Sermon Transcript
To this I hold, my hope is only Jesus. All the glory and the fortune here, when the race is complete, still my lips shall repeat, and my life, all through Christ, in me. When the race is complete, still my lips shall repeat, yet not I, but through Christ in me. Yet not I, but through Christ in me. Yet not I, but through Christ On the Sabbath, we went outside the city gate to the river where we expected to find a place of prayer.
We sat down and began to speak to the women who had gathered there. One of those listening was a woman from the city of Thyatira named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth. She was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message. When she and the other members of her household were baptized, she invited us to her home.
If you consider me a believer in the Lord, she said, come and stay at my house, and she persuaded us. Once when we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a female slave who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling. She followed Paul and the rest of us, shouting, these men are servants of the Most High God who are telling you the way to be saved. She kept this up for many days.
Finally, Paul became so annoyed that he turned around and said to the spirit, in the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to come out of her. At that moment, the spirit left her. When her owners realized that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to face the authorities. They brought them before the magistrates. And said, these men are Jews and are throwing our city into an uproar by advocating customs unlawful for us Romans to accept or practice.
The crowd joined in the attack against Paul and Silas, and the magistrates ordered them to be stripped and beaten with rods. After they had been severely flogged, they were thrown into prison, and the jailer was commanded to guard them carefully. When he received these orders, he put them in the inner cell and fastened their feet in the stocks. About midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly there was such a violent earthquake that the foundations of the prison were shaken.
At once all the prison doors flew open and everyone’s chains came loose. The jailer woke up, and when he saw the prison doors open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself because he thought the prisoners had escaped. But Paul shouted, don’t harm yourself! We are all here. The jailer called for lights, rushed in, and fell trembling before Paul and Silas.
He then brought them out and asked, sirs, what must I do to be saved? They replied, believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household. Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all the others in his house. At that hour of the night, the jailer took them and washed their wounds. Then immediately he and all his household were baptized.
The jailer brought them into his house and set a meal before them. He was filled with joy because he had come to believe in God, he and his whole household.
Well, this weekend is a special weekend for me and for Shannon because our daughter Raya is going to be arriving here from Texas and is going to be staying with us for a while. And she’s bringing along my new favorite person in the whole world, and that’s her infant daughter Ivy Lynn. We just call her Ivy for short. Ivy was born on July 21st, and although we’ve not yet had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with Ivy to this point, we did get to visit her in Texas back in August for a few days and spent a little bit of time. But I do know in this short amount of time a couple things already.
First, I’m clearly already Ivy’s favorite. That’s just objectively true. And so really there’s not reason for much debate about that. It is what it is. You just accept it and you just kind of move on, I guess.
So, but second, second, yes, I realize she has my hairline. Thank you very much to those of you who’ve pointed that out. I’m a big boy. I can handle that, but thank you. I just wanted to acknowledge that I’m aware.
I hear you people. But third, every parent and every grandparent already knows this, but to quote from a Faith Hill song that maybe you’ve heard before, a baby changes everything, doesn’t it? Priorities change, schedules change, your home changes, the smell of your home changes, your bank account changes, and many more things change, but it’s good. And it’s a blessing. But I did wanna share this piece of news with all of you because we’re a family, right?
Well, at the heart of today’s Bible passage that we’re gonna look at in the book of Acts chapter 16 are 3 stories about change, change. So these are 3 great case studies about how God brings about radical change in the lives of 3 very, very different people. And these stories are good examples of how God is able to work in remarkably different ways but at the same time reach 3 entirely different people all through the exact same message, the message, the good news of the gospel, and through the exact same person, Jesus Christ. These were 3 unexpected encounters that we’re gonna read about in Acts chapter 16. Paul had only come across these individuals because the Holy Spirit had redirected his own travel plans and because Paul had received a vision that he needed to go to Macedonia instead of his original plan to go to Asia Minor.
