Week 35 — WEDNESDAY

This verse throws light on the life in Christ: “and most of the brethren have been made confident in the Lord because of my imprisonment, and are much more bold to speak the Word of God without fear” (Phil. 1:14). This reverses what we would usually expect. The Christians were more confident in the Lord and more free to speak the Word of God without fear through Paul’s imprisonment. The usual Christian attitude is that confidence and boldness would come if Paul had been delivered from the hands of his enemies and had been freed from imprisonment. Here it was reversed. The underlying assumptions were different in the minds of the early Christians—different from the usual run of thinking today. We expect the good to be exempt from suffering and pain; God is good if He saves us from trouble and calamity. But Paul had instilled into the early Christians the faith that the Christian isn’t exempt from trouble—he uses it. He takes hold of whatever comes, good, bad, or indifferent, and takes it up into the purpose of his life and transmutes it into achievement and victory.

They saw Paul in prison turn imprisonment into fruitfulness. Had he been free to preach we would in all probability have lost his sermons. Shut up in prison, however, unable to preach, he wrote those deathless letters which have enriched the world. He really did more behind bars than free. The Christians got the clue: “What does it matter if we are put in prison? We will preach to prisoners. Dammed up, we will break out in a new direction. So if the worst happens we can turn it into the best. Here goes; we are free, for we can stand anything that happens to us—stand it for we can use it!” Out of that possibility confidence and boldness grew. You cannot get confidence and boldness by whipping up the will; you get them only by knowing that you have cosmic backing, no matter what happens, and that “God works with us in everything for good.”

O Lord, my God, I am free, for I’m free to use everything. Banished on Patmos, I will see visions of the Victory. Laid on a bed of sickness, I will make pain my partner and my teacher. Then and only then am I confident and bold in the Lord. Amen.

AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I do not expect to be exempt from the ordinary sorrows of life—I expect only to be adequate for them.