Acts 16:25-40 – Philippians

This is Acts chapter sixteen, verses twenty-five to forty.

About midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them, and suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken, and immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone's bonds were unfastened.

When the jailer awoke and saw that the prison doors were open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, supposing that the prisoners had escaped.

But Paul cried with a loud voice, Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.

And the jailer called for lights and rushed in, and trembling and with fear, he fell down before Paul and Silas.

Then he brought them out and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved?

And they said, Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.

And they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house.

And he took them that same hour of that night and washed their wounds, and he was baptized at once, he and all his family.

Then he brought them up into his house and set food before them, and he rejoiced along with his entire household that he had believed in God.

But when it was day, the magistrate sent the police, saying, Let those men go, and the jailer reported these words to Paul, saying, The magistrates have sent to let you go, therefore come out now and go in peace.

But Paul said to them, They've beaten us publicly, uncondemned, men who are Roman citizens, and have thrown us in prison.

And do they now throw us out secretly?

No, let them come themselves and take us out.

The police reported these words to the magistrates, and they were afraid when they heard that they were Roman citizens.

So they came and apologized to them, and they took them out and asked them to leave the city.

So they went out of the prison and visited Lydia.

And when they had seen the brothers, they encouraged them and departed.

And so reads God's word.

So yeah, she did a great job.

Let's uh let's go there, though, Acts chapter 16.

Acts 16 · chapter mention

This will lead us into next week, where we will begin the book of Philippians, the uh letter that Paul wrote to the Philippians some years after this.

Our passage this morning is a very exciting one.

Lots of things happening in it, and we'll uh we'll take a look at that.

But first, I want us to think about values.

Like what are our cultural values?

And I recognize we have a lot of different cultures, perhaps, represented here this morning.

Um, but I found a little shortcut to figure out how to uh define cultural values.

See, I've been to Pennies and I've been to the kids section, and a lot of those uh clothes that they have, the ones that don't have like dinosaurs on skateboards and stuff like that, a lot of them will have slogans, right?

Slogans on them, things that uh encourage kids on how they should grow up.

And you figure these these slogans have to be pretty well in step with our cultural values, because if they weren't, well, no one would buy them, and certainly no one would put their kids in them if it was something, you know, offensive.

But what kind of stuff do we see in those uh in those shirts and those jammies and sweaters and everything else that we see?

We see calls to happiness, we see calls to inspiration, following your dreams, being yourself, loving yourself, following yourself, all of all of these kind of things here.

These are all kind of values that we want to pass on to our kids, right?

Because at the end of the day, parents and you know, aunties and uncles and everybody, we we want to see kids grow up healthy and happy, right?

Another another uh way that we could boil that down, we could say we want them to be free, free to be themselves, free to live in a world without fear and safe, free and safe.

So, what do we think about that?

What is the what does the Bible have to say about these cultural values?

Because I don't think these values are strictly limited to 21st century Ireland.

I think that uh these are fairly universal.

We all want to be, you know, free and safe.

I want to be free and safe.

I don't know about you guys.

Um, but what does the Bible have to say about this?

I think uh the passage that we're gonna look at today in Acts 16 points us to a freedom and safety uh that's offered in the gospel.

And it's not always the freedom and safety that is, you know, celebrated in the world.

It doesn't always look the way that we would expect it.

But I think we can see in this passage that it's a deeper, a more lasting, a more significant freedom, a more significant safety.

And so let's let's take a look at that as we go.

But first, let's go to our Lord and ask his help.

Heavenly Father, we do thank you for your work among us.

Thank you that you sent Jesus into the world uh to call the lost, to save sinners, and that that work is still ongoing today.

Lord, thank you that uh we are recipients of his grace, and uh by his grace we get to be part of that work of salvation.

Pray that we would be um attentive to your spirit working among us here through your word, and that in all of this uh you would be glorified.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So, like I say, keep the keep the passage open in front of you here.

I want to give you the word of God, not the word of Ben.

But uh the passage that we have this morning really gives us the story of two guys.

I know there's other people in it, there's magistrates and police, and there's even Silas, poor Silas doesn't get taught billing in the story.

But um, but it's really the contrast between Paul and this Philippian jailer.

All right.

So you look at these two guys, and it's very easy to see Paul is the heroic figure.

He's the one that we're supposed to look at and say, yeah, that's that's that's right.

And, you know, just as people, when we when we read a story, when we read narrative, we tend to want to identify with the heroic characters.

I know I do.

