the forest darkness toward the Roman battle lines. It’s as if the devil himself has unleashed the hounds of hell.

The fear on the faces of legionnaires is palpable. But General Maximus rides up and down their lines calmly crying out, “Steady, boys!” Then he raises his sword and shouts,

“Unleash hell!”

The early morning skies are lit up with giant fireballs and fiery missiles launched from Roman catapults, followed by a hailstorm of flaming arrows. The forests explode into a blazing inferno, causing the barbarian battle lines to dissolve into chaos. As the legions of Maximus march into the charred forest, the battle is as good as won.

In warfare, battles are not won so much by combat on the ground as the artillery fire that rains down from the heavens above. In October of 1944 the Allied noose was tightening around retreating German armies. As the Americans crossed from Belgium into Germany, they surrounded the city of Aachen. Taking that city was the key to cutting Germany’s Siegfried Line. It would also deliver a demoralizing blow because Aachen was hallowed ground to Nazis as the birthplace and coronation site of Charlemagne, the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. General Charles Corlett broadcast this ultimatum to Aachen:

“Citizens of Aachen, time is running out. Unless you surrender, we will unleash a firestorm that will level your beloved city.”

But Adolf Hitler ordered its soldiers and citizens to fight to the death rather than surrender the city. Wave after wave of 360 Allied aircraft dropped 170 tons of bombs while another 10,000 artillery shells added to one of the most terrifying bombardments the world had ever seen. For the first time in history, a new and horrific fire fell from the skies: napalm! American infantry moved into Aachen after this city of a quarter million Germans had been completely leveled. Miraculously, only the great Cathedral containing the burial vault of Charlemagne was still intact. Such is the power of fire from heaven.

The Iraqi soldiers in the first Gulf War felt this terror from the heavens. As more than a million of them hunkered down in their fortified positions in Kuwait, the U.S. flew 109,000 sorties, dropping more than 250,000 bombs. Cruise missiles zeroed in from ships miles away at sea. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed and maimed by this inferno from the skies. A captured Iraqi general told reporters, “It was as if hell had been unleashed on us.” By the time Allied ground troops arrived, whole divisions of half-crazed Iraqis surrendered without a fight.

No one understood the power of fire from heaven more than those first followers of Jesus in Jerusalem. They were facing terrifying opposition from the authorities. The odds against them seemed overwhelming, and they could have thrown up their hands in despair. Instead they prayed, calling down spiritual fire from heaven. General Maximus cried out to his legionnaires, “Unleash hell!” Those Christians in Acts 4 must have cried out to their God, “Unleash heaven!” What battles are you facing today? The truth that we learn from that all-night prayer meeting in Jerusalem is our fifth principle in effective warfare prayer:

Winning battles in spiritual realms against spiritual forces requires spiritual power produced by spiritual prayer.

The fledgling church was in way over its head. These followers of Jesus were mostly widows, orphans, ex-prostitutes, and misfits of society led by uneducated fisherman, failed revolutionaries, and former tax collectors up against the combined might of the Jewish establishment and Roman government. If ever a movement seemed doomed, it was Christianity in its infancy. But these first disciples of Jesus understood that their battle wasn’t against “…flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the spiritual realms.” (Ephesians 6:12)

They knew that, in their puny flesh, they couldn’t win a battle against the dark forces of this world allied with the spiritual forces of demonic evil in invisible realms. So they called down the artillery fire of heaven. This is the only hope any of us have in our spiritual warfare. Though two thousand years have come and gone, we can still “unleash heaven” if only we will stop fighting in our own strength long enough to get down on our knees and pray. Let’s see what we can learn from those first Christians in ancient Jerusalem:

1. Why pick up this world’s weapons when you have heaven’s arsenal at your disposal?

Let’s go back to Acts 3:1-11 and see what first ignited this firestorm against the Christians in Jerusalem. The Apostles Peter and John were going up to the temple for their afternoon prayers when a crippled beggar asked for a handout. In Acts 3:6, Peter replied,

“Silver or gold I do not have, but what I have I give you in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.”

Peter grabbed him by the hand, and this man, whose legs had been crippled since birth, began to jump with joy, dancing across the pavement of the temple courts like Michael Jackson on steroids. As he boisterously praised God, the watching crowds were filled with “wonder and amazement” at this miracle. When the news spread, the authorities were filled with dread. This healing would only enhance the Apostles’ claims that their crucified Messiah had risen from the dead. So they hauled Peter and John into court and threatened to destroy their church.

Let’s go back to Peter’s words to the lame beggar in verse six: “Silver and gold I do not have, but what I have I give you…” Do you see the amazing claim of Peter? Armed with the name Jesus of Nazareth, we have something that the world doesn’t have, and we can give something that the world can’t give: the healing power of Jesus.

