Clough Acts Lesson 42

Psychological Effects of the Gospel – Acts 16:25-34

We have studied the invasion of Europe and we have studied how the Apostle Paul brought Christianity to European soil in one of the greatest moments of western history. Of course, from the humanist point of view this is not considered newsworthy but from the Christian point of view it very definitely is important. If this had not occurred you would not be here this morning. The invasion of Europe by the Christian faith: we saw that as Christianity entered Europe it entered conflict with Rome and the nature of this conflict persists to our present time. The nature of this conflict with Rome was over two basic premises, premises which control to this day even American political thinking. And that is that it is the right of the state to give freedom, not the right of the state to recognize freedoms that already exist but that the state itself grants freedom.

We have to, with all due respect, part company with our fellow Americans if that is what Americans think by freedom of religion. By freedom of religion the Christian has always meant the Church has an inherent right to exist which governments recognize, they do not grant, the difference being between those two verbs “give” or “grant,” and “recognize.” Governments can only recognize the Churches right to exist; they can’t give her the right to exist. But Rome insisted the state could grant rights.

Secondly, the other premise involved in the Rome church debate is the debate over what is the common good, the so-called bonum communitatis, the good of the community, and the humanists argue that Christianity is perfectly acceptable as long as it teaches Johnny and Mary to be good little boys and girls, but as long as Christianity insists that one worship Christ and not Caesar, that Christ and not Caesar is the source of blessing, that Christ and not Caesar is the absolute source of law, then Christianity is considered an enemy of bonum communitatis or the good of the community. And so those two points have always been at stake; ask your brothers and sisters behind the iron curtain today if they think that’s a serious controversy or not.

So we always have people involved in this, arguing that the state has prior rights, that the state reflects the will of the so-called People, People by the way always spelled with a capital “P,” indicating semi-deification. This why we have to be careful, when even we recite the preamble of the Constitution about “We the people” do this and do that and do the other thing. Let’s not forget that one day in 1931 Hitler sent a Chancellor Brüning (quote), “the fundamental thesis of democracy runs this way and I follow it; all power issues from the People.” And on March 23, 1933, Hitler passed or had passed The Reorganization Act that gave him total power to do whatever he did, and so it was that after March 23, 1933, everything by definition that Hitler did was legal because after all, the People had freely given Hitler the power to do what he wanted. This is where you wind up if you say the ultimate standard is the standard of the People, the People decide this, or the People decide that. The answer, our Christian counterpart to that, our interpretation of “We the people,” is “We the people underneath the law of God” do thus and such. It is “We the people operating underneath an absolute standard.”

Well that’s what was brought to Europe and when that kind of thing was brought into Europe we immediately had conflict. From Acts 16:16-24 we had conflict in the area of finance, business and economy. Where Christianity goes it disturbs people’s values and when you disturb people’s values you disturb what they buy and what they sell and the price they charge for what they buy and they sell. And this is hard to tolerate on the part of the non-Christian. Christianity shuts down production, as we see in verse 16; it drives out of certain businesses and enterprises people who were skilled in those enterprises, but because of their Christian faith they can no longer produce those goods and so the means of production are destroyed when Christianity moves into certain areas. Of course, to compensate Christianity also increases production in other areas.

Another factor, as we will see in Acts 19 is that Christianity, by changing values, changes market value of produce and so there’s tremendous shifts that occur. The argument, of course, that we’re making here is for free enterprise over against socialism.

Today, in Acts 16:25-34 we come to a second conflict between Rome and Christianity, or rather between the thought of Rome and the thoughts of Christianity; not economics this time but psychology. And so we’re going to deal with crisis counseling in verses 25-34; men meeting crises, psychological breakdowns, that kind of thing. And here we have to start from the very beginning and show why it is that we have a problem of instability today because we have three men competing for the same territory; the psychologist, the pastor and the psychiatrist. All three of these profession are in total collision. They don’t have to be but in fact they are.

The psychiatrist is the person who has doctors background, he is an M.D. in this country; he has medical training and his job should include the study of how chemical imbalances in the brain affect people’s moods and so on and he can provide a very basic important contribution. But the psychiatrist isn’t content with that. The psychiatrist puts out his office shingle and says are you disturbed, do you have problems in your life, come to me, I’ll help you make changes in your life and here he’s no longer talking just about chemical changes, here he’s talking about changes in value, changes in whole lifestyle. This immediately is like a man having his lawn next to your backyard and he tears down the fence and moves it over five feet so he can mow part of your grass and plant his garden on your lawn. And that’s what’s happened to the pastor’s backyard; it’s being invaded by the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist has his own backyard, perfectly good, he doesn’t have to move his fence over into the pastor’s backyard. And then the pastor finds on the left side of him the psychologist.

Now the psychologist has also a legitimate domain. His job is to study how people learn, perceive and respond to things, and that’s very legitimate. It involves a lot of areas of legitimate study. But not content with that, he picks his fence up and moves it over and says you have problems with your family, come to me and I’ll be your family counselor; come to me and I’ll do this for you or do that for you and change your lifestyle and help you meet the crises of life. Again he is the pagan priest.

