Editor’s note: The following article was adapted by the author from his book Pour Out Your Heart: Discovering Joy, Strength, and Intimacy with God through Prayer (pp. 161–65, 171–73). Pour Out Your Heart is available now from B&H Publishing and wherever books are sold.
I know God doesn’t make mistakes, but I sometimes wonder if I was supposed to live in the first century, because I love everything about the early church. Apart from the lack of air conditioning, indoor plumbing, and antibiotics, living in those times would have been amazing. Jesus had just spent forty days with the disciples after his resurrection. He went up, and the Spirit came down. Thousands were added to the disciples’ number. They worshiped daily, prayed continually, and shared meals together. They cared for widows and orphans, cast out demons, and healed the sick. Even when they were persecuted, they spread out among the nations and planted churches like it was nothing.
But what was it really like? Was it all that great, or were there significant hardships? What was a typical church gathering like? How did they do church in these wild early years?
In the first thirty years after Jesus’s ascension—the period of the book of Acts—the early church was everything. It was great, and it was awful; it was evangelistic, and it was legalistic; it was hungry, and it was lukewarm. The only thing it wasn’t is nothing. Its influence swept the globe in a way no social or religious movement ever has or ever again will.
Early Christianity scholar Michael Green wrote a book with the perfect title, Thirty Years that Changed the World. Green puts this season in history like this:
Three crucial decades in world history. That is all it took. In the years between AD 33 and 64, a new movement was born. In those thirty years it got sufficient growth and credibility to become the largest religion the world has ever seen and to change the lives of hundreds of millions of people. It has spread into every corner of the globe and has more than two billion adherents. It has had an indelible impact on civilization, on culture, on education, on medicine, on freedom and of course on the lives of countless people worldwide. And the seedbed for all this, the time when it took decisive root, was in these three decades. It all began with a dozen men and a handful of women: and then the Spirit came. (7–8)
Incredible, right? Green goes on to say, “We can and should ask ourselves, ‘If those people then acted in the way they did, what are the implications for disciples today, given all the differences brought about by culture, space and time?’” (8)
Among all the unique features of life in the early church, one thing stands out—prayer. If we compare the lifestyle and activities of the early church to our contemporary churches, the single most stark difference will be in our prayer lives. Green writes, “Prayer, not activism, is what they relied on” (268).
Learning Prayer from the Early Church
In Acts, prayer is the central power and activity of the church. In chapter 1, we see the believers praying before the coming of the Spirit. In chapter two, they’re gathered together again, almost certainly in prayer, when the Spirit falls. At the end of that wild, historic day, the thousands of new converts are joined to the apostles and early believers together in prayer (2:42). As chapter three opens, we find the believers going up to the temple to pray. This pattern goes on throughout the book. As Green summarizes, the early church had “life-changing power. And it only happened because these men and women put prayer at the top of their priorities” (271).
If prayer was a defining mark of the early church—with beautiful and world-changing results—why has it fallen so down the priority list for the church of contemporary America?
I believe the answer lies in our general fear that prayer doesn’t do much at all. We subconsciously believe we can do more by our intellect, strategies, and efforts than God can do in response to our prayers. How did we get here? There are multiple answers, but I believe one key reason is our diminished emphasis and dependence on the Holy Spirit.
In Pour Out Your Heart, I suggest that prayer helps us hold together two beautiful things in tension—gospel and presence. Embracing the gospel without living for the presence of God can lead us into mere head knowledge and sacrificial living. We can believe in the message of the gospel and have impeccable theology and yet barely experience the beauty of Christ. Yet, in the same way, living for the presence of God without remaining centered on the gospel can lead us into error as well. We might become focused on spiritual experience, not on knowing God in Christ. Without a heart full of the gospel, our spiritual life can become focused on personal discipline, moral improvement, and self-fulfillment.
As one of my friends put it: If you have only the gospel, you have the key to the whole house, but you might never go inside. If you have only the presence, you might have the whole house, but no key to get in.
Reading Acts and the New Testament letters, it seems the early church didn’t have this problem. As Paul wrote to the Thessalonians: “For we know, brothers and sisters loved by God, that he has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not simply with words but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction” (1 Thess. 1:4–5). Word and power. Truth and Spirit. Gospel and presence.
What, then, would it mean for us to be more mindful of God’s presence in our prayer lives? What would a more Spirit-filled prayer life look like?
Prayer and the Spirit of God
A life of walking by the Spirit is a life of prayer, and a life of prayer is a life of walking by the Spirit. Prayer is a refusal to do life in our own strength and ingenuity. It’s a plea for help from above (and within). Prayer demonstrates a heart that is hungry for God’s presence and intervention in our world. In the same way, walking by the Spirit is a lifestyle of depending on God, not self, for life and breath. The two things are nearly synonymous.
To the Galatians, Paul wrote:
Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh… If you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law… But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit (Gal. 5:16, 18, 22–23).
Paul compels us to become like Christ, developing the same character of Jesus and demonstrating his characteristics. The way we become like Christ is by walking in the Spirit, living by the Spirit, and keeping in step with the Spirit. These three phrases suggest a practical, ongoing, moment-by-moment relationship with the Holy Spirit. It is only through this perpetual dependence on the Spirit that we can uproot the power of sin in our lives and demonstrate Christlikeness.
Dependence is a key word there. As we’ve seen, our human tendency is to rely on ourselves, defend ourselves, and promote ourselves. The Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer famously wrote:
The central problem of our age is not liberalism or modernism, nor Roman Catholicism, nor the threat of communism, nor even the threat of rationalism, nor, I would add, postmodernism, consumerism, and other more contemporary isms. The real problem is this: the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually or corporately, tending to do the Lord’s work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them.[1]
This happens both individually and together in the church. Our lives, apart from walking by the Spirit, become an anxious experiment in self-reliance. We become devoted to building and protecting our own little kingdoms. We don’t intend this, but when our old self (what Paul calls the flesh) is more active than our new self (who we are in Christ), we live no different from our non-Christian neighbors.
Our churches and ministries can operate the same way. We drift back into our old self-reliant selves collectively, and we end up busy, distracted, and focused on building a spiritual empire (however big or small) that is not the kingdom of Christ. We ought to honestly ask: If the Holy Spirit suddenly left our ministries, how long would it take us to notice? If our prayers suddenly were ineffective, would our ministries come to a grinding halt? Or would they continue undiminished—because it wasn’t dependent on the Spirit and prayer to begin with?
In Galatians, the old apostle knows this self-assured, fleshy habit within us and wants to sever it. He wants us to replace it with Spirit dependence.
What would such a walking by the Spirit look like? The most practical, moment-by-moment way to keep in step with the Spirit is through an ongoing conversation with the Father.
Through God’s Son, by the power of God’s Spirit who indwells us, we can continually praise our Father God, humble ourselves before him, seek to do his will, and ask for all that we need and want. Prayer is the heart of walking by the Spirit.
Let us follow the pattern of the early church and surrender ourselves daily, in prayer and obedience. Through the power of the Spirit, let’s enjoy the life of prayer and intimacy with God that Jesus died to welcome us into!
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[1] Francis Schaeffer, The Lord’s Work in the Lord’s Way (Crossway, 2022), 36.