Freedom That Costs: Persecuted For Doing Good | September 13, 2026
This Sunday we stepped back into Unstoppable: The Church on Mission, our verse-by-verse study of the book of Acts. Sermon #44 brought us to Acts 16:16-24, and the title said most of what the text was about before we ever opened it: Freedom That Costs: Persecuted For Doing Good. Paul sets a girl free from something that had owned her for years, and before the sun went down that same day, it cost him his own freedom.
The big idea was simple and hard at the same time. Real deliverance is rarely convenient. Obedience is not always easy. We like to believe that once we say yes to Jesus the road smooths out and everybody starts being nice to us, but anyone who has followed Him for more than a week knows better. Paul says yes to setting a young woman free at nine in the morning, and by supper time he is bleeding on a stone floor in the dark.
Two Sundays ago we were in Acts 16:1-15, where the Spirit shut two doors in Paul's face without giving him a reason and then opened a riverbank in Philippi and a businesswoman named Lydia. Last Sunday we were out at Church in the Park with Grace Fellowship. So this week we picked Paul back up on that same road, and something met him there.
The enemy can use true words for false purposes. A slave girl with a spirit of divination followed Paul for days shouting, "These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation." Every word of that is true. It is free advertising downtown from somebody the whole city already listened to, and Paul shut it down anyway. Jesus did the same thing in Mark 1 with an unclean spirit that correctly called Him the Holy One of God. The source matters. In a Roman colony like Philippi, "Most High" was language pagan worshipers used too, so a true sentence could still land Paul's message in the wrong religious box, one more spiritual option instead of the one true and living God. Proverbs 29:5 says a man who flatters his neighbor spreads a net for his feet. A net, not a knife. Most of us know how to brace for criticism. We are not nearly as careful with compliments.
Doing the right thing can cost you everything. When the spirit came out of the girl, her owners' hope of gain went out with it, and Luke uses the same Greek verb back to back to make the point. But when they dragged Paul and Silas into the marketplace, they never mentioned the money. They packaged a financial grievance as an offense against Rome, because they knew exactly which nerve to press in a city proud of being Roman. The crowd joined in, the magistrates tore their clothes off them, and they were beaten with rods. That punishment was illegal for Roman citizens who had not been tried, and Paul says so plainly later in the chapter. Luke never records Paul saying that girl was not worth it. Peter writes that enduring faithfully while suffering unjustly is a gracious thing in the sight of God. Not the injustice. The endurance.
Even in your lowest moments, God is still there. Verse 24 is one sentence: the inner prison, and their feet fastened in the stocks. No angel yet. No earthquake yet. Just wounds and silence. And Luke never once mentions God in that verse. But Jeremiah sat in stocks for preaching what God gave him to preach, and Joseph went to prison for refusing to sin, and Genesis 39 picks that story back up with five words, "But the LORD was with Joseph." David wrote that if he made his bed in Sheol, God would be there. God not being mentioned is not the same thing as God not being there.
Some of us are living in verse 24 right now. One chapter of life that feels like nothing but consequence, with no explanation and no visible relief yet. Keep reading. That cell in Philippi became the place where a jailer and his whole household heard the gospel, and God built a church in that city out of a businesswoman at a riverbank and a jailer in the middle of the night. He is not limited to the comfortable half of your life.
Next Sunday we pick up in verse 25, where Paul and Silas start singing at midnight, and we would love to have you with us. We gather at 11:00 AM at the American Legion Post 96 on S Maple Ave in Brunswick. Come as you are. There is a seat here for you.