So this wasn’t expected by Paul, but these 3 unexpected encounters, I call them divine appointments, when the Holy Spirit opens up a door that we weren’t expecting, they all resulted in 3 changed lives. So how does Jesus transform a life? How does the gospel, the good news about Jesus, transform and change a person? That’s the question for us today. And we’re gonna take a closer look at these 3 people, and then we’re gonna draw some lessons from these accounts.
So first, let’s talk Lydia. Lydia. We met her as you read the passage or heard the passage read in Acts 16 a little bit ago. We’re introduced to Lydia in verse 14. Now, what do we know about Lydia?
We know that while Paul met her in Philippi, she was not a local Philippian. She was not from there. She was originally from Thyatira, which was a large port city on the other side of the Aegean Sea from Philippi within the province of Asia Minor. We also know she was an entrepreneur. She owned her own business, which was dealing in purple cloth, which makes sense because her hometown of Thyatira was the center of the purple dye trade.
She also was most certainly well-traveled, traveling back and forth to Asia Minor for work, and cultured, having interacted with all these different cultures for her business. And we can safely assume that she was wealthy, given the sizable home that she must have had, because that’s mentioned later on in the chapter that she opens it up to a lot of different people. And plus, we think she might be wealthy because purple goods were expensive and often associated with royalty back then. So one commentator suggested that if she were around today, Lydia might have been the kind of person to operate the kind of high-end store or boutique that people with money shop at. Now, I don’t tend to go to those sorts of stores.
I like, you know, Target and Walmart and those kinds of places. But think about shopping in Sausalito or in some of the nicer places of San Francisco or something like that. That’s perhaps where Lydia would have been, and maybe she would have had homes in a couple different cities if she were around today. The other thing we know about her from the scriptures is that it says she was religious. It says that she was a, quote, worshiper of God, and that’s a technical term which essentially means a God-fearer, one who fears God.
And it means that she was a Gentile who was sympathetic to Judaism. And who rejected the Roman and Greek paganism and the idea of multiple gods that many people in her region already believed. Now we might refer to her today as like a spiritual seeker. She was spiritually open. She would have likely been interested in the Hebrew scriptures and in prayer.
And God-fearers were also known to be quite moral in comparison to the paganism and polytheism of the surrounding culture and of the average Greek city at that time. So she was a worshiper of God, but not specifically a follower of Jesus up to the point that she met Paul. And this, by the way, I do wanna point out is an excellent example, I think, of how a person can be religious and moral but not be a Christ follower. How a person can live an upright life and seem to have it all together and be sincere and kind and nice, but still be spiritually separated from God. And how you can have all the things that mark success from the world’s perspective, but still miss the mark and not spend eternity with God in heaven.
You’re still in need of salvation. Jesus said, what does it profit a person to gain the whole world and yet still lose your soul? And so that needs to be pointed out. But how did the message about Jesus come to Lydia? How did the gospel come to Lydia?
We know a little bit about her now. Well, Paul and his traveling companions, we’re told in the text, met Lydia on the Sabbath at a prayer meeting of sorts that was taking place outside of the city, outside of the city gate near a river. Where were— were there other God-fearers there besides Lydia? It seems reasonable for us to assume. And why were they having an outdoor gathering instead of a gathering inside of a synagogue?
Because normally anytime Paul would arrive newly into town, he would go first to the synagogue. But apparently, we’re assuming Philippi didn’t have a Jewish synagogue because according to Jewish law, if you had at least 10 Jewish men in a city or a town, you could open up a synagogue. If you had less than 10 Jewish men in a town, however, you couldn’t open up a synagogue. So there must not have been even 10 Jewish men in the city of Philippi. That’s why they’re meeting outdoors and where they are.
So instead of meeting in a synagogue, Paul, Silas, and Luke— and Luke is the one writing the book of Acts— He uses the pronoun we here. He’s talking about himself. They found this group of women and they simply sat down to talk. It doesn’t say that anybody got up to preach or anything, and sounds like it was not a very large group. And the conversation that takes place doesn’t seem like a canned sales pitch or something like that.
