What Are You Chained To?

Just a short thought for today. I was reading in Acts 28 where Paul was coming into the later period of his ministry. He had succeeded in making all of the Jewish religious leaders really mad talking about Jesus all the time. They thought they had gotten rid of Jesus, and here this Paul guy is keeping the thing alive.

They falsely accused Paul and through political pressure against Rome had Paul put under a Roman form of house arrest. Your commentaries will tell you that this meant that Paul would have been literally chained to a soldier. The soldiers would have done this in shifts. The scripture says that Paul rented his own home under arrest for 2 years. I’ve read estimates that say that Paul would have been chained to thousands of soldiers over that 2 year period. All this time people continued to come to see Paul from all over and he continued to preach the gospel to them.

Now what do you think Paul did with those poor soldiers chained to him? How many of those soldiers met Christ there in his home? How many left there to continue spreading the gospel from within the Roman empire?

Would Paul have said that he was chained to a soldier or the soldier was chained to him?

All of us are chained to something. Something that we look at as a curse, a bad twist of fate or bondage. Maybe it’s a job we hate. Maybe it’s sickness. Maybe it’s an annoying relationship that just won’t go away. Could it be that what we call bondage is actually where God has sent us? Maybe instead of constantly waiting for God to release us from our chains so that we can at last be free to do what we are called to do, we should live sent right where we are.

What is it that they say? Bloom where you’re planted.

[tags]Paul, apostle, bondage, freedom, live sent, Acts[/tags]