A Businesswoman, a Slave Girl, and a Jailor

In Acts 16, Paul and Silas finally reach Europe. As they arrive, they encounter three different people in different seasons of their lives, yet all in need of the gospel. Lydia, a successful businesswoman, reorients her wealth and resources toward God and his Kingdom. A demon-possessed Slave Girl is set free by the power of Jesus. A Roman Jailor about to take his own life finds both physical and spiritual salvation. In each of these encounters, the outcome is the same: the Kingdom breaks into their everyday lives and changes everything. Like these three people, all of us are in need. Some of us need literal and physical saving, and others of us simply need hope. Regardless of our status, financial situation, or season of life, Jesus promises to meet our needs. But to allow him to do this requires us to surrender our lives, our needs, and our resources to him.

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 C. S. Lewis once famously wrote that when Jesus was on earth, uh, teaching and traveling as a rabbi, he was never only seen merely as a rabbi. Uh, from the beginning of his ministry, it was really clear that he wasn’t simply teaching moral truths or a better way of living to anyone who was interested.

His message was radical. His message was countercultural, it was subversive, and on some levels, it was treasonous. To argue that the righteous religious teachers were actually the farthest ones from God, to argue that King Herod was a fox and not a lion, to argue, uh, that the only way to the good life is to give up your life.

These were not normal rabbi teachings. Jesus’s best quippy sayings and pithy phrases sound fun and good. Things like, Judge not lest you be judged. The last will be first and the first will be last. Or, it is better to give than to receive. Sound really good until you actually try and live them out. Then you see how difficult, counter cultural, and sometimes painful they can be.

Lewis goes on to argue, uh, that for this reason, Jesus only produced three responses. When he met people, In his life, as he’s doing his ministry, people responded in three ways. Adoration, hatred, or terror. He says there was no trace of people expressing mild admiration. And his point was that Jesus message was so countercultural and his personality was so engaging that you had no choice but to respond to him.

And that response was either to adore him, to be terrified of him, or to hate him altogether. What you don’t see is anyone roll their eyes at him, walk away, and think that he’s just a crazy person. In other words, when Jesus comes to people, they have to respond to him. And Jesus teachings can only be true if there really is an upside down kingdom that doesn’t operate by the rules of this world.

That’s how radical his message is. So the question we want to ask this morning is, how do Jesus teachings confront us today? How differently does life in the way of Jesus look than life in the way of the world for us? Or, uh, What I’ve been wrestling with all week as I’ve studied the passage we’re about to read is this question, what does it look like when the reality of the kingdom comes clashing with the mundanity of our lives?

And so Acts 16, uh, is a story of what that looks like. If you have a Bible and you’re not already there, we’re going to pick up in verse, uh, 11 in just a few moments. But what we’ve been doing is reading through this book of Acts to see exactly that. How do people still respond to Jesus? To the king and his kingdom, even after Jesus has left the earth and is primarily doing his work through his disciples.

What does it look like? It’s a story written by a Gentile follower of Jesus named Luke who’s trying to summarize the way that Jesus continued to change the world through his disciples as they were empowered by God’s Holy Spirit. And so, briefly, here’s what we’ve learned so far. We’ve learned how the first followers of Jesus obeyed his last command to go and make more followers of Jesus everywhere they go.

We’ve learned how the fir how the church was first established and how successful it was right from the get go. But then, even as it faced opposition, persecution and suffering were actually the greater soil for it to grow than quick success and ease. Halfway through the book, we were introduced to, uh, the church’s main antagonist, Saul, who eventually becomes, after he meets Jesus in the middle of a road trip, uh, the church’s greatest missionary.

He encounters the resurrected Lord, and he has that same choice that everybody has always had and that you and I have today. Do we either follow Jesus as king, or do we face some kind of judgment? So as we continue the story this morning, we’re going to move through this next passage by looking at three people to see how they respond to Jesus and his kingdom.

