No King But Jesus | June 7, 2026
Sermon number thirty-three closed out this chapter of Acts, and Pastor Justin walked through Acts 12:12-25 to show two very different endings within a single passage, one for Peter, and one for Herod. After his miraculous escape, Peter makes his way to the house of Mary, mother of John Mark, where believers had been praying all night, only for a servant girl named Rhoda to be so overjoyed at recognizing his voice that she forgets to actually open the door, leaving Peter still knocking while the praying believers insist she has lost her mind. Pastor Justin noted the detail that this house belonged to the mother of John Mark, who would go on to travel with Paul and Barnabas and, according to early church tradition, later recorded Peter's own eyewitness testimony in the Gospel of Mark.
The Setup: An Answered Prayer and a Fallen King
His first point was that God answers prayers that are bigger than our faith. The believers had prayed with the same ektenos, stretched-to-the-limit intensity described the week before, yet when the answer literally knocked on their door they diagnosed the servant girl as crazy rather than believe it was actually Peter. Pastor Justin was careful to frame this not as a rebuke but as an honest and encouraging picture of what real prayer often looks like, earnest, sustained, and still shadowed by doubt, and he challenged the congregation to keep praying anyway rather than quietly lowering their expectations of what God will do.
Luke then pulls the camera to Caesarea, where Herod stands before a crowd at a festival, accepting their worship as though he were a god himself. Pastor Justin cross-referenced this with the Jewish historian Josephus, who independently recorded the same event with the added detail of Herod's silver robe catching the morning sun, and noted that the archaeological remains of the Caesarea theater and surviving coins bearing Herod Agrippa's name all corroborate Luke's account as real history rather than legend.
An angel of the Lord strikes Herod down on the spot for refusing to give God the glory, and Pastor Justin's second point was that God shares his glory with no one, while carefully clarifying that this is not a promise that God always destroys the church's enemies, since James was not spared the chapter before despite being equally faithful. He pushed the application inward rather than outward, asking the congregation what platform, reputation, or area of personal control has quietly been receiving glory that belongs only to God.
One chapter, two rulers, and Luke ties it together with the simple, understated statement that the word of God continued to increase and multiply, an echo of the same phrase used earlier in Acts 6:7 after the church's first internal conflict was resolved. Pastor Justin's third point was that God's word cannot be chained, stopped, or buried, whether the threat is execution, imprisonment, or a king's public claim to deity.
Psalm 2 rounded out the scripture reading, the declaration that the kings of the earth may set themselves against the Lord and his anointed, but he who sits in the heavens laughs, because every earthly throne is temporary next to his.
This Week's Application
So this week, is there an area of your life where you have been quietly accepting glory, credit, or control that belongs to God alone? We would love for you to join us this Sunday as we continue walking through Acts together.
The Crossings Community Church is an evangelical church plant in Brunswick, Maryland, led by Pastor Justin Wyckoff. We meet Sundays at 11:00 AM. Learn more at thecrossings.cc.