No Silence

DEVOTION

THE BOOK OF ACTS

NO SILENCE

Acts 4:18-20

18 Then they called them in again and commanded them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. 19 But Peter and John replied, "Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God's sight to obey you rather than God. 20 For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard."

NIV

There will always be some people who not only refuse to believe in Jesus, but want to silence those of us who do. The rest of scripture makes it clear enough why they refuse to believe in Jesus, but is there anything which tells us why they desire to silence us as well? This Sanhedrin did not want to accept Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ and that was their choice as God has given every man the free will to decide on his own whether he desires eternal life, or to perish. But to impose their will upon Peter and John was not a part of their free will God gave them. We know that God will put to silence those who do evil, but these men wanted to put Peter and John to silence for talking about Jesus. Today we have men trying their best to put us to silence. In other lands, they are actually killing Christians in order to silence us. In this land it is those who hate God, who declare unbelief in God who want to silence the voice of believers. Even our own government is acting in a way to remove our voice from the public forum by declaring any form that represents Christian belief must be removed from public places. They spit on Christianity whenever they can, making laws which defy the faith of believers. It seems we are a nation which touts tolerance for all beliefs except, of course, Christianity. Our nation even tolerates those who declare death to all those who do not believe as they do, especially Christians. When we gather with people who do not believe, we are told not to talk about our God, about Jesus, because it offends them, they don’t believe and so they do not want to hear about Jesus. But Peter told them to judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather then God. This is the voice we need, the words we need when we are asked or told to be silent about our faith. When someone says to us that it is fine for you, but not for me, so please keep silence about your faith, about Jesus, we need to simply ask them to judge for themselves whether it is right in the God’s sight for us to obey them or God. We have a voice and we cannot be silenced about the things we have seen or the things we have experienced. We have the right to speak our mind, our heart, our faith whenever the Spirit inspires us, which should be just about all the time as we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard. When others want to silence us, we say, “No silence”.