25 About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them, 26 and suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken. And immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone’s bonds were unfastened. 27 When the jailer woke and saw that the prison doors were open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, supposing that the prisoners had escaped. 28 But Paul cried with a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.” 29 And the jailer called for lights and rushed in, and trembling with fear he fell down before Paul and Silas. 30 Then he brought them out and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” 31 And they said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” 32 And they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. 33 And he took them the same hour of the night and washed their wounds; and he was baptized at once, he and all his family. 34 Then he brought them up into his house and set food before them. And he rejoiced along with his entire household that he had believed in God.
35 But when it was day, the magistrates sent the police, saying, “Let those men go.” 36 And the jailer reported these words to Paul, saying, “The magistrates have sent to let you go. Therefore come out now and go in peace.” 37 But Paul said to them, “They have beaten us publicly, uncondemned, men who are Roman citizens, and have thrown us into prison; and do they now throw us out secretly? No! Let them come themselves and take us out.” 38 The police reported these words to the magistrates, and they were afraid when they heard that they were Roman citizens. 39 So they came and apologized to them. And they took them out and asked them to leave the city. 40 So they went out of the prison and visited Lydia. And when they had seen the brothers, they encouraged them and departed.
— Acts 16:16-24, ESV

Chuck Colson had to go to prison to find peace with God.  He was Ivy League smart (Brown University), but his intellect drew him away from the Lord.  He was military grade tough (a U.S. Marine), but his heart was hardened to the gospel.  He was a financially successful Boston lawyer, but you know about that camel through the eye of a needle thing.  In 1969 he had an office next door to the most powerful office in the world, the Oval Office, as Special Council to the President.  The Washington Post gave him a different job title, “Hatchet Man.”

Power corrupts and it corrupted Colson.  In 1973 he became the first Watergate conspirator to serve actual time in prison.  On the way to incarceration a friend gave him a copy of the Bible and “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis.  He read both books, then penned his own, the first of over thirty best-sellers, entitled “Born Again.”  It described his rise and fall, his incarceration and resurrection, and how it took prison for him to find peace with God.

But Colson is not the first person to find the Lord Jesus Christ in prison.  This dubious distinction belongs to no prisoner at all, but rather a prison guard, the Philippian Jailer, who for a time oversaw the incarceration of Paul and Silas.  The two missionaries were in prison; yet, they were really free.  The Philippian Jailer was not sentenced to confinement, yet he lived in the worst prison of all, lostness.  He was blessed to discover, however, that the journey is not far from prison to peace with God.

There are different kinds of prisons.

There are prisons we build to lock up other people.  With ever increasing crime rates, it’s big business, too.  Last year we Americans spent over three hundred billion dollars on criminal justice and correctional facilities.  The state of Arkansas is currently seeking a donation of land to build our newest prison.  They want free land because it will cost state taxpayers up to a hundred and sixty-two million dollars to build the prison and twenty-three millions dollars a year to operate it.

That’s a lot of money, but it is money necessarily spent.  We must punish and potentially rehabilitate the criminals.  We ought to take good care of our correctional officers, who like the police and the military are doing the hard jobs most of us do not want to do.  We need prisons, we have prisons, and we prisons have existed in every period of human history.

The prison system in the Roman Empire was organized but arduous.  Inmates got no perks, and were dependent upon outsiders, like family, friends, or charitable organizations, for basic needs like food and clothing.  Prison guards were put under enormous pressure.  They had a peculiar custom that required a guard who let a prisoner escape to assume that prisoner’s sentence, even capital punishment.

That is why the Philippian Jailer was going to kill himself after the apparent jailbreak.  Along with Paul and Silas, there were convicted murderers who potentially escaped, and the Jailer knew what that meant for him, so he decided to just do the job himself.  Paul stopped him by announcing that all the prisoners were still in the prison.  The earthquake had broken chains and opened doors, but had not allowed any prisoner to escape justice, or injustice, in Paul’s and Silas’ case.  It must have been a well built prison to keep all the prisoners inside, even after an earthquake.

There are prisons we build for other people; then, there are the prisons we build for ourselves.  We do not build them with concrete floors and steel bars, but with unhappiness, unholiness, and uncertainty.  I think the Philippian Jailer was unhappy, working the midnight shift, seldom seeing his family.  Suicide sure seemed easy for him.  I know he was unholy, a pagan Greek working for the pagan Romans.  And by his own confession he was uncertain, he did not know how to be saved from the prison he had built for himself with his own hands, until he encountered Jesus Christ through the Christian witness of Paul and Silas.