It seems like more of a rational, low-pressure, give-and-take discussion, more so than like, say, a Jonathan Edwards-style Repent, you sinners, angry kind of a sermon, you know what I mean? So what was the outcome of this divine encounter that Paul had with Lydia and with these women? It says that Lydia was one of those listening in to Paul’s conversations, and it says in verse 14 that, quote, the Lord opened Lydia’s heart to respond to Paul’s message. Now, what opened up her heart? It wasn’t her own efforts, it wasn’t even her prayers, and it wasn’t It wasn’t Paul’s effective communication skills, it was the Lord.
We looked at that last week when we talked about how the Holy Spirit is the one who only ever opens up a person’s heart to receive him. So it was the Lord here in the same situation with Lydia. And this is a work, we said, the opening of one’s heart that God has to do anytime someone is to come to faith. Jesus said, no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. So Lydia found the message about Jesus to be utterly appealing.
That’s what the Greek word for respond actually means in this passage. It means to be attracted to. And what was so appealing and so attractive about the message of the gospel to Lydia? We’re not told exactly, except that the Lord opened her heart. What we do know is that the paganism of her day stressed living for yourself, with no hope for the future.
But the people whom Jesus invited to come to him were people just like Lydia who had been handed an empty religion with lots of cumbersome expectations and burdensome laws and irrelevant rituals, all in an eye towards trying to do just enough in order to save yourself, which is impossible and hopeless, by the way. It doesn’t work now and it didn’t work then either. And so Lydia found this message to be appealing and God opened up Lydia’s heart, and Lydia gave her life to Jesus. And it says in verse 15 that the members of her household were baptized. And then it says she persuaded Paul, Silas, and Luke, and whomever else was with them to come and to stay at her house.
The Greek word there for persuaded is an interesting one. It actually essentially means we had a debate and she won. In other words, they weren’t originally planning on going to Lydia’s home, but like a skilled attorney, She made her case and she was successful in arguing and changing their minds. I love that. And then verse 40 tells us that she opened up her home as a place for ministry and a gathering spot for the growing number of believers in the church, or excuse me, in the city.
She was a pillar of that first church in Philippi, and she’s the first mention that we have on record of someone converting to Christian faith in Jesus on European soil. It’s a remarkable story. Now I can think of, and you maybe can as well, I can think of several people who have faith stories that are similar to Lydia. Maybe your faith story is like hers where you’re successful, morally upright, and religious, and you go to church on Christmas and Easter, maybe more often than not, but you’re not necessarily a follower of Jesus. You might have even identified yourself as a Christian at some point, but you had not yet come to a place of saving faith.
And it’s in this particular space that Jesus moved in your life, opened up your heart to the gospel, and showed you your need for a Savior. And from that point on, perhaps there was a turn in your life when you were no longer just a church attender, but you began to center your entire life around following Jesus. And maybe that’s where you’re at right now. Well, that’s Lydia’s story, and maybe that’s your story as well. But the next person then we meet, the second person that we meet in this account, this divine encounter, the story of the female slave who had a spirit by which she predicted the future and who made a lot of money for her owners by fortune-telling.
Her story is altogether different from Lydia’s. They could not have been more different from one another. Lydia is an influencer. She’s driven, savvy, sharp, wealthy, well-known, well-respected, well-connected. The slave girl, on the other hand, was completely taken advantage of abused, living in darkness and despair and overwhelmed by a demonic power that took away her own freedom and left her hopeless.
And yet Jesus stepped into both of these spaces and met both of these women at their particular and specific points of need. Now, what do we know about this slave girl? 3 things mainly. First, we know that she was young. That’s what it says.
The Greek word that is used there for the the word female actually means girl, which in those days would have referred to someone quite young, possibly between the ages of say 10 to 15 years old. Here’s a quick aside. Why is this girl a slave in Philippi? What do you think? The odds are that either her parents had died and she had no choice but to be taken in by someone else and became this fortune teller.
