I
knew it was going to happen. I knew that
it wouldn’t take long for me to semi-regret this notion of skipping through
portions of the book of Acts in order to cover more of the major events. However, I also know that none of you want to
spend the rest of this year and quite possibly all of next year looking at this
book (at least that’s my guess). The
reason why I hate skipping over sections in Acts is that we miss so much great
stuff, and that’s especially true this week.
I can’t encourage you enough to go back and read (or read ahead) the
information that we will miss in Acts each week. A safe rule of thumb is to just read one
chapter ahead and you’ll know that you’ve probably covered everything. You see, we ended our time together last
Sunday by seeing the conclusion of the Jerusalem Council and the sending of the
letter they constructed to the Gentile believers. Just to give you a quick overview of what we
are skipping, we are now in the midst of Paul’s 2nd missionary
journey. As soon as our text from last
week ended, Paul and Barnabas split and went in different directions. Paul took Silas and went through Syria, Cilicia,
Derbe, and Lystra. He picked up a young
apprentice named Timothy along the way.
He went to Macedonia and there met a woman named Lydia. After she converted to Christianity, Paul
then baptized Lydia and her entire household (16:15), one of the texts
traditionally used in support of infant baptism. Then, Paul found this slave girl who was
possessed and drove a demon out from her.
However, her masters, instead of being grateful for what Paul did, were
upset with him because the girl was of more use to them possessed than she was
cleansed. When she was possessed (or as
Luke writes “had a spirit of divination”) she was able to tell the future,
which was very lucrative for her masters.
After she was healed and lost her ability, the slave girl’s owners have
Paul and Barnabas thrown into prison.
However, they weren’t just put into prison; they were beaten with rods
39 times, placed in the inner prison cell (usually reserved for the most
heinous offenders) and kept with their feet bound in the stocks.
It’s
in that prison where our text for today starts off. It was the middle of the night and Paul and
Silas were sitting there singing hymns and praying. Now, I don’t know about you, but at first
glance this just seems odd. When I’m in
midst of strife and struggle, I no doubt pray to God. However, I have found it difficult in those
moments to sing. Much of our singing is
done out of joy, which in times of sorrow can be hard to muster. However, that’s exactly what we find Paul and
Silas did. They were singing to God and
all the other prisoners there were listening to them. Now, they were doing this not out of fear,
but out of joy that God had placed them in the midst of such an attentive
audience. God had led them to a place
where there were so many folks in need of hearing of the good news of Jesus
Christ. How funny (or rather not funny I
should say) that many times we have the exact opposite reaction. Remember when we kept talking about comfort
zones and our being placed outside of them.
Those are typically our greatest times of fret and worry. How rarely do we count it a blessing to be
surrounded by so many non-believers? Instead,
shouldn’t our thinking be like that of Paul and Silas? Instead of them having to go to the people,
the people were already where they were.
Then, there was
an earthquake that hit and it shook the prison so hard that all of the doors
within the prison flung open. Not only
did the doors fling open, but the shackles around the feet and hands of all the
prisoners just fell off. Now, the
earthquake caused the prison guard to wake up and after he woke up and saw the
doors open he just figured that everyone had escaped while he slept or
daydreaming or whatever he was doing.
Without even checking to see if anyone had indeed escaped, the guard
pulled out his sword and was about to take his own life. In those days, the punishment for allowing a
criminal to go free was that you were given the same punishment that they were
owed. From the guard’s perspective,
death was a better option than the punishment of an entire collection of prisoners
falling upon one man, particularly himself.
Now,
we probably would expect Paul to just sit silent here. After all, the doors are open, the shackles
are loose, and now the jailer is about to take his own life. Once he does that, then Paul, Silas, and the
rest of the prisoners would have been free to just walk right out of the
prison. However, Paul stopped him. Paul called out to the jailer, “Do
not harm yourself, for we are all here.” The jailer then called for a light (which why
he didn’t do that before even thinking about killing himself is beyond me) and
went and saw all the prisoners. We’re
told that he then brought Paul and Silas out of their prison, looked at them
and asked, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” He had seen the power of God in the
earthquake. He had seen the prison doors
open up at the trembling of God’s hand.
And he had felt the grace and mercy of God, through the Apostle Paul,
calling out to him in the darkness. It’s
as if God was speaking to this jailer saying, “Do not harm yourself, for I am
right here.”
Without
missing a beat, Paul and Silas answered the jailer’s question of what he must
do to be saved by saying, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be
saved, you and your household.”
Notice that Paul didn’t go into all the steps of being saved. He didn’t go into the ordo salutis, the order of salvation. He didn’t talk to him about good works or
growing in the knowledge of God’s Word.