There are different kinds of people.

The Philippian Jailer was one kind of person.  Paul and Silas were completely different kind of people.  There really are only two kinds of people in the world, lost people and saved people.

Among the lost there are different kinds, too.  There are the lost people who do not know they are lost, which is the vast majority of lost people.  They don’t believe in God, or at least don’t believe that belief in God is something that should govern one’s life, not when there are more important things to do on Sundays and the other days of the week.

Then there are lost people who do believe in god, or gods, with a little “g.”  They’ve bet on the wrong horse, and they still think he is going to win.  This would have been particularly true in the Greco-Roman world of Paul’s missionary journeys.  And, it is true today to the vast majority of the world’s population, who are very religious but quite ignorant of our God and Savior Jesus Christ.

Then there are the lost people who know they are lost, like the Philippian Jailer.  This is the kind of lost person you would want to be if you were lost, only not for long.  This kind of lost person has been touched by the gospel, convicted by the Holy Spirit, and cannot rest until they get the answer to the world’s greatest question, “What must I do to be saved?”

Only saved people can answer this question.  But there are different kinds of “saved” people in the world, too.  There are people who are superficial saved, meaning they are actually lost.  There are people genuinely saved, yet yield little fruit and bear almost no witness.  Then there are saved people who truly show it, and share it, like Paul and Silas.

How provident that the Philippian Jailer ran into this kind of Christianity.  He knew Paul and Silas were on a mission for Christ and His church, and you don’t have to be a full-time missionary to be on a mission for Christ.  You simply have to let it be know to anyone who knows you for an hour or more that you have been saved by grace through faith in Christ, and Christ and Christianity are the most important things in your life.

The Jailer witnessed Paul’s and Silas’ witness, how they were singing and praising God in the midst of the most difficult circumstances imaginable.  It’s easy to do those things on the mountaintop, but it is our devotion to the Lord in the valley that lost people really look at.  The Jailer witnessed it, and wanted it, which prompted his wise and world-changing question.

The Jailer heard Paul’s answer, “Believe in the Lord Jesus,” and he believed, and we know he believed.  For while a person is justified by faith alone, saving faith is never alone.  It is accompanied by repentance, results in witness, and is marked by persistence.

The Jailer tried to make right the wrongs done to Paul and Silas.  The Jailer, once led to Christ by the missionaries, led his whole family to Christ.  The Jailer proved his faith with obedience, by being baptized and continuing on with the the new church in Philippi, long after the excitement had ceased.  When everything was said and done, the Philippian Jailer found peace with God, springing from the prison that had kept him every day of his adult life.

There are different kinds of peace.  

There are different kinds of prison, literal and spiritual.  There are different kinds of people, lost and saved.  And, according to the text, there are different kinds of peace.

There is a peace that comes from ignoring the gospel.  This is the false peace pursued by the political leaders of Philippi, when they realized they have violated Paul’s and Silas’ civil rights by unjustly beating and imprisoning them.

“Therefore come out now,” the politicians prayed, “And go in peace.”  “Peace?”  Here is what they really meant, which is actually stated later, “And they took them out and asked them to leave the city.”  They wanted the missionaries gone.  They wanted all the gospel talk to stop.  They wanted Christianity hidden in the closet, not proclaimed in the public square.  They wanted to keep this kind of “peace.”

False peace is poured out in our world today.  They want Christmas without Christ.  They want churches without the exclusive truth of the gospel and the ultimate authority of the Bible.  They want diversity, perversity, and freedom to sin, rather than truth, holiness, and the freedom from sin that comes by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.

Real peace requires prison.  People must be convicted of their sin and rebellion against God.  People must hear the witness of Paul and Silas, calling them to “believe … the word of the Lord.”  People must stand in that old prison, the Fortress Antonio in Jerusalem, look to the hill called Calvary, and see Christ on the cross.  What is He doing there?  He is taking on our prison, our punishment, our propitiation, so that we be saved and be truly free.

And when a person steps out of this prison into the glorious freedom of God, whether they be a jailer or an inmate, they can say with the great Apostle and missionary, “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith,” our bodies out of prison and our souls set free, “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (ref. Romans 5:1).  This is how we go, from prison to peace.