En-Couragement, a devotional thought

There’s a scene in Acts 23:11 that I find especially poignant. Here’s the background in a nutshell: Paul’s gone to Jerusalem where he’s been arrested by the religious leaders as a blasphemer and a disturber of the peace. He offers a public defense of himself before a gathered mob of his countrymen (visualize pitchforks and torches if you like...) at the end of which his own countrymen start crying out that he’s not fit to walk the earth.

 The Roman centurion who’s arrested him decides to interrogate him by flogging, to get to the bottom of things. They bind him up and are just about to bring down the lash, when he mentions he’s a Roman citizen and it’s illegal to flog a Roman without trial. Having narrowly escaped a scourging, he’s forced to stand trial before the Sanhedrin, where his testimony illicit such a violent response, that the centurion is forced to “drag him away by force” lest the crowd “tear him limb from limb.”

Paul’s been having a very rough weekend in ministry; the kind of weekend that makes my toughest ministry challenges look like a Sunday afternoon in the park. So it’s poignant, like I say, and touching, when you get to verse 11.

After all this danger and disgrace—mobs nearly tearing him apart, public trials, and near-floggings—Paul’s locked for the night in the Centurion’s barracks, waiting to learn what will come of him. And in verse 11 we read: “That night the Lord stood near Paul and said, ‘Take courage! As you have testified about me in Jerusalem, so you must also testify in Rome.’”

I call it poignant because if ever a follower of Jesus needed encouragement from the Lord, surely it was Paul that night. And the way the verse is worded, it sounds like he received a personal visitation from Jesus himself (The Lord stood by him...), breathing courage into his harried spirit. Of course, part of Jesus’ message for Paul is that there was more to come (eventually he will preach the Gospel in Rome itself), trials in which courage will be especially hard to come by. But in this moment at least, with dangers behind him and dangers ahead, Jesus is simply standing by his friend and imparting to him the supernatural courage that only he can.

May we also know Jesus standing by us, today, in those ministry challenges we face where courage is most needed but hardest to come by.