CPAC sermon “Jailhouse Rock and Roll”
17 May 2009 Acts 16:16-40
Movie called Paradise Road based on a true story from WW2 where a diverse group of women were held in a Japanese POW camp in Sumatra.
It shows the horror of war where the prisoners were treated with unbelievable brutality - beaten, starved, and forced to endure back-breaking manual labour from daylight until dusk in the hot tropical climate.
The food they were given was little more than garbage.
Their captors provided them with almost no medical supplies
and under this harsh treatment nearly half the camp eventually died.
Morale was understandably very low.
The women were sick, weak, and hungry, and had lost hope of ever being rescued.
A few months into their ordeal one of the prisoners, a Christian missionary to China, felt led to start a "vocal orchestra."
Instead of instruments, the women used their voices to "sing" the orchestral scores.
Another prisoner who had a deep love of music used any scrap of paper she could find to write the musical score.
Relying totally on memory they put the great classical works they had heard years earlier, into written form.
Then they put together a choir and arranged secret section rehearsals, since their guards forbade them to meet together for any purpose, even for religious services.
But sing they did. And very soon their singing had a powerful effect.
First, it stopped the cruel guards in their steps and from this point on most of them treated the women with greater respect.
Their singing also affected the women.
It gave them courage and purpose.
It gave them a reason to hang on.
Their music even helped those lying in the hospital - sick with dysentery or malaria.
The singing was a source of beauty and pleasure in the midst of the ugliness and pain of their existence.
They put together about 30 musical scores in the years they were there.
And in fact, all of their hand-written scores have been preserved.
This film underscores the truth that singing can indeed be a very powerful thing.
God can use it to touch us, to move us,
and to speak to us in ways that mere words don't.
The last part of chapter 16 in Acts records a time when,
much like these women,
Paul and Silas were arrested unfairly,
brutally beaten, and imprisoned.
This beating was no little thing.
The Scripture infers that they received the same kind of flogging, that Jesus did.
Their response to the pain and humiliation they were forced to endure, was to sing songs of praise to God.
And God used their singing in a very powerful way,
just as he used the singing of those brave women in the POW camp.
Philippi was where Paul and Silas ended up - it had evolved into a very "Roman" city populated with retired Roman soldiers and their families who brought with them many of the customs of Rome.
Because of this Romans back then thought of Philippi as sort of a "Rome away from Rome!"
Paul and his companions walked into this very Roman city as the first followers of Jesus Christ ever seen by anyone in that part of the world.
Paul's usual church-starting tactic was to go to the synagogue.
So, when they arrived in Philippi they inquired and discovered this city had no synagogue.
This indicates there were not many Jews living there because to have a synagogue you had to have at least ten men.
Well, Paul knew that any Jews who did live there would customarily gather near a river for prayer on the Sabbath.
So he went down to the river banks and found several women gathered for this purpose.
Their leader was named Lydia and she earned her living by selling purple cloth.
The passage of scripture tells us they encountered a slave girl who was afflicted by a demon…
Her healing (by Paul) was of course a wonderful thing!
But that was just the beginning.
Not everyone was happy about this miracle.
Angered by their sudden economic downfall, the slave girl's greedy masters roused the crowd to riot.
They wrongfully accused Paul and Silas of throwing the city into an uproar.
Paul and Silas were immediately seized, viciously beaten with rods and thrown deep into a Roman dungeon with their feet fastened in stocks.
After this beating Paul and Silas were then thrown into prison cell deep in the jail. Their legs were secured in stocks so they couldn't move-further adding to their extreme pain & discomfort.
Paul and Silas' response to their imprisonment can teach us things we need to know as we face the inevitable heartaches and tribulations of life.
In particular, what can we learn from this example of singing in prison?
Let’s call it jailhouse rock and roll, because the effect of their singing was to literally get things rocking and rolling when a massive EQ struck the prison!
1. I want to offer you two points: first, this text tells us that in order to “sing” in difficult times we must be able to SEE things other "prisoners" don't, ie. see the unseen.
Paul and Silas were wrongfully accused.
They were beaten and imprisoned within an inch of their lives.
I imagine the blood was still flowing freely down their backs since their wounds had not been treated.
They would have been very weak and growing weaker.
Then as the cold began to seep into their bones they must have listened to the scurrying rats that always plague places like that.
But instead of cursing their guards and groaning about their treatment these two began to pray and to sing out loud.
The Greek here is not translated as "prayers of petition" - you know, the type of prayer that says, "Get me out of here God!"
No, the Greek words in this scripture are translated as prayers of praise to God, like,
"God you are so good to us!
Thank you God for your great faithfulness!" and so on.
Can you imagine praying like that in a situation like that?
Prayer is only complete and meaningful when it includes praise to God, no matter what situation or issue we are praying for.
Remember when Jesus gave His followers a prayer "template" to follow?
It began and ended with praise.
Jesus said, pray something like this,
"Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be Your name!
And end with, "For yours is the kingdom and the power
and the glory forever and forever. Amen."
Paul and Silas understood what Jesus was saying about prayer.
In spite of their situation their prayers were filled with praise.
