Greetings

Greetings, everyone! Blessings to each of you in our Lord Jesus, and welcome to Wednesday’s edition of EDiBS. As we come to God’s Word today my prayer is that you’ll experience a rich and accessible encounter in the Scriptures – a time of receiving wisdom and insight that you can put to use in your everyday life. Let’s pray as we turn again to Acts 16. 

Prayer 

Lord God, thank you for another day to be together as your people, and thank you for this time today to come before you in an intentional way to learn from your Word. We ask that you bless this study time, and that you work in our lives for the good as a result of what we read. We ask this in Jesus’ name, amen. 

Getting Started 

As we get started today, Paul and his companions – with Luke himself now part of the group – continue their ministry together. Our focus for the day: Luke’s eyewitness account of important work in Philippi. 

Acts 16:11-15 

11From Troas we put out to sea and sailed straight for Samothrace, and the next day on to Neapolis. 12From there we traveled to Philippi, a Roman colony and the leading city of that district of Macedonia. And we stayed there several days. 13On 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. 14One of those listening was a woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth from the city of Thyatira, who was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul's message. 15When 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. 

If you’ve been with me since the early years of EDiBS, then you know that I used to love being with my two spoiled geese, Honk and Leather. I have no shame in admitting that I talked to them, coddled them, and happily put up with their overdeveloped sense of superiority over all living things. For that matter, my geese also loved being with me – and pretty much only me. They talked to me, came to me for treats, and allowed me to stroke their necks or the furry little tuft on the top of their heads. If I was out in the yard or the garden, they’d follow me about and chat with me while they ate grass or pecked at things that stoked their curiosity. But here’s the deal: they only hung out with me if I went to them first. Once they’d see me, everything was good, and in fact, once they’d see me they’d follow me everywhere I went and even stand at the front door looking for me through the glass once I went inside. But they never sought me out first. I was the one who had to initiate, because though they were certainly intelligent animals, I think their brains operated on an out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality. 

I bring up my silly geese today to illustrate what I hope you will find to be a not-silly point, but rather something I consider to be an incredibly important point that we can derive from the passage before us. Today’s reading is a great one because we get to see lots of things going on. There’s a little bit of travelogue for us to follow, there’s the action of the missionary team as they go from one place to another and follow the Macedonian call of the Lord, and of course, we get to meet Lydia, the wonderful woman in Scripture who is such a great example to us of faith and of hospitality. 

Maybe it’s because of my church-planting mindset of days past, or maybe it’s just because I’ve sensed this more and more the longer I’ve been a pastor, but when I look at this passage and consider what’s presented here, there’s one big thing — one huge thing — that stands out. On the Sabbath, Paul and his companions would normally go to the synagogue and speak. In Philippi, however, there is no synagogue, because there are very few Jews in that city. We know that, by the way, because you’ve got to have at least 10 men in order to form a synagogue, and the absence of even that small number needed to form a quorum and organize means that there’s just not a large presence. When the Sabbath comes, then, do our faithful missionaries just sleep in, gather for a late breakfast, and cluck their tongues with disappointment over the fact that there’s no organized religious assembly where they can go and present the Gospel? No! The Bible says here that on the Sabbath Paul and his companions head outside the city where they expect to find a place of prayer by the river. 

Meaning what? Meaning, first of all, that they’ve obviously done their homework during the week and have learned that while there isn’t a synagogue, there does happen to a place where worshipers of God gather. Second, and this is the pay dirt in the text as far as I’m concerned, Paul and his coworkers don’t wait for people to come to them; they go to where the people are. They don’t wait for people to seek Jesus; they take Jesus to the people. They take Jesus to the people. They take Jesus to the people. It’s that mindset which directly brings about Lydia’s hearing of the Gospel. It’s that mindset which God uses to bring her the gift of salvation — the first convert in Europe. It’s that mindset which directly leads to Lydia providing her residence as a hospitable home base for the work of Paul and his team in Philippi. And when Paul departs that city, leaving Luke behind to preach the Gospel and firmly establish the church, it’s Lydia, along with a certain jailer and his family who we’ll get to a little later, who will become the anchors of the Christian movement there. 

Wrapping Up 

The point, as we wrap up, is that when it comes to growing the kingdom of God, Paul doesn’t rent a hall, put an ad in the paper, and then sit back twiddling his thumbs saying “Well, if people want to come, they know where we are.” Paul seeks out those who need to hear the message of salvation in Jesus. He mobilizes himself. He doesn’t merely make Christ accessible to people who might be interested, he speaks Christ into their hearts by inserting himself into their world and showing them that he cares. For Paul the church is not a place with four walls and an open door once a week; the church is the people of God, not limited by walls of any kind. What would happen if Christians today stopped inviting people to attend church with them and instead decided to go out and be church where the people already are? Something to think about, especially for those of us who tend to have a very entrenched definition of what the Christian life is all about. Have a wonderful day, everyone — take care, and I’ll look forward to seeing you soon!