Persecution, Prison, and Prayer

The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much.
–James 5:16

Many of Adolf Hitler’s top officials were staunchly anti-Christian. They wanted to destroy Christianity and replace it with a neo-pagan religion that mixed Third Reich philosophy with the worship of Germanic gods. One of these officials, Alfred Rosenberg, created a thirty-point plan for corrupting the church. His plan included removing all crosses and Bibles from German churches and replacing them with swastikas and copies of Hitler’s book Mein Kampf. Though Hitler himself thought the idea of a new religion was ludicrous, he saw the value of putting pressure on the church.

Persecution has been a part of church history since the earliest days of the church. At first, this persecution was instigated by the Jewish religious leaders. But in Acts 12, about ten years after the birth of the church, we see the first instance of government-sponsored persecution.

Verses 1–3 say, “About that time Herod the king laid hands on some who belonged to the church in order to mistreat them. And he had James the brother of John put to death with a sword. When he saw that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter also.” This was not Herod the Great, who was king when Jesus was born; this was his grandson Herod Agrippa I. He didn’t care about Christianity, but he started mistreating the church to ingratiate himself to the Jewish leaders.

After putting the apostle James to death, Herod arrested Peter with the intention of executing him after the Passover feast. But notice what was happening while Peter was in prison: “Prayer for him was being made fervently by the church to God” (v. 5). And God answered their prayers in a miraculous way.

There was another prominent James in the early church: James the half brother of Jesus, who became a leader in the church at Jerusalem and wrote the New Testament book of James. He said, “The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much” (James 5:16). When James wrote these words, I think he had in mind his firsthand experience with the fervent prayers of the early church in Acts 12. Though persecution is inevitable, this story is less about persecution than it is about the tremendous power of prayer.

Today’s devotion is adapted from “Persecution, Prison, and Prayer,” by Dr. Robert Jeffress, 2022.

Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Thomas Nelson, 2010), 169–71.

Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org.