It had started out so well for Paul and Silas.
Following what seemed to be a vision from God, they had left for the region of Macedonia to tell the people there the good news about Jesus. People were putting their trust in Jesus. But there was something that completely exasperated Paul: someone known as a fortune teller followed the missionaries wherever they went. She persistently shouted out that they were servants of the most High God, telling everyone that they had come to tell people how to be saved. Free advertisement sounds okay – until you think about the implications. By having someone with an evil spirit announcing them, the gospel was being undermined. Eventually, Paul got so annoyed that, in Jesus’ name, he commanded the evil spirit to leave the woman – and it did.
I wonder why Paul only cast out the spirit when he got super annoyed. Perhaps it was because the person involved didn’t actually want to be free from the spirit giving her supernatural abilities. We simply don’t know the answer to that.
What we do know is that the people this woman worked for were not impressed. This woman, their slave, had been a money making machine for them. They dragged Paul and Silas before the authorities, where a mob quickly developed. The city officials fell into line with the mob, and had Paul and Silas stripped and beaten with wooden rods.
That night, Paul and Silas found themselves, badly beaten, sitting in the inner dungeon of a Philippian prison, with their feet in stocks.
It had started out so well for Paul and Silas.
And once again, they found themselves in the place of realising their inability to save themselves. There was nothing they could do. But they also knew something else: God is not weak!
Acts 16 tells us that “Around midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening.” Paul and Silas knew that God was bigger than anything and everything that could happen to them. That’s step 2 of being apprenticed to Jesus. But they took it further to step 3: letting Jesus set the agenda. Rather than focusing on their terrible circumstances, they focused on God. They spent the night talking to Him and singing about and to Him.
It’s one thing to say that God is stronger than our circumstances. It’s quite another to actually live that out.
What do we do when we are brought back to a place of feeling powerless and weak? It’s so easy for us to focus on our weakness. Perhaps to wallow in the disaster, or get depressed. Maybe we try and fix things like Paul did – and find ourselves even worse off!
What if, instead, we remembered that God is bigger and stronger than anything and everything. And what if we went a step further and started living as if that was true? What would that look like for you and I?
PS: Find out more about what happened with Paul and Silas in Acts 16!
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