And so the psychiatrist and the psychologist have a rightful area and a wrongful area; their rightful areas are their science areas; their wrongful areas are when they start pretending to be secular priests. And that is something that people probably have been forced on them because they refuse to study the Word. But the psychologist and the sociologist are at a disadvantage because they can’t tell people the source of values. Literally the word “psychologist” comes from the Greek word, soul, knowledge of the soul, the man who is the soul expert. That literally is how you would translate psychologist. Or if we are to literally break down the word psychiatrist, again the word soul, and this is the word heal, the soul healer. Now that’s interesting; how can you heal a soul if you don’t know what the soul is; and by what standard do you define soul? And immediately we’re back with the Word of God, and so these two areas are highly sensitive areas in dealing with rightful domain. Yet we still have people in Bible teaching churches, somebody has mental illness, they say, which itself is an unbiblical term, they say someone has mental illness, let’s go to a psychologist, the pastor is in competent to handle the problem, other Christians are incompetent to handle the problem. But that again is an unbiblical presupposition because there is no such thing as mental illness. If someone parts their hair with a crowbar you’ve got mental illness, but that’s because you’ve got brain damage. Apart from that reason there isn’t any reason other than chemical imbalances for these kinds of things.

In this passage before us we’re going to see two groups of men face a crisis. One group responds to that crisis in a Biblical way; one group responds to that crisis in a non-Biblical way. In verse 25 the scene is set. Acts 16:25, “And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God; and the prisoners heard them. [26] And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken: and immediately all the doors were opened, and every one’s bands were loosed. [27] And the keeper of the prison awaking out of his sleep, and seeing the prison doors open, he drew out his sword, and would have killed himself, supposing that the prisoners had been fled. [28] But Paul cried with a loud voice, saying, Do thyself no harm: for we are all here. [29] Then he called for a light, and sprang in, and came trembling, and fell down before Paul and Silas, [30] And brought them out, and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved? [31] And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house. [32] And they spoke unto him the word of the Lord, and to all that were in his house. [33] And he took them the same hour of the night, and washed their stripes; and was baptized, he and all his, straightway. [34] And when he had brought them into his house, he set meat before them, and rejoiced, believing in God with all his house.”

So the episode is one that clearly involves a crisis. People who are used to reading their Bibles, of course, read this passage and they light on verse 31 and they say oh, that’s the center of it. Well, theologically, yes, but don’t be too impatient. Read the text and you’ll observe this man is suicidal; he has responded to a crisis in such an unbiblical way he’s ready to take his life. He’s a totally depressed, hopeless individual. So we’re going to study why, when faced with a crisis, he reacts the way he does and why, when Paul and Silas are faced with a crisis they reacts the way they do.

Now it’s true in general in life that sometimes the response to the crisis is worse than the crisis. Suppose this is some crisis that influences you or some friend of yours and they respond like this jailer is going to respond; they respond by going suicidal. That’s their response. Now which is worse, the crisis or the response? As a result of the response the jailer could have gone to hell forever. That wouldn’t have been much of a response to the crisis; one would say that if you had to solve the problem he just gummed up the mess; he added a bigger problem to the original problem, and that’s the story when in response to crises we act unbiblical, then the response becomes the crisis, and so on; then we respond to the response and that becomes a crisis. So we have a chain of crises, one after another, because our responses are wrong, and when you get involved with this situation it’s like peeling an onion, you have to start with the outer layer and work on that one to get at the next one and so on before you can get down at the original crisis. We’ll see how Paul does this.

In Acts 16:25 it starts at midnight, now that little time phrase is in there to give us a hint of why they’re singing and praying. You say at midnight I thought they’d be sleeping; after all, Peter did, why can’t Paul and Silas do this? Well, the answer is because they’re in a situation involving tremendous pain. Remember these men have been beaten, they have faced a group of men called the lictors; lictors carried these rods, like this, with an axe. This is the symbol, Mussolini’s fascist party, the reason he got it was because they were called fasces. They are a symbol of corporal and capital punishment of the state. And so it was the rod that beat Paul so badly; they are in pain, they can’t sleep. That’s why they’re awake at midnight. Their feet are in the stocks and so they are in tremendous discomfort. So that’s their crisis. Now they could face this situation and go to pieces or they could face the situation and solve the problem.

A while ago a man, a medical doctor, wrote a book called None of These Diseases. And in this book he points out how over and over again our body responds emotionally to certain situations on the basis of conscience. There’s a little emotional center at the brain and that emotional center has been wired in there by God because God has placed in us a conscience that is to alert us. In other words, you might be driving along in the car and your generator system fails; you have to have the little idiot light go on and tell you something’s wrong. And so we have the conscience that’s supposed to turn on when something’s wrong.

Now the conscience has two lights, to ways in which it gets our attention. One way, the best way, which is not often the most frequent way, is that when we do something wrong we become mentally aware of it; that is our ideas, our thought, we know something’s wrong. Now that’s the normative way to become sensitized through a bad conscience. But then suppose we short that out, anybody that’s lived more than 15 years has become quite astute at shorting that one out; you’re driving along and you don’t like a red light to come on, it’s an insult so you smash the light and keep on driving. That’s how we operate in our life. Brilliant solution to the problem; gets rid of it, until we go on down the road and burn out the engine, then we have a real problem on our hands.

