Acts 16:16-24 - Freedom for the Exploited

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Don Filcek, Solid Foundations; Acts 16:16-24 - Freedom for the Exploited

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It's been a while since I covered the acronym of what our name stands for, so I wanted to do that.
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Take just a moment this morning as I'm going into the introduction of my message to talk about why the name
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RECAST evokes all types of thoughts in your mind, you know, like maybe recasting the nets, and that was part of the thought, is that there's a passage in John where Jesus talks about throwing the nets on the other side of the boat to haul in a catch and doing things different, so they've been fishing all night and they recast the nets and they threw them in, in obedience to God.
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And so that's part of the idea, but also it's an acronym for our core values. So it's a way of constantly reminding ourselves of where we're going and how we're getting there.
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And so the R and the E, you'll notice that the E is generally lowercase because it's not part of the acronym per se, but the
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R and the E stands for reproducing, and that is that we want to be a church that ultimately sends out teams to start other churches.
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So that as we grow and as God continues to bless us, that we reproduce this that's going on here in other areas, not that we get a central campus with a multi -million dollar facility and become a megachurch, but that as we grow the goal is to push out into other areas and to grow that way.
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So that's the R and E in recast. The C, you'll see the rest of them are on the back wall, they're community, is the second one.
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And the idea behind community is that we want to be a church that blesses our community outside of these walls.
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A church that genuinely, Matawan is glad that recast exists here and we do that through a variety of ways.
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We've helped to start a food pantry in the area, we help with the walkathon for the schools raising funds, we do things out there that are genuine needs that we're working towards meeting out there.
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So a blessing to the community. And then authenticity is that piece of relationships that, how many of you know that it's fairly easy to come into a church and kind of sit and just take things in and then leave real quick afterwards?
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Have any of you ever done that before? And that's kind of like doing church, right?
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But what we want to do is we want to be the church, and so being the church is something that's a little bit deeper, actually engaging in one another's lives.
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And I don't expect that primarily to happen on Sunday mornings, as I said earlier. I don't expect there to be just like, you know, just this heartfelt connection between people who just meet for the first time on Sunday morning, although I do want you interacting and building relationships, but it's primarily, again, through the small group ministry that we expect you to get to know one another and to pray for one another and really begin to understand where each other are coming from and things like that.
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I say this often, it's kind of become almost a model for this idea of authenticity, but we want to be a church where nobody mourns alone and nobody rejoices alone.
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And we recognize that when you come to church on Sunday morning, all different kinds of things have happened in your week.
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Would you agree with that? Some of you are coming from a good perspective, some of you have got horrible news this week, some of you are rejoicing and got some great news, and we want to be a place where people can come and share what's been going on with them this week in a place where authentic relationships.
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The S is simplicity, and simplicity is, how many of you know that things can get complex in a church?
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So that's not what it's primarily about, but it's about focus and keeping things not program -driven.
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You'll notice that we don't have a Sunday evening service, we don't have a Wednesday night program, and some people are kind of like, well, when are you going to get this program started?
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When are you going to do this? This is what we do. We grow in faith, we grow in community, we grow in service through a
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Sunday morning service, small groups during the week, opportunities for you to serve in the way that God has gifted you, and that's basically it.
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The last thing is, last but not least, and very appropriate as we come into opening God's Word and reading it together, is truth.
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Truth is what binds all of that together. So looking at God's Word and saying, this is our guiding light, this is where we get our focus, this is where we get our direction, we're in here.
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And you'll notice that even as Bill came and brought the Word last week, he preached in a little bit different style than me, what
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I would call a topical message. But where did he take us? He still took us to the
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Word, didn't he? It's still focused here, even though he is preaching topically on a topic, it's still coming out of here as the source.
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And so truth is very important. And with that said, I want you to open your Bibles, please, to Acts chapter 16, and we're going to look at verses 16 through 24.
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That's page 792 in the Bible that's in the seat back in front of you. So page 792 in that Bible, and if you do not own a
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Bible, I want you to take that one with you that was purchased with you in mind. Our desire is that everybody owns a
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Bible, so if you don't have one, take that one with you. But as you're turning there to page 792 or Acts 16, 16 through 24, this morning in our text we're going to see
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God's love and his great concern for the well -being of the most marginalized in society.
