Carter Conlon from the historic Times Square Church in New York City. Dr. Conlon, in Acts chapter 16, we find Paul and Silas stripped, beaten, and thrown in the Philippian prison.
A jailer was assigned to watch closely over them. Then, around midnight, Paul and Silas were praying, and they began singing. That's when God came to them with a magnificent miracle. Let's join Carter now with his message, God Will Come to Where You Are. I trust and believe that you will be greatly blessed as we continue to pray for you and to believe God for miracles in your life. And I believe you're going to experience that kind of a miracle.
You know, a lot of people are sitting in darkened places listening. You ask yourself the question, how can I get to God? Well, the good news for you is that you don't have to get to God. God's coming to you right where you are, right in your darkened place, in your struggle, your trial, your difficulty.
I'm going to show you that in the Bible. Psalm 40, a psalm of David, a young man who had known struggles in his life, known difficulties. He'd had some hard, hard places on his journey, but he'd learned one thing above them all. When you cry out to God, God answers. No matter how tough it gets, no matter how deep or dark the place is that you are in, when you just say the name Jesus, he'll come. There's no door that can hold him back.
There's no wall too thick. He can't walk through it. There's no sorrow so deep that he can't penetrate that area where your heart has been broken and bring healing into your life. I want you to hear my words because God is coming to you where you are, right to you right now, not 24 hours from now, not next week, not next year, but now. He's going to come to you. All you have to do is open your heart and just say, Jesus, come to me.
Don't make it complicated. He hears the cry of your heart. Psalm 40 verse 1, David said, I waited patiently for the Lord and he inclined to me and heard my cry. He also brought me up out of a horrible pit out of the miry clay and set my feet upon a rock and established my steps. He has put a new song in my mouth, praise to our God. Many will see it and fear and will trust in the Lord. David says, I was in a terrible place.
I don't know if we can even begin to understand how terrible that place was. He made some tragic mistakes in his life, some when he was younger and one in particular when he was older, but he had learned that when I cry out to God, God will give me back that song again, that song that people could see, that confidence in you, God. My whole countenance just exuding a confidence in your ability to lift me one more time and to deliver me from my enemies. Verse 11 he says, do not withhold your tender mercies from me, O Lord. Let your loving kindness and your truth continually preserve me for innumerable evils have surrounded me. David says, I can't even count them.
I seem to be opposed on every side. My mind is being bombarded by thoughts from my past, things that were spoken over my life, things I began to believe about myself. The enemy has taken these and I'm surrounded.
I don't even know what to do. My iniquities have overtaken me so that I'm not able to look up. I'm not only being accused, but I'm aware of my own weaknesses. I'm aware of my failures.
They're more than the hairs in my head. Therefore, my heart fails me. Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me.
O Lord, make haste to help me. Let them be ashamed and brought to mutual confusion who seek to destroy my life. Let them be driven backwards and brought to dishonor who wish me evil. Let them be confounded because of their shame who say to me, aha, aha, every voice that says we've got you, every thought that says you're going to amount to nothing, every demonic power that tries to bring them mistakes of my past or somebody else's mistakes that were done to me in my past, that try to come back upon me and try to declare we've triumphed over you.
We have you now. We know you were anointed to rule and reign, but we have conquered you. David said, they seek to destroy me, but I'm asking you, God, to drive them backwards. I'm asking you to bring them to dishonor and let them be confounded who think that they have the right to triumph over those that you have touched and called your own. Make that your own prayer. Make it your prayer young and old that are here in the sanctuary this evening. God, push back my enemies and don't let any voice that is trying to tell me I'm not going to make it ever triumph over me. David says, let all those who seek you rejoice and be glad in you. Let such as love your salvation say continually, the Lord be magnified, but I'm poor and needy yet the Lord thinks upon me. You are my help and my deliverer.
