Jobs were hard to come by. He was a grown man, with a wife and children to provide for. He had been an OK farmer when they lived in the country — even managed to put away a little money for them to live on after the move to the big city.
But he had no marketable skills to speak of.
He wasn’t very good with people, so being a merchant was out. Besides, he just didn’t have the patience for haggling over prices each day at the market.
He wasn’t very good at fishing, and besides, who wants to drag all that fishing gear around before sunrise each morning to sit in a cold, wet boat hoping for enough hungry fish to pay the bills that day?
He wasn’t much of a carpenter either — his wife had made that pretty clear to him a few months ago when he made that door that didn’t quite fit into the doorway right. So what if a little breeze came through the doorjamb? It’s not like winters were all that cold there anyway.
However, she had a point. He wouldn’t be able to make much profit selling doors that didn’t fit right, so carpentry was out as a career option as well.
He did have some relatives who knew some people in the city government. They had mentioned a position being available running the local jail. He knew how that position had become available though, and didn’t really want to be the next guy in that slot. The risks seemed pretty high; but he needed the money.
So he applied for the job. Not surprisingly, there were no other applicants, so he was immediately accepted as the city’s new jailer. He was given the standard warnings about security, and understood the penalty associated with any escaped prisoners.
Under the new rules — which the Romans set up soon after they took over the city — if a prisoner escaped, the jailer took his place and his punishment. That was the more euphemistic way of phrasing it.
Since most crimes there were punishable by severe whippings and death, an escaped prisoner pretty much guaranteed the jailer would have no more home-cooked meals for the rest of his soon-to-be-shortened life.
So the first thing he did was inspect the jail cells. Nice strong stone walls with heavy iron bars. With the gates locked, no one would be able to break through or dig out of their cells. He was determined not to end up like his predecessor.
Things were going quite smoothly for him now. No one had escaped, and the local magistrates seemed to be impressed with his performance— after all, they kept bringing him new business. And so far business was good.
As he was daydreaming, a commotion was getting started outside. Travelers from some new sect of Judaism had been going around the city telling people to stop doing this and that, and to follow the teachings of some Jewish prophet they claimed “rose from the dead.”
And that annoying slave girl who belonged to one of the merchants downtown — the strange local girl who told people’s fortunes all the time — she was following them around for days shouting that those men were from “the most high God,” and that they were telling everyone how to be saved.
The jailer double-checked the locks on the cells again and stepped outside to see what all the noise was about.
According to a local physician named Luke, who traveled with those two upstarts and wrote about their exploits, the one named Paul got really annoyed with the girl and ordered the spirit to come out of her. At that moment the spirit left her.
Normally, having a spirit leave someone would be a good thing, but this particular spirit had been providing a means for the slave girls owners to make a lot of money — and now their investment had dried up. So the owners grabbed the two visitors and dragged them into the town square.
A crowd formed, and started beating the two men with their fists, shoes, sticks, whatever was handy, as the town magistrates led them toward the jail. One of the magistrates jogged ahead to meet the jailer and fetch a whip. Apparently there was some flogging to be done.
The jailer handed him his favorite whip, one with a number of leather strands with pieces of bone and lead attached. As every jailer knows, a good, hearty flogging reduces the risk of prisoner escape. After all, prisoners are hardly in any shape to run away by the time the flogging is finished. Usually they can’t do much more than lay on the floor in their cell for a few days.
When they were handed over to the jailer, he recorded their names as Paul and Silas. He also noticed the magistrates warned him to guard them carefully.
Well the jailer wasn’t going to take any chances with these two prisoners. He brought them to one of the cells far away from everyone else. No windows, no light, just dark stone walls and heavy iron bars. And just to make sure they wouldn’t go anywhere, he locked their feet in stocks. Now he could rest. These prisoners wouldn’t be going anywhere.
Normally he would have gone home to sleep, but he couldn’t chance it tonight. Even though he knew they couldn’t escape, the jailer was obsessed with the cruel death that would be his if somehow these prisoners broke out.
And so he sat in the jailhouse, in his office, and finally dozed off. As the night dragged on slowly, he was awakened by voices from deep inside the prison. It wasn’t the usual whimpering of prisoners who just had the flesh ripped off their backs. No, these voices were…they were singing!
These lunatics were beaten within an inch of their lives, locked up in a cold, dank prison cell, laying in their own filth, and the filth of prisoners before them, and they were singing?
What kind of madman sings during all that?
And in the middle of the night?
And just how was he supposed to get any sleep with these guys making all that racket?
Suddenly the ground began vibrating! As he tried to stand up, he kept falling down again. Everything was shaking violently. Chunks of stone fell from the wall and ceiling. Iron bars rattled in place. Doors popped open….