Or quite possibly her parents were still alive and sold her in order to make money. And that still happens actually all over the world every day, by the way. Human trafficking, the illegal trade of human beings for the purposes of forced labor and/or commercial sex, is the 2nd largest criminal industry in the world today behind drug trafficking. Sex trafficking by itself generates $32 billion a year And globally, 800,000 people are trafficked every year, an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 of whom are trafficked every year in the United States. The average age that a child begins being trafficked in the U.S. is 12 to 14 years of age.
The state of California, in fact, harbors 3 of the FBI’s 13 highest child sex trafficking areas in the nation: in Los Angeles, in San Diego, and then close to home for us in San Francisco. So we’re going to be watching a film, by the way, on October 2nd that’s going to help open up our eyes to this problem of trafficking in the world and what we as a church and as Christ followers can do about it. So I want to put in a plug for that. But that, as I was reading about the slave girl story, I just was kind of connecting those dots and saying that still happens today all around the world. So what can we do about it?
Join us on October 2nd for that. But this young girl, and I in Acts 16 was enslaved and she was exploited, and we could say that she was in double bondage. Her slave owners treated her like property, and she was abused and in bondage to a demonic spirit. And that’s the second and third thing that we know about her, that she was demon-possessed and that she was clairvoyant. Demon-possessed and clairvoyant.
This demonic spirit enabled her to be able to predict the future. And I should point out that the phrase Spirit by which she predicted the future literally reads, when directly translated from the Greek, spirit python. Spirit python. She had the spirit, it says, of the python. According to ancient Greek mythology, the python guarded the temple of Apollo.
And over time, the word python came to be synonymous with a demon-possessed person through whom the python spoke. And so a pythoness, so to speak, made clairvoyant predictions and often uttered words in all sorts of shrieks and strange voices. But as terrifying as that sounds, think about the fact that the only way that this young girl could have ever made any money for her owners was if the things she predicted actually came true. That’s a scary thought. Now, I should add that I realize it’s difficult in cultures like ours to talk about evil spirits or demons or the occult.
Educated people tend to be dismissive of anything that science can’t properly measure or describe, and the world of spiritual beings is not easily subjected to scientific exploration. So evil spirits are regarded by many as a superstition of ancient times, but I believe that that is a critical mistake. Another reason it’s difficult for some to talk about evil spirits is that movies and popular fiction have rendered these spirits It’s like walking undead, flesh-eating zombies, and things like that. And so over-the-top special effects tend to come to mind whenever we read a text like this. So here’s the question: is demon possession like what we see here, is it real today?
Is this a real thing? I personally believe that it is. I’ve witnessed it a few times in other people. I’ve even had a direct conversation or two with an evil spirit that is at work inside of and tormenting someone. Now, that might weird you out.
I don’t say any of that to impress you or to try to establish my credentials or anything, but I think had you been with me in those exact same circumstances, you would have come to the exact same conclusion that I did. I think that we can’t account for all forms of evil in the world simply through psychology or scientific explanations. Not everything has a scientific explanation, and I think we often underestimate the power and the complexity and the depth of evil in the world today. So now maybe that raises lots more questions for you than it does answers, but the main point for us to know is that this girl is young, she’s enslaved, and she’s being tormented by an evil spirit. And it doesn’t appear that the community or her owners had any sympathy for her because as long as she was able to make money and turn a profit for them, they were good with the whole thing.
Now, how did the message about Jesus come to her? The text says that she followed Paul and the others around everywhere that they went shouting. The Greek word there actually means shrieking or screaming. She was mocking and being a distraction to the furthering of the gospel. She’s not trying to support, she’s trying to distract.
And every time they shared the gospel, she’d be right there taking attention away from the message. And crying out nonstop. And she did this, it says, for several days until finally Paul, the Apostle Paul, you know, good old compassionate Paul and his ever gentle spirit— of course, that’s not usually what we associate with Paul— but he gets fed up with this. It says he gets annoyed, and so he casts the demon out of her in the name of Jesus. Now my question is, why did Paul wait so long to do this?