A businesswoman, a slave girl, and a jailer. So first, a businesswoman. Acts 16 verse 11. From Troas, we put out to sea and sailed straight for Samothrace, the next day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, a Roman colony and a leading city of the district of Macedonia. We stayed in that city for several days.

On the Sabbath day, we went outside the city gate by the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer. We sat down and spoke to the women gathered there. A God-fearing woman named Lydia. A dealer in purple cloth from the city of Thara was listening. The Lord opened her heart to respond to what Paul was saying, and she and her household were baptized after she and her household were baptized.

She urged us, if you consider me a believer in the Lord, come and stay at my house, and she persuaded us. Now we’ve seen Paul’s preferred Mo once he gets to a new city before, and his MO is this. Go to a new city and immediately go to the synagogue to reason with the Jews. Because he believed that the good news, uh, of the gospel was first good news to, to them, to the Jews.

Their scriptures, the Hebrew Bible, the, the Torah, the Talmud, what we would call, sorry, not the Talmud, uh, the Tanakh, uh, what we would call the Old Testament, uh, had promised a messiah who was gonna come and restore the world back to the way he intended it. So the good news was this, the messiah had come, and his name was, He would preach that message in the synagogue to the Jews.

He would reason with them, argue with them, and try and prove, using their Old Testament, that Jesus was the fulfillment of everything that it had promised. Now, usually, he would get run out of that synagogue, maybe a few would follow him, but then he would go to the marketplace and give the same message to the non Jews, the Gentiles.

But this time, in the city of Philippi, there’s no synagogue. It’s likely because there aren’t enough Jewish men in the city to form a Jewish quorum needed for unofficial synagogues. That was part of Jewish rule. You needed a certain number of Jewish men to form an official synagogue. Philippi was a colony made up of Roman veterans, sat on a major road connecting Rome to the rest of Asia, and because of that it was a city committed to maintaining its Roman roots and its identity.

Now that’s going to be important later on. But here at this city, what they do find is a prayer gathering. of women. Gentile women who likely became Jews and wanted to put into practice a regular rhythm of gathering for prayer and worship since there was no synagogue. And of this group of women, Paul and Silas meet Lydia.

And Luke actually gives us some important details about the person, uh, this person Lydia, uh, whom Paul and Silas meet here. Details that actually really important for us to understand why this story is being told. First, Lydia was most likely a Gentile. So even though she’s a follower of Yahweh, she’s part of this kind of Jewish prayer gathering, she’s a Jewish convert, Luke actually uses the word God fearer in the Greek.

It’s a word commonly used to describe someone who came up in a pagan world, worshipping many pagan false gods, but who left that life to worship the one true God, Yahweh. In Lydia, We see somebody who had tried the pagan way of life, of excess, pursuing your desires, and worshiping any god you want. She’d found that life unfulfilling.

And instead, in Judaism, found something compelling about a group of people who were so committed to their one god and to each other that she gave that life up and started becoming a part of that community. The second thing Luke tells us, uh, sort of indirectly, is that, uh, Lydia’s parents Lydia’s rich.

Lydia is loaded, actually. More specifically, she’s a purple clothes dealer. Uh, that sounds like nothing to us, but at the time, purple dye was very expensive. Only the wealthy or the royal could afford it. So not only does she handle the dye, she actually dyes the clothes. She’s like a high end boutique owner or a wealthy designer businesswoman.

She’s financially independent, with a house apparently large enough not only to house her and her family, but any servants, plus these new guests of Paul and Silas. And, as we’re going to see later, actually we won’t cover this, but later in the chapter, her house becomes the first church in Europe. But it’s here, in the mundanity of her weekly routine, during a normal prayer gathering that Lydia encounters the kingdom.

Going about her day to day life not expecting anything other than just a good prayer, maybe some mediocre worship. She meets Paul. She’s put together, she’s disciplined, she’s devoted to God, but that God was actually seeking her. He opens her heart to respond to the good news. I love that that’s what happens there.