Do you remember psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous pyramid on the hierarchy of human needs? The mass of humanity spend their lives preoccupied with getting their lowest levels of needs met: food, sleep, security, sex, health, and physical pleasure. We live in a culture that crawls along the bottom of Maslow’s Pyramid, consumed with protecting and pleasuring our bodies. If that’s where we are, Maslow would say that we haven’t risen above the level of animals. Maybe that’s why Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Most men live lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with a song still in them.”

This beggar was grinding along the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid, consumed with supplying the needs of his crippled body: “gold and silver” to buy food and shelter. The world can supply those things. But Peter had something far better: a healing that would go beyond his felt needs to his real and higher needs. Peter offered what the world cannot deliver: a total “body and soul” healing. The most significant healing isn’t that a formerly-crippled man danced in the temple courtyard, but that he praised God and was reconnected to the Creator who made him for himself. His “healing” would then spark a revival that transformed a church and shook a city to its core. C.S. Lewis said,

“We Christians are too easily satisfied with lesser things. We are given wings to rise above and transform the world. Instead, we are content to play the same worldly games the pagans play.”

Preachers are increasingly imitating Dr. Phil, delivering self-help sermons on “Five Steps to Beat Stress” or “Six Ways to Spice Up Your Love Life,” presenting a Jesus who is more like a therapeutic life coach than a Savior. Churches imitate Club Med or the local YMCA, catering to people’s felt needs at the lowest levels of Maslow’s Pyramid. But people don’t need the stuff that “silver and gold” bring as much as they need real and radical “soul” healing and life transformation.

The Mideaval theologian, Thomas Aquinas, once visited the Cardinal of Naples, Italy. His eminence took the awestruck monk on a tour of his grand palace, showing off its staggering opulence. Remembering the words of St. Peter to the beggar in Acts 3, the Cardinal smugly noted, “It’s been a long time since the Church had to say, ‘Silver and gold I do not have…’” Aquinas quietly replied, “And it has been a long time since the Church could say, ‘Rise and be healed in the name of Jesus.’”

We will not win the spiritual wars of our day with the weapons of this world. St. Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians 10:3&4, “For though we live in this world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of this world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.” I believe that the Apostle Peter would ask us postmodern Christians, “Why pick up this world’s weapons when you have heaven’s arsenal at your disposal?”

2. Our power is not in our outer polish but in His Inner Presence.

Acts 4:13 gives us a powerful insight to what the authorities felt when these two apostles were dragged before them:

“When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these man had been with Jesus.”

The world is impressed with the accomplishments of the flesh. By that measure, Peter and John were nobodies: blue-collared fisherman from Galilee, tantamount to being from the poorest part of Appalachia with the equivalent of a fifth grade education. But they had courage and conviction that none of those polished elitists possessed. They performed miracles that none of these men, for all their post-graduate degrees and social success, could ever hope to duplicate. According to verse 13, there was only one possible answer to this mystery: “…they took note that these men had been with Jesus.” When unimpressive people do impressive things that are beyond their “earthly” power, it can only be explained by something “unearthly” or supernatural.

When this realization dawned on these authorities, they must have wondered if the Galilean Rabbi that they crucified was still in the grave, or if his resurrected presence was in these ragged fishermen.

We make a mistake when we try to impress the world by adopting its standards and strategies. History teaches that it is when the church has no “silver and gold” that it is at its most powerful. After more than 200 years of foreign missionaries in China, armed with the resources of the West and backed by European gunboats, Chinese Christians numbered less than four million. When the Communists expelled the Western missionaries and set out to eliminate the Chinese church, the world wondered how this ragged remnant of underground Christians would ever survive. But when the Bamboo Curtain lifted 40 years later, we were shocked to see 125 million Christians in China!

History takes little notice of the Cardinal of Naples who lived fat and luxuriously in his opulent palace. This prince of the Church looked impressive in his scarlet robes and exalted position, causing lesser folk to cower in awe and fear. But it was a simple monk (filled with Jesus), Thomas Aquinas, who is remembered as the saint who changed the world. Our power is not in outer polish but in His inner presence.

3. Temporary threats cannot stand against eternal accountability.

The authorities were in a quandary. On the one hand, they could not deny the miracle. The healed cripple was standing before them. The populace sided with the apostles who had performed this miracle. If the authorities came down on Peter and John, there would be a riot. On the other hand, if they let this thing pass, the fledgling Christian movement would grow in popularity. So Acts 4:18 records, “Then they called them in again and commanded them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus.” Verse 21 adds, “After further threats, they let them go…”

What do we do when the world tells Christians to shut up in the public arena and go practice our faith in private? Increasingly we are told that religious faith belongs only in the church house. So we cave in to social pressure. We remain mute in the face of unrighteousness lest we become unpopular. We tone down any “old-fashioned” evangelical zeal lest we appear uncool or politically incorrect. We would do well to ponder the response of Peter and John in verses 19&20: “But judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.”

