“And, being assembled together with them, commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith he, ye have heard of me. For John truly baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.” Acts 1:4-5

When you have a question about what to do or need to make an important decision, how should we as Christians respond?

Overwhelmingly, the response I’ve heard is “pray about it.” 

While I agree that prayer is one of the most precious gifts that God has given to us, I think the pattern we find in the Bible involves something else.

In this scene, we see that Jesus gave the disciples clear instructions about what they should do next. They are to wait for the fulfillment of God’s promise to give the Holy Ghost. The disciples had already been told that they would preach the gospel not only in Judea but all over the known world, but not yet. There was an important thing that needed to happen to them first. They needed to be baptized of the Holy Ghost.

What I find most interesting about this is that the disciples never asked, “what does that mean?” or “what will that feel like?” I mean, being baptized with fire sounds pretty scary to me! I would at least be asking if it was going to hurt. But even without knowing the answer to these questions, we can  see in this scene is that the disciples were given clear instruction by God on what they would be doing in the future and what they needed to be doing at that moment while waiting on God’s timing.

We will see in the coming verses that Luke records what I consider to be an error made by the disciples. They return to Jerusalem, stay together, and pray, But they also get ahead of the work of God by trying to choose another Apostle. 

More details on this later.

For now, let’s consider how we can apply this to our discipleship walk. God has given us an instruction book for our lives. The lesson for us is that we should  listen to and obey the clear written will of God in the Bible. 

Further, if we only pray, how do we really know that the “answer” we have received is God’s will? For example, if I was offered a job that prevented me from attending worship on the Lord’s day. I could pray about it, and I might come to some kind of rationalization that it was God’s will for me to take the job. The problem with this is that we are commanded to seek first the kingdom of God in our daily lives. If I leave off worship of God, I am neglecting my number one job on this earth — to glorify God!

When we need to make decisions it is good to pray for God’s guidance, but we need to not ignore that God has already given us a great amount of guidance in His word. If we only pray, we are ignoring the blessing that our Heavenly Father has already shown us His will in His preserved word.