I I look at Paul and I'm like, yes, he's brave, he's bold, he stands up under suffering, he's right there seeing God do his work of salvation.

Gets to do some pretty cool things.

But just like in life, sometimes we can learn as much or more from our mistakes in a story like this, in a in a narrative uh passage like this, we can often learn a lot as we place ourselves into the position of the person who's not quite as heroic, who maybe doesn't have it all figured out just yet.

So, really, this this uh first part of the passage here is gonna be a bit of a contrast between these two men, and I hope we can we can see some good things for us in the here and now.

If you weren't here last week, if you missed that, or if you know you want to know a little bit more to be reminded of the context of this, this is all taking place in the first missionary journey to the city of Philippi.

Philippi is the first city that Paul and his team went to in the entire continent of Europe.

So they'd been kind of tooling around, touring uh different parts of Asia Minor.

This is modern day Turkey, and uh they've sailed across the Aegean Sea to Macedonia, this is modern day kind of northern Greece.

And so a couple of big things happened in the chapter coming up to this point.

Um, one thing was they met a woman called Lydia, and Lydia heard the gospel.

She responded in faith, and you know, she and her family were baptized.

This is the first mention in scripture of anybody on the European continent excepting Christ.

That's exciting.

Yay.

Another big thing, which brings us to where we are today, which uh incidentally is prison, um, is that Paul cast a demon out of a slave girl.

And you think, oh, that's that's heroic too.

That's really cool.

I want to set people free from, you know, being enslaved by demonic forces.

Well, number one, it says that Paul did it because he was annoyed.

So that's that's that's pretty human there.

But uh what happens here is that this great thing that that Paul does to set this young girl free, it actually winds up causing problems for him because this girl was being exploited by her owners.

She was being forced into a fortune-telling racket with the demon providing uh, you know, spiritual insight there.

Once the demon's gone, the revenue stream's gone.

And so this doesn't this doesn't strike her owners as a very good turn of events.

And so Paul and Silas end up getting dragged in front of the magistrates.

They end up getting stripped and beaten and thrown in prison after the trip had started off so well.

Now, the first thing that we see here is there's a bit of exploration in this passage of the ideas of freedom and safety.

What is it to be free?

What is it to be safe?

We'll take a look at these questions from the perspective of both Paul and the jailer, and I think where we're gonna land on this is that the gospel brings both freedom and safety, though not necessarily in the ways that we might expect.

We'll start with Paul.

We'll look at his situation first.

If you have the passage open in front of you, we're gonna start actually in the run-up to our passage.

So in verse 22, we see Paul as not physically safe, not in a worldly sense.

He's been dragged into the marketplace, he's been accused.

We don't even hear that he's had any chance to offer words in his own defense.

Rather, we read that the magistrates tore the garments off of them and gave orders to beat them with rods.

Well, so much for justice.

What about freedom?

Nope, that's taken as well.

Verse 23, it says, And when they had inflicted many blows upon them, they threw them into the prison, ordering the jailer to keep them safely.

I like that word, safely.

They're not really safe in the prison there, are they?

It's more like we're gonna be kept safe from these guys.

They're not safe, they're not free, at least not any earthly type of safety and freedom.

But there's definitely more going on here than meets the eye.

And if we pick up in our passage here, our first verse, verse 25, it says, about midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God.

Now, that doesn't seem to quite fit the moment, does it?

I mean, if you're gonna sing in prison, it's supposed to be blues, supposed to be with a harmonica, you're supposed to be singing, you know, nobody knows the trouble I've seen, this kind of stuff.

But truth be told, the harmonica had not been invented then.

So maybe that's why they No, I'm just kidding.

But um they're really in a bad situation, but they're singing and they're praising God and they're they're lifting their voices to Him.

And it says the other prisoners heard them.

Who does that, right?

Why why do we why do we see that?

Well, I think that we see that this is because they're truly free in a deeper sense.

They've had a stressful day, they've been tired, they've been beaten, they'd be in a lot of physical pain, they're strapped to the wall.

I don't know that I'd be singing anything unless I could moan on key there, but but this is not even the first time in the book of Acts that we've seen behavior like this.

If you jump back to chapter 5, you don't have to do this right now, but we see in Jerusalem there was a group of Christians who were beaten and imprisoned, and it says that they were rejoicing, that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name of Jesus.

Who does that?

Well, I think it's somebody who's been set free.

So what else do we see?

Verse 26 says there was an earthquake, and it was a severe enough earthquake to shake the very foundations of this prison.