So the conscience has a second light; the second light is wired to this emotional center and when our conscience says no, no, no, no, no, and we short it out, it takes over and communicates through this, the old story of getting someone’s attention by hitting them over the head with a 2 x 4. Well, God does that with us, except He gets our attention by setting off emotional problems. And Dr. McMillan points out how all of these organs in the body are hooked into this system. And that’s why some people have one thing, some people have another because their conscience is affecting them psychosomatically. They’re having psychosomatic problems, pain, emotional problems and so on. But we have to be careful here. There is no such thing as an emotional problem. There is no such thing as emotional support. People don’t need emotional support. That’s all they’ve got, they’ve got emotional support, that’s their problem. And their emotions aren’t wrong, they don’t have an emotional trouble. If your little red light comes on your dash panel it’s not the problem with the light, so why do we say then, when we have (quote) “emotional problems” there’s something wrong with the emotions. The emotions are doing their job. So it’s not the emotions that have the problem, it’s something else that’s wrong, but not emotions. That’s psychiatric jargon from the humanist world. People don’t have emotional problems.

Another little handle that comes up here, why they’re about to have a nervous breakdown. Tell me, which nerve, where did it breakdown? There is no such thing as nervous breakdown. No nerves are broken down, the nerves are altogether fine, they’re working beautifully; that’s the problem, they’re transmitting signals so you don’t solve the problem by labeling it as an emotional problem, as a nervous breakdown, nothing like that, that’s just a crisis that God has brought in and because the conscience has been violated we’re paying the price in the fallout.

Now that emotional center has a job; it’s to cultivate and ready us for action. That’s a key elementary thing that everybody that studies anatomy knows and it’s so simple. And Biblical approach to life is built on this sound physiological principle, that your emotions are there to trigger action. So what happens? Somebody gets a problem in life and they rebound off the problem, their emotions start going they want action, they don’t take any action. Then they’ve got a (quote) “emotional problem.” Their emotion is going like this but they’re not doing anything about it. That’s what sets off these so-called emotional problems.

Here’s what Dr. McMillan says talking about this: “The emotional center produces widespread changes by means of three principle mechanisms: by changing the amount of blood flowing to a certain organ, by affecting the secretions of certain glands, and by changing the tension of the muscles. Tightened muscles can produce pain as one can easily demonstrate by clenching the fist for just about three minutes. Hence, it is understandable why people with chronic anxiety suffer a great deal with severe tension headaches that stem from tightened back muscles.” And so it is that we have this physiological fallout but the problem isn’t the neck muscles; the problem isn’t even the nerve that goes to the neck muscle. The problem is why is it that God is signaling by the conscience? Listen, why do we have the red light on the dash panel or why does the buzzer sound? Something’s wrong. And so this is why the Scriptures point back to the conscience and the conscience has to be dealt with or you’re going to have to resort to some anesthesia, liking hitting the instrument panel on your car with a hammer to solve the problem.

All right, Paul and Silas face a crisis; their emotions are geared up for action. Think of them for a moment, they just wound up on European soil, they’ve had the marvelous experience or walking into a town, no Jewish men, no Jewish synagogue. The first convert, a woman; next convert, if she was genuinely a convert, a demon possessed girl, a remarkable evangelistic record, just what you’d love to send home to Jerusalem, we’re having a big impact on Europe, won two women to Christ in a week, no local church formed, nothing. Where are you now Paul? Oh, we’re in jail now. You’re in a real mobile position carrying out the mission. Everything’s gone wrong. And so these guys could sit back there and get discouraged, let’s just… I quit, that could be the response; I’m at the end of my rope, Paul could say. If God were on the other end He’d say which end Paul, He’d say I’m at one end of the rope, you’re not at the end of the rope. Paul could say well, I’m in a prison. You know, people who are in trouble they often say well, I’m in a box, I can’t get out. Paul’s in a box and he can’t get out, right? He’s in a literal box and he can’t get out. Watch what he does. So we’re watching here a biblically informed Christian face a crisis of major proportions with the resources he’s got available. Let’s watch how he handles it. And watch that he does something, he doesn’t think about it.

That’s another thing that’s wrong with a lot of psychotherapy, sit down, we’re going to come in today and we’re going to talk about your problem. Who wants to talk about the problem? We want to solve the problem, we don’t want to sit there and talk about it. If you have a flat tire by the road you want a motorist to come along and say now you’ve got a problem with that flat tire, let’s talk about that flat tire. Does that solve the problem? No, give me a jack and I’ll fix it. So the Scriptures are concerned with solving problems, not talking about the problem. Now Paul and Silas are going to start doing something.

It says they “prayed they sang praises.” Let’s look at what they can do. If emotions are gearing us up to do something what biblically can they do? Well, they could try to get out of jail but it’s night and the jailer isn’t around so that action is eliminated. They could try to just go to sleep, that would be one thing they could do but they can’t do that because there’s too much pain. So what are they going to do. Well, they’re going to start off by following the procedures in Ephesians 5.