Paul and Silas sit down, they find these groups of women praying together. It’s a small enough group to where they’re not preaching, they’re discussing together. And he gives her the answer that she’s been looking for. You don’t have to follow the Old Testament law to gain approval from God. In Christ, God has been seeking you this whole time.

And she responds. Many traditions actually regard Lydia as a saint. She’s the first European convert to Christianity and leader of the first European church. Next, a slave girl. Verse 16. Once, as we were on our way to prayer, a slave girl met us, who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She made a large profit for her owners by fortune telling.

As she followed Paul and us, she cried out, These men who are proclaiming to you the way of salvation are the servants of the Most High God. She did this for many days. Paul was greatly annoyed. Turning to the Spirit, he said, I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her. And it came out right away.

So that’s interesting. This is actually the second time that we know of, uh, where Paul has come into contact with a sinister spiritual power in opposition to Christ and his kingdom. Uh, again, there are some really interesting details that Luke gives us. Uh, here are a few. The girl was likely 10 to 14 years old.

Uh, the Greek word that’s used there Luke actually, um, describes somebody who kinda fits that age bracket, and it’s likely that she was possessed by this demon really early on in her youth. her parents, not knowing what to do with her, gave her up, by selling her into slavery. and the word the way that Luke actually describes her, he says that she is a In Greek, it literally says spirit of the Python if you have a Depending on your Bible, you might have a note that has that at the bottom.

And here’s what that means. Uh, this was kind of an idiom. It was a phrase. Everybody would have known what this meant. Uh, because it referenced a local legend. The python was a giant dragon that guarded the Delphic Oracle and was slain by the Greek god Apollo. So the spirit of the python referred to anyone who had the gift of being able to predict the future.

Fun fact, ventriloquist comes from. You don’t need to know that. Uh, this is what I found as I’m studying this passage. Here’s the reason. Uh, these people would speak with such a deep voice that was uncharacteristic of their normal tone and voice that people thought they had something inside of them. So it was kind of like a ventriloquist, a different voice coming out of them.

These people were erratic. They were very troubled. As we see here, they would yell, they would shriek loudly. This is why Paul is annoyed. Again, these people aren’t super rare, but they’re not super common in this world either. But here’s the crazy thing is her predictions likely came true. It says that she was owned by these slave owners who made a profit from her because of her fortune telling.

They wouldn’t have made a profit from her. They wouldn’t have kept her around if these things didn’t come true. Scripture is clear. This girl isn’t suffering from some mental illness. This is some deep, deep, dark spiritual power that is possessing and oppressing her. And what she’s yelling is really interesting.

She says, These men who are proclaiming to you a way of salvation are the servants of the Most High God. Is that true? Yeah, that’s true. Now, what she’s saying is true, which is also really interesting. Why does Paul actually shoo her away? See, you, me, the devil, the spiritual powers around us, uh, if you’re new and that’s weird language to you, just stick with me.

Uh, all of these powers, these powers, good and evil, know what we all know to be true, and that is that Jesus is the real Lord. James says that even the demons believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and he died for your sins. That doesn’t do them any good. But that’s not what the Philippian citizens would have heard.

Salvation in Philippi, again, this is not a Jewish, this is a Gentile nation, this is Europe, right? These are not believers. These are people who worship many gods and go to the Oracle at Delphi to get their fortune read so they can have success. Salvation for them would have meant good health, prosperity, increased wealth, and rescue from an incoming natural disaster.

Most high, we know that refers to God. God the Father, Yahweh, but to the local Philippian citizen, this would have meant Zeus or whatever local god was seen as the highest and most powerful in that actual city. But that’s not who Paul calls on to rescue this girl from her demonic oppressors. The point of this little story is that Jesus has the ultimate authority over all creation.

His rule and his reign, the kingdom itself, covers the physical world and the supernatural world. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. And we don’t know how the slave girl responds to this power of Jesus, but here’s what we do know. The kingdom can break through powers that are both seen and unseen, and we know that the slave owners do not respond well to the kingdom at all.

