Acts 16:18-25

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.”

²³The soldiers hit Paul and Silas really hard with sticks and then they put them in the jail. They told the boss of that jail, “Make sure Paul and Silas don’t get away.”

²⁴So the boss of that jail put them in a room that was right in the middle of that jail, and he made them sit down on the ground, then he locked their ankles between 2 big logs so that Paul and Silas couldn’t move their legs.

²⁵Later, in the middle of the night, Paul and Silas were praying aloud to God and saying that he is really good, and they were singing songs to God. The other prisoners were listening to them.