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.
As the story goes, what happens is “From Troas we put out to sea and sailed straight for Samothrace, and the next day we went on to Neapolis. From there we traveled to Philippi, a Roman colony and the leading city of that district of Macedonia. And we stayed there several days.” A little bit of background on Philippi. It is basically a Roman colony as it says and during that time the reason we had so many Roman colonies was because the Roman empire wanted to remain strong and so the emperor would strong arm citizens and retiring military to move to these outlying regions to maintain a strong Roman presence in that area. Basically, what you would have in these outlying areas are these little pockets of Italy out there. It wasn’t such a bad thing. The people that lived there had to maintain some loyalty to the emperor, but really they had a pretty good deal because in exchange for their loyalty and in exchange for living in these outlying areas, they would be exempt from taxes and things like that. It wasn’t a bad place to live because it was a very prosperous area. Philippi was known for its gold mines and springs. It really wasn’t such a bad place to go and retire. This is where Paul ends up. He ends up in the city of Philippi. Then it goes on to say “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.” The question some of you may ask is why the river? We look at Paul and follow Paul in other parts of the book of Acts and he usually goes to a synagogue, a Jewish church or something. For this case, he ended up going to the river. The explanation is that because we are so far away from Jerusalem, 500 or 600 miles, there is probably not a strong Jewish presence in the area. What would happen where there wasn’t a strong Jewish presence, you couldn’t start a synagogue. You would need a minimum of ten men to begin a synagogue. In lieu of that, they would have this gathering down by a river. When you are by the river, then you can at least engage in some of the Jewish rituals. Some of the purification rituals and things like baptism and that sort of thing. Paul went in there expecting to find people at prayer. Again because the town didn’t have a synagogue he is expecting to find or he heard about it as a place of prayer. Not only would there be people praying, they would be doing things like singing hymns. They would go through the scriptures at that point what we know as the Books of the Law and the prophets and that sort of thing. Also at that location, they would expect occasionally that some sort of Jewish Rabbi might come by and help them understand the scriptures a little bit more. That is what is going on. Paul goes down there and he finds this group of women praying. Some speculation is that it was just women. There were no men there. We don’t know why there were no men but the idea is again, just like it is today, it was mostly the women that were involved in the services at that time.
As another side note, we have a group of women that pray during the 9 o’clock hour here at church. What do the prayer for? They pray for the needs of the family. They pray for the church service. They are dedicated. I would say that 99.9% of the time, it is just women in there. That is really sad. Where are the praying men is what I want to know. We need some praying men. We need some prayer warrior men and women in this church.
So you have Paul going into this situation and he kind of plops himself down in the middle of the group. He begins to talk. We don’t really know exactly what he talked about but some suspect that maybe he just did some ice-breaking-type stuff and introduced himself and got to know them a little bit. Eventually, we know that he probably shifted things to God. He began to talk about God things. He can assume that if the women are Jewish they are going to be interested in God things and they are talking about scripture at least to some degree. What he decides to do is expound on the scripture and begin to teach them the scripture. What he probably did, starting with Genesis where it talks about the idea that we are all made in the image of God, he began to talk about that, but he likely also talked about too how sin entered into the world and it created this great big void between a sinful man and a holy God. And that God in his loving kindness and mercy gave man a second chance and instituted the sacrificial system, the law, the Ten Commandments, and the sacrificial system. If people would just keep that and follow those regulations, they could atone for their sins. Their sins could be forgiven and everything would be okay. But if anybody is familiar with the Old Testament, we know that that just didn’t work. Pretty soon they corrupted the system and basically God had proven that the people could not keep the laws and the regulations. But we also know that Paul being somebody who was converted himself on the road to Damascus by a vision of Jesus Christ, we know that he was eventually going to start talking about Jesus. In spite of man’s inability to reconcile himself with God, God sent another one, Jesus Christ, to come in and be the reconciliation for their sins. They might not have even heard the crucifixion story. They might not have heard the resurrection story, but I guarantee he told them about that. He said if you believe in Jesus Christ, the door now is open to reconciliation with God and eternal life. He is probably talking like that. Again, we don’t know exactly how he is presenting it, but it is pretty easy to assume that he would be sharing the gospel message. During that time, some of the women might have just been ignoring him. Some of them might have been taking it all in. Some of them would have just been sitting there and doing something else.