So picking up in verse 19. When her owners realized that their hope of profit was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to the authorities. Bringing them before the chief magistrates, they said, These men are seriously disturbing our city. They are Jews, and are promoting customs that are not legal for us as Romans to adopt or practice.

The crowd joined in the attack against them, and the chief magistrates stripped off their clothes and ordered them to be beaten with rods. After they had severely flogged them, they threw them in jail, ordering the jailer to guard them carefully. Receiving such an order, he put them into the inner prison and secured their feet in the stocks.

Now, Here’s why, uh, Philippian culture was really important. Uh, there was a large push by Roman and Jewish citizens to delegitimize Christianity. So in this time, in this period, you were actually allowed to follow other gods. You didn’t have to worship the local gods that there were temples set up for all around your city.

You were allowed to follow any god you want so long as it was considered a legitimate legal religion protected by Roman law. Christianity Was argued by Paul. Paul did not convert to Christianity, by the way. Paul sees Christianity as the continuation, the fulfillment of his Judaism. So as he’s coming in and he’s arguing with the Jewish people, uh, the Jews that are opposing him are trying to show that, hey, uh, in Rome, Christianity is something else entirely.

It is not Judaism. It is not considered a legitimate religion. The Jews wanted the Romans to know that Christianity wasn’t protected under their Roman law. The Romans wanted everyone to adopt their religion and the worship of the Roman gods. So Paul and Silas come subverting the Roman Empire by preaching about the true son of the divine, not Caesar, but Jesus.

This treasonous message, along with the frustration of these two slave owners, left out of a job, land Paul and Silas in prison. So lastly, a jailer. Verse 25. About midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. That’s a whole sermon, by the way.

Suddenly, there was such a violent earthquake that the foundations of the jail were shaken, and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains came loose. When the jailer woke up and saw the doors of the prison standing open, he drew his sword and was going to kill himself, since he thought the prisoners had escaped.

But Paul called out in a loud voice, Don’t harm yourself, because we’re all here. The jailer called for lights, rushed in, and fell down trembling Silas. He escorted them out and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved? Now, before we quickly jump to over spiritualize that question, let’s just think about the situation that the jailer finds himself in right now.

He’s employed by the local Roman government as a prison guard with one job. And that one job is this, make sure the prisoners who are chained and shackled don’t miraculously escape their chains and their shackles. Now he’s failed at that one job. It’s really just not his fault at all. This is what insurance agents call an act of God, right?

This is something that you cannot explain naturally. This is something that happens and it’s just not your fault. And by the way, remember the last time God sent prisoners free, he sent Peter free. How did King Herod respond to those guards? They were, he executed them. They’re dead. It was a common practice, uh, much more common in ancient Rome.

So this man is in a predicament. Not only that, he’s a Gentile man. He likely has no idea who Jesus is, what the gospel was, or what the word salvation would mean to you and me some 2, 000 years later. What exactly is it that he’s asking Paul and Silas? It seems like, I would argue, he’s not asking how to get into heaven when he dies.

He’s just asking how not to get chewed out by his boss at the end of his shift. And so far, the only answer he’s got is to take his own life, because torture and public execution would be far worse. And yet, look how Paul responds. Verse 31. They said, Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved. You and your household.

And they spoke the word of the Lord to him along with everyone in his house. He took them the same hour of the night and washed their wounds. Right away he and all his family were baptized. He brought them into his house, set a meal before them, and rejoiced because he had come to believe in God with his entire household.

So if that was the jailer’s question, why does Paul answer this way? This is what we in the industry call a Jesus juke. This is when somebody asks, uh, like a not serious question, and you kind of use it as an opportunity to be like, well you think that’s hard, the flames in hell are much worse. It’s like, oh my gosh, you think it’s 117, you think that’s hot.

