November 2002

Praying for boldness

'Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.' (Acts 4: 29-30)

In the Bayeaux Tapestry one scene depicts Bishop Odo 'comforting his troops at the Battle of Hastings'. The means of comfort depicted is a sword from behind prodding them in the direction of the enemy!

In earlier times, the meaning of the word comfort was much tougher than it is in modern parlance and it is worth bearing the earlier meaning in mind when we consider the Holy Spirit as 'comforter'. In this sense, part of his role is to provide us with boldness when we need it; in fact, this need not contradict the more modern meaning of the word but rather expands it.
So when the believers prayed: 'enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness', there is a sense in which they were asking for the Holy Spirit – their request for boldness equating with their need for comfort/the 'comforter' in that context.

At any rate that is what they got because the text goes on to say: 'After they prayed, they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.' (Acts 4:31).

This is something I think we need to recover in our praying together. By this I mean what better answer could there be to most, if not all, of our prayers than for those praying to be mightily filled with the Holy Spirit.

It worked dramatically well for the early church and is surely what has always worked in the ensuing life of the church.

The second part of their prayer: 'Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus' (Acts 4:30) is the other side of the same coin.

In essence their prayer can be summarised as a request to be filled with the Holy Spirit and for healing and miracles to be part of the outworking of that. What a great prayer!

It is the type of praying we will be seeking to reproduce at our meetings in the weeks ahead.

Jeremy Jennings

This article is an edited version of one first published in Focus, November 2002. Reproduced here with permission.