Vocation and Resurrection: Working as the Witnesses of the Kingdom Here and Now

There is a scene I keep returning to from Mufasa: The Lion King, the 2024 prequel that tells the origin story of the great lion king whose legacy his granddaughter Kiara is still learning to carry. Kiara—daughter of Simba and granddaughter of the great Mufasa—enters a cave on a stormy night, trembling, uncertain whether she possesses what greatness requires. She was born into a royal lineage, heir to the Pride Lands, but she does not yet feel ready to bear that calling. Huddled in the dark with the thunder shaking the sky, she wonders: Could I ever be as brave as my father? As great as my grandfather?

It is Rafiki—the wise mentor who had known Mufasa himself—who comes to her in that cave. And he does not lecture her or reason her out of her fear. Instead, he says: Let me tell you a story. He begins to unfold the deeper story of her family—a story longer and larger than her fears, a story that gives her a place to stand, roots her in something far greater than the storm outside.

I wonder if many of us feel something like Kiara today. We live in a moment of genuine disruption. Political institutions that once commanded broad trust are under strain. Social bonds are fraying. Wars are spreading, natural disasters are mounting, and the cultural assumptions that once held things together seem to be loosening from their moorings. Many of us—whether we work in finance, education, government, science, medicine, law, the arts, or in countless other spheres of daily life—carry a quiet unease about whether the faith we profess can still speak meaningfully into a world this disordered, this complex, and this uncertain. We know we have been called to be the salt and light of the world, to be agents of peace and renewal. But we are often not sure we are ready to bear it.

This is not a new anxiety. In Acts 12, the early church faced a far more immediate version of it. Herod Agrippa I—grandson of Herod the Great—was using religion as a tool of political theater. He had James, brother of John, executed by the sword. He arrested Peter, intending to bring him out for public trial after Passover. The church was small, unarmed, and apparently powerless against a machinery of empire openly hostile to Christian faith.

Yet what follows in Acts 12 is not the church’s defeat. It is a portrait of what a powerful church actually looks like—not powerful in the way empires are powerful, but powerful in the way the Kingdom of God is powerful. Luke gives us three marks of that church, and taken together, they answer the question that hangs over every anxious generation: How do we live as faithful witnesses of the Kingdom in a world this frightening?

But before we come to those three marks, we need to see the deeper story Luke is telling—because Acts 12 is not simply a story about Peter’s prison break. It is a story about the new Exodus.

Luke is a careful literary architect—weaving together the story of Israel, the mission of Jesus, and the life of the early church into one continuous narrative of God’s redemption. Here in Acts 12, he has embedded a set of clues that are easy to miss if we read too quickly. The first is in the timing. Luke tells us that Herod arrested Peter “during the days of Unleavened Bread” (Acts 12:3). That is Passover season—the very time when Israel remembered God’s greatest act of deliverance: the exodus from Egypt.

The second clue is in the language. Peter is not simply released—he is dramatically delivered. He is chained between two soldiers, guarded by four squads of troops, locked behind an iron gate. Then an angel appears, a light floods the cell, and Peter is struck awake. His chains fall off. He is led past the guards, through the gates, and out into the open street—so stunned by what has happened that at first he thinks he is seeing a vision. Only when the cold night air hits him does he come to his senses and declare: “Now I am sure that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from the hand of Herod” (Acts 12:11).

That word rescued—in the Greek, exeilato, from the root exaireō—is not an ordinary word. It is the very word Stephen uses in Acts 7:34 when he recounts God speaking to Moses from the burning bush, declaring his purpose toward his enslaved people in Egypt: “I have come down to deliver them.” Luke chooses this word deliberately. He wants his readers to feel the echo—the echo of the great Exodus, of God breaking into history to rescue his people from the hand of a proud and oppressive power.

Just as God delivered Israel from the hand of Pharaoh at Passover—chains broken, captivity ended, a people set free to march toward their inheritance—so now God delivers Peter from the hand of Herod at Passover. The same God. The same word. The same story, pressing forward into a new chapter.

This is the new Exodus. It is not merely Peter’s story. It is the shape of God’s redemptive work in every age. What God began in Egypt—the liberation of a captive people, the defeat of a proud power, the advance of his purpose through a community he calls his own—he has now enacted in its fullest and final form through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The cross is the true Passover. The empty tomb is the crossing of the Red Sea. The risen Lord is the one who leads his people, by his Spirit, out of every bondage and into new creation.

This is the story the early church had been given to tell, to live, and to witness. Acts 12 shows us what a church looks like when it actually believes that story—when it knows itself to be part of the new Exodus, the in-breaking of God’s redemptive work in the world, called to proclaim it, practice it, and pray it into the world.

