Spiritual Warfare: Prison, Prayer and Praise (Pt 2)

And when they had inflicted many blows upon them, they threw them into prison, ordering the jailer to keep them safely. Having received this order, he put them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks. Acts 16:23-24 (ESV)

In my last post I began talking about spiritual warfare. Whenever we act in obedience to the Lord and pursue Him and His will for our lives, we are going to encounter opposition from the enemy. That truth is clearly seen in the account of Paul and Silas preaching in Philippi where they ended up in prison.

This is sometimes hard for us to get our mind around because we live in such prosperity gospel culture, but when you follow Christ, and when you live out the mission, you will experience opposition. It may be in the form of persecution by people, but more than likely the opposition we experience will be spiritual and circumstantial. What I mean by that is that the enemy will seek to use our circumstances to oppose us and hinder our ministry for the Lord.

From the story of Paul and Silas, we see some of the methods the enemy uses in his battle to hinder or stop our obedience to the Lord. In the last post I talked about the enemy's Intimidation - planting negative thoughts and self talk in our minds. Looking at the rest of the passage we see two other methods the enemy uses.

2. Incarceration (locking,binding)

v23 “they cast them into prison” Again, don’t think in terms if a physical prison; there are many other types of prisons we find ourselves in.

1. Some people are imprisoned by their past. Something has happened to you, or you’ve done something and that event has defined you. You may have committed a grievous sin, or you may have been in an abusive relationship, you may have endured a divorce, and the enemy is always reminding you of that event. In fact he is trying to define you by your past, he’s saying this isn’t just something you’ve done, or something that has been done to you, this is who you are and you will never be better than your past. You are imprisoned by your past.
2. Some are imprisoned by pain. You’ve experienced great emotional pain in your life, and you can’t seem to overcome it. The pain may come out of a broken relationship, or the loss of a significant person in your life. It may come out of a dream that has been shattered or never fulfilled. The hurt is real, but the enemy wants you to keep dwelling on the loss. He wants to keep the wound fresh, he wants you to dwell on the pain because it paralyzes you, it imprisons you and keeps you from living out the purpose for which you were created. He wants you to stay in a prison of pain.
3. Some are imprisoned by fear. It may be the fear of failure, you’ve attempted something in the past and it didn’t work out and now the enemy has convinced you that you can’t do anything. You’ve failed once, you will probably fail again so you just don’t try. It may be a fear of success, you’re afraid to succeed because then you think more will be expected of you, and you don’t want that pressure. You are afraid of expectations, so you just don’t have any or try to live up to any.

There are many prisons that the enemy tries to incarcerate us in to keep us from serving the Lord.

3.Isolation (separation)

v24 “the inner prison”  This may be the enemy’s greatest tactic. When he wants to hinder you from serving God and fulfilling the mission God has called you to, he seeks to isolate you from others in the body of Christ. The enemy is described as a roaring lion, and when lions hunt they isolate their prey from the rest of the pack and then devour them. And the devil works the same way - he gets you in a funk and gets you to withdraw from the body to isolate you.

In my nearly 30 years of ministry, one of the first indicators of spiritual attack and oppression on a Christian, is a regular absence in the weekly assembly. The thing is, God created us for community, He created it in such away that we can’t fulfill His purposes for our lives apart from the body of believers. God calls us to love Him and then love one another, we can’t do that apart from community. But the enemy wants to isolate us in order to have his way with us.

Intimidation, incarceration and isolation are tactics of the enemy that he uses to oppress us and hinder our ability to serve the Lord. He means to use these things for our harm; but God causes all things to work together for our good;even those things that don’t seem good at the time.What the enemy intends for harm, God can use for good. The enemy has Paul and Silas arrested and thrown in jail; he’s trying to stop them from sharing the gospel and seeing people saved, but did it work? No, because Paul and Silas didn’t respond the way normal people would respond. Normal, unsaved people would respond in anger, frustration, and pity. But the Bible says that at midnight Paul and Silas are praying and singing praises to the Lord.

Next time we will let’s look at what we can learn from Paul and Silas response to their prison situation. God's design is for Christians to bear testimony in troubled times to the difference God makes. And God uses our "tests" to allow us to present a "testimony." But how? Let's see what we can learn from the example of Paul and Silas. To bear testimony in troubled times . . .