Turn to Ephesians 5:18, emotions are not bad but emotions are never the object of imperative commands in the New Testament. You never find the Bible telling you feel good. Suppose it did; how could you carry out the command. God says “feel good.” What do I do about that? Stick my hand in a socket? What do I do to feel good? I have no way I can carry out the command, so therefore the Bible doesn’t give me the command to feel good; the Bible gives me the command to do good. And that’s why in Genesis 4 God says to Cain, do good Cain, and you’ll be encouraged. Emotions are not bad, they have to result in action. Jesus wept, Jesus got so mad when he went into the syndicate area in the temple and He threw them out. Do you know what the prophecy says that describes the action of Jesus throwing people out of the temple? “The zeal of thine house has eaten me up.” Now if that isn’t talking about emotions I don’t know what is. Jesus Christ wasn’t a Buddhist zombie levitated all over the land of Palestine. Jesus Christ has real emotions of anger, weeping and so on. And because He had all of these emotions and He challenged them biblically, God was pleased.

In Ephesians 5:18 we have the famous verse on the filling of the Holy Spirit; in this verse on the filling of the Holy Spirit we have a comparison between being drunk with wine and being filled with the Spirit. Rather a contrast. If you look in verse 15, 16, and verse 17 and you’ll notice each of those verses is talking about opposites. In verse 15, “walk carefully, not as blundering idiots.” Now what’s the difference there? There’s a contrast between in fellowship who’s walking in the Word of God with direction, discernment and one just kind of wandering all over the road from lane to lane. And then in verse 17, “stop being unwise, but understand what the will of God is,” see, that’s not a comparison, that’s a contrast. Now in verse 18 don’t read that as a comparison. It is a contrast also; it’s a contrast between being inebriated and anesthetizing the problem, tranquillizing the problem or being filled with the Spirit when we deal with the problem. We could read verse 18 in modern American parlance, instead of not being drunk with wine, okay, that’s one way of handling it; another one we could say, do not be controlled by Valium when it’s being used illegitimately for psychological problems instead of physical pain. So all of the drugs, the tranquillizers, the downers and the uppers are included in the word “wine,” in principle, in verse 18. “…but be filled with the Spirit.”

Now the result; again, no verbs of feeling, these are action verbs. What does it say? “Speaking among yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, [20] Giving thanks always [for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.]” So verse 19 and 20 deal with a response to a crisis, starting with the earth, that’s closest, subdue the earth. All right, we subdue the earth and that earth that’s closest to us is our bodies and the attitudes we carry around in the mind of that body. And so that is the first thing we start doing, changing attitudes that are there with which we’re responding to life. Then verse 21, [“Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God”] the general principle, after we get our own stuff together, then our relationships with other people, and thus it is in verse 22, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands,” and in verse 25, “Husbands, love your wives.” So it starts out with the second layer of the ground, the second divine institution, and the relationship in that institution. And then in Ephesians 6:1-4 it talks about children and their relationship to parents, that’s the third divine institution, and it starts radiating out there, from that point. And then it goes on further, in 6:5-56 to deal with our employer-employee relationship and it goes out there. And so we have this gradually radiating circle of the influence of the filling of the Holy Spirit in terms of actions.

Now here’s someone in a crisis situation; they have a choice. Maybe they’re either angry, they’re angry because somebody has wronged them, or they’re upset because somebody’s wronged them. But just a minute; you can’t change the fact that somebody’s stepped on your toe. Fine, that’s not your problem, God doesn’t hold you responsible. Is God, before the judgment seat, the Great White Throne going to say you’re responsible because someone else hit you. That’s not right; we’re not held responsible for wrongs done against us. What we’re responsible for is what we do in response to those wrongs. Said another way, Jesus Christ did not die of colitis on the cross because He’d been persecuted all His life. Jesus Christ died for sins on the cross because He managed to meet the problems of persecution.

All right, here’s a person here who’s out of it, facing a crisis; the Biblical inventory starts with themselves; what is your attitude, is your attitude controlled with the Word of God or not. It isn’t; the person may come and say I’ve got this problem, I’ve got that problem, oh, it’s too much for me. You mean it’s too much for you without the grace of God. See, that’s the difference. A Christian helping another Christian or a Christian helping an unbeliever; you may find yourself in this position, someone is going to pieces. If you’ve had a lot of psychological theories they teach you to listen to how they say it; do they say it in a high voice or do they say it in a low voice; do they say it with despair, do they say it with exultation. You don’t listen to what they say, you listen to how they say it. Wrong!

In the Scriptures we don’t care how they say it because how they say it is the emotional dimension of the problem; we’re not interested in that because we can’t solve that. I’m interested in the content of what they say, not how they say it. A person says oh, it’s impossible! It’s not impossible with God, you mean to say it’s difficult. And so you begin to challenge the language people are using to describe their problem, and when you begin to challenge the language that’s being used you’re challenging their interpretation of the problem and right there you’re beginning to cope with it. It’s out of control! It’s not out of God’s control, it may be out of your control. Someone could say it’s too much! Again, it may be too much but it’s not too much apart from God’s grace because of 1 Corinthians 10:13. So we have that limiting factor that begins to happen. We’ll watch how that works. But whenever we have that limiting factor it’ll show up here, change in attitude, change in relationship in marriage, change in relationship in family, change in relationship at work, because 95% of our problems any way is because of some other person, that happened to bump against us in the history of the universe. And so because we have that, then obviously we have to work out and do something about it.

