What do you do when things go wrong, when your best attempt to obey God ends up in a mess? Where do you turn when depression weakens you like a disease? When you’re attacked by the very people who should protect you, when people totally misunderstand what you say and the situation explodes into a crisis? How do you find peace when temptation rises like a fever until you submit? How do you prepare yourself for that dreaded meeting or phone call or doctor’s appointment? How do you live with the...
What do you do when things go wrong, when your best attempt to obey God ends up in a mess? Where do you turn when depression weakens you like a disease? When you’re attacked by the very people who should protect you, when people totally misunderstand what you say and the situation explodes into a crisis? How do you find peace when temptation rises like a fever until you submit? How do you prepare yourself for that dreaded meeting or phone call or doctor’s appointment? How do you live with the sorrow of watching a beloved family member or friend continue to rebel against all they know is right and destroy one relationship after another? How do you cope with getting older, watching your body age and your memory fail? How do you respond? Do you collapse in self-pity and try to comfort yourself with things you know are destructive? Do you get angry at God for failing to protect you? Do you blame yourself for being so stupid and fall into self-loathing? Because we all face these kinds of pressures, which is why we all need to learn how to respond when they come. Left to ourselves we tend to react badly, and our bad responses become habits and those habits enslave us and drag us down.
In today’s lesson we are allowed to observe Paul and Silas at a terribly low point in their lives. Everything seemed to have gone wrong, and they ended up trapped in a spiritual atmosphere that was about as close to hell as you can find on planet earth: chained in darkness, surrounded by filth and disease, held fast in a place of torture and despair, a place full of the demonic. Yet these two missionaries didn’t give in to despair, they didn’t rail against God or curse their captors. Instead, they deliberately, aggressively, tactically set about to transform the spiritual environment of that horrid place. They went to war, and they won…completely…what had been meant for evil turned out for the glory of God. And Luke has revealed enough of the details to allow us to discover how they did this. He said that in that inner jail the prisoners were listening to them intently, and you and I need to do the same. Paul and Silas are showing us how to find victory when we’re under attack, when we’re in bondage, and how to turn oppressors into brothers or sisters. Frankly, there’s no more important life lesson in the Bible.
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