Acts 16:16-22

¹⁶Another day we started to go to another place to meet with people and pray to God. There was a young woman on that road that had a bad spirit in her. That spirit showed her things that were going to happen to people. Some men made this young woman work for them with no pay. People used to pay a lot of money to her bosses, then she told those people things that will happen to them.

¹⁷That young woman saw Paul and the rest of us going on that road, and she followed us, and she kept on shouting, “Hey, these men serve the God that is the greatest of all gods. They can tell you what to do so that God will save you and not punish you.”

¹⁸She kept doing that for a lot of days. In the end Paul got upset. He turned around to the young woman and said to that bad spirit, “My boss, Jesus Christ, says, ‘Get out of her.’” Then the bad spirit came out of that young woman.

¹⁹Her bosses saw this happen and they thought, “Oh, no. Now she will not be able to tell anybody what will happen to them, and she will not get us any more money.” And her bosses were angry with Paul and Silas. They grabbed Paul and Silas and dragged them to the Roman judges in the middle of that town.

²⁰Her bosses said to the judges, “These men are making a lot of trouble for everyone in our town. They are Jews,

²¹and they are telling people to do things that our Roman law says are wrong.”

²²A lot of other people there joined those bosses and started blaming Paul and Silas. Then the Roman bosses told their soldiers, “Rip the shirts off Paul and Silas and hit them with sticks.”