We're going to be in Acts chapter 16. This is a kind of a really important section. It's where the Gospel of Jesus Christ makes it into Europe. This town in Europe, this town in the region of Macedonia is called Philippi. And the people there received a letter from Paul years later called, well, we call it Philippians.

It was just the Apostle Paul writing to the church that he had founded or planted there. And so we're in a unit that we started last week called Growth Discipline and the need for solid doctrine. So this is part of the growth section of it. This is where the church was growing. And as we're going to be looking, I'm going to read to you just a portion of it because there's actually like three or four different sections concerning what was going on in that city and in that time.

But I want to give you a little backstory of what had happened just before this. And we've jumped all around in the book of Acts in this study a little bit chronologically speaking, we've kind of jumped forward and backward. And so you're not getting, you're not getting like a point by point chronological study on this. That wasn't kind of my purpose is I selected some of these just to kind of go in different movements or sections at a time. And so one of the things that had happened with Paul, if you recall, we had talked about the church in Antioch a few weeks ago.

And this was the first place where not only did Jewish people begin believing in Jesus, but also Gentiles, people that didn't historically have faith in God had started hearing people preaching about Jesus. And they said, that's for me too. Right? Like we're in on that. And so, you know, it's interesting.

Today you meet a lot of Jewish people and their faith isn't naturally given towards allowing them to believe in Christ as Messiah. A lot of Jewish people don't believe the Messiah has come yet, and so they reject him. They say, no, that's not true, that's not our God, he's not our Savior, the Messiah is yet to come. And I was just watching something recently about a Jewish man that was studying. He's reading the Bible and he starts reading and he reads through some psalms, he reads through some different things.

And then he gets into Daniel chapter nine and he's reading at the end and he's reading it says like, the Messiah will come and then after that the city of Jerusalem will be destroyed. And he's like, that happened in the year 70. How did we miss this. This whole time it's right here in front of us. He's like, jesus is the Jewish Messiah.

Well, initially, like now, we have a lot of Jewish people that don't believe Jesus was the Messiah. But early on, the first converts to faith in Christ were Jews. It was only after a little bit of time when they had gone up and preached in Antioch, that Gentiles began believing in Jesus as the Savior, not just for the Jews, but also for the Gentiles, which is what Jesus had said. So you've got Paul and Barnabas have gone on a missionary journey from Antioch. The Holy Spirit had said, send, set apart for me, Paul and Barnabas for the work to which I have called them.

So they go off. They go off on this missionary journey, and they start finding, like, synagogues where Jewish people would worship. By the way, you had to have 10 Jewish men in one town in order to be large enough to have a synagogue. You had to have 10 believers of the Jewish faith to have a synagogue in that town. And so he would go to towns or cities throughout the Roman Empire that had that.

And he would go and speak there. He would speak to his Jewish brethren about the Messiah. And a lot of times they would believe, but a lot of times they would do crazy stuff and try to, like, even kill Paul. You know, he was just an obstacle to them, and they would try to get rid of him. One of the people that they had brought with them was this guy named Mark, sometimes called John Mark.

And you know him because he wrote one of the Gospels. The Gospel of Mark was written by this guy. He's a cousin of Barnabas. And yet for some reason or another, as he's traveling with them, when the road got a little difficult perhaps he turned around and left and headed back to Jerusalem, not even to Antioch. He went all the way to Jerusalem.

And so now Paul and Barnabas want to go on a second missionary journey. And they're like, hey, we should bring somebody along with us. And Barnabas is like, let's bring Mark. Paul says, no, he deserted us halfway through the mission. Like, why would I bring him along?

I'm not doing that again. And so they had a sharp disagreement. And this is all kind of in the end of Acts chapter or in the middle of Acts chapter 13, where you can kind of see where he had deserted them. And then in Acts, chapter 15, it tells a setup for how he. How they had this disagreement.

So Barnabas and Saul, Paul decide to go two different directions. Barnabas takes John, Mark, and. And Paul takes a Young man named Silas. There's a whole backstory to that. I don't want to tell the whole thing, but basically some men had come from Jerusalem.

Paul had been down there and said, hey, there's Gentiles. Do we have to make them follow the entire law of God, like all the laws of Moses, they have to get circumcised, become part of the Jewish faith, follow all the Jewish laws, Or is it just good enough to have faith in Jesus Christ and all of the apostles? And the ruling council in Jerusalem said, nope, all they have to do is follow Christ, follow these laws, like four rules that basically kept them from worshiping idols. And as long as they do that, everything's fine. So they had that letter from the Jewish council, this letter that says, here's the conduct for the Christian churches.