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Those who have been pushed down, those who have literally been exploited. And we're going to meet a little girl in our text who has been spiritually and socially exploited.
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She even carries the name, the title, slave. She's a slave in her culture.
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And yet we're going to see that God's love reaches down even to that lowly place where that little girl lives, and God's grace is so big and so wide that it reaches down even to her.
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And God is going to grant her freedom and peace. This is the God that we come to worship this morning, a
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God whose love is immense and wide and encompassed even us, even the lowly, and has brought us back.
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So as we come to worship, as Rob comes to lead us this morning, I want us to focus on this great
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God. I want that to be our attention and our focus in thinking about a God who reaches down to the lowly, the broken, the abused, the mistreated, the used, as we're going to sing here in a moment.
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So let's go ahead and read this text together with that in mind, and then Rob's going to come and lead us. As we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by fortune telling.
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She followed Paul and us crying out, these men are servants of the most high God who proclaim to you the way of salvation.
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And this she kept doing for many days, Paul having become greatly annoyed, turned and said to the spirit,
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I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her. And it came out that very hour.
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But when her owners saw that their hope of gain was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the rulers.
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And when they had brought them to the magistrates, they said, these men are Jews and they are disturbing our city. They advocate customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to accept or practice.
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The crowd joined in attacking them and the magistrates tore the garments off them and gave orders to beat them with rods.
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And when they had inflicted many blows upon them, they threw them into prison, ordering the jailer to keep them safely.
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Having received this order, he put them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks.
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Let's pray. Two weeks ago, last week
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I was gone so I wasn't preaching through the book of Acts, but two weeks ago, we saw the missionary team of Paul, Silas, Timothy, and then along on that missionary journey, they picked up a guy named
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Luke who ends up actually writing the book that we're looking at right now. And they were led by the Holy Spirit.
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The Holy Spirit guided them and directed them and they ended up in Europe. Okay, so they were doing this mission and it was in what is modern day
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Turkey. And they end up, by the guidance and direction of the Holy Spirit, a vision appears to them, a guy in a dream, and says, come over here, and he's from Greece, and so they go over to Greece.
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So now they're actually in Europe. And in that passage, we saw the first people to ever come to faith in Jesus Christ on the continent of Europe in our text last week.
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A lady named Lydia, and I mentioned that she reminds me of my daughter. I picture if my daughter was to go into business, she would be
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Lydia because it tells us in the text that Lydia was a seller of purple stuff. And I think that if my daughter were to open a shop, a boutique or something, you could probably just call it purple stuff and that would work.
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So I think I can kind of see Lydia in my daughter a little bit. But that was the first convert, was this wealthy, prominent lady of commerce who was a wealthy woman by any standard in that time, and a businesswoman.
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She was the first person in this city called Philippi, the town that they went to, the very first place that they're proclaiming the gospel in Europe.
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She was the first one. She came to faith in Christ. It actually says in the text from last week that God caused her to, or opened her heart to pay attention to the words
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Paul was speaking. So Paul wasn't some amazing dynamic speaker using PowerPoint and grabbing everybody's attention with anecdotes and really cool.
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It took a miracle of God to get their attention to focus in on what he was saying.
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And so that's actually my prayer often for all of you, is I don't expect to be capable of holding your attention.
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It's my prayer that the Holy Spirit holds your attention and draws particularly, I know that sometimes you zone out when
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I'm talking or whatever. But there are times when, have you ever had that happen where I'm up here talking or somebody's talking and it's like all of a sudden you hear what
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God wants you to hear? That's my prayer for us this morning is that we would hear what God wants us to hear from this text.
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But that happened with her. She put her faith and trust in Jesus Christ, acknowledged him as Lord and Savior, was baptized.
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Her household, she was excited and her household heard this message. They believed and were baptized as well and we basically had the start of the first church in Europe in our text last week.
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She said this to them at the end of our text. She said, speaking to the whole missionary team with Paul, she said, if you found me faithful then come and stay at my house.
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Now she probably had a pretty nice house, you know, like a really good crib. So she's,
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I did, I just said crib, had a nice house, okay, we'll let her talk about that.
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And so she says, if you found me faithful, come and stay with me, let me be a hostess for you.
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And so that's where they're staying. So when we pick up the text, right off the bat in 16, they're on their way from Lydia's house.