Do not delay. Oh my God. The book of Acts chapter 16 tells us of a dark and despairing prison that held fast its prisoners. As a matter of fact, it was called the inner prison. Bad enough being in the outer prison, but the inner prison was a place where there's an absence of light. There are no windows in the inner prison. There is no light in the inner prison. Matter of fact, later on, the keeper of the prison had to call for a light to go in because you can't see in that place. It's so dark, there's no visible comfort around you anywhere in that place. Nothing visible, no window, nothing pretty to look at, no birds to watch in trees or flowers to look out on the grass.
Everything is dark. All that anybody in that place would be aware of is the depth of their failures, the struggles, the trials, the hopelessness of their predicament, the cruelty of their captors, the bleakness of their future. It was a place where only the faint hope of divine help was left.
There was nothing else left. I wonder if some in that place may have even given a thought about God. You don't know for sure, but somebody there must have said, God, can you help me?
Somebody online is saying that I'm speaking about you and you know it because you're in that place. You're in the inner prison. You're in a dark and despairing place that has held you fast for a long time. It's so dark there that it's hard to see light. You can't see a future. You can't see a way out. You see the glass is continuously half empty.
You can't see the half full side of the glass at all. And in the midst of it all, suddenly in this dark place, they heard a song. Isn't it amazing? Song by people who shared some of their pain. But the curious thing about this song is that the pain that the people singing it seem to have lost its power of despair over them.
Amazing. Two guys, Paul and Silas are thrust into that prison. They've been beaten with rods.
Feet are in stocks. They're laying on cold slabs of stone. And at midnight, they began to sing and praise God. Can you imagine? I don't know what they were singing. I'd love to hear that song. I think we're going to sing one like it after I'm done speaking. There's a song I just love.
It goes, all my hope is in Jesus. And maybe Silas was like brother Roscoe. Come on, Paul. Come on, Paul.
Swing it again. Come on, Paul. And when they heard the song, you see the point being, I want to speak to the people on light. I know the stories of a lot of people in this sanctuary. And I know the stories of some people on this platform. And I know that people are going through struggles. There are people here with physical afflictions. There are people here are trying to get through struggles and trials of their own and difficulties. There are people here who without the intervention of God would already have been swallowed by the sorrow of some things perhaps that came their way when they were younger. But you heard a bunch of people singing a song and the despair they could be feeling has lost its power over them.
And the people in the inner prison began to hear the song just as you have heard us here in this sanctuary singing. There are people here that have in this sanctuary, they're still struggling with family issues, marriage issues, people struggling with physical illnesses. There are people struggling to get victory over something that they have to fight through. Everybody has to fight through certain things time and again in our lives. But yet, all the struggles of this world and the trials of this world have lost their power to take away that song. You remember David said, God heard me.
He took me out of a horrible place, set my feet upon a rock, put a new song in my mouth and many will see it and fear and trust in the Lord. You saw the song, you didn't necessarily see the struggle, but the struggles are still there. We're not here to pretend like we don't have struggles.
I know there are some people who try to do that, but that's not the truth. We all have to go through storms. We all have to go through trials. You know, Paul and Silas weren't shouting in from outside the prison through the window. They were in the prison beaten up with their backs on cold stone, with their feet in stocks and their hands in chains.
They weren't spared the hardship, but the hardship had lost its power over them to defeat them. As a matter of fact, God put such power in their song that when they began to sing their song and pray their prayers, the whole place began to shake. When you and I make the choice to live for God and sing for God, let me tell you, hell begins to shake.
Every devil of hell begins to shake because every demon of hell knows that one saint of God rising up on his or her feet with the song of God in his or her mouth one more time can tear their kingdom to pieces, can destroy their imprisonments. How many years did it take to build that prison? You think of the iron forgers forging their iron that made up these iron gates in the fire. You think of those who installed the bars in the inner parts of the prison. You think of those who had to lay the stone.
You think of those who had to develop a system to hold the captive. What did it take to bring it all to nothing? One song. Hallelujah.
