LIFE LESSONS
FRIEND OF PAUL: LYDIA
DR. JIM DIXON
ACTS 16:11-15
MARCH 19, 2006
The Apostle Paul, in the year 49 AD, had a divine vision in which God summoned him to leave Asia Minor and venture forth, taking the gospel to the continent of Europe. And so Paul, with his missionary team including Silas, Timothy, and Luke, set sail from Troas in Asia Minor, which was near the ancient city of Troy. They set sail and they came to Samothrace and Neapolis and then to Philippi. Philippi was the capital city of the easternmost province in Europe called Macedonia. Philippi had been founded by and named after Philip II, the king of Macedonia, the father of Alexander the Great.
When Paul and his missionary team came to Philippi, they wanted to preach the gospel, wanted to tell people about Jesus Christ. And they looked around for a synagogue, as was Paul’s custom, because he always wanted to take the gospel first to the Jews. But there was no synagogue in the city of Philippi. This may be because, under Claudius some years earlier, the Jews had been banished from Rome and the city of Philippi, being a Roman colony, did the same thing—banished the Jews—and maybe the Jews had not returned to Philippi in any great number. By Jewish law there had to be a minimum of ten Jewish men to building a synagogue and apparently there were not ten Jewish men in the city of Philippi. But there were a number of Jewish woman, and perhaps a few Jewish men. Paul suspected that there was a “proseuche.” A proseuche is what was kind of a small structure, usually built by the riverside, for the purpose of absolutions and water purification. It was a Jewish place of prayer and sometimes it was just an open-air area.
Paul went outside the city gates and made a mile walk with his missionary team and they went down to the riverside where there was indeed a proseuche. It was there that he sat down and talked to some women who were at that place of prayer. The group of women were diverse. Some of them were Jewish by blood and by faith. Others of these women were Gentiles who had adopted Judaism. They were proselytes. And others in the group were what, in the Book of Acts, are called “God-fearers,” or “worshippers of God.” These were Gentiles who had moved from paganism to monotheism, and they had come to believe in one God, and they believed that that one God was indeed the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but they had not been willing to embrace all of Judaism. And amongst this group was this woman, Lydia. She heard what was said by the Apostle Paul about Jesus and she became the first convert to Jesus Christ on the continent of Europe. And so today we look at her life.
We have two life lessons from the life of Lydia, and the first life lesson is this: The kingdom of heaven grows pneumatologically. That is a tough word. The kingdom of heaven grows pneumatologically. As you join this amazing race where we take the gospel to the nations, you need to remember this strange word, pneumatology. In the world of theology, pneumatology is the branch that deals with the third person of the Holy Trinity. Pneumatology is the branch of theology that deals with the “Hagion Pneumaton,” the Holy Spirit. When we say the kingdom of heaven grows pneumatologically, what we are saying is the kingdom of heaven grows by the power of the Holy Spirit. Remember this as you share Jesus in your neighborhood and at work and all over the world. Whenever you talk about Jesus, remember the kingdom of heaven grows by the power of the Holy Spirit.
So, Paul did not lead Lydia to Christ. The Holy Spirit did. We are told in Acts, chapter 16, that the Lord opened her heart. “The Lord opened her heart to give heed to what Paul was saying.” It was the Holy Spirit working in her, and the Holy Spirit had begun to work in Lydia’s life before the Apostle Paul even showed up. That is why she was a God-fearer. She was like Cornelius. She was like some of the other God-fearers like Simeon Bachos, perhaps, the Ethiopian eunuch, other God-fearers, Gentiles who had not embraced Judaism but had come to believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob or had come to believe in one true God. They were God-worshippers. The Holy Spirit had brought her that far. The Holy Spirit had already been at work in her life before Paul and his missionary party even showed up. The Holy Spirit had been at work.
God wants you to know as you are in this amazing race wherever you go, anywhere in the world, the Holy Spirit is there before you. You can have encouragement and you can have confidence because of this. Of course, in Matthew, chapter 13, Jesus gives us the Parable of the Soils. He says as we go forth in the world and we sow the seed of the gospel, we will encounter different types of soil. The people’s hearts will be characterized by different types of soil. In some people,” The soil of their heart is hard, and they can’t receive the seed of the gospel,” Jesus said. Other people, as you share the gospel, “The soil in their heart is shallow and they will receive the seed of the gospel, but it won’t really take root because the soil is shallow.” Jesus said of other people you will encounter, “The soil of their heart is thorny and weed infested. They will receive the seed of the gospel, but it will not really be able to grow because it will be choked on all the weeds and all the thorns and all the materialistic and hedonistic cares of the world. All of the pursuits of this life, all of the anxieties, will choke the seed of the gospel.” But Jesus said, “Other people will receive My Word. They will receive the gospel. They will receive the Good News of the kingdom of heaven.”