It is worth noticing why Peter is in prison in the first place. He is there because he spoke. From the day of Pentecost onward, Peter had stood before crowds and rulers alike and declared that the Jesus they crucified had been raised from the dead—that death could not hold him, that God had made him both Lord and Christ, that there was salvation in no one else. This proclamation was precisely what made him dangerous to Herod. The church’s speaking was the threat, and so Herod moved to silence it—not knowing that the word of God cannot be silenced. The first mark of the early church in Acts, then, is that it proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus—clearly, publicly, and at real cost.

This message is the center of everything in Acts. On the day of Pentecost, Peter stands before the crowd and declares: “This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses” (Acts 2:32). Later in Acts 17, Paul in the synagogue at Thessalonica reasons from the Scriptures, “explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead” (Acts 17:3). The resurrection is not one doctrine among many. It is the hinge of history—God’s public declaration that everything Jesus said and did is true. On the cross, the world rejected him. In the resurrection, God vindicated him, raised him to his right hand, and gave him the name above every name. The empty tomb is heaven’s announcement that the crucified one now reigns as Lord over all creation—over politics, over economics, over every power and principality.

This is precisely why the church in Acts could not stop speaking. The resurrection is not a private religious experience. It is a cosmological claim about the structure of reality. It declares that no Herod is final, no Caesar is ultimate, no system of oppression gets the last word. Because Jesus is Lord over all things—Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer, and coming King—no power in heaven or on earth can ultimately prevail against his purposes. This was the core of everything the early church proclaimed: not merely a message of personal salvation, but the announcement that the risen Christ rules over all of life, all of reality, all of creation—and that his Kingdom is breaking in.

The second mark of the church in Acts is that it practiced the word it proclaimed—embodying, in the texture of daily life, the reality it declared with its lips. When Peter is freed from prison in Acts 12, he goes directly to the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark, “where many were gathered together and were praying” (Acts 12:12). This is not simply a house. It is a community—people gathered, caring for one another, hosting, serving. It is a practicing church.

The pattern begins even earlier. In Acts 4, Luke writes that “the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul… and there was not a needy person among them” (Acts 4:32, 34). They shared their lives and their belongings. In doing so, they lived out the very Jubilee of God—the deep Old Testament vision of a community restored to what it was always intended to be: relationships made right, goods held with open hands, the creation ordered as God designed it from the beginning. The new Exodus was taking visible shape in daily life: a people practicing in their common life the freedom God had given them.

There is also Dorcas, in Acts 9. Luke tells us she was “full of good works and acts of charity” (Acts 9:36)—and then makes it concrete: tunics and garments, made by her own hands for the widows in her community. She was not preaching. She was sewing. And yet Luke calls her a disciple—a follower of Jesus, fully counted among his people. This is the point Luke wants us to see: it was through the ordinary work of her hands—her vocation—that the redemption of God was taking visible, concrete shape in the world. Through needle and thread, dignity was restored, the broken made whole, the grace of God woven into the fabric of a community. Dorcas’s faithful work—the vocation of sewing—was itself the sign: the Kingdom of God breaking into the ordinary fabric of life.

The early church of Acts did not only proclaim the resurrection of Jesus—that he is Lord over all things. They sought to practice that reality by embodying it in the working out of daily life: sharing their lives with one another, serving the world through their vocations. All of this flowed from the deepest conviction about reality itself—that Jesus is indeed Lord, and therefore nothing they owned, no skill they possessed, no labor they offered was ultimately their own. Through the faithful stewardship of their lives and vocations, implicated in the reality of resurrection, the early church was bearing witness to the world that Jesus is ruling, that his resurrection had changed the logic of everything.

The third mark of the church in Acts is that it prayed—and Acts 12 makes clear that prayer is not merely one practice among others. It is the very engine of everything. The passage is structured around prayer the way an arch is structured around its keystone. At the opening, Luke notes that while Peter sat in prison, “earnest prayer for him was made to God by the church” (Acts 12:5). At the close, when Peter arrives at Mary’s house, the community is once again gathered in prayer (Acts 12:12). Between these two moments, chains fall, iron gates open of their own accord, and a man walks out of a Roman prison into the open street.

Jesus himself made this unmistakably clear. When he taught his disciples to pray “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10), he was not offering a spiritual coping mechanism. He was inviting them into the mission of God—calling them to participate, through prayer, in the advance of the Kingdom. The praying church is the church that aligns itself with what God is already doing in the world and asks him to do more of it. It understands that heaven is not distant but active, not silent but moving—and that the prayers of God’s people are among the means through which he chooses to act.

This is what made the early church so fearless. They proclaimed that Jesus is the risen Lord over all things. They practiced that reality by embodying God’s Jubilee—the in-breaking of God’s redemptive order—in their common life and their vocations. And they prayed, bringing the specific weight of their broken world before the One who had already proven, at Passover, that he could open any door.

