Prison Prayers

There is Hope is the name of our new weekend message series. Good morning. It's great to have you guys all with us. My name is Renee, one of the pastors here. And before I dive into the message, I wanna do a couple of quick things. First, just to preview a sneak teaser, Trent Smith is going to be back before the end of this service with a stunning choir piece that he put together remotely with several of you who are watching right now. That comes up before the end of the service. Don't miss it.

Second, a quick recap about what we covered last weekend as we began this series. We looked at the Hope perspective, the Bible's perspective on all suffering. This is such an important message. I actually hope, and I don't say this a lot, but if you didn't catch the message last weekend, I hope you go online to our website, tlc.org and catch it. This is so crucial about what we're all going through in the world right now. Here's the Bible's perspective on suffering. First, this is temporary. This too shall pass. Second, the world is broken. We all feel it. The Bible says all creation groans because things are not the way they should be, not the way God created them to be because of the curse of sin. But third, healing is promised. One day, all suffering will be eliminated. God will restore the new heavens and the new earth. And until that day, God is working all the time, every day in your life and in my life for the good.

Now that's the perspective. What does it look like to actually live your life viewing the world this way? Well, that's what this series is all about. Every week during the series, there is hope. We are going to look at a different adventurous Bible story about people in peril and Christians in crisis. But they look at those crises through that lens of the hope perspective. And it's just going to give you a weekly hope infusion to see how people throughout biblical history were able to get hope when they were in very tough situations.

And today I want to launch with one of my personal all-time favorite Bible stories. I preached on this maybe four years ago here at Twin Lakes. It is so relevant to what we're going through right now. It's in Acts 16. I call it Prison Prayers. And it's a story all about what do you do when things do not go your way? What do you do when you get one unpleasant surprise after another? What do you do when you only want to do the right thing the right way from the right motives and things still go wrong? All the wheels keep coming off. How relevant are these questions to us right now?

Basic truth that I want to start with. When things go wrong, my attitude is the only thing that I have complete control over, right? I mean, we can't control the virus crisis. We can't control most circumstances, but you and I always have control over our attitude to our circumstances. So my question to you this morning. Now consider this carefully. Here's my question to you. Are you willing to grow in your ability to adjust your attitude right now today? Now think about this for a second, because most of us think, well, my attitude is just the way I happen to roll out of bed. Like, ah, I'm in a good mood today, or I'm in a grumpy mood today, or I'm just a natural born pessimist, like we have no control over our attitude at all.

And I don't know about you, but I'm having mood swings right now like crazy. I mean, one minute I'm all spiritual and serene and peaceful and in love with the world and my wife and my family and the Lord. And the next minute I'm irritable and grumpy and just sort of angry, right? That's kind of the way my moods are going right now. But listen, maturity means being able to conquer your natural impulses. We all agree with that, but that includes your attitude impulses. Controlling your attitude is something that you can learn. And it's a part of maturity. And we all need to learn it right now, kind of like the apostle Paul says to the Philippians in Philippians 4:12, I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation.

Now, this is a guy who'd been through a lot of very, very bad situations, but he had to learn how to be content in attitude through whatever was happening to him. Now notice he says this to the Philippians, a book of the Bible called Philippians. Today's story that we're going to look at takes place in their city, the city of Philippi, when Paul started to learn that the key to managing my attitude is fixing my perspective, the way I choose to look at the things in front of me.

I'll explain with a true story. In 2016, the Wall Street Journal carried a great story about a mountain bike company with a problem. When they shipped their bikes to their online customers, the bikes were constantly being damaged in transit. And so the team got together to figure out how are we going to solve this? They thought about new shipping materials, new shipping routes, new shipping delivery companies, but all of that would have added too much to their expenses. And then one of the junior members of the team speaks up with an idea. He says, what if we changed the way delivery people look at our bikes? Everybody else looks at him and says, what are you talking about? He said, think about this. Our bikes come in a box that looks just like a widescreen TV box. He said, so why don't we print a picture of a television on the side of our boxes?

