Ben's Blessing Blog

It's been a little while since I've posted a post. I am back from Thailand now and I will have to write more about it in an upcoming post, because I have something which I thought was interesting in my devotions. :)

Here it is, It's the story of Paul and his companion Silas and they were just cast into jail. After being cast into jail the jailor in this story was given a strict command. He was told to keep them safely. Upon having been given that charge it says he "thrust them into the inner prison". So Paul and Silas were busy getting cast and thrust around. As you all know there was then an earthquake at midnight and I find it interesting that the first words out of the jailors mouth are "Sirs, what must I do to be saved." There was no questions about the present situation, and he paid no attention to the other prisoners. There was not a prisoner in that prison house that night which had a fetter or a door closed on them. They all had the possibility of running away. However, you never hear of any of that. You simply hear the prison guard realizing that he needed salvation. How did he know of that term?

It's just my thoughts, but I think that many of the prisoners if not all had got saved. I believe that he had preached to them and revival broke out and they concluded their service with singing and when God shattered that prison open those prisoners knew it was not their place to run away and the prison guard realized by all the prisoners being there, there was a change in their life which he needed as well. These were all hard criminals in jail. They all would have probably ran away at a moments chance, but once Jesus came into their life they became submissive to their authorities. The first though to the jailor was that everyone was gone. Everyone including Paul and Silas returned to their jail cell. Obviously the jailor couldn't have got people in their to start fixing the doors right after an earthquake before all the prisoners left. In fact he took them to his house to get them cleaned up and probably didn't even have much security for the prisoners. They could have still run away, but you never hear of that. Paul and Silas returned back to their own cells and were later released

Paul and Silas made the best of out of their situations. That jail experience was very painful, they were cast into one prison and then thrust into an inner prison with stocks. The pain didn't silence them though, they started preaching salvation and I believe the prisons started repenting and once they began leading in songs the earthquake disrupted things, but the revival kept on going with the prison captain who had fallen asleep during the service then getting saved.

There are a lot of lessons to be learned from this passage. It was interesting to me to just think about the revival which most likely happened just because Paul and Silas were faithful to preach the Word. We need to remain faithful, you never know what may come out of it.

BenH