So as they came back with that letter, a couple men came from Jerusalem that were considered prophets. They spoke good words of God into the people in Antioch, supported them. And Paul decides to take one of them along with him. Silas, one of those men that had come from Jerusalem, that was a prophet. Paul says, I'll take Silas.

Barnabas, you take Mark, you go over that way. We're going to go up this way, and we're going to do that. So Paul takes Silas and they start revisiting the cities that they had been from. And as they're there, Paul takes that letter with him. He takes it on the journeys because he wants to share this with these churches that he has already kind of helped plant before and say, here's the rules.

Like, here's the doctrine. Can you imagine? Like, until you have some official guidelines, people are like, they're going through a lot of different things. Think about it. You come from a pagan culture that has all this.

It wasn't just, like, promiscuity. It was actually like, you would go to a temple, you could sleep with a prostitute in the temple that would somehow connect you with the deities, the gods, and bring favor to you and your household. And now you're going from that and you're coming to the church, and you're like, do we do that here? No, we don't do that here. Like, it's different here.

They're like, oh, okay, like, what's the limit then? Like, what's the line? Like, what do we do? Like, how do we connect with God? How do we commune with God?

Well, for one, you declare with your mouth that you're saved, that you believe in Jesus Christ, Then you're baptized. You participate in holy communion. You do all these different things. Those are kind of the rituals, the parts of initiation into the faith or being part of the faith. So Paul brings these letters to him.

He's like, okay, I started these churches, but now I want to give them some guidelines. So he brings this letter to him. He brings some guidelines. He encourages them. And as they followed that solid doctrine of how to live, how to believe and how to act, the churches grow.

The churches are growing constantly because of the encouragement and the guidelines. And these guidelines are not, like, strict and harsh and repressive. They're actually very generous. And so Paul's doing that. He's carrying this along.

He's bringing Silas with him. He's got a good thing going. And he keeps wanting to go into this Asian territory. He wants to go to Asia. He wants to go to a place called Mysia.

And it just keeps saying that the Holy Spirit wouldn't allow them to. I want to share two things with you before I get ahead. One, I almost forgot. Mark, the guy that Paul said, no, he's not coming with us. He was like.

He fell into such a sharp disagreement with Barnabas that they split company. Paul and Barnabas were tight. Barnabas was the guy that had given Paul his start when nobody would trust Paul because he had been crucifying Christians before Paul was a Christian. He was not crucifying, martyring them, like killing them, persecuting them. When he's doing that, he becomes a Christian.

We had the bright light. God converts him. And Barnabas is like, no, Paul's. He's on the team now. He's on Team Jesus now.

So they had such a sharp disagreement about Mark that they split up. Now, I want you to know, though, that that wasn't the end of Mark. Just because one person kind of didn't see the character, the true nature of Mark, or one person didn't see the value in him, didn't mean that Mark's time was over. There's going to be times where leaders fail you. There might be a time where I fail you.

It's possible. And so Paul, I'm not saying I don't know whether he was right or wrong in that moment. I do know this later on when he's writing a letter to Timothy that we'll talk about in a couple minutes. We'll talk about Timothy. In second Timothy, chapter four, verse 11, he's saying to Timothy, he's like, come visit me soon.

Paul's in prison at this point in his life. He says, come visit me soon. And he tells him a Couple things. And he says, bring Mark with me because he's useful to me. He's a great help to me.

Somewhere along the line, Mark knew he wasn't finished. Mark wasn't done. God wasn't done with Mark. Even though Paul had a moment where he was done with Mark, God wasn't. And God had worked through Barnabas and through others and through different things along the way that not only would Mark be restored to usefulness in the world of Paul's ministry, but he would also be useful to the Holy Spirit in the way that he wrote an entire one of the books of the Bible, the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Although it was only 16 chapters. He didn't get like 28, like Matthew or something like that. Mark kind of condensed it down. He was like, let's get it done, you know? So this is the thing, like, I just wanted you to hear because some of you might have hit a point in your life at some point where you're like, is that it for me?

Have I kind of plateaued out? And this is all God has for me. God's not done with you. God has more for you, and it might be more than you've ever dreamed or imagined. Amen.

Now, as Paul has gone off and Barnabas has gone off, Paul finds this guy named Timothy. And Timothy, I don't know how else to say it than this, so please don't be offended. He was considered a religious bastard. Like his mother was Hebrew, his father was Greek in the Hebrew world. In the Jewish world, that was considered religiously, a bastard like your dad doesn't count.