And this is a picture of one of their actual boxes. He said, maybe by only changing that one thing, delivery people will look at the box and instead of thinking, this is a mountain bike, we could just throw this around. They'll think, oh, this is a TV. We must handle this with care. So they tried it. Didn't change a thing, not packaging, nothing except for the picture on the outside of the box. Guess what happened? Shipping damages fell by 80%. The lesson? Often I think I need to change my circumstances, what's in the box to be happy. But the fact is you can't always get a change in circumstances, but you can always change how you label them.

I'll show you what I mean in this story from the Bible. We see three perspective shifts that will change your life, especially as we go through this virus crisis, but really any crisis, any unexpected thing that comes your way. In this story, Paul and Silas encounter three different kinds of difficulties that they choose to relabel. They choose to have a different perspective on them. First, they choose a new perspective on closed doors, a new perspective on closed doors. Acts 16:6. Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. When they came to the border of Mizzi, they tried to enter with Phinea, but the spirit of Jesus would not allow them to.

What is this all about? Mizzi, Mizzi, milk of Magnesia. Let me show you on a map. They were trying to keep going from Jerusalem through the Roman province of Asia Minor, which is modern Turkey. They tried to go east. They were stopped. They tried to go north and they were stopped. So what are they going to do? They hit one roadblock after another. Well, verse nine. During the night, Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia, and that's where modern Greece is today, standing and begging him, "Come over to Macedonia and help us." After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that, watch this, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel, the good news to the Macedonians, to the Greeks.

And so they get in a boat and for the very first time, they cross the ocean and land in Greece, Macedonia, Europe. For the first time in the Bible, we see Christians going over to the European territory. And of course, that's going to change history, that decision. Now think of this. It was because they didn't get to go where they wanted to go that they ended up where they needed to be. Let me stop the story for a second and ask, is that for you today? Maybe right now you're just grieving something that has become a closed door for you. Maybe a graduation ceremony that you won't get to have this year because the virus crisis has slammed the door shut on that. Maybe that wedding ceremony that you don't get to have because the virus slammed that door. A job you didn't get, slam. A job you lost, slam. Can you relabel that box this way? See roadblocks as reroutes. See roadblocks as reroutes.

Let me explain this. It's easy to stare at the roadblock and just sit there and wish things were different. But actually you're not stopped. You're just rerouted. Like when the map app on your phone says it's recalculating your new route. Practically, I think of Dee Dee Vargas, a TLC member I've mentioned before. She's a real estate agent. Not much real estate going on right now when you can't even show homes. But instead of staring at the roadblock, she saw it as a reroute. And with her newfound time, she began something she calls project elderly care. They take essentials to people in need. This last Thursday, they delivered 2,200 bags of essentials. And the stories, one woman said that she and her daughter had no food left in the house except for a single basket of strawberries from a neighbor. Can you believe that?

Now, if you want to help them with their food distribution, just go to our website at tlc.org/help. You'll find that ministry and many others. Or if you need help at the same site, you can find ways to say, "Hey, I'd like to get one of those bags. We're in desperate need right now." But do you see what I'm saying? Dee Dee relabeled that box from roadblock, she can't do what she had planned to do with her time, to reroute, "I'm going to do something else." Same exact box, but she put a new perspective on closed doors.

Then number two, get a new perspective on uncertainty. A new perspective on uncertainty. Watch this. Let's go back to the map. They go on their new route. They cross over to Greece, hit the coast, go into the first big city that they land near, and that's Philippi. And they're expecting to find a Jewish synagogue because this is the way they have always done their ministry in every single city they have gone to up to this point. They have gone into the Jewish synagogue, started preaching to the Jewish men about the Jewish Messiah, Jesus Christ that they believed in. Guess what they discovered? No synagogue in Philippi. In fact, there's apparently not even enough Jewish men in the city for there to be a synagogue, which meant that there were less than 10. So confusing. Their whole ministry model out the window. I'm sure they were like, "What are we even doing here in Philippi? I thought I was convinced God was calling us to this ministry and now it looks like we're not even going to have a ministry. What are they going to do?"