This had been going on for days. Why didn’t he just do this from the start? I don’t know, and you don’t know either, but this was a completely different scenario from Lydia, isn’t it? Lydia came to faith at a prayer meeting in a Bible study, and this young girl has an unforgettable experience with the unlimited power and authority of God. Lydia came to faith through a rational conversation, but this young girl needed something that broke through her slavery.
And Jesus’ name is greater than any name, and his power is greater than any power. So it was by the name and power of Jesus that this evil spirit was cast out. Completely different story from Lydia, and yet their need is exactly the same. And Jesus came into both of those spaces and gave them new life. So what was the outcome of Paul’s unexpected encounter with this young lady?
Well, we know that the evil spirit left her, and with it went her ability to be able to predict the future, and so therefore to be able to make money for her owners. Now, while it’s not specifically mentioned here in the text, you could argue, I’m gonna argue, and others have, that this slave girl, in addition to being set free from the demon, possibly came to faith in Jesus and was converted after this exchange with Paul, and perhaps even became part of the church at Philippi that began to meet at Lydia’s home. Now, where do we get that idea from? Not explicitly in this text, but more from the teaching of Jesus himself about how the demonic operate. Jesus said this in Matthew 12:43-45.
It says, when an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, I will return to the house that I left. And when it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean, and put in order. And then it goes and takes with it 7 other spirits more wicked than itself, and then they go and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first.
That is how it will be with this wicked generation. That’s what Jesus said. So what Jesus is teaching here is that if the demonic is cast out of a person and doesn’t— and something doesn’t move into that space, then that evil spirit will not just return, but will return with some friends, and the person will be worse off after than they were before. So what’s likely happened here, we think, in Acts 16, is that after the girl’s owners realized that the evil spirit had been cast out and that they can no longer make money, it appears something else has moved into the house. Do you follow me?
Now, I’ve met people who could easily relate to Lydia’s faith story, and I met a few others who can’t relate to her at all, but they can relate possibly to the slave girl because maybe Jesus in their faith story rescued them out of really dark Maybe in the nastiness of drugs and alcohol, or in the middle of some type of sexual licentiousness, or in a place of addiction or despair, or maybe even in some type of demonic oppression. Do you know someone like that? The gospel is for the Lydias of the world, but the gospel is also for the oppressed of the world, like this slave girl. Now, what ends up happening after this story is that Paul and Silas are arrested and brought before the authorities. On the false charges of stirring up strife in the city and almost causing a riot.
And the authorities decide to have Paul and Silas stripped, and it says beaten with rods, and then thrown into prison and assigned a jailer whose specific job was to just guard them carefully. Now, Roman prisons back then usually had 3 main sections. They had sort of an outer community part where there would be both light and air that was fresher for prisoners. Who had minimal charges and where perhaps some of the prisoners could walk around and stretch their legs out a little bit. The second portion was a little bit more inside and it was where prisoners were usually separated from the others by metal bars and gates and that sort of a thing, but they could at least often have a window or a certain amount of light during the daytime.
And then you have the inner part of the prison, this third part, which is basically a dark hole in the ground where the air is stale, there was little to no light, and human waste from the other parts of the jail would flow downhill and into this intersection. And that’s where the jailer placed Paul and Silas. Moreover, the jailer also put Paul and Silas in stocks, forcing them to be in and to maintain a position that a person’s body doesn’t naturally want to be in. So they’re sitting there in human waste, their bodies being contorted into uncomfortable positions, They’re in excruciating pain, all while, let’s not forget, still dealing with painful welts and gashes from the beating that they had received earlier. Now, what do we know about this jailer?
We don’t know his name, but historically speaking, in major Roman metropolitan areas like Philippi, jailers in these jails were almost always former highly decorated Roman soldiers who, as a gift of retirement from the front, were given these jails to run. So this guy is probably, we think, ex-military. And what do we know about Rome and their military? We know that they were a brutal and a tyrannical regime. So it stands to reason that this particular jailer in Philippi was brutal as well.