You're not part of the faith. You're an illegitimate Jew is what they considered that. And so his religious upbringing wouldn't have been the same as his relatives that were fully Jewish. He wouldn't have been part of the synagogue learning and education system. He wouldn't have learned the Torah.

He wouldn't have learned all that from the different teachers of the law. And yet Paul reminds him, he says, your grandmother and your mother. And he mentions them by name, Lois and Eunice. He says, these women have taught you the Scriptures from your youth, from your young age. In other words, these women that were.

These were his Jewish mother and grandmother. They recognized that even though the laws of the faith weren't going to allow him the same Jewish education in the Scriptures as some of his cousins and friends would have had, that they were going to give it to him anyway, these women stepped up and they taught him the word of God. So when Paul finds the man he Finds this young man, Timothy, when he's traveling through these cities, he finds somebody that Timothy was now well respected by. The brethren. It says the brethren is their term for the believers in Christ.

The Christians and the brethren have shown their respect for Timothy, and so they respect him. And yet he didn't have, like, the upbringing and the pedigree. He also wasn't circumcised into the Jewish faith. That was the physical mark in the flesh that you identified as part of that people group. Everybody that was part of the Hebrew faith, Hebrew lineage, was circumcised on the eighth day.

And that was their sign of their covenant with God, that they were part of his family, part of his people group. And so Timothy hadn't been circumcised because of who his father was. Paul, it says. Now, this is interesting. Paul took him along.

It doesn't say he adopted him. And there's no, like, precedent or custom for this. But in my mind, it was almost like he fathered him in the faith. He actually calls himself, like, my son in the faith. And so I think Paul said, like, okay, I'll do for you what your father wasn't able to do.

He says, I will kind of take you under my wing like, you were my son in the faith, and I'm going to raise you up and train you up. Men, don't miss your opportunity to do this. Some of you older folks, I feel like I'm getting into that category. I'm not old, but I mean, like, I look at younger people than me, I'm like, you guys just need a dad, you know, like, seriously, like, where's your father's at? You know?

But anyway, even guys my age, like, there's a lot of people out there, they've never had a father that would raise them up in the faith. And. And it's time to step up and say, okay, I'm gonna be there for the next generation and make sure that they know who God is, that they know who they are in God's family, and that they know the scriptures. And I'm gonna teach them to that. I'm gonna show them their place in this world, their place to serve Christ.

And so this interesting thing happens that Paul does says he had Timothy circumcised. Now, it's very interesting because if you know much about this story, Paul would later fight people about this, saying that they didn't have to do that. And he'd be like, yeah, you don't have to get circumcised in order to Be a Christian. That's the whole reason he had gone to Jerusalem, came back with the letters, was saying, like, you don't have to buy into the law of Moses. You don't have to become circumcised and all that stuff.

Now why in the world would he do that for Timothy? And as I pondered over that, I look at that and I'm looking at this during this week and I'm studying it and I read carefully. Did you know when you have questions about the Bible, the best thing to do is to keep reading the Bible. You're gonna find the answer somewhere. Most of the time it doesn't hurt to cheat and use a search online to find answers that point you to other scriptures that somebody else has already thought ahead of you on and been like, I had the same question too.

And so I studied it and then I wrote it down and I put it online and now you can read it. I thank God for people that write these articles and blogs because they're helpful to me. And one of the things that we see though, as you keep reading that scripture is it doesn't say that Paul circumcised him because of the Christians or their opinion of Timothy. It doesn't say he circumcised him because it was the only way for him to become a believer. It says he circumcised him because of the Jews in the area.

See, what Paul was trying to do at this point early on in his ministry was he was going to where the Jewish people were first and he was wanting to connect the Jewish people with Christ as their Messiah. And he knew that if he starts bringing this half non Jewish young man along with him, and they know who he is, even though they respect him, they're not going to respect the message of Paul. And so because he wants to reach those that he feels are his kind of target audience, he says, I don't want there to be any barriers, so I will do what I can. There's another time where Paul says, in his ministry, he says, I became all things to all people so that I might win them to Christ. Now that's not Paul saying, like, I'm wishy washy and my character changes.

His character remained the same. It's not Paul saying, well, I let my morals go up or down, my values change. Nope, his values didn't change, his morals didn't change, his ethics didn't change. In fact, he would have some harsh words face to face with the Apostle Peter at one point, who did have that problem. Peter who would kind of go back and forth.

