Acts Devotional Week 9

June 24, 2012

Acts 16:16-24

One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave-girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling.  While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.”  She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out that very hour.  But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities.  When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.”  The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods.  After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely.  Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.

Who sets people free?  Here we have a slave-girl and a prison.  The girl was a slave who made money for her owners.  She was enslaved to a spirit who controlled what she was able to see and speak.  She was not allowed to be who God created her to be.  In the name of Jesus, Paul and Silas freed her.  She found freedom in Jesus Christ.

Yet that freedom had a cost.  The girl’s owners lost a source of income.  They were upset so they decided to go after Paul and Silas.  All Paul and Silas were trying to do was go to a place to pray.  They were not seeking attention or trying to cause trouble.  Yet they find themselves seized, put on trial, stripped, beaten and put into prison.  In freeing a girl in Jesus’ name they found themselves in prison.

The work of the Lord can be difficult.  As God frees people from their prisons of sin and its consequences there is opposition.  Through Paul and Silas Jesus was changing the way the world worked.  Some just didn't like that.  A safe and tame message of salvation is fine, but when God changes things there is often resistance.  Ultimately, imprisonment could not stop God’s work (Acts 16:25-40).  Salvation spread and the world was changed.  God sets people free.  Will we accept that freedom or stand against it?  Will we be willing to make the sacrifice needed to set people free?