Doors popped open!?! The prisoners!!! No bars, no doors!! The prisoners would all escape!! As the earthquake began to subside, he ran deeper into the jail, bringing a torch to light his way. The cell doors had popped open, and he knew for sure that the prisoners must have escaped into the dark of night.
He knew the terrible death that awaited him in the morning when the Romans discovered all their prisoners had escaped.
So he drew his dagger to kill himself much more quickly and mercifully than the Romans ever would. But just then, he heard a voice cry out in the darkness: “Don’t harm yourself! We are all here!”
That was the prisoner, Paul, yelling to him.
But he had inflicted such cruelty on him, locking his feet in stocks after his brutal flogging. Yet here was this Paul, trying to save the jailer from killing himself.
Other prisoners would have escaped, or at least hoped for the jailer’s death. But not these prisoners.
Their God must be powerful. He freed them by a powerful earthquake, yet they didn’t even run away. They stayed in their cells just to save the life of the jailer who had treated them so miserably.
This jailer thought he had everything figured out. He had hung his very life on the sturdiness of stone and iron, only to have his life collapse around him as the stone and iron failed him.
But Paul and Silas had shown no concern for the stone and iron, and had placed their lives in the hands of their God, this Jesus they had been talking about — a God who shook the earth and broke his jail. A God who could do that, and have such devoted followers who were even willing to stay in prison to save a miserable jailer’s life — well, this was a God worthy of total worship.
So the jailer fell to his knees before Paul and Silas and asked, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”
Paul told him, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved — you and your household.”
Well, the jailer didn’t really know what Paul meant.
Who was this “Jesus” and what should he believe about Him? So he brought Paul and Silas home with him, where they explained to the jailer and his family all about Jesus.
How Jesus brought salvation for everyone by sacrificing Himself on the cross for humanity’s sins; how he had conquered death by rising from the dead on the third day.
He explained that Jesus bridged the gap that sin had placed between humanity and our Father in heaven — that the Father offered the gift of eternal life to all who accepted Jesus’ sacrifice on their behalf.
That’s all it would take for the jailer and his household to be saved.
Everything this jailer had trusted in collapsed, but he could see that Jesus would be solid and strong against any adversity. And then he thought about his household. His wife and children! The very people he’d been trying to provide for by taking this prison job to begin with! They had now all heard the Gospel, and compassion filled the jailer’s heart.
He began to clean his prisoners’ wounds. The deep gashes and tears from the whip, the scrapes from where they had fallen repeatedly on the rough gravel, injuries that he himself caused. As his heart changed, the jailer and his family were baptized immediately.
Immediately.
Not the next day, or two weeks from Thursday, or the following Easter.
Immediately.
They realized that Jesus was the only thing they could truly count on. Not the Romans, not stone walls, not iron bars.
Only Jesus. And they realized it immediately.
But the story doesn’t really end here, does it? As the jailer made his decision to follow Jesus, he realized what the cost would be to him and his family. As he cleaned the wounds on Paul’s and Silas’ back, he no doubt saw the scars of previous beatings. He realized that following Jesus would have a heavy price. And he chose to follow Jesus anyway.
A savior who can fill our hearts with enough joy to have us sing in the midst of our pain is a savior worth following.
We tend to think that all the conversions in the New Testament were simple, happy events that had no difficult consequences for the believers. Maybe it’s because Luke moves on from town to town and event to event with Paul, and doesn’t have the opportunity to follow the new converts’ stories. But many people were martyred by the Romans during the first three centuries, enduring torture and death, merely for proclaiming to be followers of Christ.
We don’t face the same penalty here in San Diego. And while that’s fortunate for us, we lose track of the fact that suffering in the name of Christ continues today.
Last week, according to Voice of the Martyrs, a Christian organization that helps persecuted Christians around the world, the following happened in Pakistan:
• Muslim radicals in Pakistan have introduced a law in Parliament that any Muslim who converts to Christianity should be killed.
• On May 7, 2007, Christians in the Charsadda District received letters warning them to shut their churches and convert to Islam. The letter that set a 10-day deadline said, “All Christians should convert to Islam within 10 days or leave Charsadda. We will execute all of you if you don’t convert to Islam.” Copies of the handwritten letter were delivered to two churches and several Christian homes in Charsadda. Even though the police have been alerted, Christians in the area are concerned for their safety. A similar letter was delivered to believers in Mardan district.
The VOM newsletter details dozens of instances of Christian persecution worldwide each week. The simple truth is that more Christians have been martyred in the past 100 years, than in all the other centuries combined.
This week, a Christian leader named Jerry Falwell died. He had placed Jesus above everything else in his life, and tried his best to follow God’s will. He was also a sinner like us, and didn’t always say the right thing or approach a subject in the best way, but he did his best every day to live as Jesus lived and do what Jesus did. And he was vilified for it by the media and our secular society.