Let’s come back and see what Paul and Silas do about their problem. The drugstore is closed, they can’t get any tranquillizer this evening. Well, what else are they going to do then? It says in the Greek, “praying they kept singing.” “Praying,” present participle, “they kept on singing,” singing is imperfect tense, continuous action. The participle describes activities parallel to the main verb. So here we have the activity of praying simultaneously with the activity of singing. What does this mean? Well, I think it tells you something about what they did with their problem. Here they were in jail and there must have been tremendous pain. The reason for this is what the jailer does to them after he’s converted; that signals that they are having pain. All right, they have pain; when you have pain it’s hard to keep track of your thought, so they know they want to pray, but how do you pray when you’re in pain and you’re having all this distraction? Plus the fact there’s probably noise going on in the prison. It’s probably almost as noisy as Wednesday night when half of you traipse in here and yak, yak, yak, while the other half is back there trying to pray.

So they have a problem of concentration. So here we have them coming into jail, how are we going to solve the problem, I’ve got to pray, I’ve to get my mind on the Word of God. How are we going to do it? We’re going to chant it out loud. So when you see them praying and singing, that was a thing they could do with their problem. Their emotions were like this, and if they don’t let those emotions drive them to some Biblical solution to the problem, then they’re going to get colitis, ulcers or something else. They’ll run their body down to the point where they get very sick, because your body is not made to take all this frothing, heaving, surging bunch of juices that circulate through our system, without action.

So Paul and Silas take action, and then low and behold, “the prisoners kept on hearing them,” so they seized control of the situation. [26] “And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were broken,” now if this isn’t a literal rendition of 1 Corinthians 10:13, we quote that, there are a number of new people here so this morning let’s turn to 1 Corinthians and read 1 Corinthians 10:13, this is the most vexing verse for the human race because every time, just all of us have the same thing, we might as well stop wearing poker faces because we all have the same problem here, that when there’s some problem we always want to plea it wasn’t our fault; it’s somebody else’s fault. If he hadn’t said that I’d be a better wife. If she wasn’t such a nagging bitty I’d be a better husband. If I had a better boss I’d be happier in my job. It’s always somebody else; basically stated every time we get in severe problem we’re pleading this: God, please excuse me from my problem because my problem is unique.

Now look at 1 Corinthians 10:13, “There has no temptation” or testing, “taken you but such as is common to man,” whoops, I thought my problem was unique. No, it says it’s “common to man,” that means there was at least one other member of the human race before you that faced the same problem. Now, you don’t understand, see, my problem is unique. God understands and He says it’s common. There is no such thing as a unique problem; now either God’s a liar or you are, or I am when I face a situation. We’re either all liars or God is a liar but something’s wrong because the verse says, “There has no testing occurred that is not common,” that’s assurance right away that somewhere in the universe somebody else faced the same kind of thing, “but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted” or tested “above that which you are able,” I’m at the end of my rope; God says you’re not, He will not allow you to be tested above what you are able; I can’t take it any more, God says He will not allow you to be tempted above that which you are able. Now what are we going to do with this? Smile and kiss it off or believe it. Now this is why this is such a sticker of a verse, it’s like a thorn, it just runs right into you and you wish it wasn’t there because what this verse shows more than practically any other verse in the New Testament is the idea of personal responsibility. You can’t get through verse 13 without saying about personal responsibility, I don’t care how ugly someone has been, I don’t care how bad the situation is, there’s still a zone of personal responsibility. Well I want to talk about the…. Let’s talk about the personal responsibility, what we can do here. You can’t change out there so forget it. You can change the zone of responsibility and improve how we’re responding to this kind of thing. God “will not allow us to be tempted above that which we are able, but will with the temptation make a way of escape, that ye may be able to bear it.”

Now that’s the situation that Paul faced. Paul faced a situation in which he literally was in a box. Now look what he did. He can’t get out of the box, no way physically. But he has a zone of response where he can do something, and then he has a zone where he rests. And he faith-rests what he can’t change, for the moment. He can’t change his legal state in jail; he can’t get on the phone and call his lawyer; they don’t have phones and they don’t have lawyers. He can’t bargain with the jailer , the jailer is sleeping. He can’t get out of the stocks to move around even because the pain, he’d like to, if he could just walk around the cell, he can’t even walk around the cell. So he can’t do any of these things. Well, what can he do? He can sing and he can pray, so he does what he can do, biblically. And he does so, and look what happened in verse 26.