Acts 12 is not simply an ancient story. Its pattern runs through the whole of church history, taking flesh in generation after generation of people who discovered that the risen Lord was real and that his mission was their calling. To see that pattern alive in another age, we need to step into eighteenth-century England—a world that was, in its own way, as dark and as entrenched as anything the early church had faced.

Georgian England was a society fractured by brutal inequality. The industrial revolution had swept millions of the rural poor into overcrowded cities, where child labor, grinding poverty, and rampant disease were simply facts of life. And undergirding the entire economy of the British Empire was the transatlantic slave trade—a machinery of unspeakable cruelty that transported hundreds of thousands of Africans in horrifying conditions, with the full sanction of Parliament and the blessing of polite society.

The church, by and large, had little to say to the ruling class about any of this. Preachers like George Whitefield and John Wesley had ignited a genuine revival—preaching the new birth to vast crowds of miners, factory workers, and the forgotten poor, sometimes to tens of thousands gathered in open fields. Their preaching was transforming lives. The gospel was reaching those who had nothing, but the corridors of power remained largely untouched.

The church, like Kiara in the cave, found itself trembling before a world it did not know how to reach. The great question of the age was the same one that hangs over ours: How will the church become an effective witness to God and his Kingdom in the places where power actually lives?

The great evangelists of the age were already at work. George Whitefield blazed across England and the American colonies, preaching the death and resurrection of Jesus with extraordinary power—calling all who would listen to be born again through faith in the risen Christ. John Wesley spent decades in the saddle, riding from town to town, proclaiming that Christ had died for sinners and risen from the dead—and that this gospel had implications for every corner of life. In his 1774 tract Thoughts Upon Slavery, Wesley declared the slave trade “the execrable sum of all villainies,” a profound evil that no Christian conscience could tolerate. John Newton, the former slave ship captain who had written “Amazing Grace” from the wreckage of his own life, urged all who heard him to repent and surrender their lives to the risen Lord. These men preached faithfully. Their voices formed the spiritual imagination of a generation and refused to let the gospel remain merely personal or merely private.

It was the atmosphere created by this proclamation that prepared the ground for what came next. In 1785, William Wilberforce—twenty-six years old, already a rising member of the British Parliament, naturally gifted and socially well-connected—underwent what he called a “great change”: a genuine conversion to evangelical Christianity. His first instinct was not confidence. It was paralysis. He wrestled with whether a life in politics was compatible with true Christian faith and considered leaving Parliament altogether. He was, in a very real way, standing in a cave on a stormy night.

When Wilberforce went to Newton for counsel, contemplating whether to leave politics altogether, Newton told him plainly: do not leave Parliament. Stay where God has placed you. In the film Amazing Grace, Newton’s words cut to the heart: “Wilber, you have a work to do.” That word came from a man whose own story embodied the power of grace. Newton had spent years as a slave ship captain—and even after his conversion in 1748, continued in the trade for six more years, blind to the evil he was part of. It was only after twenty-four years of ministry, and forty years after his conversion, that he finally and publicly denounced the very trade he had once served. The gospel had worked slowly but deeply in him. That word gave Wilberforce a story to stand in—the story of the new Exodus, the in-breaking of God’s redemptive work in the world—and with it, the confidence that the same patient, transformative grace that had slowly changed even Newton’s stubborn heart could change not just individual lives but the laws, the institutions, and the moral fabric of an entire society. It sent him back to Parliament not in spite of his faith, but because of it.

From that moment, Wilberforce found his vocation anchored within the grand story of redemptive history. His seat in Parliament was not a compromise with the world but a calling from God—the specific place where he was to bring the rule of Christ to bear on the great injustices of his age: the abolition of the slave trade, the reform of public manners, and the renewal of the moral fabric of his society.

Wilberforce did not carry his calling alone. He and others found a community—evangelical Christians gathered in the village of Clapham, just south of London, meeting regularly in and around the home of banker Henry Thornton. The Clapham Sect, as they came to be known, was something closer to what Acts 4 describes: a fellowship of one heart and soul, pooling not only resources but vocational gifts in service of a shared mission.

What made them extraordinary was their refusal to divide faith from vocation. Hannah More—poet, playwright, and one of the most celebrated writers of her day—poured her literary gifts into pamphlets against the slave trade and devoted herself to establishing schools for the poor. Zachary Macaulay, a gifted statistician and researcher who had personally witnessed the horrors of plantation slavery in Jamaica, became the group’s indispensable compiler of evidence, supplying the facts and arguments behind every speech made in Parliament during the abolition campaign. Henry Thornton, a respected banker and economist, built the financial infrastructure that sustained the mission of the community. James Stephen, a barrister, brought his legal expertise to drafting the abolition legislation itself. It was through communities like Clapham—serious men and women of God coming together to practice the reality of resurrection in renewal for the world of their time—that the Kingdom of God was taking tangible form in law, in education, in public argument, and in the institutions of their age.