Falwell was the founding pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. He was 22 at the time, back in 1956. As the church grew, he began Liberty Baptist College at the former elementary school nearby. Since then, the church has grown to more than 24,000 members and the college is now Liberty University with about 10,000 undergraduate students plus graduate-level business, law, and seminary programs.
Here are a few examples of the vitriol our society has poured out upon the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s passing:
• “Goodbye and good riddance, Mr. Falwell (using the title "Rev." is an insult to the men and women who truly believe in salvation).” (http://www.thisistrue.com/blog-jerry_falwell_american_taliban.html)
• We all wish we could make the world a better place, but it’s a rare and special person who actually makes it happen. Jerry Falwell did it merely by dying. … What was it about him that made me despise him so, that made me so livid at the sight of him, that made my skin crawl? … his crude and narrow interpretation of the Bible — but the same can be said about (James)Kennedy, James Dobson, John Hagee, Pat Robertson, Robert Schuler, Benny Hinn—the list is depressingly long”. (http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=27487)
• “Falwell went to hell.That’s where he belongs. He’s with Hitler, Pol Pot, Reagan, Strom Thurmond and Saddam now.” A reader of that blog subsequently responded, “Sorry, but even hell has standards for entry.” (http://www.cnsnews.com/news/viewstory.asp?Page=/Nation/archive/200705/NAT20070517a.html)
• And even from journalists: “Knowing I didn’t have a deadline to meet that day, my first thoughts were not of what to say or write. In fact, my very first thought upon hearing of the Rev. Falwell’s passing was: Good. And I didn’t mean ‘good’ in a oh-good-he’s-gone-home-to-be-with-the-Lord kind of way. I meant ‘good’ as in ‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead.’ (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cathleen-falsani/falwell-a-spiritual-bull_b_48806.html).
Contrast that with the statement from the Right Reverend Tom Wright, an Anglican Bishop in England, who wrote on his blog:
“My own sense, having spent a lot of time in the States over the years, is that he was a classic of his type and with a lot more integrity than some of the shady characters in the religious penumbra…. Within the strange, large economy of God’s grace, which filters the truth of scripture through all of us imperfect interpreters, it may be that I make just as many mistakes as I think he did, but we are each called to be true to what we find in scripture and I have no reason to suppose he was not as obedient to that imperative as I struggle to be.” (http://bibliatheologica.blogspot.com/2007/05/n-t-wright-comments-on-passing-of-jerry.html)
The jailer’s decision was not any easy one. But despite the difficulties that lay ahead, he realized that the God who would bring him to those difficulties would also bring him through them.
Listen to what Jesus said in the Gospels about the cost of following him. Luke writes in Chapter 6, verse 22,:
“Blessed are you when men hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man.”
And in Chapter 21 (16-18):
“You will be betrayed even by parents, brothers, relatives and friends, and they will put some of you to death. All men will hate you because of me. But not a hair of your head will perish.”
Matthew (10:22) and Mark (13:13) likewise tells that Jesus said,
“All men will hate you because of me, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved.”
All three writers of the synoptic Gospels felt that statement by Jesus was so important that they each included it in their own writings. It was a near guarantee that the world would hate them for loving Christ, yet they chose to believe him and put their very hope of salvation in Jesus anyway.
What about you?
What do you put your hope in?
Your wealth? Lots of Enron and Worldcom stockholders learned how quickly a solid financial base can collapse from under us.
Your possessions? Well, more than 2,000 of our fellow San Diegans lost everything they owned, including their homes, in the Scripps Ranch area fires just a few years ago. People living on Catalina Island experienced the same thing last week.
Or maybe your job? Corporate takeovers, downsizing — just last week, Accredited Home Lenders, a San Diego mortgage originator, reported having slashed 1,300 jobs in the past four months.
The jailer in our story experienced an earthquake, and saw his whole world collapse around him. So he reached out to Jesus. Maybe it won’t be an earthquake for you.
Maybe an accident, the loss of a job, rejection, cancer, a guilty conscience, or any number of things.
Maybe you feel your own world collapsing right now. The things you have placed your trust in, maybe they don’t seem quite as secure anymore. Why not put your hope in Jesus?
He’s reaching out for you tonight, just as he reached out to a certain jailer 2,000 years ago. He’s offering eternal security and joy, and all you have to do is accept the sacrifice that he already paid for your sins.
The Bible says, in Romans 6:23, that “the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
All you have to do is turn to him, and pray for Jesus to come into your heart. And believe in him with all your heart. Just as Paul told the jailer in our story tonight, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved — you and your household.”
God bless you all.