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We can easily assume that. They're on their way from Lydia's house to the place of prayer just outside the city where Lydia was led to Christ.
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Now the implication is that maybe on a daily basis, at least regularly, they're going out to this place of prayer and praying together as a new church.
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So it's outside of the town, it's a place where there would have been flowing water for ritual purification and things like that.
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They're still going out and they're going to pray. But along the way, we are introduced to the main character in our text today.
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It's a little girl. And she's a little slave girl, the text tells us. She is not just a little slave girl, but she is possessed by a demon.
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By a demon that gives her the ability to tell the future. So it's a future telling spirit.
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And she meets up with the missionary team on the way to prayer and the text tells us that her ability to tell the future made her profitable to her owners.
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Which implies, if you think about this logically, it implies that she was actually quite effective at the supernatural ability to tell the future, right?
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If she's profitable. How many of you know if she's telling the future and it doesn't come to pass, no profit, right? People stop coming, stop paying attention.
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So we're actually looking at miraculous things here. Now at the Greek level of studying this passage, there's an interesting thing to note here that just doesn't come out in English in verse 16.
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She is said to be possessed by a python spirit. That's literally the Greek word is python.
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Like the snake. How many of you like snakes? She's possessed by a python spirit. What is that about?
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Well the python was a symbol of the famous oracle of Delphi. Have any of you ever heard of the oracle of Delphi?
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A famous kind of Greek thing back in ancient times. The oracle was concerned with the telling of the future.
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So people would come and bring sacrifices and bring offerings. There at the oracle, the priests and the priestesses would then in turn go into a trance and proclaim the future and give a future, basically tell the future.
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The priests and priestesses of Delphi worshipped the god Apollos. And so the way that this all works and the reason python is in here is
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Apollos in mythology had defeated this giant python and in exchange for defeating the python, he was given the ability to tell the future.
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And so they are basically offering, giving offerings to the god Apollos, Apollo in their mind in exchange for the future.
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So that's what's going on here is this little girl is ultimately seen as connected to the oracle of Delphi in some way.
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And what's interesting to note in all of this, the reason I even bring any of that up, is the clear correlation between the demonic realm and the acts of worship of idols and man -made deities, that there's a correlation between false religion and demonic activity.
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I think we sometimes act a bit arrogant looking back at history. We have a chronological pride about us that looks back at ancient religious practices and says, really?
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Like really worship stone? Like really? Okay, like there's a passage in Jeremiah that I've always thought was really sarcastic and humorous.
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You think God has a sense of humor? He says, what a guy does is he goes out and he chops down a tree and he takes a third of it and he roasts his dinner over it.
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He takes another third and makes a chair. I don't remember exactly what the text says, but he makes something with it. And then he takes the other third and he makes a god and worships it.
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Like do you know the sarcasm that's in there? But what I want to point out to you is we could tend to look back at things like what's going on here, the
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Oracle, all of this stuff, pagan worship. How could anybody be so naive to worship idols or the
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Greek gods and goddesses? Has that ever crossed your mind? How could somebody be that naive? These gods and goddesses in our text today, to their viewpoint, to the vantage point of somebody living in that day and age, they are doing miracles.
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They are telling the future accurately. They are being fueled by the demonic.
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Do you see that? So that if you and I lived in that time, we would just be as easily roped in as them.
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Because we would be seeing miraculous signs and amazing things going on and it would be like, whoa. But it's not good.
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Is everything that's miraculous and amazing, is it all good? No. Satan has his counterfeits as well.
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So there's a reality to the power of evil, as we're going to see throughout this passage. And what we're going to find even a deeper level is that not everything that a demon utters is always blatantly evil at face value.
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We're going to actually see this demon state truth. It's going to declare truth. It's going to twist it a little bit, but declare the truth.
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So this slave girl attaches herself to Paul and company. She's following them around incessantly. So it's implied that every day they take off from Lydia's house and this girl somehow connects with them, maybe on the marketplace on the way there.
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And she is incessantly saying the same thing over and over again. She's crying this out in the power of this demon.
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She's saying, these men are servants of the Most High God who proclaim to you a way of salvation. Now the text reads in the
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English Standard Version, the way of salvation. The way that the article works in Greek there, it's quite likely, and many scholars are saying, it's likely that she's declaring that this is a way of salvation.