Verse 13, "On the Sabbath, we went outside the city gate, literally thinking outside the box to the river where we expected to find a place of prayer. We sat down and began to speak to the women who had gathered there. They don't find Jewish men. They find Gentile women. So they go with it. It says one of those listening was a woman from the city of Thyatira named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth. Now, purple clothes were literally the most expensive clothes for the wealthiest people, the super wealthy. So this was a Gentile businesswoman who was probably very, very successful. It says she was a worshiper of God and the Lord opened her heart to respond to the message. And Lydia becomes the first European in the Bible on European territory in Paul's ministry to believe in Jesus Christ.

But Paul never would have found Lydia if his original plans hadn't been shipwrecked. Here's the relabel, "On the box called uncertainty," watch this, "don't mistake changeable tactics for unchanging goals." Now, just think about this statement for a second. Paul's goal never changed. Spread the good news about Jesus. Paul's tactics had to change. No Jewish men. Let's go to the Gentile women. Okay, here at TLC, you know, we've got a beautiful campus and we have amazing buildings. Lots of wonderful ministry has happened inside of these buildings and they are almost completely empty right now. What if, just speaking theoretically here, our ability to use these buildings and meet here is delayed into next year? Is our goal as a church thwarted? Not one bit. Our goal is not to use buildings. That's a tactic. Our goal is to be building into people's lives and that goal will never change.

Our tactics have had to change with amazing effect. Listen to this. Did you know that right now we are ministering to more people than ever before in the history of this church? I mean, there's so many metrics on this. We've seen the viewership of these virtual church services that you're watching right now grow into the several thousands in many states and even many countries of the world and locally our church has been able to assist literally thousands of people a week with practical needs, food and groceries and toilet paper and so on, more actually than we have ever helped before over a similar period of time in this church's history. And I want to add, by the way, thanks to your continued generosity, we couldn't do it without you.

But my point is our tactics have had to change, but our goal, not at all. So your life right now, a lot of uncertainty right now, but God's goal for your life is as certain now as ever. And it's simply to transform your character into Christ likeness and for you to touch others with the love and the message of Jesus Christ. On that you can be certain in times of uncertainty. All right, back to the story for our final point. Right after this is where things really go south and you see the third perspective shift, a new perspective on crisis. I mean, complete crisis. Next verse. One day as we were going down to the place of prayer, we met a slave girl who had a spirit that enabled her to tell the future. She earned a lot of money for her masters by telling fortunes.

She followed Paul and the rest of us shouting, "These men are servants of the Most High God, and they have come to tell you how to be saved." And her endorsement is not helping. Paul gets kind of annoyed. He says, "That's enough." Casts the spirit out. So Jesus sets this poor human trafficked slave girl free. Are her owners happy for her? No. It says her masters' hopes of wealth were now shattered. And so they grabbed Paul and Silas and dragged them before the authorities at the marketplace. "The whole city is in an uproar because of these Jews," they said to the city officials. That's interesting. There's definitely an anti-Semitic thing going on here. They're teaching customs that are illegal for us Romans to practice. And then the crowd joined in the attack against Paul and Silas, and the magistrates ordered them to be stripped and beaten with rods. And rods were bundles of sticks the size of baseball bats.

Wow. After they had been severely flogged, they were thrown into prison, and the jailer was commanded to guard them carefully. So that's his only order, guard them carefully. Look where he goes with that. When he received these orders, he put them in the inner cell. Now, this word, the inner cell, would have struck dread in the hearts of people reading this 2,000 years ago, because in a Roman prison, the inner cell was the lowest cell. It was where the drain was of the prison cells. In other words, all of the filth, all of the human waste flowed downhill to this inner place. It's where you put the worst prisoners, the ones you hated. And he fastened their feet in the stocks there, very painful position.