He was only commanded to watch Paul and Silas carefully, but it was his own personal decision to put them into stocks and into the inner cell. Now, does he strike you as the kind of person who you would sit down with at a river, maybe at a Bible study, and have a friendly conversation? Friendly spiritual conversation with. He doesn’t seem like any kind of a spiritual seeker at all. He doesn’t even seem remotely open to that.
If anything, he seems spiritually indifferent. Seems like he was much more interested in torturing Paul and Silas, belittling them and dehumanizing them, given that he was given a simple order to guard them, but he chose on his own to go way beyond that order. He’s a blue-collar kind of a guy who is quite different from Lydia and the slave girl. So what do Paul and Silas do in these circumstances? Swollen, lacerated, and sticky with blood.
Well, they did what all of us, I think, would naturally do. They prayed and they sang hymns to God at midnight. Of course, right? You would do that, right? No?
Maybe not? Well, it says that the other prisoners listened in as Paul and Silas were praying. Were worshiping God and lifting up prayers and worship. And the people listening in were probably wondering, what in the world has gotten into these guys? And then it says, an earthquake shook the foundations of the prison, causing everyone’s chains to come loose, which, if you read the book of Acts, just seems like kind of one of God’s specialties, breaking chains and busting people out of jail.
God does a lot of that, it seems, in the book of Acts. It seems like if you ever want an earthquake in your location, just lock up one of the apostles in jail, right? Right? But when the chains fall off of the prisoners here, the jailer panics, understandably, and in fear of the consequences of having to report an empty prison, the jailer prepares to commit suicide. But while Paul and Silas could have escaped in the chaos following the earthquake, they paused.
They paused to save this man’s life. And that’s how the message of Jesus came to the jailer. As he looked at Paul and Silas, he was understandably moved by the peace and the joy that he saw in them in the face of suffering and by the kindness and forgiveness that they were demonstrating to him in the face of his cruelty. And he had also witnessed, let’s remember, the unmistakable power of God in the earthquake. And all of these events through God’s direction brought this man to a place where he asked the single most important question in the entire world.
He asked it in verse 30 of chapter 16. He said, what must I do to be saved? What must I do to be saved? Notice what he asks. What must I do?
His expectation is like many of us think. We think if we’re gonna experience salvation, if we’re gonna get to God and get to heaven, we have to do something. Tell me what I have to do. One thing or a lot of things. We think we have to earn it.
We expect to be told, well, here’s a bunch of different things that you need to do first before you can be saved. But all Paul says to the jailer is one thing in verse 31, in answer to his question. He says, believe.
Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved. Believe in what Jesus has done for you. Believe. And then somehow, some way, God broke through this man’s hard heart and his spiritual indifference and compelled him to realize he too needed a saving relationship with Jesus. He needed what these guys had.
So Paul points to the only names that save, to Jesus, the one who had saved Lydia and the one who had delivered this young girl from spiritual torment. And so Paul effectively tells them, Jesus can save you too, and he can save your family as well. Now, what was the outcome? What was the result? The jailer’s whole household hears the gospel, it says, believes it, and is baptized.
And moreover, in an act of repentance and humility, the jailer not only washes the wounds of Paul and Silas, but he feeds them both a meal at his home. So we’ve got this man, angry, violent, heartless, and apparently uninterested in spiritual matters. And yet, even into that darkness, Jesus steps in and saves. And maybe that’s a story you can identify with. Maybe you’re not like Lydia, or maybe you’re not like the slave girl, but maybe like this jailer, you were at one time indifferent and uninterested in Christianity or God.
Or spiritual things, or perhaps you were angry and bitter like this guy, and yet Jesus saved you from that anger and that bitterness or that aggression. So here in Acts 16, God just keeps stepping into messy places and rescuing, doesn’t he? Again and again. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who in these stories you most identify with, whether one of them, a combination of them, or none of them. The larger point is, like them, All of us are sheep who have gone astray, and the Good Shepherd came after us and rescued us.
