The Grace of God…

The Grace of God in isolation

Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, rejoice! Let your gentleness be known to all men. The Lord is at hand. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:4-7)

It is difficult to connect isolation with joy. But Paul does. He wrote his letter to the Philippian church around twenty years after he and Silas spent the night in the darkness of the inner prison at Philippi. They had been beaten, their backs were sore and bleeding, and their feet were in the stocks. They were being punished for doing good. If ever there was a time for despair and to doubt God, it seemed that was the time. But at midnight, in the darkest hour, Paul and Silas prayed and sang praises to God. The prison was filled with their joyful praise, and all the prisoners heard them. The earthquake which followed led to the conversion of the Philippian jailer, and that night in the jailer’s house Paul and Silas sat with their new brother in Christ. The once hard-hearted jailor was transformed into the gentlest of men. He expressed the reality of his salvation by the love he showed Paul and Silas in dressing their wounds and providing a meal, and by rejoicing with all his house. I like to think that, as Paul’s letter to the assembly at Philippi was read out, the Philippian jailer and his family, together with Lydia and the slave girl, sat with tears of joy rolling down their faces as they remembered how the love of God transformed their lives. But where was Paul writing from? He was writing from another and longer imprisonment. Yet joy continued to fill his heart. It was a joy he wanted to share and which he speaks about in every chapter of his extraordinary letter.

It is astonishing to realise that a considerable amount of the New Testament was written from imprisonment and isolation. When darkness, and the isolation it brought, filled the land of Egypt, we read that the people of God “had light in their dwellings” (Exodus 10:23). Isolation can be lonely, but it need not be so. It can be a place where we learn the nearness of God and the joy and opportunity it brings. When Saul of Tarsus met Jesus and was blinded by His glory, he began his discipleship in the isolation of blindness with the words, “What shall I do, Lord?” That desire to serve never left him. He never viewed any circumstance he faced as confinement, even prison. They were God-given opportunities to serve and honour the Lord. Paul never ceased to ask, “What shall I do, Lord?”

In this way, Paul is an example to us to lay before God our isolation and our loneliness. We can come before God in every circumstance we face and ask the question Paul asked, “What shall I do, Lord?” In this way we can discover the will of God and the grace He gives us to accomplish it. And we shall also find the joy that comes from such a pathway. The Lord wants our experience with Him and with one another to be a joyous one: “The joy of the Lord is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10).