He's like, okay, I can act like a Gentile now and just be free and. And then, oh, the Jews are around. I gotta act straight laced with them. No, he says, like, he would shun himself away from the Gentiles when the Jews were around. And Paul says, you can't do that, Peter.

He's like, you live like a Gentile yourself. Anyway. So what Paul was saying is he says, I lived in such a way that all people could respect me. And in so doing, I wanted to win them to Christ. I wanted them to know Christ as their Messiah.

And so I believe what he did was he had Timothy circumcised so that it wouldn't be a stumbling block for people that that would be an issue for.

So then what they do is they travel to more churches, they travel to more places and they're strengthening these churches. But they want to go and carry the gospel into places that nobody's been yet. They wanted to go to these towns in Asia and Asia Minor, be kind of like on the western side of what we think of as Asia today. But God closed the doors for them. Now, if any of you, maybe it's been in a personal area of your life, maybe it's been in ministry that God has called you to do at some point, but you're going around and you're thinking, I'm doing the right stuff.

And then it just feels like a door closes. And sometimes maybe you've been praying like, God help me to do this. And then it feels like a door slams in your face. You're like, God, I thought this was the right thing to do. Why is the door closing?

Sometimes it's because there's danger over there that God doesn't want you to get involved in. Sometimes it's because that might be the right thing and it might be the right time, and you might be the wrong person for it. It might be that God had somebody else designed to do that and he had them going there and he didn't want you in that place. He has somewhere else for you to go. Sometimes it might just simply be because God wants to make sure that you are being obedient and listening to him rather than just going on your own initiative Sometimes.

And I think it's okay to pray this. I might change my belief on it later if God reveals something to me. But sometimes I think it's good to pray. Lord, I don't know, but it feels like this is what I'm supposed to do. And if you don't want me to do it.

Close some doors down on it. And he will. There have been plenty of times where I wish that I had prayed that because we embark on some area of ministry and it just fails miserably. And it's like, lord, were you trying to say, don't do that all along? And I didn't listen.

You know, like, just, lord, close the doors before we ever get down that road. So what they did was they just kept doing the thing they were doing. Paul and Silas and now Timothy. They just keep ministering to these churches that are kind of existing churches. They're strengthening them.

They're helping their doctrine out.

And Paul tries to open doors. God keeps them closed. So they just keep doing what they're doing. And then the early part of Acts, chapter 16, Paul's asleep. Sleeping is great.

I slept a lot yesterday. I had the first day off in a long time. I told Jesus I was sorry I hadn't had one. I took a day off yesterday. It was great.

I slept a lot. I was reading books on my Kindle tablet and I fell asleep in a recliner. And I would wake up and I would read some more and I'd fall back asleep. I can't tell you how many naps I took. It was like five just in a row.

It was like serial napping. It was fantastic. I never left my house. It was fantastic. So thanks to the guys that cut the grass yesterday.

It wasn't me, and I appreciate you guys doing it. But anyway, if you guys like it, the grass is cut around here. Like, I think it was Detroit and Kendall and Keith, I think I heard. Yeah. So thank you, guys.

All right. You guys don't care about grass. So anyway, Yeah, we had a record amount of rain lately. Like, 8 inches of rain in the last couple weeks, I think. So it's insane.

So these guys, though, they. Paul's asleep. He gets a vision. It's not just a dream. This is a spiritual vision that God gives him.

And I picture this, like, standing on. This guy's, like, standing on the map is the way I picture it. Like, there's this big blown up map, and there's this guy standing there, like, larger than life, motioning to Paul, like, come help us. It just says, a man of Macedonia. I don't know how Paul would have known he's from Macedonia unless he's standing on the map, like, where Macedonia was.

That's the way I picture it. Like, Paul's standing where he's at. This guy standing where he's at and the guy's like, come help us. I might play around. Maybe Jose will beat me to it.

I don't know. I might play around with Chatgpt later and try to make that image so we'll see who does a better job. But anyway, so, you know, like, you know, he says, come over and help us immediately. That day when Paul wakes up, they leave like, this is a guy that's been chomping at the bit to go minister in a new place. And every time he goes to do it, the doors are closed to him.

And now God has opened up a door and said, hey, like, this is where I want you. Now there's a good, like, lesson in being patient to wait for God to tell you what to do. I know I'm up here and I'm telling you, like, go serve Christ. Do this and do that. I'm also aware that every time I do that, that you might be like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do.

