Pursuing Peace Through Praise

Pursuing Peace Through Praise

Scripture: Psalms 100; Acts 16:16-24; Psalm 8:2; John 14:27

This morning I wish to share with you a personal message that I’ve titled, “Pursuing Peace Through Praise.” For those of you who attended Bible study this week, some of this will sound familiar to you.

The past three weeks have been a difficult time for me and for my family. For me personally it seemed that everything converged together in my mind last Monday evening. So that night I laid in bed struggling with some of the events of the day and the preceding weeks. Even though I was tired, sleep refused to come. As I lay in bed I began to pray in the spirit. The more I prayed the more awake I seemed to become. My heart was heavy, my peace was not to be found, and my mind was racing. I finally drifted off to sleep, but found myself awake again a couple of hours later. Again, I started praying in the spirit. However, this time as I prayed, the Spirit interrupted me and told me to give God praise. I paused and thought about what He had spoken to me. As I began to give God praise, Psalms 100 came to mind. It says, “(1) A Psalm of Thanksgiving. Make a joyful shout to the LORD, all you lands! (2) Serve the LORD with gladness; come before His presence with singing. (3) Know that the LORD, He is God; it is He who has made us, and not we ourselves; We are His people and the sheep of His pasture. (4) Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise. Be thankful to Him, and bless His name. (5) For the LORD is good; His mercy is everlasting, and His truth endures to all generations.” (Psalms 100:1-5)

As I thought about this Psalm and how it came to mind when the Spirit told me to praise God, I began to focus my praise on the “why”, which we see clearly in this Psalm. The first four words of this Psalm say that it is “A Psalm of thanksgiving.” So as I thought about that, I had to think about why I was thankful in the midst of what I was dealing with. I thought about my past. I thought about my present – yes, the current situation and all of the torment and pain it represented. Then I thought about the future – where God already was, waiting with the answers to the situations I was struggling with. Here is my point: this Psalm is one of thanksgiving. It is a song of praise for the Lord’s faithfulness to His people. This song says make a joyful noise unto the Lord and serve Him with gladness! Why? Because He is God and He is the one responsible for our being. Not only that, as His children, we are the sheep of His pasture – in other words, we are under His care!

Acts chapter sixteen records the story of Paul and Silas beginning to do just this after they had been beaten and imprisoned. Let’s examine this story in Acts sixteen beginning at verse sixteen. “(16) Now it happened, as we went to prayer, that a certain slave girl possessed with a spirit of divination met us, who brought her masters much profit by fortune-telling. (17) This girl followed Paul and us, and cried out, saying, ‘These men are the servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to us the way of salvation.’ (18) And this she did for many days. But Paul, greatly annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, ‘I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.’ And he came out that very hour. (19) But when her masters saw that their hope of profit was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to the authorities. (20) And they brought them to the magistrates, and said, ‘These men, being Jews, exceedingly trouble our city; (21) and they teach customs which are not lawful for us, being Romans, to receive or observe.’ (22) Then the multitude rose up together against them; and the magistrates tore off their clothes and commanded them to be beaten with rods. (23) And when they had laid many stripes on them, they threw them into prison, commanding the jailer to keep them securely. (24) Having received such a charge, he put them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks.” (Acts 16:16-24)

Paul and Silas were on their way to the place of worship for prayer and the reading of the Scripture. As they walked to their destination a slave girl, possessed with a spirit of divination and who had been following them for many days shouting that Paul and Silas were servants of the Most High God began following them again repeating the same thing. Now understand that everything this slave girl was saying was the absolute truth, but Satan was using this truth – as he always does – to discredit the message of the apostles. He used a young girl he controlled with demons and used as a medium to make the people think that the apostles were in league with her and the demons who spoke through her were serving the same God. Therefore, the people would conclude that they were doing miracles by the devil and so discount the gospel. But on this particular day, Paul had had enough. He had grown tired of the demon following them around saying, through the girl, that they were both the same. He turned, faced her and commanded the demon come out of her in the name of Jesus. Notice that he spoke to the demon, not the girl. The demon spirit immediately left her. When the demon was cast out of her in the name of Jesus, it proved that they were of God and not of demons. The story does not tell us how long this slave girl had been possessed, but what it does tell us is that she was a “money-maker” for her masters. So once she was no longer possessed and could no longer practice divination, her masters became extremely upset with Paul and Silas. They dragged them before the leaders and had them beaten and thrown into prison. This was one of the five times that Paul “received forty stripes, minus one” from the Jews (Second Corinthians 11:24).