Triumphant Gladness

I am going to read a text from a narrative that gives an account of the first Christian services ever held. It is the first song service that is recorded.

Acts 16:25: “And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God: and the prisoners heard them.”

Christianity is a religion of song and in this particular respect it is distinguished from very many of the false religions known to the world. It is a religion of song because it is a religion of gladness. Christ not only saves the soul but He satisfies the longing of the human heart and song is the natural expression of a happy heart. Our hymnology just teems with illustrations of this thought. I think of one old song we used to sing many years ago. I sometimes wish we could resurrect a number of those hymns that seem to have gone out of date.

I feel like singing all the time;
My sins are washed away,
For Jesus is a Friend of mine,
I’ll praise Him night and day.

When on the cross my Lord I saw,
Nailed there for sins of mine,
Fast fell the falling tears, but now
I’m singing all the time.

One great truth suggested by this text and the narrative from whence I have taken it is that the joy of the Christian does not depend upon circumstances. Joy that comes to a  natural man is the result of something that happens. If it is something real good, if everything is coming one’s way, we may feel like expressing ourselves in song. But the joy of the Christian does not depend upon circumstances or what happens. Bless God, it fills one’s heart frequently in spite of what happens, not because of it!

We have a good illustration in the story before us here. Two men, preachers of the Gospel, had carried the glad tidings to one of the most wicked cities the world has ever known. It was seething with sin of the vilest character—sin fostered and perpetuated by parasites for the sake of money. It is not always because men delight to see women and boys and girls degraded and debauched with drinking and licentiousness that they engage in many of their evil works and deeds. It is because of the money that is in it, because of greed and love of gain. It was so in the city of Philippi.

Spiritism Is Of Satan

One day, these two preachers saw a spirit medium, for that is just what she was. I am not saying that to hurt the feelings of any one who has resorted to the seance to find some comfort in the hour of your sorrow. I am saying it because the Bible puts the damnation of God upon that sort of thing. If you will read your Bible with care you will see that spiritism is almost as old as human history and right from the beginning God puts His seal of disapproval upon anybody who will resort to a “wizard,” or a “witch,” or a “necromancer,” or a spirit medium. This girl in the city of Philippi was evidently one of that sort. I am not one of those who say all such revelations and manifestations are fraud and forgery. Not at all. I believe my Bible and I believe the devil can give a revelation as well as God. I believe evil spirits can possess a man or woman and can counterfeit my mother’s voice or my child’s voice and deceive me into believing that my very child or my mother is talking to me. And I would no more go to a spirit seance, even if I were told that my little boy would materialize before me and talk to me, than I would think of going to some den of iniquity, for I know I would be on the devil’s ground.

Demons Believe And Tremble

This girl followed these preachers and she cried out, “These are the servants of the Most High God.” Have you ever noticed, friends, in the Bible wherever demons are spoken of they never question the deity of Christ. Never. They say of Jesus, “We know who Thou art. Thou art the Holy One come of God.” Devils believe and tremble. This woman testified that these were the servants of the Most High God and she followed them.

Then Paul turned around and cast the demon out of her. It was Satan in that woman who did the divining and Paul cast that wicked spirit out of her. When her owners who were making money out of this cursed thing saw the source of gain was taken from them, they charged Paul and Silas with disturbing the peace. They found them in the market place preaching, had them arrested and brought before the authorities. The magistrate had their backs stripped bare to the waist and scourged them with great leather thongs. And then they charged the jailer to put them in the inner prison and make them secure in the stocks.

We sometimes talk about the awful places that some of our city jails are. But listen, friends, they are homes and heaven compared with the jails in the time of Paul. What I want you to see is this, that in spite of all those conditions and circumstances, that darkness and that suffering, the joy of the Lord filled their hearts and bubbled over. Joy in spite of conditions! Bless God for that kind of joy! Anybody, as I said a moment ago, can sing when everything is bright and is coming their way, but when it is midnight, when your feet are fast in the stocks (and I guess every fellow sometimes gets his feet tangled in the stocks), when your hands are tied, when it is a physical midnight, a material midnight, and everything looks as black as hell itself, it is only the joy of the Lord that makes you sing.