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She's not going all the way and saying this is the only way of salvation. It's a way. This is a possible way to be saved.
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Does anybody besides me notice some free publicity here? Do you see that?
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Paul and company are trying to get the message out and they've got a megaphone running around with them telling everybody the message.
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Do you see what I'm saying here? They got a freebie here. Right? I mean, aren't there churches out there that would pay for this kind of publicity?
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Maybe we'd hire her to stand out front, out by the street and cry out, come here, this is where salvation is found.
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This is the Most High God and all this stuff. How many churches would kind of sell themselves out on something like that?
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Think about that. I mean,
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I'm wondering, Paul and company, what are they thinking? You mean we get a free voice declaring our purpose and our mission to everyone?
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Excellent. Bonus. Right? No. It's unclear why it takes many days and the text tells us that it took some time, but Paul and company endured her incessant following and proclaiming.
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It's kind of getting to the point where it's badgering them until Paul finally gets very disturbed.
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The text tells us greatly annoyed. The verb used here for Paul's reaction is that it's a burden to him, an annoyance.
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It's quite possible by this verb that Paul is just going nuts. This is starting to drive him crazy every day, day in and day out.
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She's saying the same thing over and over again, following them. Think like the kids in the back seat. You know that trip where you're going to Florida and they ask every single mile, are we there yet?
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And you haven't even left the state of Michigan. Have you been on that trip before? I don't like that trip.
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Seeing here and throughout the New Testament, a little bit of Paul's personality. It is possible that there is a fleshly level to his annoyance.
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I mean, he would admit to ever being annoyed by somebody before. Okay? He's a little bit annoyed here, but there's also room in the word that's used here for him being disturbed or burdened, that he's literally concerned for this little girl's plight.
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So that I see a little bit of both. I see a human response on Paul's part. He's annoyed by it, but I think he's equally frustrated that there comes a point sometime during this week or however many days this was, that he begins to realize this is demonic.
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This girl has supernatural abilities that are not hers. He becomes aware that the girl's insight is from this
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Pythonic spirit that is dwelling within her. We know that because of what he says to her. He doesn't even speak to her, as a matter of fact.
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In the text, we see that he speaks to the demon within her, to the spirit, and he says, I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.
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A bold command, spoken not to the little girl, but spoken straight to the spirit that is dwelling within her.
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Notice Paul doesn't use holy water. He doesn't sprinkle anything on her. He doesn't make a sign of the crucifix or go back home and grab a crucifix and hold it up.
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He doesn't appeal to his own purity before God. I'm on mission, and I'm all that, and boy,
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I have done a great job, and I'm honoring God, so demon, you've got to do what I tell you to do.
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He doesn't appeal to his own purity. He doesn't engage in a long discussion with the demon, does he?
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See that in the text? He does not try to trick the demon into telling him the demon's name.
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Have you ever heard that before? I mean, why am I saying that? There are some Christians out there, I don't even know where they get this kind of thing from, other than one story,
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I guess, in the New Testament, where Jesus asks the demon its name, or where the demon supplies its name. But there are some
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Christians out there who believe that you have to get a demon's name in order to get control over it. So they have this long dialogue and try to trick the demon into telling you its name, and then you can cast it out.
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Does anybody think that's a little bit strange? Maybe just a little bit? Okay. Others of you are thinking, maybe
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I'll try that sometime. The text also says nothing about the little girl's head spinning in circles.
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Just get that out there. You should not know what I'm talking about.
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He appeals to the power of the name of Jesus Christ. Do you see that in the text?
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He evokes the name of Jesus Christ. Paul knew fully that the demon did not have to obey him.
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Do you put these things in perspective from time to time when you're reading the text? This demon, before the creation of the world, stood before the throne of God in service to Him, as an angel of the
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Most High God. He is now geographically located in a little girl in Philippi, in Macedonia, in a district of Rome.
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Has he been around for a while? Has that demon existed? Has that demon seen the course of human history?
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Does he have some wisdom? Does he have some knowledge? Does he have some experience? Does he have to obey
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Paul? Not at all. We need to put ourselves in perspective sometimes, don't we, as to what we are.
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What does it mean to be a human? Interestingly enough, it's an amazing fact that one day the saints of God will judge the angels, the
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Bible tells us. But for right now, where we stand from this vantage point on this fallen earth, we are below the angels.