Here is the amazing thing. The Holy Spirit is at work in the hearts of people all over the world. He is at work in the soil of their heart. The amazing thing is that soil can change. If the soil was hard, it can become soft. If it is weed-infested, it can become whole. Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit, attends the gospel and the Holy Spirit is at work wherever you go working on the soils of people’s hearts.
I remember at Fuller Seminary in the School of World Mission, there was a missiologist, a professor there named Dr. Glasser. He told me once about a friend of his who had gone to the mission field in Africa and had done theological preparation, had learned the Indigenous languages and had gone through all of his preparation for culture shock and had gone to this part of Africa to share Jesus. He went to a remote tribe that had never heard the gospel and Dr. Glasser told me that in this tribe there was of course a lot of idolatry. People worshipped idols, but idols do not just appear out of nowhere. They do not just arise ex nihilo. Someone has to make those idols, and so, in every tribe there is an idol maker (maybe more than one), somebody who has that craftsmanship with their hands who can actually construct these idols that are worshipped by the tribal people groups.
There was man in this tribe that Dr. Glasser’s missionary friend who going to who was the idol maker. The Holy Spirit had begun to prepare the soil of his heart before the missionary ever arrived. And so this guy who was the craftsman, the arts man who made the idols, was going through this kind of evolution in terms of his awareness of God. He thought, “These people worship all of these idols but they’re really worshipping my gifts. They are really worshipping my abilities. They are worshipping my skills, my craftsmanship. They’re worshipping the skill of my hands.” Then he began to think deeper as the Holy Spirit began to work in his spirit. He began to think deeper. He said, “You know, maybe what they really need to be worshipping and who they really need to be worshipping is the One who gave me my abilities, the One who gave me this artistic craftsmanship, the One who made my hands. Maybe that is who they need to be worshipping. Maybe we should all be worshipping the One who made my hands.”
This was his pilgrimage of thought prior to the arrival of the missionary. And then when this missionary then arrived, this friend of Dr. Glasser’s, he had a time of prayer before speaking to the people and he had a word of knowledge from the Holy Spirit that he was to begin by saying, “I come to you in the name of the very God who made your hands.” He had never ever begun any talk like that in his life, but he had this word of knowledge, so he stood in front of the tribe and said, “I come to you in the very name of the God who made your hands.” This guy in the back, this craftsman who made the idols, stood up and threw his hands in the air and he was the first convert.
I ask you, hadn’t the Holy Spirit arrived first before the missionary? You can believe that, and you see God wants us to have this comfort, this confidence, this knowledge that He’s working in the hearts of people. And He is working in the soil of their hearts, preparing them for our coming and faithfulness with the gospel.
Of course, the Apostle Paul understood this. After Philippi, in a period of weeks Paul made his way down to Athens. There in Athens he took the gospel to the cultural center of the Greek or Hellenized world. Athens was a great city—the city of Sophocles, the city of Euripides, the city of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great. Athens was an amazing place. Paul went up on the Acropolis. He saw the Parthenon, the Temple of Diana. He took it all in and he was not intimidated. He knew the Holy Spirit had already arrived, so he went to the Aeropagus and he began to speak to the people. And he said, “As I walked along, men of Athens, observing the objects of your worship I saw one altar with this inscription, ‘To An Unknown God.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I declare to you.” And he went on to tell them about Jesus and about the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The interesting this was that Paul just assumed that there were people there searching for a God who was yet unknown to them. He just assumed there were people there who were feeling after God, reaching after Him, striving after Him. He just assumed the Holy Spirit was already at work. I wonder whether we are like that. I mean, do we make that assumption? We should assume that the Holy Spirit has already arrived and the Holy Spirit is already at work in the lives of the people to whom we go.
I know most of you, probably all of you, have heard of W.C. Fields. W.C. Fields of course died some time ago. He was a famous comedian. He was an actor. He was an entertainer, a very, very talented man. He is always kind of remembered for his top hat and his big nose and his way of speaking through the corner of his mouth. W.C. Fields, like all of us, had a few eccentricities. One was that he was always afraid of poverty. It came from his vaudeville days where he could not put bread on the table. And so he went through his life fearing poverty. It is like some people who went through the Great Depression. There is just this fear of being poverty stricken.
So he would dream some nights that he would be in some other city, some foreign city somewhere in the world and he would be broke and would have no money and no means of getting money and would be destitute. So W.C. Fields, historians tell us, began to do a very weird thing. He began to establish bank accounts in strange cities all over the world—700 bank accounts in seven hundred different cities. In some of them he would just put $50. In some he put $50,000. He would use fictitious names like Aristotle Hoop. By his own records he had these seven hundred bank accounts around the world. The problem was that the records were lost and, upon his death, his relatives could not claim their inheritance. They could not find all the bank accounts. They did not know what cities and they did not know the names. They were only able to find sixteen of the seven hundred bank accounts, losing out on their inheritance.
