Lydia Series

Good Morning. If you have your Bibles with you today, we will be looking at Acts 16:6. We have been going through the series called Extraordinary People. People in the Bible who, because of their faith, because of their obedience, God used in extraordinary and amazing ways. The last few weeks we have looked at six different characters. Today, we are going to look at a woman by the name of Lydia. Because she was given a divine appointment with apostle Paul down by a river, she met him and her life would never again be the same. I want to give a little background on this passage before we dive into it. This passage takes place during Paul’s second of three missionary journeys. In chapter 15, we see the apostle Paul and his friend, Barnabas, taking a letter to Antioch that was addressing some issues that the church was dealing with there. I don’t have time to get into those issues. If you want to read about it, you can go back and read chapter 15. After they delivered the letter, Paul thought it might be a good idea to go back and visit the churches that he had planted during the first missionary tour. To go back and actually strengthen them, encourage them, and teach them some things. That is what they decided to do. Unfortunately, before they left, Paul got into a heated argument with his friend Barnabas and Barnabas got so mad that he headed off southwest to the island of Cypress and Paul took Silas and eventually Timothy and headed northwest.

That brings us to the passage where it says “Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. So they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas.” Hopefully, you can see from this passage, I don’t have a lot of time to spend on it, that there is some divine steering going on. The Holy Spirit was involved in this journey of Paul. Paul is a preacher and he wants to preach. He begins to journey and the Holy Spirit won’t allow him to preach in the province of Asia. He continues on and gets to the other side of Asia and he gets to this place called Mysia. He decides he wants to go north into Bithynia and the spirit of Christ says no you can’t go up there. At this point he has traveled a good 500 miles and not really being able to have any notable contact.

Just in case you are someone like me who struggles with ancient geography, I thought I would quickly show a map to give you some perspective of what we are talking about here. This is Jerusalem. Here is Antioch. They are going across here. This is where Barnabas ended up going. You have Paul, Silas, and eventually picking up Timothy there and going out across this area called Phrygia and Galatia and basically ending over here to Mysia and Troas. When they get here, they want to head up into Bithynia and this is Turkey right now or Asia Minor. They get to this point and I am sure that Paul is becoming quite frustrated in this situation. Then something amazing happens. God gives Paul this vision in the middle of the night. It says “During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.” An interesting side note is that this is the place where Luke, the writer of Acts, kind of injects himself in the story where he switches from the pronoun they to the pronoun we. Now the writer Luke is part of the story. The significant point here is that this is the first very clear communication that Paul has received that I want you to go in there. Instead of saying don’t go there, he is saying I want you to go there. He wants him to go to Macedonia. Again looking at the map, Macedonia is this area over here. Really now it would be considered southeastern Europe. I am terrible with countries but I think it would include Greece, Algeria, Serbia, Bulgaria. This is the area up here. What is significant about it is that this is the first real move from Asia over to Europe. This is a major turning point in Christianity. Paul had never been this far before. This again is Europe so it is an exciting time going on and Paul is excited about it. He has this vision. He has these clear orders to keep going over and he is assuming he is going to meet this man in Macedonia.