It’s been said that the content of a prayer shapes the one who prays it, because we tend to pray what we love, and what we love makes us who we are. And this is not only true of individuals, but of churches too. Like when the early church once prayed,

Now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus. (Acts 4:29–30)

Of all the things they might have prayed — and of all things churches should pray at various times — the fledging church in the early pages of Acts wanted God to give them boldness: “Grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness.”

We as twenty-first-century pastors and churches can learn from this first-century prayer, but to do so, we need to first go back one chapter.

Words Filled with Jesus

The apostles Peter and John were walking to the temple one afternoon when they encountered a lame man. He had been lame from birth. The man was doing what he was always doing: asking for money from people passing by. But on this particular day, something unexpected happened. The man passing by responded, “I have no silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!” (Acts 3:6).

In an instant, the man was healed. He leapt up and began to walk. He entered the temple “walking, leaping, and praising God” (Acts 3:8). The scene drew a crowd, so Peter did what Peter was always doing. He preached. His sermon was full of crystal-clear witness to the person and purpose of Jesus. He is the Holy and Righteous One (verse 14), the Author of Life and the one whom God has raised from the dead (verse 15). Jesus is the reason, the only reason, why the lame man was healed (verse 17).

Then Peter proceeds to show that the Hebrew Scriptures had long foretold Jesus, from Moses in Deuteronomy and God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis, to all the prophets “from Samuel and those who came after him” (Acts 3:24). It has always been about Jesus, and people’s response, now, must unequivocally be to repent (Acts 3:19, 26).

New World Breaking In

These Jewish leaders were “greatly annoyed because [Peter and John] were teaching the people and proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection from the dead” (Acts 4:2).

The problem wasn’t only that Peter and John were witnessing to Jesus’s own resurrection, but that they were saying Jesus’s resurrection has led to the inbreaking of the resurrection age. As Alan Thompson writes, “In the context of Acts 3–4, Jesus’s resurrection anticipates the general resurrection at the end of the age and makes available now, for all those who place their faith in him, the blessings of the ‘last days’” (The Acts of the Risen Lord Jesus, 79). That, in fact, was what the healing of the lame man was declaring. The new creation had invaded the old.

“Jesus is the climax of all of God’s saving purposes, and we cannot ignore this without eternal consequences.”

In the resurrection of Jesus, everything has changed. He is the climax of all of God’s saving purposes, and we cannot ignore this without eternal consequences. This message ruffled the feathers of the Jewish leaders, and so they arrested Peter and John and put them on trial for all that happened that day.

“By what power or by what name did you do this?” they demanded (Acts 4:7). Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, and again with a crystal-clear witness, says the lame man was healed because of Jesus. Jesus is the Messiah who was crucified and raised, and who was foretold in the Hebrew Scriptures. Specifically, Peter says that Jesus is the stone mentioned in Psalm 118:22, the stone that would be rejected by the builders but then become the cornerstone. The stakes could not be higher. Only in Jesus could one be saved (Acts 4:12).

Outdone by Fishermen

The Jewish leaders were astonished. They could not reconcile Peter and John’s boldness with the fact that they were “uneducated, common men” (Acts 4:13). These were neither teachers nor even pupils, but fishermen. Fishermen. That agitated the Jewish leaders all the more. These unskilled regular Joes, as it were, had been teaching the people! And now they ventured to interpret the Hebrew Scriptures before these skilled Jewish interpreters, telling them who Jesus was, according to the Scriptures, and who they were, according to the Scriptures.

These Jewish leaders saw their “boldness” (Acts 4:13), but this wasn’t merely a reference to their emotional tone. Peter and John’s boldness wasn’t mainly about their zeal or behavior — it was about what they had to say. This kind of boldness is repeatedly connected to speech in Acts, so much so that another way to render “boldness” in many passages would be “to speak freely or openly.” That’s what Peter and John had done. They had spoken clearly, freely, openly, boldly about Jesus from the Hebrew Scriptures — and they had done so under intense intimidation.

As they watched this unfold, even the Jewish leaders began to connect some dots. “They recognized that they had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13). So how did these untrained fishermen learn to interpret the Scriptures like that? How could they speak so confidently about the meaning of Scripture when they had never been taught? Well, because they had been taught — by Jesus himself. They had been with Jesus, and so they were unusually bold. They spoke of Jesus clearly, both of his person and work, on the grounds of what the Scriptures say, even when it might have cost them their lives.