What happens in the area where you’re faith-resting? God comes in and takes care of that problem. Does God sing for Paul? No. Does God pray for Paul? No, because that’s Paul’s doing. God does the other doing, the resting. So the earthquake comes, and by the way, the picture here isn’t some stone jail, the picture is this jail is carved in a cave, it looks something like this, here’s the cave ceiling maybe, and the floor comes up like this and they’ve cut up into the rock and they’ve put these rods through the rock in the floor and the ceiling of this jail so when this rock gets caught in an earthquake and shifts the bars fall out. And the stocks, they’re all into the rock layer in the wall and they drop out. And that’s what’s mentioned in the last part of verse 26, the prison was shaken “the doors were opened,” that’s talking about the bars dropped out of their sockets, “and every one’s bands were loosened.”

Now what more, physically concrete picture can you have of God handling the resting side of a problem? [27] “And the keeper of the jail,” now at the end of verse 26 we’ve finished Paul and Silas’ response to their crisis. They handled it magnificently, and God got them out. Paul didn’t get an ulcer out of it, Paul didn’t go… there are two ways you can go with your emotions, this is a human viewpoint see-saw, bottle them up or let them explode, ventilation. That’s where you go to these P groups and they say you hate your wife, fine, here’s a pillow, draw a face on it and hit it, hit it harder, and the feathers go out all over the place. That’s encouraging sin; that’s encouraging assault and battery, that’s not therapy. That’s encouraging a sinful response instead of challenging it. That’s no way to run a group. In the first place, if a guy is having a problem with his wife it’s not the group’s problem, it’s his problem and it shouldn’t be aired before a group; it’s a violation of privacy.

So in verse 27 we have the opposite situation, here’s a guy with no doctrine and he’s a non-Christian and he faces a crisis. Let’s watch how he handles it. “The keeper of the prison wakes out of his sleep, he sees the prison doors” perfect tense, “have been opened,” and the next thing is he tries to solve his problem, suicide, brilliant solution to the problem, it really makes it go away doesn’t it. It makes him go away and that’s the problem with all non-Biblical solutions, they destroy you, they don’t solve the problem. It’s like driving along again on the highway and your red light turns on and you don’t like it so you hit the dash panel with a hammer, it solves the problem, and you go on one more mile and you lose an engine, because that happened to be telling you your oil was low. So here the man tries to solve his problems suicidally.

He’s got a reason for it, it sounds like, because in the human viewpoint system he thinks he’s in a box. Here he is and Rome is saying to him buddy, we put you in charge of this Roman jail and you can take those prisoners to Mars if you want but when we have the trial before the magistrate those prisoners better be here buddy, because if they’re not here we come for you. Well, the jailer might have thought of this excuse, well, I can take off to the hills. Whose out in the hills but people who were formerly in his jail; not quite the buddy system. So that’s not going to work. So if he stays in the system Rome’s going to get him; if he goes outside the situation the former guys that were in his jail are going to kill him. So he’s got a marvelous set of options; only one third one he doesn’t think about and that is God’s solution to the problem.

So let’s see what happens. Paul, verse 28, comes into the crisis. Now watch what Paul does in the middle of this situation. “But Paul cried with a loud voice, saying, Do thyself no harm; for we are all here.” Now there’s some neat principles to watch. This matter of the voice, the connotation here isn’t that Paul is screaming from the top of his lungs. The connotation of this and meaning of this is that Paul brings authority into the situation. You’ll see this happen again in the crisis of the shipwreck in Acts 27. Paul brings order into the middle of chaos. Look at what happened; from the jailer’s point of view everything is breaking loose; it’s like someone with a nervous breakdown, everything is falling apart, look at this, just one big mess. Okay, there’s a theology that we all get sucked into. It’s a false theology; we all get sucked into it when we get in this state of mind, and that is we have just given affirmation that we believe chance reigns. And so the crisis cannot be handled until it’s cut down to size. We don’t mean minimizing the problem.

If someone comes in here in this situation, in the jail, he’s in a problem all right; he could have a real problem. Paul’s not going to pat him on the head and oh, dear fellow, everything will be all right. Maybe everything won’t be all right unless he makes some changes. So we don’t minimize it but we cut the problem down bringing in one simple doctrine, the doctrine of God’s sovereignty. God is in control of the situation and no non-Christian has this tool to handle his crisis. That’s why you see your fellow Americans out here, whenever there’s something wrong, where do they flee but the pseudo place of sovereignty which is government. That’s what is driving us to socialist solutions because people reject the sovereignty of the personal God and since they can’t totally reject sovereignty, they’ve got to have something in control, the government will be in control.

So we have sovereignty brought in, the air of authority. This is a most important thing, that it is not out of control. We don’t know how we’re going to solve it yet but we know one thing, chance does not reign in this mess, God reigns.

Now God goes on to a second principle. He says, “Do thyself no harm; for we are all here.” Now at this point he’s passed to the second stage where he’s able to calm the person down and get him to look at the data, and this comes to a second problem and that is that 95% of the time when we reach this flip-out point we have exaggerated the size of the problem. In 95% of the cases it isn’t that bad. But we have looked at it so long, so hard, and let it bug us for so many days or so many weeks that it’s bloomed on us. So somewhere along the line you have to prick it with a pin and get it down to size, beyond just the sovereignty size and that is let’s look at some data; what is really going on. Somebody calls up, for example, and says I’m going to blow my brains out, my debtors are all over the place. They’re calling me on my phone, they’re going to sue me, they’re going to bring me to court, I’ve got all these financial problems, I can’t solve them, I’m going to blow my brains out. A question would be how much do you owe? Well, I don’t know that. You don’t know that; you don’t know how much you owe but you’re so sure that whatever it its so much that we can’t solve the problem. See, it was a failure to deal with the concrete facts of the case and the result is it mushroomed out of control.

