“About midnight, Paul and Silas began praying and singing hymns to God, and all the other prisoners were listening” Acts 16:25
PRAISE BRINGS PURPOSE
We pick up the Acts 16 narrative with Paul and Silas having been unfairly stripped, beaten and imprisoned and sitting under the watchful eye of a sadistic Roman centurion. If you or I were to put ourselves into this duo’s shoes (or lack there-of at this juncture) it would be fair to reason that this unjust treatment and jail-time is slowing the work of God down.
Just when it seemed like Paul and Silas were making ministry head-way in Philippi, this now happens! I can almost imagine Paul saying to Silas, “Revival was just beginning to break out here in Philippi! First Lydia comes to Christ, then I’m preaching up a storm, I cast that demon out of that lady and I was about to start getting really Pentecostal on the crowd Silas, but then this happens! This jail is really impeding the work of God here!”
That’s what he could have said.
But fortunately for us Paul and Silas chose to respond in a different way. While their situation was at its darkest, they decided to pick up the weapon of praise and allowed it to bring a fresh purpose into a very trying situation.
How you view it, allows God to use it
When our perspective changes we realize that every circumstance can serve God’s purpose. Scripture puts it this way; “what the enemy plans for evil, God can use for good!”
But what is really significant in this verse is the phrase that directly follows Paul and Silas getting their praise on. It’s a part I have underlined multiple times in my bible: “and the other prisoners were listening”
We too quickly forget that it’s not all about us!
Let me illustrate it this way. When my family immigrated from Zimbabwe in the midst of huge political upheaval in 2003, we left behind a large four-bedroom home and one-acre property and arrived on the sunny shores of Durban, South Africa with nothing. It was in this new environment of financial pressure, lack of job opportunities and being at the mercy of kind people who let us live in their one-bedroom granny flats at the back of their gardens that I saw my dad, one of my all-time heroes, start to visibly shrink back under the weight of the opposition.
It seemed from the outside that God’s purposes for his life and for our family had begun to stall. But what should be remembered as a year of defeat was redeemed for the plans of God, because my dad picked up the weapon of praise. Every morning without fail the little flats we called home for that twelve-month period were filled with songs of praise by a broken and some-what beaten man, but a man who had bought into a faith that declared “there are two times to praise God; when you feel like it and when you don’t”
What makes this story the most significant is the fact that just like in Acts.16, there was somebody else listening. Me.
As an insecure, lust-addicted, friendless fifteen-year-old also going through an immense transition because of the move, the faith that had seemed to just come so naturally to my family up to this point was proved to be real as I watched and listened to my dad’s response. A season that the enemy planned to use for destruction became the very season that saw me (and countless others because of it) find Christ to be the anchor in every circumstance.
You don’t know who needs your praise. Maybe it’s somebody across from you at work, next to you at school or even in your family right now, but the truth remains that “other prisoners are always listening”.
When we decide to pick up the weapon of praise in every season and in every scenario, we will discover that while we might often seem chained, He is never chained!