Heart of Worship: 30 Days to Deeper PraiseSample

It’s Kenzie with Essential Worship and we feel so blessed to bring you today’s Scripture from Acts 16:25-26 (NIV):

“About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly there was such a violent earthquake that the foundations of the prison were shaken. At once all the prison doors flew open, and everyone’s chains came loose.”

Have you ever done the right thing and it ended up backfiring in your face? Like you made the difficult decision to choose the right thing and it still goes wrong? We’ve been there. And as history has it, we are in good company alongside both Paul and Silas (some of the most dedicated followers of Christ!).

While traveling to a place of prayer, Paul and Silas came into contact with a female slave who had an evil spirit by which she would fortune-tell to make her owners money. After a few days of her following them around, Paul cast the spirit out of her “in the name of Jesus Christ”.

Saving someone from an evil, demonic spirit sounds like a good thing, right? Even the right thing, the best case scenario? To us, absolutely. But to her owners, their means of making money disappeared at that moment, so they took Paul and Silas to the authorities - thus how they ended up in prison.

Paul and Silas “should” have been celebrated (by all human measures), but instead they were imprisoned, punished.

We don’t know about you, but our response to this situation would have been despair, anger - maybe even a little bit of confusion. We would have spent the rest of the evening either mute and not talking to God at all, screaming at God for His seeming injustice of letting us be imprisoned, or ignoring God entirely and coming up with a plan of release.

And yet, that was not the action that Paul and Silas took. Instead, you would have found them in their cell worshipping the Lord and praying to Him with bold faith.

This brings about our first question for you to chew on, taking a moment to reflect on your own heart: When you are faced with what feels like unjustifiable trouble - how do you react towards God?

1. Do you go silent on Him? Refusing to speak to Him at all out of disappointment and confusion?
2. Do you scream at Him, perhaps with some choice words you may later regret?
3. Do you take matters into your own hands, like His opinion or help doesn’t exist?
4. Or do you hit your knees in prayer - choosing to worship Him anyway regardless of the cost?

1 through 3 come quite easy - but getting to choice 4 is much harder. It takes practice and it takes faith.

Our friends CAIN wrote a song about this Scripture where the chorus starts by singing, “Praise opens prison doors”. Today, we can say that while we still struggle to choose praise in our trials - we know that there is freedom on the other side of praise and worship. We know that Christ is glorified when we choose to trust Him in confusing and dark circumstances. And we know that He is working all things for good - even in the prison cell.

Take a moment to read the rest of Acts 16 whether it’s your first time or five-hundredth. You are about to see the plan that the Lord had working behind the scenes and the life that He let Paul and Silas go to prison to save.

Our unfair, unjust “prison” could end up being someone else’s rescue story. Choose to praise Him - even when you don’t know the end of the story.* He is worth it.

You might just be surprised by what He does in the process.

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*note, we know that sometimes really dark things happen that make it feel impossible to praise the Lord. There is sooo much grace for this. Your tears and prayers of confusion, anger, and shame are just as much worship onto Him as is a song. You’re allowed to take up space and mourn. He just wants to be near you. We are with you, friend, but more so - God is with you.

Amen.