In Acts 16 we read, ” Along about midnight, Paul and Silas were at prayer and singing a robust hymn to God. The other prisoners couldn’t believe their ears. Then, without warning, a huge earthquake! The jailhouse tottered, every door flew open, all the prisoners were loose.” (The Message)
Man alive, so often I wish I was more like that. These have not always been easy days recently and my prayer has become that I want to have joyful faith. Not just faith, but faith, even when I cannot understand or see what God is doing, that is also full of joy.
So I was asking myself today about singing in prison and why Paul and Silas could do that -even after being flogged and striped and humiliated. Yea, maybe The Message is a bit interpretive when it says “other prisoners couldn’t believe their ears.” The “could not believe their ears” part is not in the Greek, but would you have believed your ears sitting in a dungeon only to hear people singing hymns and songs after you knew they had skin hanging off their backs in ribbons, bloodied and broken. How could you not be amazed at that?
One phrase kept going through my mind as I considered this:
“We don’t believe we have the same God”
“We don’t really believe we have the same God”
Do I believe that God has the same love toward me that he had to toward Paul and Silas?
Do I believe that God extends the same grace and mercy toward sinful me that he extended to Paul and Silas?
Do I believe that God can work all to my good as he did for them?
I do have the same God as they had! He loves me just as much, he has the same love, wants to provide for me just as much, can use all for my best and his glory – even the worst of things.
If I really believe that, that God feels and acts toward me just as he did toward Paul and Silas, it will certainly produce a song in whatever hard times I am facing.
So the question is not if I can muster up a song even when I do not feel like it, but do I really believe I have the same God that Paul and Silas had. If I do, the singing, at least some of time, will come naturally.