Voices Lifted Together

This is the boldness the church pleads for in Acts 4:29–30.

The Jewish leaders had warned and threatened Peter and John to stop talking about Jesus, but eventually they had to release the men from custody. Peter and John went straight to their friends to report what happened. These friends of Peter and John, the nascent church in Jerusalem, “lifted their voices together to God” (Acts 4:24). Their corporate prayer was as rich with the Old Testament’s witness to Jesus as Peter’s sermon was. They knew the person of Jesus. They knew why he had come. And they knew how unpopular this message would be.

And what did they pray?

They did not pray for articulate positions on the current cultural issues, nor for increased dialogue with those of other faiths, nor for the ability to refute this or that ism, nor for the development of a particularly Christian philosophy or culture (all things we might pray for at certain times in the church). None of these are part of the church’s prayer in Acts 4. Rather, they prayed for boldness to speak the word of God. They asked God to give them the kind of speech Peter and John had modeled — to testify clearly about who Jesus is from the word of God, no matter the cost, as the new creation continues to invade the old.

Do our churches ever pray like this today?

Do we lack a similar heart? A similar perspective? Or both?

And yet our cities need our boldness every bit as much as Jerusalem did in Peter and John’s day. They need the crystal-clear witness of who Jesus is and what he has come to do.

Praying for Revival

What if the church of Jesus Christ, in all her local manifestations, was marked by a singular passion to know Jesus and make him known? This is the true priority of the church in every age and culture.

“The best, most important thing we ever have to say is what we have to say about Jesus.”

We are all about Jesus, and the best, most important thing we ever have to say is what we have to say about him. Our failures to live up to this calling are reminders of our need for revival — of our need to plead with God for boldness. Like the early church, may our heart continually beat to testify to Jesus’s glory and to what he demands of the world. Church, this is who we are. Recover it, as needed, and live it out — even though it’s the last thing our society wants to hear from us.

Our society wants the church to be “helpful” on society’s terms — what J.I. Packer called the “new gospel,” a substitute for the biblical gospel, in his introduction to Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ. Whereas the chief aim of the biblical gospel is to teach people to worship God, Packer explains, the concern of the substitute only wants to make people feel better. The subject of the biblical gospel is God and his ways; the subject of the substitute is man and the help God offers him. The market demands the substitute, and those who refuse to cater to it are at the risk of being considered irrelevant or worse. Against that mounting pressure, we should pray that we would speak clearly, freely, openly, boldly about Jesus from the Bible, no matter the cost.

Would this not be the sign of revival? Would God not answer our prayers like he did for that first church?

When they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness. (Acts 4:31)

There was a bucket of electric bouncy balls, not a baby, in my stomach. He just never stopped moving. Usually the jabs and kicks gave me comfort — “Call the doctor if you haven’t felt the baby move in a while,” they say. I had no reason to pick up the phone, so instead I came up with one that would keep me up all night.

“I wonder why he moves so much,” I said to my husband before bed. As he reached for the lights, I grabbed my phone. What does it mean if your baby moves a lot? I typed into Google. My stomach dropped as I read the first result: “High Fetal Movement Associated with Stillbirth.”

Like I said, I didn’t sleep that night.

Psalms and Search Engines

I wonder how many twenty-first-century tech-saturated Christian mothers, like myself, abide by their own translation of Philippians 4:6: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything let your requests be made known to Google.” When we remove prayer, supplication, thanksgiving, and — above all — God from the equation, we forfeit all chance of experiencing any lasting end to our motherly anxiety. We cannot type, scroll, click, and read our way to peace. There is no “peace of Google,” only the peace of God (Philippians 4:7). And for that, we must pray.

Which can be quite difficult for expectant mothers to do. Burdened for the children we cannot hold but deeply love, our minds tend to tumble down hypothetical rabbit holes: “How long has it been since the baby kicked? Shouldn’t the kicks be harder? Is the baby really growing? Am I eating enough? How much should I be eating?” Pounding heart, tight lips, it seems far easier to search, our fingers frantic, than to seek God in prayer.