And as they praised God, God did the same thing He did for King David:
He "...put a new song" in their mouths... "a hymn of praise to God." (Psalm 40:3)
And as they began to sing joyful songs of praise,
they turned their cold, dark cell into a heavenly sanctuary!
How were they able to sing songs of praise under those circumstances?
They understood that when a follower of Christ is in the centre of God's will, he or she is never UNDER the circumstances.
Rather, they knew that they had a loving Heavenly Father who is sovereign OVER every circumstance of life whether it’s good or bad.
Paul and Silas had enough confidence in God to know that He was still in control,
and that He could and would use even this painful, dark situation for their good and for His glory.
Charles Spurgeon once said,
"It is easy to sing when we can read the notes by daylight;
but the skilful singer is the one who can sing when there is not a ray of light to read by.
Songs in the night come only from God; they are not in the power of men."
Paul expressed this same confidence in God later in his life when he was imprisoned in Rome.
He wrote to young Timothy and said that even in the midst of suffering, (2 Timothy 1:12)
"I know whom I have believed and I am persuaded that He is able to guard what I have entrusted to Him for that day."
Two things were driving Paul and Silas to trust God that night:
1 they believed that God's sovereign power and knowledge were absolute. God was in control.
2 they understood that God's love for them was infinite and unconditional. God would give them the strength and fortitude to bear whatever came their way.
They had what we might call "seeing hearts".
In other words, they looked at their situation not with “physical eyes” but with the "eyes of their hearts”, or with “eyes of faith”.
These two missionaries didn't allow their circumstances to choose their attitude.
They made a conscious decision to trust God,
to praise God,
to have faith in God no matter how bad things appeared to be.
And if we are to "sing" in those times when we feel imprisoned by hardship, we must make the same attitudinal choice.
Victor Frankl was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II, and as such he was well-acquainted with suffering and deprivation.
He saw life at its worst.
Over the years, he observed that some of his fellow prisoners survived the horrors of prison camp while others did not and he became curious as to why this was so.
He shared his insights and conclusions in a book called
Man's Search for Meaning
He wrote,
"Everything can be taken from men except one thing: it is the last of human freedoms - the ability to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances."
Frankl was right.
Attitude is a choice.
It is a conscious decision.
We can choose to embrace an attitude of optimism or we can look at life from a pessimistic perspective.
…like the teenager who is preparing for a test.
He tells his dad, "I'm going to fail this test because I don't understand the material."
His father responds, "Son, you have to try harder. Be positive!"
"Okay," the boy replies, "I'm POSITIVE I'm going to fail this test!"
Attitude is a choice.
Like Paul and Silas always choose to look at any situation through the eyes of optimism.
This kind of optimism is not wishful thinking or naivete.
For maturing believers like Paul and Silas, this kind of optimism is based on faith, a faith that is sure and steadfast.
It's a commitment to put our trust, not in the ever-changing circumstances of life, but rather in God, who, as James 1:17 says,
"...does not change like shifting shadows."
And, one of the wonderful blessings of choosing this positive attitude is that it enables us to SEE things that other, more pessimistic people miss.
Paul referred to this in 2 Corinthians 10:7 when he said that people who don't put their confidence in Christ, "...are looking only on the surface of things."
In later years, Paul said, (Romans 8:28)
"In all things God works for the good of them who love Him,
who have been called according to His purpose."
If we are to sing in tough times and persist through those times, then we too must have that kind of confidence in God.
If you feel that you are being treated unfairly in your life right now; if your life seems like a prison, if you are going through heartache and pain, then, hear the Word of the Lord:
Trust God. He will never leave you nor forsake you.
He is truly LORD of all, even life and death itself.
So open the eyes of your heart and sing!
Secondly, when we sing in times like this the world will notice and will want to learn to SING along.
Verse 25 says that as Paul and Silas were singing, the other prisoners were listening.
They'd never heard this kind of response to their situation before.
The Greek here literally says, "They listened attentively."
Then when God miraculously responded by sending an earthquake that opened the doors and released the chains and locks from around every prisoner, well, they knew that they were part of an incredible experience.
More incredibly they didn't take advantage of the situation and run away.
The jailer thought they had all run away and was about to take his own life in desperation, but Paul was able to say, (v28)
"Don't harm yourself. We are all here."
That made the jailer ask life's most profitable question,
"What must I do to be saved?"
In other words, he said,
"Teach me to sing too!
Tell me what I need to do to sing like you?"
Ironically he was no longer the captor but captive to what his prisoners had to offer.
And he urged Paul and Silas to share the gospel with his family as well, because verse 34 says that his entire household was baptized.
Then he fed them.
Think of it as King David wrote in the 23rd Psalm - God had truly prepared a table for Paul and Silas in the presence of their enemies!
The world needs to learn to sing our "song!"
They are listening to hear how we respond to the unfairness of life.
In the darkest times of our lives we need to be at our BEST as Christians.
There must be SINGING instead of SIGHING.
This morning let's all ask God to give us "seeing hearts."
Let us pray as the Psalmist prayed,
"God, open my eyes that I may SEE wonderful things in Your
ways." (Psalm 119:18)
"Open my eyes wide enough that I can see Your great faithfulness."
Amen….