Yet practice alone was not enough. The Clapham community also prayed—together, regularly, earnestly. They brought before God the specific realities of the abolition campaign: the parliamentary votes they needed, the opposition they faced, the suffering of men and women in slave ships whose names they would never know. They prayed as people who genuinely believed that the risen Christ was ruling from heaven, and that the prayers of his people moved history.

This was not easy faith. Wilberforce introduced abolition bills in Parliament year after year, and year after year they were defeated. The economic interests of plantation owners, slave traders, and the colonial economy were formidable. There were seasons when Wilberforce’s strength was waning, his health failing, and the cause seemed impossibly far from victory. In those moments, he leaned on the word of God and the prayers of those around him. It was in one such moment that Wesley—then in the final weeks of his life—took up his pen and wrote his last letter. Six days before his death, from his deathbed, he addressed it to Wilberforce: “Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils. But if God be for you, who can be against you? O be not weary of well-doing! Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might.”

They kept going. Like the church in Acts 12—gathered in Mary’s house while Peter sat chained in Herod’s prison—they kept praying and kept working. The bills kept failing, the years kept passing, but the community held together in faith. Then, in 1807, the Slave Trade Act finally passed. Three days before Wilberforce died in 1833, slavery itself was abolished throughout the British Empire.

The witness of the Kingdom in that age was never the work of one man. It was the work of preachers—Whitefield, Wesley, Newton—whose proclamation formed the spiritual imagination of a generation. It was the work of ordinary men and women with serious vocational commitments—writers, statisticians, lawyers, bankers, educators—who refused to accept the status quo, and instead brought the realities of the gospel to bear on the public world through their actual skills and their actual lives. It was the work of prayer—the sustained, collective, costly prayer of a community that believed the risen Lord was real and that he was making all things right again. It was, in the deepest sense, the work of koinonia—a fellowship of shared life, shared mission, and shared hope. Through that partnership of preachers and practitioners and pray-ers, the church of their time embodied the life of the Kingdom in the public square—not merely as social reform, but as a living demonstration of what the world looks like when the risen Christ is Lord, and as a faithful witness to the Kingdom of God that has come.

Ironically, Acts 12 ends with Herod dead and the word of God alive. The man who accepted the praise of the crowd as a god is struck down in the very moment of his glory. The word that proclaimed the true King, meanwhile, increases and multiplies. The reversal is complete. This is the rhythm of redemption—the pattern that runs through every age of the church. Empires rise and fall. The slave trade, which once seemed as permanent as the tides, was abolished. And the new Exodus God began in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ continues, through his Spirit, into our own time.

The men and women of eighteenth-century England who gathered around Wilberforce believed—in light of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus—that the story of redemptive history was not background noise. It was the most real thing in the world. And because they believed that, they took it seriously and embodied it in both their public and private vocations. Their legislative work and their schoolrooms, their pamphlets and their prayer journals, their legal briefs and their acts of charity—all of it was, in the deepest sense, the work of sacrament: the bearing of God’s grace into the world, the making visible of what is still invisible—signs of the Kingdom that has come, and signposts of the Kingdom that is still to fully come.

We are part of that same story. The same Spirit who anointed Jesus to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, who descended at Pentecost, who sustained Dorcas’s hands in their sewing, who heard the earnest prayers of Acts 12 and sent an angel into a locked cell, who formed Whitefield and Wesley to preach and Newton to counsel and the Clapham community to practice and Wilberforce to persist—that same Spirit lives in us now, pressing this story forward through our lives and our labors.

Returning now to Kiara in her cave. At the end of Mufasa: The Lion King, after Rafiki has finished telling her the story of her grandfather—a story of fear overcome, of an orphaned cub who became the great king of the Pride Lands—something shifts in her. She had entered that cave trembling. But now she knows. She knows whose granddaughter she is. She knows the story she belongs to. She climbs to the top of the rock, opens her mouth, and roars. Not out of pride or performance, but out of deep, settled conviction. The story has found and shaped her. She is no longer afraid to venture out into the world and rise to her calling as the queen appointed to restore and sustain the order of the Pride Lands.

Like the world Kiara faced, like the world the early church of Acts faced, like the world Wilberforce and his friends faced—our times are difficult. The fractures are real. The weight of what feels broken—in our institutions, our politics, our communities, our trust in one another—is not something to be minimized. But we are not without a story to stand in. We are rooted in the story of redemption, made possible by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and that story is the truest and the most real thing in the world. Because it is true and real, we too can confidently step into the story—proclaiming the risen Christ in the spheres where we live and work, practicing the renewal of God’s Jubilee in the particular vocations we have been given, and praying together with the earnest, expectant faith of people who long for the Kingdom of God to make all things right again.