³⁰ . . . “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” ³¹They said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” ³²And they spoke the word of the Lord to him together with all who were in his house. ³³And he took them that very hour of the night and washed their wounds, and immediately he was baptized, he and all his household. ³⁴And he brought them into his house and set food before them, and rejoiced greatly, having believed in God with his whole household.

The question rings through the ages; God is looking for this response in every heart. It first rang out at the end of Peter’s Pentecostal message:

Now when they heard this, they were pierced to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brethren, what shall we do?’ (Acts 2:37)

The message is the same, and it breeds the same response. Just as “the Lord opened [Lydia’s] heart to respond to the things spoken by Paul” (Acts 16:15), so now He opens the heart of the Philippian jailer and, as it turns out, the hearts of his entire household. And the open heart, in conviction, desperately seeks a solution to the problem. For the jailer, the Lord used his dire circumstances—impending painful death for failure to keep his prisoners behind bars—to open his heart to a deeper problem, that of sin. God often uses life difficulties to shake people out of complacency and bring them to focus on what really matters, namely, the sinfulness of the heart.

The solution: “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved.” How wonderful and how simple; yet it took the fear of death for the jailer to be open to this message. Upon further teaching, like the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:36), he was ready to make a public confession of faith by being baptized.

Notice also the change of heart toward the apostle Paul and Silas; the jailer immediately treated them with kindness by cleaning their wounds, something a jailer would never have done apart from a complete change of heart. Jesus said, “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). The jailer’s conversion was genuine.

Some have used this passage to teach infant baptism, but that reads too much into the text. What is clear is that the jailer “believed in God with his whole household.” They all believed, and therefore they all, as new believers, took the first step of obedience that comes from faith.

Notice the celebration, the hospitality, the meal, and the rejoicing. Whenever Christians gather, we have the opportunity to enjoy our fellowship and unity in Christ, as fellow members in the community of the redeemed!

Lord, thank You for the fellowship we experience now with the family of God.