READING:
One-year plan: Esther 1-4, Acts 16:1-34
Two-year plan: Joshua 19, Luke 9:10-27
———-
There’s much that challenges me in today’s New Testament reading. For example, Paul and Silas had been beaten and thrown into jail, but they did not complain. Rather, they sang and prayed late into the night, praising God even in the midst of their imprisonment. The rest of the prisoners listened to them, apparently captured by something unique in their spoken and sung words. Prison walls did not stop Paul and Silas from praising God.
Then, a violent earthquake hit, the foundation was shaken, the doors flung open, and the prisoners’ chains broke. You might assume that prisoners suddenly freed from their shackles would quickly escape if the prison doors were also open (in fact, that’s what the jailer expected to have happened when he awoke to discover the apparent jailbreak). What else would you expect from prisoners already in jail for breaking the law, especially when it was an earthquake that jarred the doors open in the first place? Indeed, some scholars argue, in fact, that the prisoners must not have known the doors were open at that point, perhaps because they would have been held in a deep interior “dungeon.”
Whatever the case may be, the fact that the prisoners remained led the jailer to cry out, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30). Under God’s plan, the prisoners stayed put so the jailer would find freedom in Christ.
PERSONAL REFLECTION: When was the last time you saw God work in mighty ways in your life?
DAILY PRAYER: “God, thank You for breaking our shackles of sin.”
TOMORROW’S READINGS:
One-year plan: Esther 5-10, Acts 16:35-17:21
Two-year plan: Joshua 20:1-21:33, Luke 9:28-43