We see “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.” This is where we get our first introduction to this person Lydia. There is not a lot of information there about Lydia. Luke gives a very brief description about Lydia. If we unpack some of this a little bit and include some of our own knowledge and our own experience, we can come up with a pretty good profile of this woman Lydia. The first thing we know is her name is Lydia. That is really not obvious because there are some translations that call her a woman of Lydia. The city she was from, Thyatira, was actually at one time, about 1,000 B.C., part of the kingdom of Lydia. So some translations actually say there was a woman of Lydia that was there. We don’t even know if that is her exact name. We do know that for the past several hundred years, we have been referring to this woman that sells purple as Lydia and so we will continue to do that today. That is just a little background information. What we see here is that she is a seller of purple cloth. What Luke is doing here is basically letting us know that we are talking about a wealthy woman. A woman of means. A woman that has some money. The reason we know that is because we know that purple dye way back when in the first century was very, very expensive. The dye back then was not made like it is today using chemicals. The dye back then was made by killing shellfish and somehow milking the dye that comes out of them and producing the dye that way. It would take up to like a thousand different shellfish from this Mediterranean area just to make up enough purple dye to color the hem of a garment. Thousands of these shellfish. The process was very time consuming so purple dye was very expensive. Not only was it expensive because of the process, it was expensive because of the fact that it was very good stuff. Unlike other dyes, when it was exposed to the weather, it would not lessen the color; it would increase in color. This purple dye basically became part of the clothing of royalty. Only wealthy people could afford clothes that would use this dye. This woman was obviously a wealthy woman. She probably figured out that Philippi was a nice place to go because it was a very prosperous place so she traveled from Thyatira over to Philippi and pretty much had a pretty good business going there. We see later that she had a pretty large house. So we know again she was a wealthy woman from Thyatira. We know that she could have been named Lydia or not. But we also can speculate that since she was a dealer in purple cloth that she was a member of what they would call a trade guild. Kind of like a trade association. We don’t have many of those today but back then everybody was involved in a trace association. They called it a guild. This would include the artists, the writers, merchants, and dyers. The trade guilds existed to make sure people would keep employed but also it would be used to protect the property, the equipment, and also the trade secrets. She was likely part of some sort of a dyers-type guild. We would also know, if we did a little reading, we would see that if she is part of a guild it would also mean she is connected to some sort of a pagan-type cult. Back then, all the guilds were attached to some sort of a pagan, non-Jewish cultish type activity. They would hold their meetings within these temples. In the temples eventually they began to expand and have dinners and have parties and even prostitutes and everything coming in there. It would be kind of a seedy environment. This would have been the environment that our lady Lydia would have been involved in at some point in her life. She would have been exposed to it. We get the sense when we read on that she was a worshipper of God. We get the sense that maybe even if she started out exposed to this seedy lifestyle or this cultic lifestyle and maybe even though she was a wealthy woman, there was something going on inside of her that she felt she was being drawn back into a relationship with God. It says she is a worshipper of God. When Luke describes her as a worshipper, what he is basically saying is that she is a convert to Judaism. She is not a born Jew but she has made a conversion to Judaism. She is really a devout woman. It means she practices the Jewish rituals when she can. We again don’t know how often she does that but probably on a regular basis.
But getting back to the story by the river, we see all these woman sitting around listening. We see Lydia paying very close attention to every word that Paul speaks. When he starts talking again about how it is not about a religion. It is not about keeping all these rituals. It is about our relationship with Jesus Christ. Her ears are picked up and she is listening. Before you know it, something really strange begins to happen. It says “The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message.” This is really the key part here. We don’t use the term open your heart very much. When we think about open heart surgery or something it is the idea that the heart is temporarily stopped so the surgeon can do some sort of a surgery on it. I really think in a spiritual sense that is kind of what is going on. She is listening to the word come from Paul and he is just speaking away. He is giving her scripture after scripture from the Old Testament and telling her the story of Jesus and it is hitting her head but what is happening is some of it is starting to sink down below the surface there. It is starting to approach her heart. At some point, it is clear that it is the Lord who opens her heart. This is a key thing. It says the Lord opens the heart. Sometimes we think that God is sitting way out there sometimes and when we are ready to approach him, we can go to him. But really it is talking about the Lord is the one that initiates the relationship with us. God is the one who courts us. What is going on here is her heart is being prepared. Her heart is being opened to receive the word. What she has is the responsibility to respond to it. She could say yes or no. I think everyday people around the world their hearts are open when somebody is out there speaking the word and they have a choice. They can respond by saying yes or no. If they say no the heart is closed. God in his mercy continues to give more opportunities for the heart to be opened and then what happens is somebody says “Nope. I am starting to get it. I am starting to understand some divine truth but no thanks.” Close the heart. This may go on dozens or hundreds of times in a person’s life. But we also know by scripture, especially in the Old Testament, there are times where the Lord closed the heart of people. In other words, people’s hearts had become so hardened, so used to saying no to God that God says it is obvious you don’t want me. Your heart is shut and there is no more opportunity. The door is closed for good.