And the main point or the lesson of this chapter seems to be that whoever you are, you need Jesus. Whatever your background, you need Jesus. No matter your needs, you need Jesus. Jesus can meet those needs. Now consider one more time just how different these 3 individuals are beyond their gender, There’s a great little chart I found in a church planter’s manual that helps illustrate this.
I remember in school occasionally having the old compare and contrast assignment, you know, where you’re given 2 or more people or events and you have to figure out what they have in common or how they were different. I doubt anybody would ever ask a student in school today to compare and contrast the people here in Acts 16. Just in case, take a look at this chart. We’ve got the 3 different converts. Their ethnicities were different from one another.
They were different economically speaking. They were different socially. Lydia was a social insider. The slave girl was a social outcast. The jailer was sort of in the middle.
They were different in terms of their spiritual backgrounds and interests. And the ways in which they each experienced and were impacted by the message of Jesus were unique as well. So we’ve got 3 entirely different types of individuals. They could not be more different. They’re in 3 different events that led to their conversions, but they were all reached by the one and only Savior and by the same message.
And notice how the message of the gospel changes their lives in such personal and practical ways, not only saving them but delivering them out of where they had been. The gospel doesn’t necessarily change their or our outward circumstances, not always, sometimes, but it does always change us from the inside out. It does something in us. It addresses the heart of our problem, which is the problem of our hearts. You might hear someone say, well, you know, I’m not really the Christian type, but this chapter is showing us there is no type for becoming or being a Christian.
It is for everyone. The gospel is not just for certain types, of people. Everybody needs a saving relationship with Jesus, everybody, because we all have the exact same problem and we all need the exact same solution. Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved. And one of the things I love most about this chapter is just how audacious it is that God would establish and build the Philippian church out of these 3 people that we read about today.
There’s a traditional Jewish prayer that Jewish men would often pray back then, and it went something like this. They would pray, Thank you, Lord, that you have not made me a woman, a slave, or a Gentile. Let me repeat that. Thank you, Lord, that you have not made me a woman, a slave, or a Gentile. Now, how insulting and condescending is that?
But look in this chapter who is impacted by the good news of the gospel. A woman, Lydia, a slave, and a Gentile, the jailer. That’s who the gospel comes to here. And that’s who God uses to start the Philippian church that began to meet, verse 40, at Lydia’s house. The first church on European soil was established through these diverse and unlikely people.
Now, does that at all seem coincidental to you? It doesn’t to me. So the Philippian church started then and there, and later Paul would write these words to the church in Philippi that he had come to develop such a strong affection for. He wrote in the book of Philippians chapter 1, I thank God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
You know, whenever one of the apostles would write a letter to a church back then, someone in the church would usually read the letter aloud to the entire congregation. And who knows, maybe it was the slave girl who read Paul’s letter to the Philippian congregation. Maybe it was the jailer. Maybe it was Lydia. What is certain is that God did indeed begin a good work in Philippi, bringing many people to faith in Jesus, which eventually spread to all of Europe.
And it all started with these 3 unexpected encounters and these 3 now transformed.
Lives. Would you pray with me?
I thank you, God, for the power of the gospel. I thank you that the message of the gospel and putting our hope and trust in it is sufficient for us to be brought to a saving relationship with you, not by our works, not by our deeds, not by the family in which we’re born or the country in which we’re born, not by our pedigree or by anything else, but by your grace is anyone saved. I thank you, God, for the reminder that you’re the one who opens up the heart. And I thank you that at one point, Lord, you came into my life because you opened up my heart to receive you. And I pray, Lord, that anyone who has not yet done that would do that.
I thank you that you call us to relationship and not simply to be religious, but to experience the joy of fellowship with you. I pray that that would be experienced by all of us. And I pray, God, that as we look at people around us, that we would recognize your deep compassion and love for all, and that there is no one that you are not able to reach. You are able to reach even the hardest heart, even the person in the darkest of places, even the person that most people would say that’s not even possible. God, you can do it, and I pray that you will.
Release your power, bring those who do not know you to salvation, and be glorified and build your church as a result. Thank you, God. We pray all these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