Now, I grew up in California.

Um, I've been through many earthquakes.

You do not feel safe in an earthquake, especially a bad one.

But while the text doesn't explicitly tell us that this was a miraculous event, we have to assume that it was.

Because in the verse right before, Paul and Silas are praying and singing, and suddenly there's this earthquake, and a very specific, directed earthquake that, you know, shakes the foundations and all the all the bonds are unfashioned, unfastened.

They weren't kept safe from this earthquake, but they were kept safe through it.

So for these men who'd been wrongfully imprisoned, these men who'd who'd called out to the Lord God, to these men who had seen this amazing turn of events, this might have been, this must have been quite the moment.

But they didn't leave.

Verse 28, Paul calls out to the jailer.

He says, Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.

Why didn't they leave?

You know, if you were to go back in the book of Acts again, in chapter 12, the apostle Peter is imprisoned in Jerusalem, and an angel comes and he leads him out and he pulls him out into the street.

Peter doesn't wait around.

Peter doesn't say, Should I go, should I stay?

He doesn't start singing the clash.

But these men, they don't seek their freedom.

Even when it's served up to them on sort of a silver platter here, and we have to ask ourselves, why not?

I think in a in a in an immediate sense, they were interested in preserving the life of the jailer.

But in a deeper sense, they didn't need to seek this worldly freedom because they already had a truer freedom in the gospel.

See, it's only in Christ that one can be free even when locked up.

It's only in Christ that one can be safe even in the midst of natural disaster and abuse.

Paul would write about this in the in the letter we're going to start next week.

Uh he wrote in chapter four of Philippians, he says, I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound.

In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.

I can do all things through him who strengthens me.

So for Paul, freedom and safety are not based on his circumstances.

They're found in the gospel, they're found in the good news of Jesus.

Now, let's compare the jailer.

We don't even get to know the jailer's name.

We'll pretend that his name was something like Lucius.

All right, that's a great name for a Roman jailer.

Imagine meeting this guy in eternity in glory and being like, hey, what's your name?

Oh, yeah, I'm Lucius.

Well, have I heard of you?

Do I know anything about you?

Oh, yeah, I'm in the Bible.

I'm I'm there.

There's a story about me in the Bible.

Well, I don't remember any Lucius in the Bible.

I'm the Philippian jailer.

Okay, I know you are.

All right.

But anyhow, this man is just known by his occupation.

That's all we know about him.

We don't know his name.

We don't know what his friends called him.

Maybe he was just really, really good at what he did.

Maybe he was good at being a jailer.

Maybe he'd never had a prisoner escape on his watch.

He at least had a sense of what he was doing.

The magistrates ordered him to keep the prisoners safely in jail.

And he made them as secure as he could.

Deepest, darkest part of the jail, shackles to the wall.

Says keep them safe.

But of course, this means that if the prisoners are kept safely, then the jailer is safe, right?

He's living outside of the jail.

He's not in captivity, so he's free.

But that safety and freedom are both very shallow in the end.

When the unexpected happens, everything he had placed his hope in was letting him down.

Verse 27 says, He drew his sword and was about to kill himself, supposing that the prisoners had escaped.

It's at this point that Paul interjects.

He says, You don't have to kill yourself.

You've not failed in your job.

We've not used our freedom to escape.

Talk about challenging worldviews there.

You can see from the verses that follow this that the jailer is just freaking out, if I may use a technical term.

Verse 28, it says, He rushed in and trembling with fear, he fell down before Paul and Silas.

He could have asked them any number of questions.

It could have been like, What was the deal with that earthquake?

Why are you still here?

Why are you concerned about me?

Why are you singing?

What's the story here?

But life-threatening events can sometimes show us things about ourselves that we hadn't realized before.

This jailer, who was neither free nor safe in any enduring way, asked, What must I do to be saved?

I thought I was safe.

I thought I was free.

But I'm seeing here and not, here and now, I'm not.

What must I do?

Maybe we have similar stories among us.

Maybe you were placing your hope in something that didn't pan out.

Maybe, maybe a job, maybe success, maybe a relationship.

And of course, none of these things are necessarily bad in themselves.

But when they become the ultimate thing in our lives, they become idols.

Idols of the heart.

Two things we know about idols.

Number one, they're not lasting.

And number two, they don't satisfy.

Oscar Wilde says, each man kills the thing he loves.

But in this case, maybe it's the other way around.

The things that we love, the idols that we love, end up killing us.