One song sung in the midnight hour. One saint or two saints in this case that chose to worship God above their struggle and their own personal trial because they knew they already had the victory in Jesus Christ. They knew heaven was already their home. They knew there's no power of hell that could hold them down.
They knew they were given a divine commission to take the strength of almighty God to their generation. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. When they began to sing and when they began to pray in the midnight hour, it just doesn't get any darker. The place was shaken.
Can you imagine? As we sang in this sanctuary, I think somebody's place began to shake out there. Your dark apartment. I'm speaking to somebody.
Even your one lamp you have has about a 20-watt bulb in it. You're afraid of light for some reason. It's dark, but as we began to sing… You don't even know why you're watching this prayer meeting.
I know why. As we began to sing, we chose to sing through our own fatigue. I think it was Vanessa who got up and said, God had to drag some of us in here just to sing because we're tired.
We got our own struggles. It's been a hard day. It's 90 degrees outside. 100 degrees.
Thank you for that correction very much. But God brought us here and as we began to sing our song, your place began to shake. Everything the devil has built around you began to shake. It began to lose its hold. It began to lose its sense of permanence.
It began to lose its lies of hopelessness. You'll never get out. You'll never amount to anything. You'll never be anything. God doesn't love you.
God doesn't want you. All of a sudden, all these things began to break. Suddenly, the Scripture says the doors opened. Those doors have big keys, and they got big deadbolt locks. They go into big iron openings in the big steel frames around.
When they shut, they stay shut. It took all that to lock them in, and it took one song to open it up. When Jesus Christ stood in the temple and opened the book of the prophet Isaiah, and he said, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, began to state the reasons. One of them was to set free the captives. By the power of his presence, by the power of his word, not to have the captives find a way out and then come to church, get themselves all cleaned up and all dressed up and get their speech all good and look respectable and come to church. No, no.
He goes to you right where you are. Then another thing happened. The chains fell off. Hallelujah.
The chains on their heads just let go. The things that say, you'll never be more than what you are. You'll never have more than what you have.
You'll never be anything other than what you've been. Those chains that say that you're bound to your past, you're bound to your behaviors, you're bound to the lies that are governing your life, then suddenly the place is shaken, the doors open, and the chains fall off. The glory of God comes into every cell.
Do you want to know the interesting thing about this story that I love? There's none of them left because the presence of God was sweeter than the whole thought of freedom in this world that lay before them. They didn't want to leave the presence of God.
It's really that simple. The presence of God had come in. When you have the presence of God, where do you go to get more?
What does this world have to offer that could even rival that or even match that or even come close to that? The jailer sprang to his feet and ran in and called for a light. He was going to kill himself because it would cost him his life to lose his prisoners. Those were the rules back in those days. He was about to kill himself where Paul said, do yourself no harm.
We're all here. Could you imagine? I think that's part of the reason why he gave his life to Christ that night because these were hardened criminals in this place. The thought that they would not flee an open cell was perplexing to his mind. The only explanation I can come up with is the presence of God had come to them.
Where do you go from that? Every man or woman, whatever it was, chose to sit in their cell even with the door open and the chains off. They stayed there because the presence of God was there. God comes to you where you are. He's not afraid to come to you where you are.
He's not ashamed to come to you where you are because he loves you with an everlasting love. As a matter of fact, he said through the prophet Isaiah, I can never forget you. I engraved you on the palms of my hands. When those nails went through the hands of Jesus, your name was on the tip of those nails. He loves you with an everlasting love. He has a future for you.
He has a plan for your life, not just eternal forgiveness as wonderful as that is, but a plan for your life, for the future. I don't know what happened to those prisoners, but I strongly suspect when I get to heaven, we're going to find out some of them became evangelists. We're going to find out. I don't know. I think maybe one day they stood before magistrates and the magistrate would say, the door was open.