So you're Paul and Silas. You're sitting in human waste, surely in darkness. You've just been pummeled with a baseball bat, publicly humiliated, total injustice, victim of racism. What do you do now? Here is the most remarkable verse of the entire story. Verse 25, "About midnight," and I don't know about you, but "about midnight" is when all of my problems seem worse. About midnight, they seem 10 times worse. In fact, about midnight, all I see is problems. Well, it says, "About midnight, Paul and Silas," what? "Were praying and singing hymns to God, and all the other prisoners were listening to them," because they have never heard anything like this before, especially echoing from that inner cell.

So I got a question for you. What does singing praises at midnight in prison do for your perspective? Why is that a good idea? Well, let me explain it to you this way. I want to show you something. These are zoomed in pictures of everyday objects. See if you can guess what they are. What do you think this is? I'll give you a moment to think about it. This is a banana slice magnified by an amazing microscopic photograph. What about this? This is the vinyl groove of a record. Remember vinyl records? And this one is cool. What do you think this is? Here's a hint. Do you see the hooks and catches? This is Velcro. And finally, what do you suppose this is? You might say, "Hair?" All right, what? This is a human eyelash. Doesn't that kind of freak you out about your own eyelashes?

The point is, when you are so close to something, even though you're seeing it with total accuracy, these are totally accurate microscopic photographs of all of these objects, you're not really seeing this. You don't really understand what these are for because you're too zoomed in. You're not seeing the big picture. Well, when I worship in my jail cell at midnight, it zooms out my perspective. I'm no longer looking at my problems microscopically. I remember how big God is and how big his love is. And this is why the single most effective perspective adjuster on earth is worship, praying and singing to God. It gives you a big picture view.

Let me tell you an amazing story about that, about prison prayers. Once when I was in Uganda, speaking at a conference for missionaries, I had lunch with a guy named Ron Pontier. Now, Ron is a missionary aviation fellowship pilot, and that means he flew missionaries into all kinds of places in Africa. He himself has saved entire villages by flying in medical supplies and all kinds of aid. Well, one day, Ron was landing his airplane on a very, very remote landing strip, and he was captured and held hostage for a number of weeks by radical terrorists. And they told Ron, we are going to execute you, and they even set the time and date for the execution. Can you believe that? They said, yeah, it's going to be like 12 weeks from now. That's when you're going to be executed.

Now, Ron was an amazingly cool customer during his captivity. In fact, he even asked the terrorists, he said, can I choose who is going to shoot me on the firing squad? And they said yes, because they told him he was going to be shot by firing squad. He said, okay, I want that person, that person, and that person to be the ones who kill me. And they said, why? And he said, well, I've been observing your marksmanship. They're definitely the best at shooting, and I don't want somebody to like miss and just hurt me. I want it to be over with, so I want them on the firing squad. I heard that, and I asked Ron, how can you possibly have been so cool under that kind of pressure? And here's what Ron told me over lunch one day. He said, Renee, it did not happen automatically.

He said the first several days in captivity, I was panicked. He said specifically, listen to this. He said, I was bargaining with God saying, God, don't you realize you need me? I'm a skilled pilot. Don't you know how many lives I could save if you got me out of this? And he told me, Renee, it was almost as if I could hear God speaking, saying, need you? I can raise pilots out of the rocks if I want to, Ron. I don't love you and value you because of your skill. I just love you. You are far more important to me than what you do. And he said, Renee, in that cell, I had a spiritual awakening. He said, God was saying to me, do you sense my presence? Sense that I am with you now? Do you sense my infinite love for you in this moment? And Ron said it was not until he could just relax and say, yes, I receive your love. I know that you really love me, and I really love you too, that he found perfect peace.

He said, I knew that no matter what happened, I would be with the God that I loved so much and that loved me so much. Either I'd be with him here or I'd be in heaven, and it didn't really matter to me which one. And he said he would sit in his cell and just worship God with prayer and with praises in prison. So what happened to Ron? How did he get out of that? Well, the night before his scheduled execution, something happened to him that sounds just like something right out of the book of Acts. The area that he was in was bombed, and shockwaves shook the prison building, and a whole section of the wall of his cell fell down outward. Boom! And Ron just walked out because everybody else was preoccupied, unharmed. He said, I just strolled right into the forest and into the arms of opposing forces, and he was saved.