God's not telling me to do anything, you know, Like, I don't know what it is. Have your heart ready. Like, you don't just go out and, like, throw seeds on the ground and hope that crops spring up, you know, you prepare the soil, you till the soil, you get rid of the rocks, you get rid of the weeds. You do all this stuff, you might fertilize it, do a soil sample, all these things long before you ever put the seed in the ground to hope for a harvest. You have to prepare your heart, you have to prepare your mind, you have to prepare your soul.

We're listening to the spirit of God speaking to your spirit to prepare yourself. Okay, Lord, when it's time for me to minister, tell me and I'll go. And that's what happened with Paul. He's eager to go, but the doors keep closing. And so finally, in his sleep, like, he has to be asleep for his mind to shut down enough.

Who's there? Like, who has problems shutting your mind down? Okay, that's okay. You're fine. That means you just want to get a lot accomplished and you're thinking about a lot of things.

But sleep is a blessing from God that allows that to and allows the dreams to take over. And that's when your brain starts trying to process all this stuff that's going on in your head all day. And so that's why your dreams are really weird sometimes, because you've got a lot of stuff in your head and your brain's trying to process all that. But in the midst of even all of that, Paul has this vision from God and this man from Macedonia saying, come help us now. You know what he didn't do?

What he did not do was go there and say, okay, you guys need, like, some new social program. You got society problems. You need to fix it. No, he didn't say, oh, well, the problems are your government. You need to elect some new leaders.

Let's start. Help somebody's campaign out. No, he didn't go in and say, like, well, you know, your schools are a mess. Let's fix your schools, or your medical system's deficient. They didn't do all that stuff.

The help that they needed, that this man in the vision was begging them for, was to come and declare the gospel of Jesus Christ. So that's what Paul does. He goes there and remember how I said earlier that they would have. They had to have 10 Jewish men in a city in order to have a synagogue there. And apparently in the city that they land in, Philippi, a leading city in the region of Macedonia.

And this is in. This would be in Western Europe, by the way. And so it's. It's the first time that the gospel that we know of was ever preached or presented in the continent of Europe is when Paul went there, as he was called by this vision to come do. And so he goes to Europe, he preaches the gospel, or he's looking for a place to preach the gospel, but there's no synagogue there.

So he went to a place where he would think, if there's any Jewish believers or converts to Judaism, where they would be is down by the river, there's flowing water. The water is a place where you can, like, wash your hands and other things to be ritually clean according to the law. And so he goes there expecting to find some people coming to pray. What does he find? Who does he find?

He finds women there. Okay, I don't know where the men were. I don't know what was going on with them. Maybe there weren't any men who had the fear of God in them there. That's possible.

But what I do know is this, women, you ladies have so much that you're great at, so much that you can do that we can't very well as men, or can't at all. But one of the things that, like, you don't hold the corner on it, but you're just good at it and don't pull back from this is prayer. You're the one, like, every now and then you'll hear A story in antiquity, in history, of, like, this guy that was, like a leading prayer warrior most of the time. Who is it, though? It's the women.

It's the women. It's the women that are on their knees in the middle of the night praying for their kids who are wayward. It's the women who are praying for the salvation of their loved ones. It's the women who recognize and understand the eternal importance of time spent in prayer. Don't pull back from that.

We need you guys. We can do better. Like, follow the lead of these women. Anyway, Paul finds these women there. These women are praying.

Now, it doesn't specifically say whether they were Jewish or not, whether they were converts to Judaism or not. It doesn't say any of that. But they were believers in God. They were devout women that were following God. One of them was named Lydia.

Says she was a dealer in purple cloth. That region was known for that. They had purple dye there. It was one of the most expensive dyes you could ever get because it came in little tiny amounts and some shell creature in the water. And so you would only get a little bit from each one.

And so it took so many of them to make dye for purple cloth. And then the only people that could afford purple cloth were, like, royalty or priests or things like that. And so she probably had a lot of wealthy clients. She was very influential. She might have been a bit wealthy herself, we're not sure.

And she becomes a believer. She opens her heart up. Well, it says that the Lord opened her heart up for faith. She was already there, devoted to God, and yet she didn't have the full picture about who Jesus Christ was. She didn't have the picture of the Messiah that hadn't been presented in their region yet.

And, folks, there's a lot of places in our community, there's even people that don't even know who Jesus is. Now, you'd think, like, everybody knows at least who Jesus was. But there's even people today in modern society that the church has been on the decline for so long. We've been, like, kind of irrelevant to people for so long in a lot of places in the world that there's people that don't even know who Jesus is. You say the name Jesus and they're like, I don't know who that guy is.

