God Save America!
Notes
Transcript
God Still Can!
God Still Can!
23 On being released, they went to their own people and reported what the chief priests and elders had said to them.
24 When they heard this, they lifted their voices in unity to God and prayed, “Lord, You are God, who has made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them,
25 and who by the mouth of Your servant David said: ‘Why did the nations rage, and the people devise vain things?
26 The kings of the earth came, and the rulers were assembled together against the Lord and against His Christ.’
27 Indeed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, were assembled together against Your holy Son Jesus whom You have anointed,
28 to do what Your hand and Your counsel had foreordained to be done.
29 Now, Lord, look on their threats and grant that Your servants may speak Your word with great boldness,
30 by stretching out Your hand to heal and that signs and wonders may be performed in the name of Your holy Son Jesus.”
31 When they had prayed, the place where they were assembled together was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness.
The disciples have just come from being in front of the Sanhedrin to be scolded for preaching the gospel.
They came back to the others and look what they did.
When we get scolded or told we can’t do something, we complain and complain.
When the COVID hit and we were told that we could not have church, what did you do?
The church as a whole began to start talking about what the government can’t do and how it was not fair and wrong to mandate that we could not have church.
Peter and John came back and explained what had happened and look what happened.
They had a prayer meeting for God to do something about it!
They understood who had the power and who had the abilities to make things happen.
When we complain about our surroundings and circumstances, we give the enemy power that he does not deserve.
Most people, no matter what political party they are associated with, could appreciate President Ronald Reagan’s wit and charm.
“America was founded by people who believe that God was their rock of safety. I recognize we must be cautious in claiming that God is on our side, but I think it’s all right to keep asking if we’re on His side.”—Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan’s statement will and should make you think.
The question is:
Are we on God’s side?!?
When we do what we want to do and then pray that God bless what we are doing, we tend to tell God this is what needs to happen, now bless this!
When all along we should be on our knees first, before we start doing what we want to do.
When the Sanhedrin commanded peter and John to not preach again, the first thing they did was run to the church and ask for prayer.
The church didn’t discuss it, come up with a plan, set a committee, and raise the funds to put into action.
They prayed!
They knew that the only way to follow what the Lord had instructed them to do was to pray and rely on Him!
What Can We Do?
What Can We Do?
First, we must choose to serve the Lord!
God will do the same for America today as He did then if we will pray to Him and serve Him like they did.
He Answers The Prayers Of His People
He Answers The Prayers Of His People
Things changed because they prayed.
Have you heard this quote before?
“Much, much power! Little prayer, little power!”
2 You lust and do not have, so you kill. You desire to have and cannot obtain. You fight and war. Yet you do not have, because you do not ask.
James says here that if you do not ask you do not receive.
This tells me that if we want something from God we need to ask Him.
There is a direct relationship between a desperate faith-filled prayer and God’s intervention into the affairs of men and women.
He Does What He Wants To Do
He Does What He Wants To Do
Our God is a sovereign God, which means that He stands on His own and needs no other to hold Him up!
There will be no replacement for God.
He has always been and will always be!
We must remember this, because just because you pray something, does not mean that you will get it.
This is echoed in:
3 You ask, and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your passions.
This is good news that we do not always get what we want, because God has a bigger plan that will benefit us far better than our own plan.
My God sees what I cannot see and knows what I do not know.
Our faith in the sovereignty of God increases our confidence that God’s will be done!
Likewise, the absence of our prayers can cause delays in the will of God for our lives.
God never gets pinned in a corner!
President Lincoln during the Civil War saw the Sovereign Hand of God at work:
The Civil War produced the death of more Americans—almost half a million—than any war before or since. With Americans dying on both sides, the War taxed everyone’s ability to understand what God was doing here. This was no holy war against the pagan infidels; this was a war that turned brother against brother, father against son, and Christian against Christian. This was a God-forsaken was if there ever was one, and yet Lincoln saw Gos using this war to set straight the course of history. “Both parties depreciated war,” Lincoln proclaimed in his Second Inaugural Address, “but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came…Neither party expected for the war, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other…the prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purpose.”
“If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, most needs come, but which having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.”
Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid with another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
(Lincoln: Selected Speeches and Writings, Vintage Books-Random House, 1992).
He Honors His Word
He Honors His Word
The early church prayed the Word of God that was relevant to their situation.
We should know God’s promises that apply to the present situation that our nation is in right now.