And that very nearly, in a literal sense, is what happened very nearly to the Philippian jailer.

I mean, I can think of times in my life where work became an idol to me, where it was more important to me to maybe be a good employee than a follower of Jesus.

I didn't realize it at the time.

It was subtle, just little things, little choices, little thoughts in my head.

But God made it clear to me that the attitude that I had towards work was wrong.

I needed to change the way that I thought about myself, my life, my work.

Once I did that, I came to know that it was God, not a job, not a position, not a salary.

It was God who provided for me.

And in that, I became free to work hard, to do my job well, but to still keep relying on God to meet my needs.

It helped me to recognize that job security, being safe in my job, is not as enduring as the safety offered by a loving Heavenly Father.

Freedom and safety only from the gospel.

So the question for each of us is what do we place our hope in?

If it's something apart from God, even if that's something that's a good thing, it becomes an idol.

It can be so hard sometimes to recognize when things are idols because there's many things that we like, many things that we enjoy in life, many things that we want in life.

But when we figure out that that thing is more important to us than the Lord, um, it can be recognizing that it's an idol.

Sometimes we only recognize it in moments of crisis.

And when we figure those things out, friends, it's not a moment to condemn ourselves.

It's not a moment to sit in our own misery and be sad about it.

It's a time to entrust whatever that idol is to the Lord.

Trust that He will do right with it and that He will do right with us.

Put Him on top.

Freedom and safety only from the gospel.

Now, going forward in the passage, we see that the jailer finds that Jesus is the way unto salvation.

Yay.

Paul and Silas preach the gospel to him and his family, and they believe.

We see that there's immediate fruit out of this faith.

They take these men out of prison, they provide them a meal, they look after the wounds that these guys have had.

It's an amazing story.

It's all told in the space of a few short verses, and it brings us to our second point for the morning, which is the advance of the gospel is unstoppable.

Again, not always in the ways that we expect.

Now, if we think about it, there's probably two main desired outcomes from Paul when he comes to a new city, right?

Option A.

You come to town, you meet people right away, you preach the gospel, you see people come to faith, and then you make your way to your next destination.

You see that happen in chapter 17, the passage right after this.

Paul goes off to Athens, not immediately after this, later on in chapter 17.

Paul goes to Athens, a few people come to faith, and then the next thing you read, he's in Corinth.

Great.

And then option B, probably even better, he comes to town, meets people, preach the gospel, see people come to faith, and then stay on for a while and help them to organize a church, help them to grow to maturity.

We see this in Corinth.

He stayed there for a year and a half.

That's Acts 18.

We see it in Acts 19, where he stayed on in Ephesus for like two years, and then even later on, he sent his protege, Timothy, off to look after the church in his absence.

So a lot of good stuff going on there.

Both of these are great and positive outcomes for the gospel.

Both of these would be what I would pray for if I were on Paul's team.

But it's not what happened here.

Come to town, check, meet people, check, preach the gospel, check, see people come to faith, check, get the whole city into a frenzy while we get beaten and imprisoned.

No, no, not part of the plan there.

But that's how the Philippian visit went down.

And because of that turn of events, this Philippian jailer and his family came to know Jesus.

I don't know that there's any way that that happens in option A or option B.

The detours, the setbacks, the struggle.

These all serve to advance the gospel.

In fact, Paul uses this very language in the book of Philippians, which again we're starting next week.

Writing from prison, another time he was in prison, he says, I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel.

To put it another way, uh, the difficulties we face along the road are not a bug, they're a feature.

How can that be?

Well, because God uses all of it.

God uses all of it.

Nothing is wasted.

Paul and Silas being in jail wasn't taking them away from the work that God had for them, it was accomplishing it.

You see that in the lives of the jailer and his family.

You can see that just even in the in the very first verse that we looked at there, that all the prisoners were listening to them as they were praying, as they were singing.

How would they have had access to these prisoners?

Otherwise, they wouldn't have.

You know, there are whole uh gospel organizations dedicated to going and meeting people in prisons and proclaiming the gospel to them.

Paul didn't want to go through the busyness of setting up a company, so he just got himself arrested.

No.

But that's that's how it worked for him.

And he was able to do things in this that he never would have been able to do.

Think about the events that led to them being in jail.

This is this is interesting too, because the magistrates had them stripped and beaten and imprisoned, all without a proper trial, all without the system of law and justice.

They didn't have a chance to defend themselves.

Surely that can't bring about an advance of the gospel, can it?

Injustice?

Nah.

Well, actually, look at what happens next.