Let me tell you about Jesus. That’s a Jesus juke, it doesn’t make any sense. Paul knows what this guy’s asking. Paul’s smart, right? We all admit, we all know, Paul’s one of the smartest people to ever live. The way he writes, even non Christian, like, scholars and academics admit that if Paul really did write all of this stuff, which we believe he did, Uh, he was a genius.

In this situation, Paul knows exactly what the jailor’s asking. So I think there’s a couple of options. Option one, Paul is some kind of evangelistic jerk. He sees an opportunity and he takes it. Basically, he says, I don’t care how you die, everyone’s going to die, but I’ll tell you how not to go to hell when you do.

Now, he can be a little brazen and brash at times. I think that’s possible. Possible that Paul likely didn’t care about the jailer, he just wanted to get out. And since the jailer was asking, he’s like, well, I might as well give him the gospel and see what happens. Or, Paul actually knows. something that you and I have forgotten.

Paul actually knows that the jailer needs saving from his imminent death, yes, but he also needs saving from his own life. Paul knows that what you and I often forget about what it means to follow Jesus, what ties all three of these encounters together that we’ve just read is this, that the kingdom is for here and now.

Not just for after we die. Regardless of the problem, whatever issue it is that we are facing, Christ and his kingdom are the answer. New Testament scholar N. T. Wright puts it this way, The Christian worldview sees the entire mess that the world is in. From the global facts of human rebellion, idolatry, and sin, the corruption of human life and relationships, the pollution of our planet, the worldwide systems of economic exploitation.

Think about that slave girl situation. And so on, right through to this messy situation here and now, this sudden crisis, this person in desperate need or sorrow or fear, and this person whose own deliberate sin has raised a dark barrier between themselves and God. The Christian worldview sees all of this under the heading of the way the world currently is, as opposed to the way the world will be when Jesus is reigning as Lord.

And the way it can become, even here. And now, because Jesus is already reigning as Lord. In other words, from demonic oppression to that dreaded upcoming meeting with your boss, whatever trouble you find yourself in today, all of your troubles find their answer in the rule and reign of King Jesus on earth here today as it is in heaven.

And let me just, I know how that sounds. I wrestled with this all week. It’s like what you were telling me, my problems could be solved if I believe in Jesus. Yeah, kind of, yeah. I know this brings up a lot of questions that we’re not going to answer now, but presumably here’s what this looks like for the jailer.

He runs off with Paul and Silas. He has two choices. How does he respond to the kingdom? Does he adore Jesus? Does he hate Jesus? Is he terrified of Jesus? I think he’s terrified. And that fear eventually leads him to adoration. That’s where he ends. He rejoices because he came to believe in God along with his entire household.

But his deciding to respond to the gospel, to that response that Paul gives him, believe in the Lord Jesus, his following Jesus leads him out of that present circumstance and into the kingdom. What must I do to be saved, he asks. It’s a question that summarizes this whole passage and that points to one simple truth.

All of us have a need. The jailer needs saving from the unsolvable problem that he’s in. He needs to be saved from an evil job, an evil empire, and the situation that he only sees suicide as the solution to. The slave girl needs saving from a possessive demon. She needs freedom from an oppressive system that preys on her weakness and from evil men who exploit her for profit.

Some of us here today come into the kingdom with a real and tangible need. Like the jailer, maybe our question is that. How do I get out of this mess? What must I do to be saved? I don’t care about my afterlife, I care about my tomorrow. How do I get out of this situation? Or like the slave girl, maybe we have a dark and deep rooted spiritual need that we don’t voice or ask help for.

Notice, she didn’t ask to be delivered. At the tail end of his teaching on how to free yourself from anxiety, Jesus gives us a bold command. Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. And all these things will be provided for you. His argument goes like this. Your stress and anxiety may be coming from your attachment to your stuff.

Your job. Your fears, your worries, your reputation, whatever it is that you have that you are worried God won’t provide for you, might be the thing driving you away from the kingdom. Unless we learn to prize the king and his kingdom above everything else vying for our devotion in this life, our problems will rule and reign over us.

