The Jailer's House, and Mine

She was fifteen when somebody wrote it on a card for her, and she has had it in her Bible since, and about a year ago she took it out and did not put it back.

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.

The woman who gave it to her was kind and meant it entirely, and had a way of saying and thy house that made it sound like a done thing being announced rather than a verse being quoted. Aleisha was fifteen and had just become a Christian and her father was the reason she was crying at that camp, and somebody handed her a card that said her house was included.

She is twenty-one now. Her father is exactly as he was. Not hostile; that would be easier. Amused. Fond of her, proud of her in a way she can feel, and utterly unbothered by any of it, and he has been like that for six years while she has been holding a card.

What has happened this year is not that she stopped believing in God. It is narrower and it is uglier and she has not said it to anybody: she feels defrauded.

Somebody promised her a thing, and it did not come, and she has been carrying the arithmetic of a broken agreement, and underneath it is a question she cannot ask her house group without frightening them, which is whether the promises are like that generally.

If somebody handed you a verse as a guarantee, hear the question. Who exactly was standing in front of Paul?

What was actually said, and to whom

And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.Acts 16:31

The scene is a prison in Philippi. There has been an earthquake, the doors are open, and the man who runs the place is about to kill himself because his prisoners have escaped, except they have not. He comes in shaking and asks what he must do to be saved.

And Paul and Silas answer him, and the answer is addressed to a specific man in a specific night.

Now read the next verses, because they are what nobody put on the card. And they spake unto him the word of the Lord, and to all that were in his house. Then the jailer washed their wounds, and was baptized, he and all his, straightway. And the chapter says he rejoiced, believing in God with all his house.

So what happened is this. Paul told him the way in, for himself and available equally to his household, and then Paul went and preached to that household, and they heard it, and they believed, and they were baptized, all in one night, in one room.

It is a report of what happened in one house. It is not a clause guaranteeing that the relatives of every believer will be saved regardless of hearing, believing, or wanting to.

You have been holding a true sentence and reading it as a different kind of sentence, and it is already a report of a night rather than a signed contract. I am not taking a verse away from a twenty-one year old. It is written in Acts 16:31 and in the verses after it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets somebody read the whole account rather than a card.

The fraud she feels is real and it has the wrong defendant

And now the important part, because she is right that something went wrong, and it matters enormously who did it.

Somebody made her a promise that God did not make. That is a real thing that really happened to her at fifteen, and the sense of having been defrauded is not oversensitivity; it is an accurate response to a misrepresentation.

But God is not the defendant. A kind woman at a camp overstated a verse to a crying girl, out of love, and did her real harm without meaning any.

That distinction is worth everything, because if the defendant is God then every other promise in the Bible is now suspect, and Aleisha has spent a year quietly conducting that trial.

You were misinformed by somebody who loved you and not by the one whose word it is, and His word is already exactly what it says. Scripture says God is not a man that He should lie (Numbers 23:19), and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a young woman put the right name on what happened to her at fifteen.

What she actually still has

And here is what is left when the card goes, and it is more than she thinks.

She has a real account of a real household who heard and believed in one night, which is evidence that God does that, and does it in whole houses, and did it in a house nobody would have picked.

She has a father who is alive, fond of her, proud of her, and unbothered, which is a very good position for a man to be in compared to most of the alternatives.

And she has six years of praying for him that were not a fraud and were not wasted, whatever the card said. The prayers were real. The person receiving them is real. What was false was a guarantee about the timing and the certainty, and nothing about the actual work was touched by that.

You have everything you actually had, and it is already real, and the only thing that has gone is a promise nobody was authorized to make. It is written that they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all that were in his house, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that work in houses without ever being contracted to a date.