Remembered Paul and Silas while reading their missionary account in Acts chapter 16.
Paul cast the demon out of a slave girl, who had been disturbing them as they were doing ministry. Yet, what he did angered
the owner of the slave girl. He got Paul and Silas arrested.
The two daring missionaries were ganged up and beaten by the crowd and eventually they were thrown into prison.
Paul and Silas could have chose to end their missionary careers right there and then by airing their complaints to God
“Okay, Lord. We did ministry. We obeyed you, and here we are, inside this smelly dungeon. Chained and our feet in stocks. Is this your reward for your missionaries?”
But they didn’t. You know what they did? If they had their iPod shuffle, they could have pulled that out and started listening and singing worship songs to the Lord. But since that happened about 2,000 years ago, they sang acapella. They worshiped the Lord in the midst of their pain.
While their wounds are still dripping out blood and their eyes are perhaps, bulging after coming in contact with closed fists of people who hated them for preaching the Gospel, they chose to worship God.
In other words, they zoomed out of their current situation, then zoomed in on God’s greatness and goodness.
Looking back, I often had to ask myself, “how many times have I complained to the Lord when something unexpected, something bad or something came up that threw me out of my comfort zone?”
Yet, here’s what I realized. God is not in the business of causing you and me to hurt and suffer just for the sake of hurting and suffering. But God is in the business of using our pains and difficulties in life to bring us closer to Him.
To borrow from Pastor Mark Batterson’s line in his book In A Pit With A Lion On A Snowy Day, “Worship is forgetting what’s wrong with you and remembering what’s right with God.”
If you’re in pain right now, here’s a piece of Biblical lesson we can learn from Paul and Silas, zoom out of your problems and zoom in to God and His goodness.
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