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There is a cosmic hierarchy. And by the way,
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God is not even on that cosmic hierarchy. God is above that cosmic hierarchy. But we need to be cautious and careful about how flippant we are about things pertaining to the demonic.
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We're going to see an entire text that I'm going to talk about later, down the road in Acts 19, where some people thought that they were going to be pretty arrogant and cast some demons out of a person, and they get the tar kicked out of them and pushed out of town.
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There's some serious stuff here. So he appeals to the power of the name of Jesus Christ.
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And I think that Paul acknowledges that if Christ doesn't want this demon gone, it's not going anywhere. So he appeals ultimately to Christ, and it says in the text, at that very hour the demon left her.
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At that very hour. Although the text isn't specific, I see significant clues that this little girl comes to faith in Christ and becomes integrated into the church in Philippi.
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Let me give you three reasons why I see that. And I have to give you this rationale because, again, if you read the text again, you're not going to see it there explicitly.
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But I genuinely believe that she becomes a follower. The first reason is that our author, Luke, the literary context is that this story occurs right in between two other stories of conversion, of people coming to faith in Christ.
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The first being Lydia. And I think we're seeing the second part in a three -part series on God bringing people to faith in the city of Philippi.
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The first one was this wealthy lady, Lydia. The second one was this lowly slave girl who is possessed.
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And the third one is going to be this hardened Roman soldier who is a jailer.
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And he's going to give us a cross -section of people who come to faith in Christ there in Philippi. And we're going to see that last one about the jailer next week.
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So that's kind of where we're at. Reason number one. Number two.
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Jesus, when teaching his followers about demon possession, taught that it is futile to cast out demons without filling that void with the
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Holy Spirit. Not that we have the power to give somebody the Holy Spirit, right? But Paul would certainly have known that and would have clearly proclaimed the gospel to this little girl who has now had this demon cast out of her.
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And I assume that she embraced that. Matthew 12. You don't need to turn there, but write it down if you're taking notes. Matthew 12, 43 through 45,
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Jesus gives explicit teaching on this. And I'm going to paraphrase it. He says, if a demon is cast out and returns and finds the person empty, not filled with anything, cleaned up, their mess is cleaned up, but they're not filled with anything like the
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Holy Spirit, then that demon goes out and gets seven of its demon friends and goes in and re -inhabits that individual and they are worse off,
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Jesus says, than when they began. So I'm confident that Paul was aware of that. And he would not have left this girl open for that kind of return trip.
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And the last thing, this last one all by itself would not be significant evidence, but putting all three of these together lead me to believe pretty soundly that this girl comes into the faith is the response of the owners in verse 19.
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They completely give up hope that she's going to regain the ability to tell the future. They completely give up hope that this demon will return to her.
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What would be the first thing that they would probably tend to do if they didn't see her as converted or changed into something else?
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They would be down at the Oracle of Delphi saying, can you get this taken care of? Can you get this back?
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Because we need her for profit. So they'd be trying to get that demon back, right?
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But there's no hope in them that that's going to happen. But whether or not she becomes a full blown convert, at least we can say that God has granted her a significant level of freedom from significant exploitation.
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She has been exploited. When I've read this passage in the past, I've been so caught up in the supernatural elements that I think
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I've missed the human element of what's going on here with this little girl. So let's take a moment to pause and meet this little girl.
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We get no name in the text, but I'm still astounded by how much information we actually get about her without a name in just a short few words.
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First of all, she's a girl. The Greek word implies little girl.
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Like not marriageable age, which means in that day and age, she is under 13.
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Under 13 years old. And this is her lot in life. She's a little girl. Can you picture a little girl in your mind under 13?
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She's a slave. She's not just a little girl, but number two, she's a slave.
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Either her mother was a slave when she was born, which how many of you would admit that would be difficult enough? Even if both her and her mother are owned by the same people, horrible, horrible lot in life.
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But what's more likely from just the statistics of what Roman life was like, is that both of her parents are gone.
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And she was most likely abandoned at birth. That's the most common situation when you see a slave girl in Roman times.
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That she was literally abandoned and left, and as gruesome as this is, and as horrible as this is, often little girls were sold at birth or left at birth because the family wanted a son to carry on their name.
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It's quite likely. And I'm speculating, but this is based on historical evidence and just running the odds.