You show them a picture and they're like, I don't know. Maybe not. We don't even know if that's what he looked like. So it doesn't matter. But you know what?

I'M saying they don't even recognize culturally who is that guy. And so we have a lot of work to do. And so as Paul is presenting this to them, this is the first they've heard about the Messiah. But it clicks. It makes sense because he's reasoned to them from the Jewish scripture, saying clearly the Messiah was going to come.

He was going to suffer and die and rise again, and he's the Savior for the world. And so they received him. Now, God had opened up Lydia's heart to receive the message of Jesus Christ. And as he shares with her, as he shares with them about this Lydia and some of these other women, we assume get baptized. They're right there by the river.

This is like immediate. They proclaim their faith in Jesus Christ. They get baptized right then and there. And Lydia says, hey, if you think of me as like, worthy of it, come and see. Stay in my home.

I'm going to put you guys up. So now they've gone from being homeless to having a nice home to live in. Isn't it great? There are some people that God has given the gift of hospitality, like, open up your home for people, whether it's to live there, to stay there, to sleep there, to eat there, whatever it might be. God has given you that gift to say, like, just extend whatever it is that you already have.

You don't have to go out and do anything extra. Just open your home up for people to be in there. And so that's what Lydia did. And as she does that, that's now their base of operations. They now are provided for in a way.

They don't have to worry about their physical, like, situation, their food, that's all covered. So now these men can go out and they can minister, they can proclaim the gospel. And so they begin doing this. And they're finding people every day. They're going out, trying to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with them.

But something very interesting happens. This young woman starts following them that's possessed by a demon. And she's like. It says that she's given the gift of, was it divination or whatever. She's able to, like, foretell the future in people.

And so her masters, that owned her. Now, this is terrible, right? Like, you've got evil men that are not only treating her as a slave, but they're also. She's possessed by an evil spirit and owned by evil men. And they're putting her to work to make money for themselves.

It's pretty despicable. And for several days she just Goes saying, listen to these men. They're telling you the truth. That can get you saved. What?

Paul gets annoyed with it, though. Like, I get it. I get it. I've had people that sometimes say truthful things, and yet there's so much addled about them that they'll just. They'll mess up everything.

And they're like. It's like, would you just stop, please? You know? And so eventually, you know, you just got to do something about it. That may or may not have happened this week around here anyway.

So Paul just looks at her and he cast the demon out of her. He tells it to leave her. Now she's restored to her right mind, to her right self. And the guys that owned her realize their hope of income from her is lost. And so they're going to have a problem with that.

So they get Paul arrested, they drag him off to the courts, and the courts decide that Paul and Silas should get beaten with rods. Who knows how many beatings. It was just until they were tired, I guess. They beat him with rods, and then they ordered him to be locked up in the lowest part of the jail, in a dungeon, locked up with their feet in the wooden stocks, probably their hands chained behind them to the stone wall. And that's where they get thrown.

And they're locked up. And it's midnight. Instead of going to sleep, instead of crying, instead of weeping and moaning about everything going on with them, they sang. They sang hymns and praises to God. And that's where I want to pick up our story today.

I want to read to you from Acts, chapter 16, starting in verse 25. About midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the rest of the prisoners were listening to them. By the way, I've never spent time in jail, but I've watched movies. I've heard from people. If you're like, at midnight, lights are out, you know, a couple hours ago, and it's midnight, and if you're making a lot of racket, they're going to tell you to shut up.

You know, the guards might come in and do a little tune up on you. That's what they do with the nightsticks anyway. They definitely are not happy with you for this. If you're singing at midnight, you're probably going in the. You know, the solitary.

You know, they're going to lock you up in solitary instead, though. Listen to this. The prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly, a great earthquake occurred, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken immediately. All the doors flew open.

Uh, oh, the bonds of all the prisoners came loose. That's not good. When the jailer woke up, he saw the doors of the prison standing open. He drew his sword and was about to kill himself because he assumed the prisoners had escaped. By the way, his death would have been pretty much inevitable at this point.

If the prisoners had escaped, the Romans would have killed him. This was his only way of restoring honor. It was an actual, like, an honor suicide, like they would have in some Eastern cultures, whereby it would restore honor to him and his family, and it would prevent his whole family from probably meeting the same fate as him. They were pretty brutal back then.