The Gift Of God

This joy it is the gift of God. It is “the joy of the Lord” Himself. David says, “He brought me up from an horrible pit. He set my feet upon a rock and put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto God.” And you know that is the natural consequence, or supernatural if you like, of every man or woman who puts faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

I could not help but think tonight that until forty-two years ago I don’t know that I ever sang. I never knew a Philpott that could sing until I was saved and then I found out one could sing after all. At any rate, I never thought of singing. But I went down to the blacksmith shop the next morning after I had been converted and worked on the very same old sleigh that I had been working on the day before. The nuts were rusty and the wrench slipped. It was nearly noon. I was working away. I had not said anything to anybody, but I was quite happy. My boss came over to me and stood looking down at me (he was a big man) and he said, “My boy, what’s the matter with you?”

I was surprised. I did not think anything was the matter. I said, “Nothing, Bill.”

“Why,” he said, “don’t you remember yesterday I rebuked you for taking God’s name in vain?”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

“But listen,” he went on, “you’ve been singing all morning.”

God had put a new song in my soul and it was just singing itself. You will have a hard time convincing me that conversion is not a real thing. For forty-two years there has never been a suggestion of an oath come to my lips and before that time, I took God’s name in vain almost every sentence. You may not believe in miracles, but I do. Yes, this is the joy of the Lord that makes light all one’s hands finds to do, that gives common toil a new complexion, that lifts it to a holy plane.

The Testimony Of Fact

The history of the church literally abounds with records of men and women who have been able to sing when their feet were fast in the stocks and it was a physical midnight. Let me just read a verse or two from the songs of some of those midnight singers.

Stone Walls do not a Prison make,
Nor Iron bars a Cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an Hermitage.

If I have freedom in my Love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above,
Enjoy such Liberty.
—Richard Lovelace, “To Althea, from Prison”

Thus sang Sir Richard Lovelace in a dirty prison.

Madam Guyon said: “Sometimes it seems to me as if I were a little bird whom the Lord had placed in a cage and I had nothing to do but sing.”

“A little bird am I, shut in from fields of air,
And in my cell I sit and sing of Him who placed me there,
Well pleased a prisoner to be, because, My God, it pleaseth Thee.”

Dear old John Bunyan, when cast into prison, cried out, “Since God has given me freedom, I am at home in prison.” It was there that he sang his immortal song which has been translated into nearly every written language under the sun. It takes its place next to the Bible itself.

A few years ago, I had the privilege of being in John Bunyan’s little home. There was a woman in charge of it. I asked her if she were a Christian and she said she was not. I said, “My sister, I can’t understand how any one could live in John Bunyan’s house and not accept Christ.” She showed me the room where Bunyan used to kneel and pray for hours, and I said, “Why not kneel here and pray to God for forgiveness?” And she did. I went to the jail on the edge of the old bridge in Bedford and looked into that little room not as large as this platform where Bunyan dreamed his dream and wrote his wonderful story. You can look for a new kind of religion if you like, but give me the religion of these old saints of God.

The power of song is proverial [sic]. Battles have been won by song. You can find in the Bible that again and again battles were won by those who had faith in God and dared to go forth singing some great song of triumph and of faith.

Solo In Police Station

Dr. Albert Banks tells of a police court scene in this country, in one of the largest American cities. It was the usual morning scene. There were thirty drunks and disorderlies—the common crowd that we see in an ordinary police court. You know I sometimes think that if I were a professor in one of our theological seminaries, I would make it part of the young preacher’s education to go and visit the police court once in a while and look in the faces of sad mothers that stand there pleading for wayward boys and girls, and to see those there for the first time coming up for some crime, as well as those hardened through years of sin. I think may of our preachers fail because they do not know this side of life. They know books and they know poetry and they know flowers but they have not looked the fact of sin and shame squarely in the face.

