This is the Join the Journey weekly prayer podcast.

Unlike our new Tuesday teaching episodes, this time is set apart for guided prayer as we abide in Jesus together.

Here's your host, Wes Butler.

Welcome back to Conversations for the Journey. If you are joining us for the very first time,

I'd just love to take a minute to remind us of what it is that we do on this podcast each week.

Our hope is that we would take what we are reading in God's Word and that we would apply it to our lives in such a way that it informs our prayers.

What we believe is that we have a God who speaks, that he actually has spoken first.

And so all prayer is a response to him because he has spoken to us.

And so what we try to do is just take his words that he's spoken to us and enter into a dialogue with him,

where we respond in kind to the things that he is speaking to us.

And so this week we are going to be listening to what God has to say to us in Acts 12.

And this is a really pivotal time in the church, as just about every

chapter of Acts seemingly is, but this is a really heavy time in the life of the early church,

because this is the moment where the very first apostle is killed. So the chapter starts off

with James, who is the brother of John, one of the sons of

thunder that walked most closely with Jesus, and he is put to death by Herod at the very

beginning of this story. And then, in addition to that, Herod doesn't stop there, but he sees

the opportunity to seize Peter and to imprison

him most likely with very similar intentions, to try to kill him and to put to death really

this movement that he was seeing spread throughout his kingdom. And yet the story unfolds in a way

that we see God miraculously show up and rescue Peter, and then ultimately end with

the death of Herod, that Herod, who thought that he had all the power and that he was

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