See, the magistrates were finished with Paul and Silas.

They were done.

They figured they'd serve their time.

Let's move them along.

They're probably patting themselves on the back for dealing quickly with these troublemakers.

See this in verse 35.

Maybe they figured Paul and Silas would count themselves lucky and be on their way.

But look at verse 37.

But Paul said to them, They have beaten us publicly, uncondemned, men who are Roman citizens and have thrown us into prison.

And do they now throw us out secretly?

No.

Let them come here themselves and take us out.

Now, when I've read this before, I've always kind of looked at Paul and said, He's being a bit of a diva here, isn't he?

Right?

I want to speak to your manager here.

But I never really thought about the effect that this would have going forward for those who were still left behind in Philippi.

Verse 38 says that the magistrates were afraid when they heard that they were Roman citizens.

Now imagine if Paul and his team had simply just kind of licked their wounds and slipped out of town.

What's to keep these new Christians, these new brothers and sisters, from facing further repercussions?

If the magistrates had had the attitude of, yeah, we really showed them, didn't we?

You know, what would what would Lydia and the slave girl and this jailer and all the others have faced going forward?

By having this interaction with the magistrates, Paul was advocating for the fledgling Philippian church.

Verse 39 says he got an apology.

So he didn't have to slip out of town.

He was able to leave under his own steam.

He was able to say his goodbyes, encourage this new church before he left.

And he went on to the next city and had great success there.

Well, the next city is Thessalonica.

We can talk about Thessalonica a different day, but spoiler alert, things there didn't go according to option A or option B either.

If you read ahead, you'd see this whole point is driven home.

The gospel is unstoppable.

God will accomplish his work, he'll build his kingdom.

The obstacles, the roadblocks of this world won't stop it.

In fact, God will use all of it, good and bad, to advance his kingdom.

I can remember years ago I was on a road trip in the States.

And road trips in the States are no small thing.

We were driving on an eight-hour car journey, right?

Unheard of in Ireland, I know.

But we were we were cruising along, Doreen and I.

Ah, I was in the days before children.

But uh we were cruising along, we were going from Los Angeles up to Carson City, Nevada, where we lived.

And beautiful open road.

We got about three-quarters of the way there, and the road was closed.

I was just like, oh, we're so close and yet so far.

And I remember, you know, you could turn back and you could take this other way, and it would have, you know, taken hours and whatever like that.

We wound up kind of setting out on our own, finding this little dirt track.

We went about 15 miles up this little dirt road behind Mono Lake and beautiful, beautiful country we would never have seen if not for this road closure.

So if God can use a road closure and a detour and an unexpected little adventure there to show us something special, something fun, how much more can he use the circumstances of our lives to advance his kingdom, to advance the message of the gospel, to achieve his work through us?

Once we understand that the gospel is unstoppable, it frees us up again with that freedom.

It frees us up through all these twists and turns that we face in our lives.

It stops us beating ourselves up even if we miss an opportunity to share with somebody.

Or if a gospel presentation that we give to somebody doesn't go well.

Because we can trust that he is able, that he is working, and his work is unstoppable.

It lessens the sting when those around us maybe aren't yet ready to hear the good news of Jesus.

Because we can recognize that salvation is in his hands.

And he's not done with that coworker or that family member or that neighbor or that friend.

In some ways, it should give us boldness to go forward and do his work even when we don't feel ready.

And it gives us maybe even a greater sense of thankfulness for our own salvation when we see that God stops at nothing and he worked out even our own salvation out of his great love.

So just as we close, I just want us to think about what Sunday mornings might have been like in that Philippian church as they were getting going there.

You go up to Lydia and you ask her, Hey, how did you come to faith?

And she has a very straightforward testimony, right?

I heard the word, I heard the gospel, and I responded in faith.

It says God opened her ears and her eyes and her heart.

You ask the slave girl, how did you come to faith?

Well, Paul got annoyed.

Um, but you know, this whole turn of events that all started from Paul setting her free, from this demon being cast out and her seeing the truth.

Ask this Philippian jailer, right?

Well, how did you come to know Jesus?

Well, there was a miscarriage of justice, there was an earthquake, nearly killed myself, and here we are.

God saved me.

Met some of the strangest people I've ever met.

But the truth of the matter is the gospel set all of those people free.

The gospel gave each of those people safety and hope.

And we see through their stories, as stories of each of us, all the way down through the ages, we see that the gospel is unstoppable.

Thank you for listening to this week's sermon.

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