It is easier to praise God when things are going well.

What do we do when the wheels fall off?

Today on Truth For Life we look at Silas and the Apostle Paul's prison experience

to learn how to worship and witness even when our circumstances are daunting.

Alistair Begg is teaching from Acts chapter 16, we're focusing on verse 25.

I think that it is safe to say that more than anything else we long together to be both a worshipping and a witnessing community of God's people.

And it is for that reason that I wanted to draw your attention to the 25th verse of Acts 16.

It just slips into the middle of the narrative here. It is there without much introduction and much follow-up on.

About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God and the other prisoners were listening to them.

The context in which this incident emerges is described for us here by Luke. In fact, you have the encounter of three individuals in the space of a few verses who are impacted by the power of God's word.

First of all, in the life of a business woman by the name of Lydia, who had been attending the place of worship, who had been listening to the word as it was proclaimed,

and who in the course of that routine environment discovered that her heart was opened to the truth of God's word and her life was changed.

Then we go on to read in the opening verses of the section that follows of their journey to the place of prayer once again,

and this time met by a slave girl, an anonymous slave girl, and she is delivered from the spirit that possesses her.

Luke does not tell us that she is at the same time converted and baptized, but I suppose each of us in reading this hopes desperately that that's the case.

You have added to the number not only a business woman who is identified by name, but an anonymous slave girl who was being used and abused by those who were her owners.

Then, of course, in the section that we did not read that follows the course of our reading this evening, you have the story of the conversion of a Roman jailer.

John start points out quite helpful that in relation to these individuals, they were disparate from one another, racially, socially, and psychologically worlds apart,

and yet they were changed by the same gospel and they were welcomed into the same church.

Now, the context that, of course, gives rise to the arrival of these individuals in the jail is the fact that when Paul exercised the spirit that possessed this young girl,

he also exercised the source of her owner's income. And as a result of doing so, the encouragement of the conversion of Lydia and the dramatic transformation in the life of this girl is then more than balanced out by all that follows from that point.

And you will notice that they are seized in verse 19, they are dragged into the marketplace, they agora, they are then put face to face with the authorities, they bring out the magistrates, and they seek very skillfully to disguise what their real concern was.

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