That’s where the book of Psalms comes in. For millennia, restless saints have fled to its pages. When we lack our own words, enough calm, or even the desire to pray, the Psalms hand us hundreds of ways to talk to God. Consider, for example, how an anxious expectant mother might use Psalm 139 to pray for herself and her unborn child.

‘You See’

Because of the sheer fact that we cannot see our unborn babies, we often imagine what could be wrong. With the help of Psalm 139, we can turn from anxiety to adoration. King David’s words call us to wonder, rather than worry, over what man cannot see, as we praise God that his eyes keep watch over the children in our womb.

In the spirit of the psalm, we can begin by focusing on God’s omniscience over our blindness. “O Lord,” we might pray, “you have searched and known not only me, but also my child. You know when I sit; you know when my child stirs. You are acquainted with all our ways, from the words I will say soon, to the organ that will form next. In a word, your hand is upon us” (verses 1–5). What is dark to mothers — the womb, our unborn children, what lies ahead — is light to him (verse 12). Anxious about what we cannot see, we can adore the God who never stops seeing.

Nor has he ever not seen. His knowledge of our unborn children never began; it has always been: “Your eyes saw this child’s unformed substance an eternity before the pregnancy test came back positive. No part of this process has ever been hidden from your sight” (verses 15–16). As we say these words to our all-seeing God, we send them coursing through our unseeing selves. Wonder is a great antidote to worry.

‘You Are Sovereign’

Not only does God see what goes on within our stomachs and lives; he sovereignly oversees it all. We know we cannot watch our unborn babies grow, but that doesn’t stop us from thinking we can control our pregnancy, at least in some measure. That’s why we often flit from one search to the next — for control. We can praise God for so much access to life-sustaining information (it’s probably wise not to eat raw fish if every health institute says so), but we must not deceive ourselves. While we carry our children, God is in control of them.

Psalm 139 offers a fitting reminder, as David attributes action upon action, outcome upon outcome, to God alone. With David we declare, “You form this child’s inward parts; you knit this baby together in my womb. I praise you for the fearful and wonderful works of pregnancy. You are making and weaving this little person together” (verses 13–15). A pregnant mother can attend to the atoms in her unborn baby’s body no more than she can touch the moon — thankfully. We have not the power to form, to knit, to make, to weave. But our God does, and we have his ear.

What’s more, David affirms how God forms both bodies and days. Before the foundation of the world, God not only chose to create our children, but he determined the length of their lives. Through prayer we say to God and ourselves, “In your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for this baby” (verse 16).

God didn’t pen our children’s stories into a dusty three-ring notebook, the kind that are always lying around, and then slam it shut. David says, “In your book were written.” Expectant mothers, our Father has a book! He is ever aware of its tales, of the lives of our unborn children (and everyone else). For what he has written, he will bring to pass. Whatever this trimester may hold, may our prayers lean into the sovereign God who holds it.

‘You Are There’

By this point, it’s easy to agree with David about the extent of God’s knowledge and power. His attributes are “too wonderful for [us],” too “high” to grasp and grip (verse 6). At the same time, Psalm 139 encourages mothers to rest assured that he is with us, in all his great and mysterious perfections.

David teaches us this lesson by taking us on a trip around the universe. He imagines himself up in heaven and down in Sheol (verse 8), east as the sunrise and west as the seas (verse 9). In each place, he finds God there. Amazingly, the Lord does not arrive after David, but leads David there himself (verse 10).

After David’s example, we can imagine ourselves walking through a hundred different high and low points of pregnancy (an exercise that may run our emotions through a pinball machine). Picture a doctor gesturing at a dot of flashing white, tears of joy springing to our eyes. There’s a heartbeat. A month later, that heartbeat seems too low, even inconsistent. We cry again, this time for fear.

Step back from each hypothetical. Turn to God and say, “During ultrasounds, you are there! Through worry-ridden nights, you are there! In the hospital room, you are there! Come what may, you are with me wherever I go, leading me, guiding me, holding me” (verse 8). As we praise his presence, his presence comforts us.