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It's most likely that this girl has never known her real parents. She is not free to go where she pleases.
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She is the property of another person. She is bound by significant, heavy social chains.
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Would you agree with me? She's bound by some significant social chains. The third thing that we find out about her, she's possessed by a spirit as we've been talking about.
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And I'm going to state something that seems obvious, but I just want to clarify that we're all on the same, make sure we're all on the same page with this.
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Very simple statement, but demons are not nice. Did you know that?
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Okay, they're not nice. Despite her usefulness in society, the demon exploiting her has no interest in making her life comfortable, hopeful, or meaningful.
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She is in heavy, significant spiritual chains, social chains, spiritual chains.
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And fourthly, she is profitable. She's profitable. Is that a nice way to talk about people?
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They're profitable. She's being exploited by the demonic to further their cause in false religion.
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You think about it that way. So this demon has every interest in her because it forwards this idea that Apollo is real.
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It forwards this idea that the Oracle of Delphi is significant and worthy of sacrifices.
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You see that? So she's being exploited by the demonic, but she's also being exploited by her owners to make a financial profit.
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Money is changing hands over her. She is a paycheck to someone.
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Exploited according to dictionary .com, it's a two -word definition. Think about these two words in conjunction.
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Dictionary .com defines exploited as selfish utilization. Selfish utilization.
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And I'm going to state something that I really don't want to have to elaborate on, but I feel like I ought to state it just because we are people.
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It's something that God has to state to me as well, and that is just simply, do not exploit people.
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Don't exploit people. Don't exploit your employees. Don't exploit your children.
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Don't exploit your wife. Don't exploit the relationships you have. Don't exploit your employer. Don't exploit people.
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Don't be guilty of selfish utilizations. Don't exploit your co -worker.
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I think that's probably what most often happens, is exploiting others to try to climb, and they become rungs on the ladder to success.
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Can you see how that can happen at your workplace? Can you? I mean, I don't work where you work.
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I work right back there in that corner office. I don't see where you are. Nod your head or raise your hand if you can see.
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Am I striking anything here, or is that just not really where you look? You can see the potential to exploit others to get ahead.
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Don't do it. We'll talk a little bit more about that here in a minute. But it's into that context of exploitation that the freedom of Christ comes.
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The light of God shines down on this little slave girl, and she is granted spiritual freedom. Now we don't know what happens to her with those social chains.
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I don't know if she's released or not. We don't go forward in the text. I don't know what her owners restrict her in regards to involvement in church and things like that, but she's at least granted spiritual freedom, the most important freedom of all.
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Her owners don't like the love of God so much, though. They physically seize Paul and Silas.
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This is a gentle arrest. Notice in the text that we've got four missionaries that are mentioned by name earlier.
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We know that they're all present, but only two of them are arrested, Paul and Silas. Timothy and Luke, fortunately, look
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Greek enough to not get arrested. Paul and Silas apparently looked Jewish enough to get arrested, and probably they were also the ones speaking the most.
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They physically manhandle them into the marketplace. Within every marketplace that was a Roman colony, we saw earlier that Philippi is a
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Roman colony, and within every marketplace under Roman jurisdiction, there was a raised pavement called the bima, a place of judgment where the two magistrates of that colony would sit in judgment, and the court is in session.
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The accusation here in the text is a bit funny because we know why they have been arrested.
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We know why they've been dragged to court, but the owners of this little girl give a different reason.
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I think somehow saying this, these guys cast a profitable demon out of our slave girl, that sounds a little less threatening publicly to the safety and security of the city, the town of Philippi, than saying these people are outsiders who are coming in to disturb our city by promoting unlawful customs and practices.
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Now the magistrates are being told that their presence is against their own jurisdiction.
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Now they're like, well, okay, you're telling me that the safety and security of my city is at stake, rather than just your profit.
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I'm not as concerned with your profit, right? How many of you know that that happens in our homes every day, those of you with children?
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It's funny how real and authentic the scripture is. My kids are able to accuse one another to me in ways that they know is going to get me riled up.
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Do you know what I'm saying? They've learned the buzzwords. Like even Leah, my youngest daughter, she's five and she's figured out that if she says,
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Adam pushed me, and then she uses the phrase, on purpose.
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Once she says on purpose, she knows that discipline is going to happen. So everything for her is on purpose.