Of course, as believers of Jesus Christ, we are promised an inheritance and it is an amazing inheritance. “Sugkleronomos” is the Greek—co-heirs with Christ. We are heirs of God and co-heirs with God’s Son. Of course, we generally think, “Well, we enter into our inheritance when we die.” That is how most Christians think—“When we die, we get the ‘heaven deal’ and we get the ‘new body deal’ and all the benefits of eternal life, all the benefits and glories of heaven. That’s our inheritance and we come into it when we die.” But biblically we begin to enter into our inheritance the moment we embrace Christ. The moment you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and your Savior, you are already given eternal life. Those of you who belong to Christ already have eternal life right now and you have already been given the person of the Holy Spirit! That is what the Bible says. The moment you receive Jesus as your Savior and Lord, He sent the Holy Spirit into you and this indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. You have been given a new power by the Holy Spirit characterized by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. And of course it is at war with the old nature, but you have been given this new nature by the Holy Spirit.
Also you have been offered gifts of the Holy Spirit. Of course, you have the fruit of the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit and the anointing power of the Holy Spirit. I wonder sometimes how many Christians are just ignoring their inheritance? If you are entering this amazing race, know the kingdom of heaven grows pneumatologically by the power of the Holy Spirit and He attends you. He dwells within you. He empowers you. He gifts you and He prepares the hearts of people before you. How often do you pray before talking to somebody about your faith in any sense? How often do you pray for the Holy Spirit to do His work and to anoint that conversation?
That is the first life lesson from Lydia, that everything happens by the power of the Holy Spirit. That is how it was for her. She came to Jesus not by the Apostle Paul. He was simply used. He was a tool used by the Holy Spirit. It was the Holy Spirit who opened her heart and caused her to give heed and it was the Holy Spirit who had prepared her heart even before Paul arrived. That is why she was already a God-fearer.
We have one more teaching from Lydia and that teaching is this: The kingdom of heaven grows exponentially. God wants you to know this and wants you to have this encouragement, this excitement, as you join this amazing race. He wants you to know that His Kingdom grows exponentially.
Some of you have studied various fields of math in school. Some of you have forgotten almost as much as you ever knew. Many of you have studied algebra. If you studied algebra, you know about exponents. In algebra you have a number or a letter and sometimes that number or letter has above and to the right of it an exponent. That exponent might be a two, which means that the number or the letter is squared. Or that exponent might be a three, which means that the number or the letter is cubed. I think you know what I am talking about. This is why we speak of growth as exponential. When you look at a person, you do not know the number that is immediately above and to the right of their head. You do not know what number is there. Of course, they are just one person, and it does not do a lot of good to square or cube the number one, but you understand the idea. The idea is growth, incredible growth.
And so in Matthew 13 when Jesus spoke of the soils and He spoke of the soils of peoples’ hearts as the gospel seed is sown and He spoke of the good soil, He talked about this exponential growth. He says that some people will receive the seed and it will bring forth growth. He said that in some cases, thirty-fold; in some cases, sixty-fold; in some cases, a hundred-fold. Isn’t that incredible? This is the promise that is given. So as you go forth and you share the gospel and you talk in any sense about your faith in Jesus Christ, the results are exponential. It is unbelievable. If you have one person who comes to Christ, you do not know what the ultimate impact of that is because you cannot see the exponent. You cannot see that number above and to the right of their head so you do not know what might be happening and what is going to happen.
So we have Lydia. Lydia was a very unusual person. She was rich. We know that. We know she was really rich because she was part of the “porphuropli.” The porphuropli were people who were sellers of purple dyes. They had to be incredibly rich. And of course, purple dye was made in the region of Lydia and it was made from the excretions of certain shellfish, forms of mollusks. Four different shellfish were capable of producing the purple dye excretion, but it took 8,000 of these shellfish, their excretions, to produce one gram of purple dye! It was precious. It was sought all over the world from the region of Lydia. Of course, Lydia, the person, might just have been called, “the person of Lydia.” We do not know if Lydia was her real name. We do know she was part of the porphuropli. This is incredible information.
She had been in Thyatira. She had belonged to a trade guild. Thyatira was famous for its trade guilds, and of course the purple dye trade guild was fabulously wealthy. She had taken her trade to Philippi, and she was still dealing with the guild but bringing purple dyes in. Of course, kings and royalty wore purple robes, and the wealthiest Romans embroidered their robes with purple. Of course in palaces and in mansions and in great churches and temples, curtains were embroidered with purple. In the most wealthy of places the entire curtain would be the color purple. She had this business. She had a household, and she probably had many servants. She may have had children. We do not know, but when she accepted Jesus Christ that day by the riverside, she invited the missionary party to come and stay at her house and her whole house became believers. Through her influence and this domino effect, we began to see the exponential growth. And so her whole house is baptized—the servants, the employees, perhaps her children. And then we see later in Acts 16 the inference is that her home becomes the headquarters for the New Church in the city of Philippi. Amazing.
