Wednesday, November 5th

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Wednesday, November 5

Acts 5:19-24

But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors and brought them out, and said, "Go and stand in the temple and speak to the people all the words of this Life." And when they heard this, they entered the temple at daybreak and began to teach. Now when the high priest came, and those who were with him, they called together the council and all the senate of the people of Israel and sent to the prison to have them brought. But when the officers came, they did not find them in the prison, so they returned and reported, "We found the prison securely locked and the guards standing at the doors, but when we opened them we found no one inside." Now when the captain of the temple and the chief priests heard these words, they were greatly perplexed about them, wondering what this would come to.

There have been dozens of movies made about prison escapes. Here are a few that come to mind:

Escape from Alcatraz starring Clint Eastwood.

The Great Escape starring Steve McQueen.

The Shawshank Redemption starring Morgan Freeman and Timothy Robbins.

I could list many more but in each case the stories follow a similar line. The inmates find some creative and usually painstaking way to escape the cells and walls of the prison. They spend years digging an underground tunnel with a spoon; or they crawl for miles on their belly through a sewer pipe; or they swim the San Francisco Bay with one arm...but they find some way to escape into freedom. Then they inevitably get as far away from that prison and the authorities as possible. They leave the country, they change their identities, they try to disappear somewhere far away!

Watch what happens here!

But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors and brought them out, and said, "Go and stand in the temple and speak to the people all the words of this Life." And when they heard this, they entered the temple at daybreak and began to teach.

O.K., so we have a miraculous, divine prison break; but look at what God tells them to do once they are set free! He tells them to go back to the place they were and to do the very thing that got them thrown into prison in the first place!

Whaaaaaat? You have to be kidding me! That makes no sense whatsoever; unless, of course, that the escape from prison isn’t the point of the miracle at all. The point of the miracle is the proclamation of the gospel!

We have a tendency to focus our attention on the miracles themselves; the healing of a man born lame; the angel setting prisoners free in the middle of the night; men speaking in languages they have never studied; while forgetting or overlooking the purpose of the miracles. In each case the purpose of the “signs and wonders” is the preaching of the gospel and people coming to faith in Jesus Christ.

The greatest miracle, of course, is a heart set free from the power of sin and death; a heart filled with the love and peace of the Holy Spirit; a soul saved from condemnation; a soul anchored in the promise of eternal life.

Let’s keep our eyes focused on the greatest miracle of all!

Pastor Brian Coffey