Singing in the Dark Until the Walls Shook

Paul and his friends were staying at Lydia's house now, and they often walked out to the river to pray.

One day a slave girl came running after them. A bad spirit lived inside her and let her tell fortunes, and her owners made heaps of money from it. (People paid good money to hear what would happen next Tuesday.)

"These men are servants of the Most High God!" she shrieked. "They are telling you the way to be saved!"

She did it again the next day, and the next, for days. At last Paul turned around and spoke to the spirit. "In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to come out of her!"

It came out that very moment, and the girl was free. Her owners were furious. Their money had gone out with the spirit.

They grabbed Paul and Silas and dragged them to the marketplace. "These Jews are making trouble in our city!" they told the judges. The judges ordered their clothes torn off and had them beaten with rods. Then they were thrown into prison. "Guard them carefully," the judges told the jailer.

So the jailer put them in the inside cell, the deepest and darkest one, and locked their feet in the stocks. (Stocks were a heavy plank with holes for your ankles. You could not stand, let alone run.)

Their backs stung from the rods, the stone floor was cold, and it was midnight.

And Paul and Silas began to sing.

They prayed and sang hymns to God, and the other prisoners lay listening in the dark. (Most nights in that jail you would hear groaning, and snoring, and rats.)

Then the ground began to shake. The whole prison rocked down to its foundations. Every door swung open. Every chain fell loose and rattled onto the floor.

The jailer woke up and saw the doors standing wide. He was sure his prisoners had all escaped, and in those days a jailer who lost his prisoners could be put to death himself. He pulled out his sword to kill himself.

"Don't hurt yourself!" Paul shouted from the dark. "We are all here!"

"Bring lights!" the jailer cried. He rushed in, shaking all over, and fell down in front of Paul and Silas. "Sirs," he said, "what must I do to be saved?"

"Believe in the Lord Jesus," they said, "and you will be saved, you and your household."

That same night they told the jailer's whole household about Jesus. The jailer washed their wounds. He and his family were baptized before sunrise. He brought Paul and Silas home and fed them (a midnight supper with the men he had locked up), and the whole house was full of joy, because they had believed in God.

The earthquake had opened every door in that jail, but an earthquake cannot make a man glad. The jailer had held the keys all along, yet he was the one standing in the dark with a sword in his hand.

Paul was put in chains more than once. From a prison far away, he wrote a letter to the church that had begun in Lydia's house and the jailer's. "Rejoice in the Lord always!" he told them. His gladness came from someone who had also been beaten, who sang a hymn with his friends on the night he was arrested, and who rose from the dead on the third day.

The jailer had asked what he must do to be saved. The answer was one name, the same name that had set the slave girl free: Jesus.