‘Protect This Child’

Toward the end of the psalm, after David has adored the all-seeing, sovereign God who is in his midst, he turns to petition, earnestly pleading for God to act (verses 19–22). Confident that God is over his life, he asks God to intervene in his life. In the same way, the more a mother recalls the power of God both to take and to give life, the more she will ask God to protect the child in her womb.

We pray confidently for God to protect our unborn children because we are confident that he can protect them. We ask him to decrease blood pressure, to increase growth, to remove hemorrhages, to induce labor — all because he can. And so we pray, with every mother’s blood-earnestness and a Christian mother’s confidence, “Oh that you would protect this child, O God!”

He delights in a mother’s pleas for her unborn child, which are themselves expressions of worship. We petition him because we know he is with us, listening to our cries. We petition him because we know that only an all-knowing, all-powerful God is able to sustain the babies in our bellies. We petition him because we know he loves those babies, more than we could understand.

Ought God’s thoughts about this pregnancy, then, be more precious to us than Google’s (verse 17)? A single search may produce 239,000,000 results (I just checked), but even that number has an end, a limit, a boundary. God’s knowledge is infinite, vaster than the sands on every shore (verse 18). His power, presence, and ability to protect likewise know no end. And — can you believe it? — this God is with us.

Sometimes, the solution to our spiritual struggles is less spiritual than we imagined.

Maybe you walk in a spiritual wilderness, afflicted by distressing doubts. Maybe a dull apathy settled upon you some time ago. Maybe you live in a land where joy feels far away.

You might imagine that the main solution to these spiritual struggles is, well, spiritual: hold more firmly to God’s promises; draw near to him more regularly; search out hidden sins. And you might be right. But maybe, just maybe, you need to hear counsel like John Newton’s (1725–1807):

Sometimes when nervous people come to me, distressed about their souls, and think that is their only complaint, I surprise them by asking if they have no friend in Cornwall, or in the north of Scotland, whom they could visit; for I thought a ride to the Land’s End, or John o’ Groat’s House, might do them more good than all the counsel I could give them. (Letters, 389)

Sometimes, our spiritual struggles come not because we have neglected God’s word but because we have neglected his world. We have walked through life wearing sunglasses and wondered at the darkness. We have lived with headphones on and questioned why we can’t hear.

We may indeed have spiritual issues to address. But our first solution may simply be this: open your eyes and ears and wonder at the world God made.

Where Wonder Dies

By wonder, I mean a wide-eyed awareness of God’s creation that leaves us hushed, self-forgetful, and brimming with joy. Such wonder quiets cares and awakens worship. It gilds ordinary moments and dignifies daily labors. It composes and calms, reminds and recalibrates, adds poetry to prose. Even a little wonder can do wonders for the soul.

But some of us rarely look through the window of wonder. We are too distracted by other attractions, even though they lend far less cheer to heart and mind. Perhaps two allure your attention.

The first is probably not surprising. On average, we Americans check our phones some two hundred times a day, or about once every five waking minutes. “With the smartphone,” Nicholas Carr writes, “the human race has succeeded in creating the most interesting thing in the world” (The Shallows, 233). But this “most interesting thing” has a way of rendering the real world uninteresting. Life looks drab in the smartphone’s glow.

You don’t need to be addicted to your phone, however, to lose your wonder. Another more surprising attraction draws and keeps many for far too long. Some have called it “the devilish onrush” of the modern world; others, “the cult of productivity and efficiency” (The Art of Noticing, xv). Many of us really like getting things done — and fast.

People made in the image of a creative God ought to value productivity. But “the cult of productivity” is something different. Those shaped by this cult don’t simply like getting things done; they dislike not getting things done. And so they have little patience for stillness and silence, meditation and marveling. Unproductive feels unbearable.

So then, the phone and the to-do list, entertainment and efficiency, digital bombardments and hustle-bustle busyness — often, these are the enemies that steal our wonder.

How Then Shall We See?

These enemies are also difficult to resist, even when you know what they take from you. The sight of a real mountain may seem dull compared to a digital mountain — or the mountain of work we’d like to get done. Reclaiming wonder takes effort. It takes a willingness to pin down our twitchy thumbs and endure the sight of unchecked boxes as we reorient our vision to “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely” (Philippians 4:8).

