In Prayer and the Word

What do you do when you don’t know what to do? Jesus has spent forty days with you speaking of how to proceed but then He ascended to the Throne in Heaven. The Holy Spirit has not yet empowered you. Following seeing Jesus ascend and the angels say, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” you go back into Jerusalem. I don’t know about you but after having Jesus in your midst in His glorified body and then witnessing the Ascension, ‘going back’ would be anticlimactic. Wait for what’s next, that,

“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” ¹

Waiting. You don’t know it will be ten days but you do know Jesus said to wait. Who’s waiting?We have the Eleven disciples called as Apostles listed by name plus several women who were disciples and Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary’s other sons. But there are more disciples, those who believed and were followers of all He said. Over the next ten days, the number identified in this group swells to one hundred and twenty! But, what shall we do?

All these with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers. ²

Great first step into the unknown! Pray. Devote yourself to prayer, to seeking the LORD, to come into agreement with His Name in prayer. And what is birthed out of this? The LORD gives perception that makes sense to us when we read it but if you had been there, would we have seen what God says through the Word?

In those days Peter stood up among the brothers (the company of persons was in all about 120) and said, “Brothers, the Scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand by the mouth of David concerning Judas, who became a guide to those who arrested Jesus. For he was numbered among us and was allotted his share in this ministry.” ³

When in doubt as to how to proceed, pray and do what the Word of God says. Great plan. Now we concede that the disciples knew the Scriptures more fully than we—Jewish boys by the age of twelve had memorized the first five books of the Old Testament and more—but when you see what the LORD drew their attention to, you should be amazed. I wouldn’t have made the connections the LORD make through the leaders.

“For it is written in the Book of Psalms, “‘May his camp become desolate, and let there be no one to dwell in it’; and “‘Let another take his office.’ So one of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us—one of these men must become with us a witness to his resurrection.” ⁴

When you must act, follow the Word of God. But who could be a candidate to take Judas Iscariot’s apostleship? We begin to see a better defining of how many were serious disciples, who not only heard but believed as two candidates immediately are put forward. ⁵ Of these two, Matthias is chosen to be one of the Twelve. Interestingly, the actual decision on which of the two is left in the will of the LORD.

Our takeaway is in the waiting upon the LORD while we are waiting upon the LORD. When we don’t know what next, there is no better path than following our ‘what now’ with where we are in the LORD today. What decisions are we making today that we will live out going forward and are they founded in the LORD, what He has done in our lives already and what He pointedly says in His Word?