So that’s what Paul is doing in the last part of verse 28, he’s saying look, come here a minute, jailer, just take a check; every time when these Roman jailers woke up in the morning they’d do what any jailer does at the beginning of his shift and that is you have a head count to find out if anybody slipped out during the change of shift or during the last shift. It’s standard operating procedure. Well, all he’s saying to the jailer is hey bud, you know every other day when you come in here the first thing, what do you do, you take a head count, don’t you, to find out if everyone’s here. Try it, you might be surprised. So he asks the guy to calm down and look at the facts of the case. So that’s the second thing in verse 28.

Now Acts 16:;29, the fact that the jailer responds this way shows you that he’s emerged from the first crisis. Now remember I said that crises of life are the result of, kind of like an onion skin, there’s one layer on top of another layer. Here’s the crisis, here’s our first response to the crisis, here’s our second response to the crisis, we just build up the pile. In this case, this guy, at least we know he’s got a crisis and one response to it, suicide. So Paul deals, not with his basic problem; he deals first with this one, his suicidal response. He stops the suicidal response because by the time of verse 29, what’s the guy doing? “Then he called for a light, and he sprang in,” now with one hand you can’t hold a sword and a light, so he’s had to put his sword down to pick up the light to say hey, you know what, this problem might be solvable after all. So Paul has been successful, he hasn’t solved the guy’s total problem yet, but he’s got him away from this ridiculous proposed human viewpoint response.

And then the guy comes, and this is where the Greek gets very interesting because the way most people read this it sounds like it’s the crisis of the prisoners that set of his question about salvation, but if you think a moment, and you look at verse 28 and 29 that doesn’t follow, does it? Hasn’t this jailer had his initial problem solved? Aren’t all the prisoners, in fact, there in the jail? Well, then why do you read verse 29, you get to the verb tremble, it says he started to tremble, now we’re getting down to the crisis situation, the real crisis in his life. It wasn’t the jail, it was a spiritual problem this guy had all this time and here you have revealed to you why God permits crises. Why does God permit crises in men’s lives. To rip off false human viewpoint lifestyles.

Crises are good and not to be feared by Christians. They are means for rapid change. It might take you twenty years to make certain changes in your life; it might take twenty years for me to make changes in my life and the only way God can make the change is to put us in a position where everything jumps out and now we have to make the change. A tornado comes and flattens the home; maybe it’s a person who’s had a whole screwed up concept of values and property. Now they’ve lost all their property. That’s not an absolutely disastrous crisis; something better can emerge from that. It goes back to this curve that I showed you a while ago, a state of man going into a crisis like this, he goes into the crisis and by God’s grace he comes out better than he was before. That’s the Biblical view of crises; crises are good; breakdowns are good, when a person breaks down his nerves haven’t broken down but his lifestyle is. For years and years and years they tried to solve their problem this way, this way, this way, this way; God’s solution is this way, until finally the house just built up like an inverted pyramid; wham, it just crashed and that’s good because it got rid of all this crud so we can start now, how were we supposed to do it in the first place. Crises are not to be feared, God uses them. And here God is using a crisis in this man’s life to show that halfway through verse 29 we emerge to the man’s spiritual state and from this we learn something.

Notice what he says in Acts 16:30, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” Now where did he get the verb “saved” from? Turn back to verse 17; in verse 17 we have a situation where the demon possessed girl kept on saying, “These are the servants of the Most High God, These are the servants of the Most High God,” and then she said, “who show us a way of salvation.” And I said when they “show us a way of salvation,” she was misdefining the word, Paul was angry at her for misdefining the word, but when she did God in His grace took that little girl’s words into the ears of this hardened jailer and stored them for later use. And we can kind of profile this jailer and his problem, he probably was one of these guys, you meet them all the time, that inside spiritually speaking they’re a bowl full of jelly. On the outside they may have muscles and they may have an aggressive personality, but it’s all a façade because deep down underneath they are very insecure, very insecure! These are the guys that are caricatured by the ERA people as the male chauvinist, always trying to put women down, just for the sake of putting them down. And the reason is because these boys are so insecure they can’t handle a girl that has a brain in her head. So they’re afraid, a woman becomes a threat to these guys, and so they have to put them down. That concept. So they have a little crusade to do this.

All right, what happens, there’s this façade. In the days, weeks, maybe ten days, Paul had been witnessing and the gospel had filtered and hit the façade and bounced off this guy; oh, I don’t need that, I’m a man! Big jailer here, big man on campus, I don’t need that religion stuff, that’s good for this little seventeen year old brat, she can go through the streets with it, and then Paul, this little decrepit Jew from some place, let him talk his little gospel, but I don’t need that stuff, I’ve got everything in control, I don’t need God, God’s a weakling, that sort of approach. And inside we know he’s jelly because God tells us in the Word of God that this kind of a man is a phony. But the problem with him is he can’t admit he’s a phony and this thing has to be cracked. So God brings a crisis into his life and that’s why in the middle of verse 29 his façade cracks and drops off and all of a sudden, underneath is revealed the man in all of his spiritual realness.