But really what saved him was back in the prison cell when he was able to relabel himself not as superhero for God, leader of ministry, needed around the world, but simply as child of God, loved by him. He zoomed out and got the big picture, and that sustained him. And I really believe that God is saying to you and to me, you know, I do have plans for your future, but would you just let me love you for a while? Learn to sing prayer and praises at midnight in your prison cell when it looks like all the wheels are coming off, like Paul and Silas did.

Now listen, praising does not mean pretending. You know, Paul and Silas were not denying the reality of their situation. They weren't like, what prison? Everything's fine. No, they were still hurting. They still needed care for their wounds. They were just remembering God still loves me even here. And then next, the pace picks up as we wrap this up. Earthquake shakes the prison doors open. A jailer wakes up, becomes suicidal. Paul speaks up, don't kill yourself. The jailer runs in, falls trembling, says, sirs. Remember how he treated them and now it's all, sirs, what must I do to be saved? And they say, believe on the name of Jesus Christ and you will be saved.

And look at his instant change of heart. He washes their wounds. And then he takes them to his house, introduces them to the wife and kids. And they sit there and listen to Paul. And in the morning he and his family all get baptized together. And I think they must've been in the audience of the letter to the Philippians. And they knew a little bit of what Paul meant when he said, you know, cause I was with you guys when it happened. I had to learn how to be content in any circumstance, but none of this amazing story would have happened if Paul had just given up and ground his teeth in frustration when all the doors seem to slam shut and everything started going wrong.

In fact, if everything had gone according to Paul's plan, they probably never even would have met Lydia or the slave girl or his family or the jailer. What Paul's beginning to learn is this, and here's the relabel on the box containing crisis. And don't miss this. If you've been drifting off until now, focus here because this may throw some of you for a complete loop. You and I need to develop a willingness to embrace suffering, to embrace suffering. I want to show you something that you may have never have seen before in the Bible. Earlier in the book of Acts, Paul has been a vicious enemy of the Christians, even approving of their murder, but he comes to faith in Christ. And in a vision, Jesus says to a disciple named Ananias, he says, go help Paul out. He says, go. This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their Kings and before the people of Israel. Watch this. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.

And it's not because God had some kind of a vendetta against Paul. He killed Christians. Now let him taste some of his own medicine. Now God's just saying, Paul, I just want you to know you will suffer because his suffering shaped his ministry. And that's going to be true for you too. Listen, suffering is going to happen anyway. It just is, because again, we all live in a broken world. In fact, a box of suffering has been delivered to your front doorstep to some level or another. We're all going through it right now during the virus crisis. So either you relabel it and embrace it as something God will work through, or it'll just remain frustrating and maddening and absurd. Right?

So what do you learn from Paul and Silas in this story? Learn to sing praises at midnight, your midnight, in prison, in your prison that you may feel like you're in right now during this lockdown. Because when you do, you're going to experience a perspective shift and you will find that you know, you will sense, you will feel that there is hope. Let's try it right now. Let's bow our heads in a word of prayer. And with our heads bowed, let me just say that what helped that jailer and his family 2000 years ago is the same thing that can help you today. Remember what Paul said, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved." And so maybe you want to affirm, maybe for the very first time or maybe reaffirm, "I believe on the Lord Jesus Christ." Because when I do, I believe in somebody who conquered death, who is the Lord of all, who is working behind the scenes to save me and the world. And that frees me from my prison of self-pity with a new perspective. I believe.

And Lord, we want to pray for all those experiencing high stress or illness during this crisis. Those in financial stress, physical stress, emotional stress. And of course, we think of those who are sick. I think specifically of people that I know right now who are sick, like Lisa and Angela and Alan and others. We pray for healing and we pray for hope. We pray for strength. And we think of the soldiers on the front lines of this battle, the medical professionals, the first responders, the scientists. We ask that you would give them all strength and skill so that this can be conquered. In Jesus' name, amen.