In other words, Jesus is big enough to save us from our deepest spiritual needs, to free us from sin, Satan, and death, yes, but he’s also close enough to meet our daily needs. If our lives revolve around Jesus, our problems get a lot smaller as Christ gets bigger. But what about Lydia? Unlike the slave girl, she wasn’t under the possession of a demon or the oppression of a slave owner.

Unlike the slave owners, she wasn’t out of a job because of Jesus. Unlike the jailer, she didn’t have a boss who would bite her head off, maybe literally. She was her own boss. But she was still stuck. Successful, has everything that she wants. Thriving business, money to her name, a stable career and a calling, and a comfortable home.

But still stuck. If the best hope that she has is in following the law of the Old Testament, she will be stuck trying to get something that’s already freely on offer for her. As wealthy as she is, She’s still spiritually poor and in need of salvation. I would argue that Lydia is where most of us in this room are stuck.

Eugene Peterson, the great author and pastor, argued that for many of us, the thing that keeps us out of the kingdom, the thing that keeps us from seeking first the kingdom, the thing that actually keeps us trapped in our needs. Is what he calls the unholy trinity. My needs, my wants, and my feelings. That’s good.

Uh, I wanted so badly to take credit for this because this comes as a conversation between Pastor Trey and myself. I feel like we had similar ideas and he put it in a three step phrase, so here’s how he summarizes these three things. And we would argue, very humbly, that these are the three predominant idols in our city today.

My comfort. My convenience. And my consumption. And it alliterates, so it’s not me.

My comfort. We like to keep things close to the chest. Our pursuits are actually Lydia’s lifestyle. What we want is what Lydia has. We want stability. We want things to make us feel good. If anything rubs up against the natural rhythms that we’ve built for ourselves to make us feel good and be successful, we don’t want to do those things.

My convenience, we want the path of least resistance. In fact, sociologists outside of Queen Creek obviously argue that, uh, one of the biggest, uh, changes in modern society between the last hundred years and now is, uh, that our lives are primarily becoming more and more as technology advances about minimizing pain and maximizing pleasure.

We assume, as we’ve talked about throughout this series as a whole, that if something is hard, it must not be right. We want what’s easy for us. And my consumption. Generosity is so hard because it asks us to hold with open hands the things that we’ve been holding on so tightly to. The lives that we’ve built for ourselves around consuming more and giving less.

And here’s the thing about Lydia, she had almost everything she wanted. She had comfort, convenience, and consumption. But what does she do? She reorients her entire life. Her house that used to serve her needs now becomes an outpost for the kingdom. Again, many traditions call her a saint because of the way that she responds.

God opens her heart and she obeys.

How do we seek first the kingdom?

We submit all of our lives to the king. From the immediate desperate cries of our hearts, how do I get out of this mess now? To the deeper, darker spiritual needs of our souls. From the things that seem really silly, dumb, and trivial to ask for. To the things that we would be afraid of others finding out.

Dallas Willard puts it this way, Do we love the kind of day to day interaction with God we see in the life of Jesus? in the early church and perhaps have experienced in our own lives? Or do we love something else more? God will not force the kingdom down our throats.

So do we really want the kingdom?

Are we really willing to reorient our entire lives around Jesus in order to see our needs in light of eternity? And I know, again, let me just say, I get how this sounds. It sounds like a spiritual answer to some really tangible physical problems that we have. This is not a full kind of theology on suffering and how to get out of our issues.

And this is certainly not a promise that if you follow Jesus, you’re going to materially be successful. All your needs will be met in this life and everything’s going to be happy for you. We just prayed for Christians where that is not a reality. But what is their hope really in?

Have we given Jesus the authority, not just to rule out there in the corrupt and morally bankrupt world around us, but also in here, in the desperately sin ridden world within us? So why don’t we stand and respond?