That was why he had that crisis just then; it was to do away with the façade in a way that calm, cool, routine Bible teaching would never have done. Paul could have sat there and had a Bible class in front of the prison and still be there 1900 years later if the guy lived that long, I don’t need that, don’t need that! And he’d still be the same way. There’s a time and a place for routine Bible teaching but for some people in some situations it’s not enough and God loves them enough to smash their façade with a crisis. So now the man is broken and he says “what must I do…” it’s that girl, that girl, salvation, what’s this about salvation. He’s picked up the vocabulary from the girl he probably despised.

And then they gave the famous answer in verse 31, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” Notice he does not say, Well Mr. Jailer, what we want you to do now is very calmly invite Jesus into your heart. Now people are led to Christ that way; no problem if you became a Christian that way fine, but theologically that’s not the best way and why settle for the less when you can get the best. Nowhere in the New Testament does it ask you to invite Jesus into your heart. Nowhere! That is not in the New Testament text, including Revelation 3:20. The New Testament gospel is “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved,” and the very invitation focuses your attention on the Son who is at the Father’s right hand, objectively, outside and beyond you. But if instead you get this gospel invitation, inviting Jesus into my heart, where is my heart, down in here, Jesus is in my heart. If you look inside you immediately inculcate a subjectivism and now everything from this point forward in the Christian life is how I feel. Jesus there, but who’s on the throne, that kind of thing. Now it’s a good illustration but the point is that perpetuating this inward subjective type gospel leads to anemia spiritually and so the New Testament always says look outside of yourself, it’s at the Father’s right hand, you believe on the Son and you’ll have life.

And then it says, “and thy house,” that doesn’t mean that every little infant was baptized here, because in the very next verse, verse 32, which if people would just read would solve the problem of verse 31, it says: “And they spoke unto him the word of the Lord, and” they spoke the word of the Lord “to all them that were in his house.” In other words, everybody is being evangelized, and only those who hear the Word of God and respond to the Word of God are believers. This is not a mandate for infant baptism. Now what happens. This man believes at some point along here and he shows his belief three ways. The crisis is resolved, his suicidal tendencies have stopped, he becomes a Christian.

Acts 16:33, “And he took them the same hour of the night,” and it doesn’t mean he “washed their stripes;” it is he bathed, there are two verbs in the Greek and it means the difference and here’s why. There’s one verb in the Greek, nipto, it means just take a wash cloth and wash something; but then there’s another word which means to submerge yourself in a tub of water and take a bath. And that’s the verb used here, and that introduces the principle of how we can be baptized and it also shows you how he was baptized, by what mode. He was bathed first, so obviously water was available, after the instruction, by the way, of verse 32, please notice. They were instructed first, before they were baptized, then he was washed and so the pain… here the jailer is coping with the pain, probably with the wash they had some local anesthesia they could administer, and then he was baptized, the jailer was, and then the third thing, they brought him into his house, and that shows you tremendous confidence. Imagine, a hardened jailer. You gotta meet at least one jailer in your life to realize what’s going on here in verse 34. Ask some of our lawyers that go over to the jail every once in a while and they’ll tell you the character of the jailer. But here the guy invites one of his prisoners out into his home for dinner. What is going on? Well, something radical is going on, a whole complete change in his lifestyle. He set, and then the explanation at the end of verse 34 for the actions of washing, for baptizing and for feeding them is given in the verb “believing” because that verb “believing is perfect tense, it means he had believed with the results that continue into the present moment. And the results showed up three ways. [34, “And when he had brought them into his house, he set meat before them, and rejoiced, believing in God with all his house.”]

So the explanation was that this man was soundly converted. Now look at this; here’s God’s solution to crisis. We’ve watched Paul and Silas meet a crisis; we’ve watched the jailer meet a crisis. One tried good response, one tried a bad one. Paul was in the box with a real crisis, and you know, the jailer’s crisis turned out, at least a superficial one, wasn’t even real was it, the prisoners weren’t released, they were there, it was just a mere threat and yet under the sovereignty of God this jailer solved his real problem. Underneath all the façade and big talk was a man who was desperately fearful, a man who had never coped with his guilt, a man who had never solved the basic problem of life and that is where do I place my trust? Where do I solve the problem of my guilt? Do I bring it before men in society or do I bring it before God and His gracious Son, one or the other.

Our hymn this morning is a hymn that was written by a man in a similar crisis to the jailer, John Newton, who was active in the slave trade depicted in the film Roots, and somewhere during the slave traffic and days he was witnessed to, I think it was through John Wesley, I’m not sure, but John Newton became a Christian and John Newton was the same kind of guy, with a façade of toughness that the Philippian jailer had, but underneath he was a man burdened with great guilt, and as a result he wrote this hymn.