When Paul and Silas were unjustly imprisoned in Philippi, they prayed and sang songs to God, in spite of being beaten and placed in the inner prison. The end result was that all those in the prison house, heard their witness to the Lord, and the jailer became saved (Acts 16:31)!
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
As we commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we reflect on his letter that he wrote from jail, when he was unjustly imprisoned, in Birmingham, Alabama, on April 16, 1963.
…I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid…..
He concludes his letter by saying:
There will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’ sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, is a holiday marking King’s birthday. He was born on January 15, 1929, with this year marking his 83rd birthday. The holiday is observed on the third Monday of January each year. Dr. King was a Baptist minister, and the chief spokesman for nonviolent activism in the civil rights movement, which successfully protested racial discrimination in federal and state law.
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