He was about to do himself in because he assumed the prisoners had escaped. But Paul called out loudly, like. I think he probably heard, like, the sound of the sword drawing, you know, that little. That little shink. It's a sound that you're going to recognize.

And he says, don't harm yourself, for we are all here calling for lights. The jailer rushed in. He says, yeah, I guess that was a little bit of a quick decision, wasn't it? No. He said he fell down trembling at the feet of Paul and Silas.

What in the world? These guys are the prisoners. Now he falls down at their feet. Isn't that interesting? He falls down at the feet of Paul and Silas.

Then he brought them outside and asked this question. This is the most important question of the day, sirs. What must I do to be saved? Now, I want to tell you something. This isn't.

This just hit me just now. You know how he asked the wrong question. He put all the action on who? Himself. What must I do to be saved?

I don't know what Paul exactly said in that moment. We know what it says here in Acts. But I hope what he said was, buddy, it has nothing to do with what you do. There's nothing you can do to be saved. It has everything to do with what Christ already did for you.

Has everything to do with what Christ did for you. All you must do is accept that, believe that you must proclaim that he is your savior as well. So here's what he says. Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved. You and your household.

Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him along with all those who were in his house at that hour of the night. He took them and washed their wounds. Then he and all his family were baptized right away, by the way, I want to see the Church of Christ grow. I don't necessarily want to go through all that, you know what I'm saying? Like, I don't need to get beaten, arrested, you know, all these things.

I don't want that. The question is, am I willing for that? I mean, we're talking about persecution as part of the unit. We're in the suffering that the Church goes through. Am I willing, as somebody called of Christ to see the name of Christ proclaimed?

Am I willing to go to whatever lengths and extremes it might take me in order to see the lost brought to Christ?

The jailer brought them into his house and set food before them. He rejoiced greatly that he had come to believe in God together with his entire household. At daybreak, the magistrates sent their police officers saying, release those men. The jailer reported these words to Paul saying, the magistrates have sent orders to release you, so come out now and go in peace. But Paul said to the police officers, oh, I love this.

Listen to this. This is like that get out of jail free card he's been sitting on that he didn't use. Why didn't he use this before? Because he knew that Christ had him there for a reason. So he took that beating, he took that imprisonment because he knew that Christ had somebody he was trying to reach.

But now Paul said to the police officers, they had us beaten in public without a proper trial, even though we are Roman citizens. They threw us in prison and now they want to send us away secretly. Absolutely not. They themselves must come and escort us out. You're holding all the cards here, you know, Isn't this.

I love this. This is so cool. The police officers reported these words to the magistrates. They were frightened when they heard Paul and Silas were Roman citizens. And they came and apologized to them after they brought them out.

They asked. They asked them repeatedly to leave the city when they came out of the prison. Have you ever been asked to leave an entire city? Sorry. They asked them to leave the city.

When they came out of the prison, they entered Lydia's house and when they saw the brothers, they encouraged them and then departed. I love the attitude of Paul here, by the way. He's like, he endures the beating, he endures the imprisonment. He does all this stuff in the middle of the night. He's singing hymns or having a worship service in the jail.

Nobody's yelling at them to shut up. They're all listening. Why? Why are they all listening? Because those men that were in that prison, even though they're shackled up to.

And they're behind iron bars, maybe their feet are in stocks, we don't know. But they're all locked up. The Same as Paul and Silas. And. And yet it seemed like Paul and Silas were the most free men there.

Like, they had more freedom than the jailer or the people in jail. And all those men that were in the jail realized that there was something stronger than the bonds of iron and wood and steel that was binding them up. And to be free of that thing was more important than anything else in the world. So when the doors fly open, that's why they didn't run out. That's why they didn't leave.

That's why they would willingly submit themselves to being stuck in that dungeon. Still was because they knew the same question was on their mind that was on the jailer's mind. What must I do to be saved? Now I think the jailer has another thing that he's concerned about, literally his life. He's like, I need to be saved from Rome.

Paul shared with him about being saved from his sin and being brought into fellowship with Christ. But there was still the issue of, like, his jail. Like, could have been. Everybody could have gotten out. I think they probably locked the doors back up and secured it before the baptism thing at his house.

I'm not sure.

But Paul, he later secures the freedom of the magistrate by playing his Roman citizenship card and says, you guys should have never put us in that jail. So you really. Now, you can't blame the jailer for taking us out of it. In other words, the jailer did the right thing in bringing us to his home and washing our wounds that you guys never should have put on us. Paul actually brought the safety as far as, like, just the civil safety to the jailer that he was worried about, while also caring primarily for the man's soul.