I find help from two habits that draw from God’s creative pattern in Genesis 1:1–2:3: Daily look upon God’s world and call it good. Weekly rest in God’s world and be refreshed.

DAILY ATTENTIVENESS

Habit 1: At least once daily, attend — truly attend — to one of the wonders God has made.

This first habit borrows from Clyde Kilby’s “means to mental health,” where he gets more specific: “I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are.”

At least once a day, in other words, find something unentertaining and unproductive, some flower that unfolds its beauty only under the sun of patient attention. Press through the discomfort of undistracted inefficiency and slow down. Look. Listen. Notice. Consider something God created and “be glad” that he spoke it into being.

“Sometimes, the solution to our spiritual struggles is less spiritual than we imagined.”

As the biblical writers show, we do not lack wonders to choose from. The sun gives one reason for gladness (Psalm 19:1–6); insects give another (Proverbs 30:28). Gentle rains show one kind of beauty (Psalm 104:13); stormy winds show another (Psalm 148:8). We find unspeakable variety in God’s world — from sheep to sharks, earlobes to earthworms, tree rings to the rings around Jupiter — but they all share the glory of God’s original “good” (Genesis 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31).

And if the objects of our wonder are many, so too are the means for observing them. The creativity of God invites creative exploration. Maybe journal daily just a line or two about something you observe. Or try your hand at some modest poetry. Or reclaim lull moments (like waiting or walking) for noticing. Or build a five-minute sanctuary in your afternoon where you simply sit, pray, and see.

Throughout Genesis 1, our God took daily pleasure in the world his words had made. So, why not adorn your own days with an answering “good”?

WEEKLY REFRESHMENT

Habit 2: Weekly, set apart extended time to get lost in the wonders of God’s world.

Daily attentiveness has a way of delighting us in the midst of our labors, sending us back to our screens and our tasks a little more free. But our souls cry out for something more than snatches of wonder. We want to hear more than a passing melody, want to see more than a corner of the canvas. We want to give our attention to the wonders of God’s world long enough to get lost in them.

Scripture’s celebrations of creation bear the marks not simply of attention but of extended attention. In Proverbs 30:24–28, the wise man’s appreciation of small creatures is exceedingly big. Our Lord Jesus showed a similarly patient pleasure in creation. He knew the ways of the wind and the signs of the skies (John 3:8; Matthew 16:2–3); he sat before wildflowers with enough awareness to see splendor greater than Solomon’s (Matthew 6:28–29). The wise care about wonder; they also know that wonder can take time.

Some of us feel wonder so rarely because we rarely (or never) walk through a whole day or even afternoon with the phone silent, calendar clear, and to-do list empty. We rarely let creation or those around us set the day’s agenda. And so the trails near home go unwalked, the best of books lie unread, quiet birdsong goes unheard, deliciously complex meals go unmade, and the images of God within our own home go unobserved, unmarveled.

Both in creation and among his old-covenant people, God set apart one day in seven for the rest that leaves room for wonder. Though Christians are not bound to keep the old-covenant Sabbath, God’s original six-and-one pattern still holds wisdom. But even if we choose a different interval, we need some kind of rhythm that refreshes the deepest parts of us.

Wonderers and Worshipers

Creation holds “untold resources for mental health and spiritual joy,” writes John Piper (When I Don’t Desire God, 197). But as he emphasizes, these “untold resources” do not belong to creation itself. They belong to the Creator. And so, we look to creation to see the Artist, not simply the art; we listen for the Author in every line we read.

In Psalm 148, the psalmist’s reflections follow a wonderful pattern: in meditating on sky, earth, sea, and man, he follows God’s creative work from day 4 to day 6 (Genesis 1:14–31). He puts his finger to paper and traces his Father’s lines, seeking to add his creaturely “good” and “very good” to God’s primal pleasure.

He is, in other words, not first a wonderer but a worshiper. Breathless, he beholds trees, clouds, cows, grass, storms, ships, laughs, stars, streams, and comes away saying, “His name alone is exalted” (Psalm 148:13). The countless wonders of the world bear one signature. God has written his name in everything good.

Maybe, then, the solution to your spiritual struggle is less spiritual than you thought. And maybe the God of Genesis 1 calls you to seek him not just through his word but through his world, daily and weekly rejoicing in him.