Those thirty men filed up before the magistrate and a strange thing happened. In the cell below was a baritone of a prominent opera company who had gotten into some sort of difficulty and was awaiting trial. He was downstairs in a cell and there was an open space between that cell and the court room. The window was open. As those men stood up before the judge, they heard someone singing:

“Last night I lay asleeping
And there came a dream so fair.”

Last night? A dream so fair? Last night had been a nightmare to those fellows—the first night in prison for some of them. The contrast between the song and the facts of that morning was so terrible that it came as a shock to those hardened men. The song went on:

“I stood in old Jerusalem
Beside the temple there.”

The judge called the sergeant and asked what it meant and he told him that an opera singer who had gotten into trouble was in his cell alone, singing. Every man in line began to move with emotion.

May I digress to say that about eight years ago, I was in New York City with a man who had been a prominent criminal in this country. He was given, I think, his liberty by President McKinley and later he was given back his citizenship by President Roosevelt. I happened to be with him in the city of New York and there came an invitation from Thomos Osborne of Sing Sing to visit the penitentiary, at Ossining. We went out in one automobile and they were to come in another. Their automobile broke down. We were to be there at twelve o’clock and the meeting was to be held at that time. When this man did not arrive, Mr. Osborne said the only thing to do was to have the meeting after supper, about six o’clock, and so we were invited to be guests at the penitentiary all day. I have been all day in Sing Sing. I saw a baseball game played between the prisoners and a New York team and the penitentiary team won out. It was a great ball game.

I was escorted about by a young lawyer who was going to liberated in about two weeks. He was to be chairman of our meeting that night. My friend, Browning, a high tenor, had been visiting the cells with me all afternoon. It was very interesting and very sad. When we sat together on the platform that evening, the young lawyer got up and introduced the speaker and then he said, “We have Mr. Philpott from Canada and he has with him a Mr. Alfred Browning, a good singer. Would you like to hear him sing?” And they all began to clap their hands. Browning said to me, “Preacher, do you think it would be wrong if I sang one verse of the Rosary? Did you notice that in almost every cell the beads were hanging on the wall? I think if I could sing one verse of the Rosary and break off and sing a verse of ‘Just as I am, without one plea,’ it might touch their hearts.”

I said, “I think it would be all right.” He was only singing a moment or two when heads began to go down, and down, and down. You talk about a prayer meeting. There was hardly a head up in that room full of people and there were 1,600 or 1,700 of them. My lawyer friend turned to me and said, “Preacher, God must be in the boy’s song. That crowd out there would not cry like that unless the Almighty was touching them.”

Browning went on:

“Just as I am, without one plea,
But that Thy blood was shed for me.
And that Thou biddest me come to Thee,
Oh, Lamb of God, I come.”

And you could hear them sob all over the place.

Just so, these fellows were moved in the police court as they heard that song coming up from the cell below. One old hardened prisoner looked up and said, “Judge, this isn’t fair. We are here to take our medicine. We are here to take our punishment. But that song! It brings back memories!” And then he sobbed right out loud. One boy sat down and put his face in his arms and sobbed, “Oh, my mother, my mother.”

The song continued. The sergeant backed up against the wall and waited. The judge sat still until, in a great climax they heard, “Hosanna! To the Highest Hosanna, Forevermore!”

And the judge in the silence waited. Finally he said, “I am going to dismiss every case. It is not a conquest of punishment this morning; it is a conquest of song.”

Song has often won when everything else has failed. I thank God that I know of a religion of song. I know of a Christ that can put joy in a man’s heart, a Christ who is saying to a poor tired world, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” I know of a Christ who is saying to poor, disturbed hearts, “My peace I will give unto you.” I know of a Christ who sends His ambassadors to turn men “from darkness to light, from the power of Satan unto God.” I know that Christ and that is the Christ I offer you tonight. He does the same for men today as he did in the days of Paul and Silas, when the prisoners heard and the doors opened and the shackles fell off. We know the jailor was one of the converts, but I think if you could have visited the church at Philippi you would have heard a great many say, “I was converted in the jail that night.” God grant that somebody here tonight may be able to give a testimony to the power of song and the Gospel of the grace of God.