“There are a good many problems before the American people today, and before me as President, but I expect to find the solution to those problems just in the proportion that I am in the study of the Word of God.”—President Woodrow Wilson, 28th U.S. President
We must hold the God’s Word, regardless of what the media tells us.
Remember that your circumstances do not change who God is or what He can do!
It’s time to step up as Christians and step into the power that we have been given access to through Jesus Christ!
He Rules The Rulers Of The Earth
He Rules The Rulers Of The Earth
12 Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom He has chosen as His inheritance.
1 The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, as the rivers of water; He turns it to any place He will.
13 Samuel said to Saul, “You have done foolishly. You have not kept the commandment of the Lord your God, which He commanded you. Truly now, the Lord would have established your kingdom over Israel forever.
“Direct my thought, words, and work, wash away my sins in the immaculate Blood of the Lamb, and purge my heart by the Holy Spirit…Daily frame me more and more into the likeness of Thy Son Jesus Christ.”
—George Washington (1)
“The Lord our God be with us, as He was with our fathers; may He not leave us or forsake us; so that He may inline our hearts to Him, to walk in all His ways…that all peoples of the earth may know that the Lord is God; there is no other.”
—George Bush (41)
“We can all pray. We all should pray. We should ask for courage, wisdom, for the quietness of soul, which comes alone in them who place their lives in His hands.”
—Harry S. Truman (33)
He Confuses The Plans Of The Enemy
He Confuses The Plans Of The Enemy
The early church prayed:
The Cross was the ultimate upstaging of Satan’s plans.
In Israel, He caused the enemy to turn on himself.
The Lord sent the sound of a multitude of horses and chariots to drive away the enemy of Israel.
The Lord showed Elijah what the king was thinking in his chambers.
Daniel told Nebucanezzar what he dreamed.
God is in control and when the enemy comes at us to destroy, he had to ask permission from God first!
So know that God knows exactly what is going on in your life and in this country.
He is waiting on His church to cry out to Him for help!
He Provides Protection For Us
He Provides Protection For Us
16 And he said, “Do not be afraid, for there are more with us than with them.”
Because of God’s intervention, the impossible can be accomplished in your life and in this nation.
We must put our trust and faith back in Christ and stop relying on the world and it’s ways to solve the problem.
He Responds To Obedience
He Responds To Obedience
The early church knew their charge and mandate.
We are to preach the gospel and spread the good news of Jesus Christ to this hurting world.
This has not changed since the first church started meeting together.
When the enemy tries to stop us, we should pray for the boldness to GO anyway!
No matter what the enemy convinces you to believe, the call to go and tell has not changed!
He Can Birth Revival Out Of The Enemy’s Attack
He Can Birth Revival Out Of The Enemy’s Attack
When the enemy attacks, we have two reactions, come together and pray or separate and be destroyed.
When the early church was persecuted, it brought them together in powerful prayer and precipitated another outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
Just like the attack that follows the moving of the Spirit, the blessings follow the attacks of the enemy.
There was a youth revival that followed WWII.
There were hundreds of soldiers saved in the Gulf War.
Through the power of the risen Christ, we too can continue the destruction of the world of the devil!
31 What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?
8 Whoever practices sin is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was revealed, that He might destroy the works of the devil.
We as Americans need to realize that it is what we need to do that will get the attention of God.
We need to get back to prayer in our homes, prayer at our jobs, prayer in our churches, and prayer back in our lives!
We need to use the weapons that God gave us to fight the enemy!
Freedom is not free!
When we want to be free in America, lives had to be lost, if we want freedom in Christ, He had to give up His life for us as well!
22 And according to the law almost everything must be cleansed with blood; without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.
Alter
Alter
Do your need forgiveness today for the sin in your life?
Jesus Christ shed His blood for you so that you might be saved.
Are you a sinner that is need of the grace of Jesus Christ?
Are you in bondage to a past life that has you held in captivity and is smothering you to death?
Do you need freedom this morning from the life that has you held down and can’t move?
Are you living in fear this morning of the way of the world around you?
Even the church is caving in to the pressure of the world these days!
When the fear is forced on you through the media and the reports of how bad it is getting, you can rejoice in knowing that your God has everything under control!
Do you need a refreshing of the Holy Spirit this morning to wash away the effects of the world?
A Psalm of David.
1 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
2 He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside still waters.
3 He restores my soul; He leads me in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.
4 Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; my cup runs over.
6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Feel the refreshing peace of God flow over you right now as the Holy Spirit refreshes you!