We have the situation here where it is God initiating the relationship with Lydia. Lydia at this point chooses to respond. It says “The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message.” How did she respond? It is hard to put a picture on it, but it is the idea that she is probably looking at her life and saying what I was doing before whether it was following material life or following the career or whatever, I am putting that behind me. I am putting the sins of the past behind me. I am putting aside this idea of my faith being some sort of a legalistic ritual. I am putting aside the idea that I have to do anything for God. I am beginning to accept the fact that it is all about a relationship with Jesus Christ. She responds. It goes on to say “When she and the 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.” We see a nice little progression. We see the word of God going out to somebody. We see God opening a heart. We see a person responding. Going into baptism and then going right into ministry. Using their giftedness. That is the picture that is going on here. We see that she responded in baptism and the minute she gets done with baptism and says come over to my house and hang out a little bit. Even Paul is shocked by this. He says no I’d rather not, but it says she persuaded us. She basically persuaded Paul and the group to stay at her house. What we learn later, or some suspect, is that her house became basically the first church in Philippi that became the base camp for many other plants over in that region. We know that it wasn’t just this one time situation. If we look over in Acts 16:40 after Paul and Silas come out of prison they went to Lydia’s house where they met with the brothers and encouraged them. We know that her house that was a wealthy house with a lot of servants and a big house now her house became a house of prayer. Her house became a little church. Because she probably had the gift of hospitality, she welcomed people in. We see a very clear progression in this story of Lydia. That is pretty much the story of Lydia.
I was thinking about how Paul was likely processing all these things. It is as if Paul is being strong armed almost by God to avoid Asia and Bithynia and he goes 500 or 600 miles and finally gets a clear direction from a man saying to come on over here. He gets on his boat and he is likely thinking that he is going to share Jesus with some beggar out there and the first person he encounters is a wealthy woman next to a river. I think he is realizing when it comes to going out there in the mission field or wherever I go, I need to be available but I also need to be very flexible. That is the story of Lydia.
It is a good story and it is actually a story that reminds me of another story. A story about a woman named Sherry. Sherry grew up in some part of New York and at about 21 she felt like she wanted to get involved with the fashion industry. She went to school. She decided to enroll in the prestigious Parsons School of Fashion Design in lower Manhattan. After four years or whatever, she graduated from college and graduated with very high honors and awards and that sort of thing. When graduation time came, she had several offers from several different companies to work as different occupations. One offer she got was a company in Los Angeles, I think it is called Marc Jacobs. She decides to take that job. So she has to leave New York and moves to Los Angeles. She gets out there and she is young, vulnerable, and the problem is she gets really, really involved in the party scene. She likes the nightlife of Los Angeles but she really can’t handle it. One night she is at this fashion show and has a little bit too much to drink. She has an overnight fling with some guy and she thinks she is in love with the guy and she marries him. Six months later what happens? He ditches her for another woman. She is so upset so what does she do? She throws herself into her work. She becomes kind of a workaholic, which is bad for her but good for the company. They see what a hard worker she is and begin to promote her up the corporate ladder. Pretty soon what happens is she becomes the regional vice president for Marc Jacobs of the Northwest Division. Even as much wealth as she has and as much prestige, she is feeling like this isn’t it. I don’t know what I am doing. I am not happy. I am feeling dissatisfied with my life. One night, she is up at the Space Needle in Seattle. At the top of the Space Needle is a restaurant, a revolving restaurant. Very expensive and very nice place. She is having dinner with a buyer from Nordstrom’s Department stores. She is having dinner and she is having a little bit too much to drink and pretty soon she starts sharing her story and how miserable she is. How she really doesn’t like her life and she is upset about her marriage, her failures and all this kind of stuff. This buyer from Nordstrom’s, who happens to be a Christian, starts talking to her. Just kind of sharing her own story. I know where you are at. I have been there. I followed the career path. I used to be in the party scene. I used to do all this type of thing. I used to do a lot of things that I really regret. You know what? When Jesus Christ got ahold of me, everything changed. It is not that I had to quit my corporate job but what I saw is that my priorities began to change. Before it was work and then maybe family and then faith, now it became faith and family and then work. So she shared this story with Sherry. In Seattle there is a huge church up there called Mars Hill. The next day she goes to church and hears this great message by the pastor. Sherry gives her life over to Jesus Christ and is baptized shortly after. Her whole life, her whole priorities change. In fact, she started a line of young women’s clothing whose companies values were honesty, integrity, and modesty. A complete life change.
