When Prayer And Praise Don't Come Easy

When I think about my attitude in both the little trials and the big traumas of life, I wonder if I could have been like Paul and Silas in prison. I don't know if I could have prayed and sung praises while sitting in shackles.

The two men hadn't done anything wrong. All they had done was cast out a spirit from a possessed girl when they saw that it was evil and not of God. The trouble came when the girl's handlers realized they could no longer profit from her soothsaying services. They rounded up a posse and had Paul and Silas thrown in prison for stirring up trouble.

So there they sat in shackles and chains, surrounded by other prisoners, some of whom may have been there on false charges, too. They'd not been given a fair trial, they were locked deep inside the jail, and they were suffering for something good done in the name of Jesus Christ.

Do you ever feel like that? Like unfair things are happening all around you, you're suffering from some strange reason, and you feel completely chained down? It happens to all of us at one time or another. The circumstances around us seem to come out of nowhere and aren't at all what we expected. Then we feel like our hands and feet and possibly our heads are all bound in chains and immoveable.

But then...

And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God: and the prisoners heard them. Acts 16:25

Pretend for a minute that you don't know the earthquake is coming, you're clueless about the chains falling off, and you haven't heard about the jailer and his family getting saved. 

All you know is the story to this point, and the two men have gone through all kinds of terrible things. But they don't grumble and grouse, like I wonder if I would do. They don't just sit there depressed, waiting for the circumstances to change. They do the three things they know how to do: they pray, they sing, and they praise.

1. They pray. In the middle of this dark, unforgiving time, they turned to God in prayer. Their only choice right now was the best one they could make. We don't know exactly what they prayed, but we know as we keep reading that their prayers were answered. Communicating with God through prayer is greater than grousing any day.

2. They sing. I wish I knew what songs they were singing in those days. It was probably some of the psalms and anything written by musicians in the first churches. But the song itself doesn't matter. It's the heart attitude that you use to create that joyful noise that matters and that changes everything.

3. They praise. Even in the darkness and torture, they chose worship over worry and fear. They fought injustice and pain by praising God for who He is and what He had planned for them, before it ever happened. 

Paul and Silas worshipped God in the middle of a terrible situation. They made that choice, and it's the same choice we're tasked with every single time something doesn't go our way. We can sit in shackles and pout until something changes, or we can praise and worship the Lord with all our hearts, minds, and souls. 

It's a choice. Choose to praise God regardless. Praise. Regardless.