Unscripted

Here’s the screenplay. A couple of missionaries are severely flogged and jailed. Despite their wounds and apparently unconcerned about the opinions of the prison population, they pray and worship God while doing their time. That night, there’s an earthquake, the prison doors fling open and, amazingly, all the prisoners’ chains just happen to fall off! One of the two intervenes in the jailer’s suicide attempt, shares the message of salvation and the jailer’s whole family comes to faith in Jesus Christ.

Hollywood? No, Bible! (Too far-fetched for Hollywood.)

But what a series of events! What an orchestration from the Divine! What great lengths to save a soul! God really must have wanted to claim the jailer and his family as his own! And what sovereignty! God would spring Paul and Silas from human captivity and release them into his kingdom work.

Who prays this stuff up? Seriously. Who knows better than God how he should go about his business? No one does.

But we try, don’t we? Have you ever tried to script God? We know what we want and we have plenty of suggestions for God as to how he might go about it. You know, just in case they hadn’t occurred to him. It’s our little way of retaining control, isn’t it? Our remnant of doubt; our reluctance to relinquish.

I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that neither Paul nor Silas prayed for a door-opening, chain-loosening, jailer-saving earthquake. Maybe they prayed for release; perhaps they prayed for their fellow captives and even their captor. But suggest the means to God? Nah.

Here’s what we know for certain. These faithful apostles prayed to God in belief and worshiped him in spirit and in truth. And it was God who conceived his plan in wisdom beyond understanding ... who executed it in his power beyond measure ... and in his love without limit. All of this for his own glory!

God takes great pleasure both in hearing our prayers and in answering them. And it must delight him to surprise us, for he rarely grants our requests according to the scenario we’ve written for him, but always better.

We can suggest his next lines all we want, but we do well to watch for a different scene and to listen for a sovereign script we could not write. For he wows his audience with the unexpected. Every time.

[See the daily reading in Acts 16:25-34.]