Why didn't you leave? And all they could say is God came to where I was and changed my life. I think some of them may have found themselves with this sudden supernatural, not just that prison, but the whole system letting them go so they can serve God and glorify God.
I don't know that for sure. It's a conjecture, but I think I'm going to live when I get to heaven to see some of that. God came to them and that's the word that God's given me for you. People who are online, God has come to you right where you are, right in your room.
You with your burlap lampshade with about a 20 watt bulb in it. He's come to you to set you free because he loves you. He's come to you because that's why he came to the earth in the first place.
That's why he went to a cross. He went to a cross, the Bible says, to take your captivity captive and give gifts to you. To give you the gift of eternal salvation by taking your place on the cross and paying the price for everything that you have done that separated you from God. He came to you to give you hope in the future, to give you a new song.
And before you know it, you're going to be singing the song. You're going to be telling all your friends, I've got to tell you what God has done for me. And you're going to find yourself praying for them and you're going to find God doing the same thing for them that he did for you.
That's what's going to happen to you and that's what's happening in this last generation. A mighty army is coming to its feet and you are part of it. So Father, in Jesus' name, in Jesus' name, in Jesus' name, Father, I ask you by the power of your Holy Spirit to visit people right where they are. I ask you to shake their captivity, shake their strongholds. I ask you to open their prison doors. I ask you in Jesus' name to take the chains off of their hands. I ask you, Lord God, to give the people a new mind, a new heart, and a new spirit, for this is the promise you made through the prophets of old.
I ask you, God Almighty, to have them sing this new song that David spoke about. I was sinking. I was dying. I was in a horrible place. I called up to God. He lifted me out of a horrible pit.
He set my feet upon a rock and established my goings. And he has put a new song in my mouth, even praise to our God, and many will see it and fear and trust in the Lord. God, thank you for planting that new song in somebody's heart.
Thank you for new words coming into their minds, new thoughts about the future, a new pathway before their feet, a new solidness they never had before, a new freedom they've never known. Thank you, God. Thank you, Lord Jesus Christ, for doing what only you can do. We give you praise and glory for it. We thank you, Lord, that our songs have borne fruit, eternal fruit. We thank you, Jesus Christ, for all that you are doing. Now I'm going to ask you to pray a simple prayer with me, a simple prayer.
And here's what it sounds like. And I'm going to say it and you say it right after me. Jesus Christ, Son of God, come to me right where I am.
Set me free and I will serve you and I will walk with you all the days of my life. If you just prayed that and you meant that with all your heart, text the word decided to 51,000 on your cell phone. Just go ahead and do that right now as a simple act of faith. But just do it. Go ahead.
Just text the word decided to 51,000. We're going to have communion in just a moment. We're going to celebrate this great victory that's come to your life in your house, in your dark place. Can you actually feel the light that's coming in now?
Can you feel the light? It first begins in your own heart. Suddenly there's a warmth, there's a hope, and it radiates through you up into your mind. Suddenly God says, just let me and I'll give you new thoughts and I'll give you a new way to live and a promise that when death comes your way one day, that heaven will be your eternal home.
Heaven is the place where God is and you'll be with God forever. Hallelujah. Father, thank you for what you have done. God, I don't know the people, but I see the faces and I want to say thank you. I want to thank you for the tears coming down somebody's face right now. I want to thank you God for the hope coming into somebody's heart right now.
I want to thank you for the chains falling off somebody's hands right now. I want to thank you Lord that somebody's going to go outside after this meeting and just sing for the first time in a long time. They're just going to sing to you.
God, thank you. Even if it's a song in their own words, they're going to sing to you and give you thanks and give you praise in Jesus' name. You've been listening to Carter Conlon from Times Square Church in New York City. For more information and resources to help you in your walk in Christ, log on to tsc.nyc. That's tsc.nyc. And be sure to be with us next week for A Call to the Nation with Carter Conlon.