Note well the second word of verse twenty: “…judge...” We are all on trial in a world where people are constantly making judgments about us. If we heard all the nasty things they say, we would probably roll up in fetal balls and cry ourselves to sleep. But the worst the world can do is to make our short lives miserable, and then put an end to them. Yet Hebrews 10:27 says, “It is appointed unto a man once to die, and then to face the judgment.” Those apostles understood that after this life, there is an eternal accountability that far outweighs the judgments of this world. They would agree with this quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste death but once.” Spiritual warriors fear only the judgment that follows death, and so they live brave lives calculated to please the One who sits on an eternal throne: Jesus Christ!

4. Prayer brings down the spiritual power of heaven.

Verse 23 goes on, “On their release, Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and elders had said to them.” How does this church respond to threats? A lot of congregations would have come unglued. A whole lot of negative talk would be going on. Cautious saints would voice ideas about appeasing the authorities. If it had been a Presbyterian church, they might have organized a committee to deal with the issue. But verse 24 quickly follows with these words: “When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God.” The Greek sentence structure gives the sense that they immediately went into prayer. Most of us are more like the bumper sticker: “When all else fails, pray.” But prayer is the first weapon of spiritual warfare because it unleashes the artillery fire of heaven.

Look at this prayer: “…they raised their voices…” These weren’t nice little “Mainline Christian” prayers. They were loud, pounding-the-door-of-heaven, urgent, passionate, blow-the-roof-off-the-church-building, everyone-praying-at-once at the top-of-their-lungs kind of prayers. Why do we Presbyterians leave those kinds of prayers to the Pentecostals? But more important than the passion of their prayers was their content:

1. There was an appeal to the Sovereignty of God. Look at the first words out of their mouths in verse twenty-four: “Sovereign Lord!” Sovereign is the old word for king. God is the King of kings and Lord of lords. He created the heavens and earth, and they are his exclusive domain. He is the Lord of history. No king is raised up and no empire falls, except at his command. In verses 24&25 they quote the words of David in the Second Psalm: “Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings take their stand and then nations gather together against the Lord and the righteous against his Anointed One.” The Scripture they quote in their prayer shakes its head at the foolishness of people who try to fight God. Search the pages of history and you will discover that no nation has ever come up against God’s people without being smashed by our Sovereign Lord. And yet those ignorant of history still foolishly think their arms are long enough to box with God.

How much does God control history? In verse 27 they remind God (and more importantly themselves) of how Pilate, together with the other forces of evil, conspired to put the “Anointed One” to death on a Cross. He even succeeded. But that didn’t make God any the less sovereign. They continue in verse 28, “They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.” Even when it seems that the enemy triumphs, it is only because God has a better plan. God has not limited himself in any way. He knows everything that will happen in the future. And he controls that same future. When the Dutch humanist, Erasmus, spoke out against the sovereignty of God, Martin Luther responded, “My dear Erasmus, your God is much too human.” But our God is not a human. He is the Sovereign Lord of history!

2. There is a belief in the Sufficiency of the Spirit. They go on in verse 29 to pray, “Now Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with boldness.” We should never focus on the power of our enemies, or the size of the danger we face. Instead, we should pray expectantly that God will fill us with his Holy Spirit so that we may boldly face and overcome them. The great 19th Century evangelist D.L Moody once said, “The world has yet to see what a fully committed Christian can do.” Filled with the Holy Spirit, we can overcome anything this world can throw at us. Spiritual warriors should always expect great results from their prayers: nothing less than the fire of heaven unleashed in them!

3. There is an expectation of Supernatural power. In verse 30 they get even greedier in their prayers: “Stretch out your hands to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.” Someone has written that the First Century Church wouldn’t have survived for a single second without the miracle-working presence of the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit could leave most of our churches today, and we would continue on without missing a beat. We attempt such small things for God, and have perfected our Madison Avenue techniques, so that we operate like well-oiled corporations and country clubs. Peter Marshall wrote, “Outfitted in the most modern deep sea diving equipment, we Christians march bravely out to pull plugs from bathtubs.” But when we commit ourselves to become dangerous Christians, marching out of our sanctuaries to take on the world, we will need supernatural miracles to win the day. Do you believe that Jesus still performs miracles today? Do you believe that he still heals crippled beggars? Do you believe that he will shut up the mouths of our enemies and give us amazing victories even when we have no silver and gold? Then pray expectantly, and march forth boldly!

4. There was a resulting Shaking of their world. Verse 31 says, “After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.” The Spirit is in all Christians all the time. At the moment of salvation, every Christian is baptized in the Holy Spirit. But we are not all filled with the Spirit all the time. Every moment of every day we should pray, “Lord fill me to overflowing with your Spirit.” It is only when the fires of heaven are unleashed in us that we can have the boldness necessary to shake our world. My prayer is that God would shake up my life, shake up this church, and shake up our world. Christ is not looking for nice, moral people who occupy a pew on Sunday. He’s looking for a few good men and women who will commit to being dangerous warriors who will shake up their world for His glory.

Copyright 2008-2012, All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced without permission from Dr. Robert Petterson, Pastor Trent Casto or Covenant Presbyterian Church of Naples.