You look at the early church (and a lot of people do not realize this) and we view Christianity as simply a movement of the poor. And certainly Jesus loves everybody, but the truth is it was the rich who provided their homes for the early church to meet in. Only the rich had homes that were large enough to provide for congregations to assemble. And so, Lydia’s house became a place where the kingdom of heaven would grow exponentially. But Paul could not have seen the exponent above and to the right of her head, and yet he knew the kingdom of heaven grows like that. He knew that.
So you should take encouragement when you teach a Sunday school class. You do not know those children in terms of that exponent. When you go into the inner city and you work with an inner-city child, you do not see the impact of that one life. When you go anywhere in the world and you share the gospel of Christ, maybe you only have one convert, but you do not know the power of that.
That is why I love the story I first read in a book by Robert Schuller. It is the story of a Moravian missionary named George Smith. Of course, the Moravians were a strong pioneer missionary force and in the 1700s they took the gospel of Jesus Christ to many parts of the world and George Smith took the gospel to Africa. After much preparation and after much training in language and in theology, he went into Africa and experienced the culture shock of being a pioneer missionary to a part of Africa that had never heard the gospel. He grew ill and became deathly sick after leading, by the power of the Holy Spirit, only one person to Christ, a woman in that tribe in Africa. George Smith began his journey home by sea, and he died on the journey home.
It was almost one hundred years before missionaries went back into that region of Africa. It was in the 1800s. It is said that when missionaries arrived, they found 11,000 Christians that had come from that one convert.
You do not know, do you? How crazy! He could not see the exponent. Incredible. So, God wants you to know this. Of course, think about who led Billy Graham to Christ. Who saw the number above and to the right of his head? Who led Billy Sunday to Christ? Who led D.L. Moody to Christ? Bill Hybels? Rick Warren? Who led you to Christ, and what is the exponent above and to the right of your head? How is Christ using you? How faithful are you? How faithful am I?
I think the Lord would probe this morning and seek some answers from us and maybe some commitment to this amazing race. He wants to encourage us. I have a copy of Christianity Today. This is the most recent issue, the March issue of this year. Its entitled, “Missions Incredible.” It is talking about the Third World—or what we used to call “the developing world,” but now they call it “the majority world.” They call it the majority world because that is where most people live is in the Third World, or the developing world. The developed nations only have 18% of the world’s population. There are 6.4 billion people in the world but over five billion of them live in the Third World or in developing nations. And you see, it is there where the gospel of Jesus Christ is growing exponentially.
There is a major feature article in here on South Korea and what God is doing there, what the Holy Spirit is doing there, and how South Korea is sending missionaries all over the world. In a few years, they will be the primary mission-sending nation on earth. They will send forth more missionaries than the United States of America according to Christianity Today. The face of the Christian world is changing and there are some Christians in other parts of the world a little more faithful to this amazing race and to this incredible call. But it is not too late for us. It is not too late. So, God’s call is upon us.
This last Friday was of course St. Patrick’s Day. Some people marched in a parade. Some people maybe spent the afternoon in an Irish pub. Some people wore green. A lot of you wore green. Of course, most people do not really give St. Patrick a thought and they really do not know much of anything about him. Maybe they do not care. St. Patrick, you understand, was a missionary. He was one who had joined the amazing race. He took the gospel to Ireland. He was from Britain. He was from England, but he took the gospel to Ireland.
There are a lot of legends about St. Patrick—that he charmed the snakes and they went into the sea and drowned. Surely that is bogus. There is the legend that he used the 3-leafed clover to illustrate the Holy Trinity. And maybe he did. We do not know for sure. There are many legends, but of course what we do know is that through him, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the kingdom of heaven grew exponentially. So, it is said that St. Patrick founded three hundred churches in Ireland and baptized 150,000 people. The numbers might be wrong, but I will tell you this: Whatever he did, it happened pneumatologically. It happened by the power of the Holy Spirit, and I will tell you this too: The growth was exponential because that is how it works.
So here is the call of God upon us today. Many of you are going to go down to the large gym after this service and join in this kind of victory lane missions fair. But let it be a time of commitment. Let it be a time of commitment that there is going to be a consecration in your soul to the cause of Christ in this world and that you are going to offer, at a deeper level, your time, talent, and treasure to the Great Commission because you believe in the power of the Holy Spirit and you believe indeed that the kingdom of heaven will grow exponentially. Let us look to the Lord with a word of prayer.