So all this is going on. I believe there was a lot of converts that night, not just the jailer and his entire household, but I believe a lot of the men that were in that prison were saved that night, too. I don't know if they were ever baptized. Maybe the jailer started doing that. Maybe he baptizes the first one.

He says, okay, now you pass it along. I don't know how the church started working, like, how the system of the church worked in jail. I know that there's a lot of religion in jails. I know there's a lot of people in prisons that realize, like, I'm here and I deserve to be here, but I don't want to get stuck here forever. And they start following Christ and they start turning to Christ and they start finding hope and healing for the wounds that their sins have caused and meanwhile, the ones that are missing this entire thing.

By the way, you got two churches, you got a church meeting in Lydia's house and the church surrounding the jail. I don't know what happens if you get out of jail, if you have to go to Lydia's house for church now. And they're like, well, I guess you guys just came from the prison prison ministry, huh? You know, like, come on in, let's get you clothed. And like, all we have is purple, you know, like, because it was Lydia's, I'm not sure.

Anyway, can you imagine getting out of jail and like now all of a sudden they throw a purple shawl or a robe over you and you're like, okay, this wasn't what I expected, but alright, I'll take it. It's amazing what happens when the gospel truly penetrates an entire city. Except the magistrates didn't quite get it. Their hearts weren't open to it. They begged Paul and Silas to leave the entire city.

I was just thinking about that as I was talking about it. I'm like, wouldn't it be so great if we ministered to people in such a way that it caused an uproar not because of bad things happening, but because it upsets the. The evil way of life that some people are enjoying so much that it changes the way the city is to the point where our city leaders said, you guys need to stop. And we're like, nah, I don't think so. Because that's what Paul did.

Like, they're like, please leave. He's like, no, we're going over to Lydia's house and I'm going to preach to them for a little bit, if that's okay. He encourages the brothers, meaning he preaches to them a little bit and he encourages them and then he leaves. He's like, I'll leave when I feel like it. Thank you very much.

Or do you want me to lodge a complaint with somebody in Rome? They're like, no, no, no, it's okay. Just stay a little while longer if you want. Just please leave though. Stay a little while.

Just please leave.

Oh man, it was great. I'd encourage you to read Paul's letter to the Philippian Church. He writes it later on when he's arrested again. Years later, he gets arrested. He ends up in a Roman.

It's not really a jail. He's under house arrest. But it wasn't a nice house. It was probably still like a jail cell. He ends up there for a couple years and while he's there.

He writes a few letters, and some of those made him into the New Testament. And one of them is his letter to the church in Philippi, the Philippian Church. It's four chapters long. There's something beautiful about reading the Book of Philippians out loud. If you're not used to reading scripture out loud.

I don't do it all the time either, but sometimes when you do that, it just opens it up in such a way. Encourage you to take this sometime this week and do that. Just read it out loud, a chapter at a time. Read through the whole thing. I don't care, but read through it and just see what God wants to say to you today.

Here's my big takeaway. We talked about the prisoners recognizing there's something stronger than wood and iron and steel and concrete that's binding them, that's imprisoning them. And to be free of that is the most important thing. I want you to spend some time this week and look at what might be chaining you down, what might be holding you back. Even if you're a believer in Christ, you're saved by the blood of Christ.

Your sin is no longer holding you down. But there might be things in your life that you've allowed to kind of still shackle you in a way. There might be things that you've allowed into your life that perhaps at some point in your life, when you were a new Christian, you're like, okay, Christ is going to keep cleansing me. The Holy Spirit is going to convict me of sin. I'm going to get rid of all these things.

I'm going to live the right way. And then you compromised on it. At some point, you've compromised on it, and you've allowed it to kind of influence you and change you in ways that you never would have thought that you would go through. And now that you've allowed those things in, you're saying, okay, well, you know what? I guess this is just kind of the new me.

This is how I'm living. I'm kind of finding my balance, my equilibrium on it, and this is where I'm going to stay. No. If those things are keeping you from full devotion to Jesus Christ, they're chaining you down, they're holding you hostage, and you need to ask the question, who, Christ? What must I do to be saved from this?

What things must I allow you to remove from my life? I can't clean myself up. I can't cleanse myself. But I want to allow you the space in my life to do that. So allow Christ to remove those things from you.

This week, I encourage you to read both acts, chapter 16 in its entirety, and the book of Philippians. I think you'll really enjoy it. And my prayer is that God speaks to you through those.

That.