The Special of the Day… From the Orange Moon Cafe…
“Songs In the Night"
"And the multitude rose up together against them: and the magistrates rent off their clothes, and commanded to beat them. And when they had laid many stripes upon them, they cast them into prison, charging the jailor to keep them safely: who, having received such a charge, thrust them into the inner prison, and made their feet fast in the stocks. And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God: and the prisoners heard them” (Acts 16:22-25).
Certainly we understand the Apostle Paul and his ministry partner Silas praying. They had lost so much. Their freedom, their opportunity to minister, their relative comfort of life, and even the skin on their backs all burned in the fires of persecution. Believers prayerfully seek God and His help in such circumstances and conditions, asking for His deliverance and His grace to deliver, guide, comfort, and enable.
“Call upon Me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and Thou shalt glorify Me” (Psalm 50:15).
But to sing? Why did our hurting brothers of old do that? First, we might acknowledge God’s command that music often accompany our approach to Him. “Sing unto the LORD, O ye saints of His, and give thanks at the remembrance of His holiness” (Psalm 30:4). Being godly sons of God in Christ might well have motivated Paul and Silas to obey their Heavenly Father as a matter of diligent duty despite their loss and pain. We often do not feel our faith, nor does positive emotional and physical sensibilities always accompany our faithfulness. Perhaps our brethren of old simply determined to trust and obey God regardless of the daunting challenge they faced. “I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live” (Psalm 104:33; emphasis added). If so, what an example Paul and Silas serve regarding our own difficulties, pains, sorrows, and losses.
However, I never read this account of “songs in the night” without considering that something else led to their sublime beauty of intent, regardless of how their content might have sounded (Job 35:10). I will always believe that God met Paul and Silas with some special imparting of grace in the prison that became a concert hall before walls crumbled to dust in the throes of an earthquake most certainly not of earthly origin (Acts 16:26). God’s promised “very present help in trouble” may well have become very obvious to His servants in a place where it might have seemed impossible to know and experience. How this happened, we do not know (Psalm 46:1). That it happened seems certain because any song of praise in such a place and condition must have been composed by the Holy Spirit on the pages of Paul and Silas’s hearts in such glory that they could not help but sing.
Do we believe that God can give songs in our night? Is He that present, that faithful, that powerful, that active, and that wondrous in grace and involvement in our hearts and lives? We must believe, first because it is true, and then because our faith and faithfulness sings as we trust our Lord and find Him to indeed be “a very present help in trouble.” The Spirit of God, that great and glorious Composer of songs in the night, will meet us in the unlikely concert halls of our challenges. And should our flesh wonder, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?," our hearts will answer, “How can we not?” (Psalm 137:4).
“Thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.”
(Psalm 32:7)
Weekly Memory Verse
The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister and give His life a ransom for many.
(Matthew 20:28)
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