He didn’t even talk to him about baptisms or professions of faith. Now, I realize that some of you may be a
little confused by some of this. You see,
Paul and Silas didn’t talk to this jailer about those things because they
didn’t have to. My beautiful little girl
Ashby has brought a lot of joy to the lives of her mama and daddy. She (along with her brothers) has helped us
to know things like love, responsibility, and heartache like we could have
never imagined. She has especially been
a life-changer for me. You see, she is
her mama as a little girl. Now, I was a
typical little boy who couldn’t pay attention, acted up, and it took threats
from my daddy (not mama) to make me even remotely behave. But my little girl is different. Ashby is as innocent and kind-hearted as you
will find. However, that has come with a
price. Any time that she gets sad or
feels that she has disappointed anyone in any way it crushes her. It crushes her so much that she cries and she
cries so hard that she hyperventilates.
We have to calm her down and remind her to breath because she’s
forgetting to take in air. What does all
this have to do with Paul and Silas telling this jailer that all he has to do
to be saved is believe in Jesus Christ as Lord?
Well,
it’s this. I don’t have to tell Ashby to
breathe, to make her lungs work, to make her heart beat, to make her blood
flow, and so on (you get the idea). She
just has to breathe and the rest will take care of itself. If this jailer just believes, then the rest
will take care of itself. If someone
that you know, or maybe even yourself, would just believe, then the rest will
take care of itself. I’m not downplaying
things like repentance, and baptism, and confession of sin, and profession of
faith, I’m just saying that those things will come if genuine faith is
there. We don’t get baptized or have our
children baptized because it’s on some sort of salvation checklist. We do so because it is an outflowing of our
belief, our faith, in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. In other words, when we truly believe in
Jesus Christ, then all the other things like good works, growing in knowledge
and understanding, and strengthening our relationships with God naturally come.
Several
years after this event here with the Philippian jailor, the Apostle Paul would
write in his epistle to the Christians in Rome, “The word is near you, in your
mouth and in your heart; because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is
Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be
saved. For with the heart one believes
and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved…For everyone
who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Rom. 10:8-10,
13). You see, Paul didn’t have to go
into some long-winded answer over what it takes to be saved because it’s pretty
simple: believe. Now, let me make a distinction here really
quick between believing and acknowledging.
There’s a world of difference between these two words. After all, Satan acknowledged Jesus. Satan acknowledged him as the Son of God; he
even used that specific title to refer to him.
It’s not enough for us to just acknowledge that Jesus is real. It’s not enough for us to just acknowledge
that God is real. We have to believe
it. We have to believe it with every
fiber of our being. And as Paul says
numerous times throughout his various epistles, a truth belief in Christ will
change us. Make no mistake about it,
there is no probably to it, it will change us.
If you or someone that you know thinks that they have a new-found belief
in Jesus Christ and yet nothing changes, then I’m afraid that it quite simply
isn’t belief, it’s acknowledgement.
During
the course of both the material that we jumped over and our text for today we
have three different conversion accounts.
We have the conversion of Timothy as he was convicted by God’s Word as
Paul and Silas preached. We have Lydia, who
overheard Paul and Silas praying and her faith was taken from simply
acknowledging God to believing in Jesus Christ and being baptized in the name
of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Then we have the Philippian jailer who came to God not through prayer or
hearing his Word, but through the power of his works. Three people all with three different types
of conversions, but they all have one thing in common. Do you know what it is? Well, it’s not that they were converted by
Paul or Silas. It’s that in every
instance, the immediate response was belief, which ultimately led to some type
of change. Timothy became a disciple of
Paul. Lydia was baptized along with her
entire household and seemingly changed who she was before. The Philippian jailer went from caring not for
Paul and Silas to cleaning their wounds, caring for their needs, and ultimately
having himself and his entire family baptized too. He and his family even brought Paul and Silas
(mind you criminals in the eyes of the officials) into their home to eat. We could even make the case that the slave
girl who was cleansed of the demon was converted as well, which would bring our
total up to four.
However,
what I want all of us to take away from this text isn’t the number of
conversions or how they happened. We
know that numerous people come to Christ through all different types of
events. Not everyone is changed by
hearing a rousing sermon or exposition.
Some folks are claimed by God through life-changing experiences, moments
of isolation, or seeds that lay dormant in the heart for many years before
finally beginning to grow. No matter the
way in which we come to Christ, the answer is still the same: believe and you will be saved. Belief must come with growth. Growth must come with change. Change must come with obedience to the will
of God. It’s like we said last week with
the Jerusalem Council, we don’t do good works to be saved. We do good works because we are saved. All of the things that we think of when it
comes to becoming a Christian aren’t done so that we would believe in Jesus
Christ as Lord and Savior. They are done
because we believe him to be. I’ll leave
you with this question (and I don’t mean to offend if I do), but how have you
changed since your belief in Christ became real? How has the person you are (actions,
thinking, priorities, etc.), how has that person changed since experiencing for
the first time the true, inescapable belief that Jesus Christ is Lord? If that belief is truly there, then change
must be present. If we are left
unchanged, then all we have simply done is acknowledge him, which shows no
greater faith than Satan himself. “Believe
in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” Glory be to God; in the name of the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
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