Doesn’t that sound like the story of Lydia? It should because I made it up. Totally. It is a made-up story. But it doesn’t really matter because just like the story of Lydia, we had a basic outline of Lydia and we could assume some things. Most of the things I said were true. There is a Parsons School of Fashion. There is Los Angeles. Marc Jacobs is a famous designer. There is a Space Needle. There is a restaurant on the top of the Space Needle. There is a Mars Hill Church. You know what? There are thousands of women who are up there on the corporate ladder where they can’t stand their life. They hate their life. They are miserable. They are wealthy but they are miserable. It doesn’t matter whether the story is true. What matters is there are enough of those stories out there that it doesn’t matter what the facts are. It is the reality behind the facts. There are women and men out there in every field from food service to fashion to film. Whatever it is. They are out there and just tired of their life. They are unhappy. They are divorced. They are miserable. They could be wealthy. They travel all the time. Even people that are beginning to think is this all there is. They are starting to feel a prompting inside them to begin to go back to possibly the God of their childhood or just some form of faith. They are out there looking.
Then we have all the corporate people in here, which I am sure we have a good 30 or 40 people who work on an everyday basis in a corporate environment that come across those Lydias. You are the Paul’s out there that simply have to listen and take advantage when you see somebody there that begins to share any sort of insight about their personal life and you begin to sense that something is not right in their life. You begin to share. You are doing what you are supposed to do. You are supposed to be pushing that word out there and allowing God to open the heart up and then do the work. That is what is nice about this. You don’t have to do the work. God does it. All you have to do is share your story. If you call yourself a Christian, you should have a story. If you don’t have a story, you are probably not a Christian. God got ahold of you at some time and hopefully changed your life. If he changed your life, you have something to share and that is all you have to share. Just like the blind man. I don’t know what was going on there. I can’t explain theology. All I know is that one time I was blind and now I see and that is all you have to tell them. One day I was walking this way, and I chose to walk that way. That is all you have to do. God has all these divine appointments out there and we just keep skipping over them for whatever reason. These people are out there hungry and waiting. They want to hear some good news and you have this.
Before we close, I would encourage you if you are in that corporate environment or any sort of environment where you are around people of influence, the Lydias of the world, don’t be shy about telling your story. That is your responsibility. That is not Chuck’s responsibility. That is your responsibility to do. In closing, I know also in a crowd this size there are going to be people that in many ways are like Lydia or it could be a man who maybe are in that situation. Maybe you are working a corporate job. Maybe you are working too many hours. Maybe you have a lot of failed relationships. Maybe you have a rich pocketbook but you have an unfulfilled life. If there are people here today I would say that if I said anything, if the word spoke to you, if Debbie sang a song that ministered to you, that you would take it to heart. And if you feel something moving in your heart that means God is trying to pry your heart open. I would say don’t close it. Don’t shut it. You might be able to shut it today but you aren’t going to be able to shut it tomorrow. He might shut it for you or you might not even have another breath to breathe tomorrow. If you are there today and you are someone who God is working on your heart, I would say don’t let this opportunity go by. As we get ready for a time of prayer, we will have a time of offering where people can come forward. I would say if you are one of those people, come forward and let somebody pray for you. Let somebody pray and listen to you and actually begin to guide you to the next step. What is the next step? The next step is baptism. That is the process that we see and that is the process that we practice around here. I make no apologies for it. Basically, the word goes out. God opens the heart. The person receives the heart. The person is baptized and they become disciples of Christ who use their gifts to minister to others. That is the pattern that we practice here.
If you are somebody like that and you are feeling like I think it is time. I think it is time that I come and begin to make that next step towards salvation and Jesus Christ, I would encourage you to come forward, kneel with somebody, talk to somebody, but not only that. Today, I would invite you to be baptized. Last night, there was a phenomenal baptism. Our man Jason got baptized. Stand up Jason. Let’s give him applause. I told my son to empty the baptistery. He said that is a waste of water. It costs us $8 to fill it. I decided that we have a heater now it even makes it more appealing. The baptistery is filled and I don’t want to give anybody pressure but I don’t want to also renege on my responsibility to allow people to come forward and make that decision of baptism. If you are at that place and you really are seriously thinking about doing it, I would say what better day than today. Come down and kneel. Meet with an elder. Meet with somebody and let them talk you through it. If you feel you are ready and they feel you are ready, we will go back and we will have a baptism today. As Debbie comes up to play, she will lead us in a time of prayer.