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I don't even think she knows what the phrase means, other than that that gets me riled up. Adam hits her on accident, am
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I going to discipline that? No, not so much. But even Linda was saying, as I was kind of walking through this sermon with her, she said, just the other day, we're trying to get
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Luke to not name call and that kind of stuff, and he was calling Leah a name.
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So she sat him down. Leah's kind of in the room, kind of playing with her toys, but she's listening. And Linda says, we don't want you name calling.
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So half an hour later, what does Leah come running up the stairs and accuse Luke of doing? She's never used that phrase ever.
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We've never heard her use the phrase name calling. Luke's name calling, she got it.
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She knew what needed to be said to get the maximum penalty possible. Anybody, does that just happen in my family?
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Okay, good. But we have a tendency to do that too, right?
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We can flavor and spin things our way to get, we can do that with our boss.
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They were doing this, or we could spin those kinds of things out of the way to get what we want.
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There's a public trial happening in a not so Jewish friendly marketplace, and the crowds begin to join in.
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It's a trial, so what are you going to do at a trial, especially when there's no such thing as contempt of court?
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So why don't we just go ahead and start beating the people who are on trial, right? That's what literally happens here.
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And so the magistrates have to act quickly because the crowds start to get involved here. How dare these people attack the sovereignty of the colony of Philippi with their false teachings and all of this stuff, and so everybody's getting up in arms.
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The magistrates act quickly to avoid an all out riot. They turn them over to a group of people called the lictors.
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Lictor is an actual office within a Roman colony. There would have probably been six or seven lictors that would have been there.
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They carry around a wonderful device. They carry around a packet of canes with them everywhere that they go.
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A bundle of canes to demonstrate the power and the authority of Rome. Do you have any idea what the canes might be used for?
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Yeah. Because you never know when you might get to beat someone, so always be ready.
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Maybe just carry it right with them, just in case. Today's the day. I mean have to beat somebody.
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I'm sure that they didn't like it. The literal text in verse 23 is actually very gruesome.
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I don't know why the ESV didn't just translate it because it's a very picturesque word. Rather than saying they laid many blows on them, the actual word there in Greek is stripes.
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After laying many stripes on them, the shirt is torn off and they laid stripes on it.
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Can you picture why the word stripes is used? I don't think it takes much imagination to understand that. The horror of how this has turned out poorly for Paul and Silas is the many stripes that are laid on them.
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A cane on your bare skin does not make for a pleasant afternoon. The magistrate decided when it's been enough.
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We don't know how many that was, but enough is enough. They command the jailer to lock them up and he commands them especially secure.
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So the jailer has just the place, the inner prison, think high security, and he places their feet in the stocks.
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I always picture stocks. What do you picture when you think of stocks? Is it kind of like this? Your hands through holes, your neck through holes.
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The primary thing about stocks in England and in New England in the colony times, the primary thing about stocks was humiliation.
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About being humiliated in the public square. It was obviously uncomfortable to be in that position, but then not only that, but you're humiliated in front of everybody in your town.
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This is not primarily about humiliation. These were actually used for torture, these stocks in Roman times.
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Now what you need to picture is that these are like two 4x4s or 6x6s that are clamped down and they've got combs of wood between them so that your feet fit in here and they could line up a bunch of prisoners in one stock.
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They'd be sitting on your rear feet in front of you and they would put your feet in these things and clamp down hard enough on that wood, rough cut wood.
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How hard do you have to clamp down on that before you can't move your feet out? Think about that. So they've been beat.
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They've been abused. And now they're laid out in these stocks overnight.
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Who knows who they're next to either. You just don't know who you're going to be sitting next to in that kind of a situation.
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And he's being tortured. They're being tortured. Pretty tough to sleep.
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There's no indication, however, in the text that Paul and Silas regret setting this girl free from her exploitation.
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Do you think it crossed their mind? Come back next week to hear how they respond to this because you're going to be in awe.
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The way that they respond to this. There is no doubt in my mind from what I see in the text for next week that they were grateful and glad to be able to suffer for the setting of this little girl free.
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Rejoicing. So the plot moved along. We've got a chance to walk through a great story.
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But what does that mean for us in 2011? What does it mean for where we live? The Oracle of Delphi is gone.
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Organized slavery is gone, right? Exploitation and demons are gone, right? Right?
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No. No, as a matter of fact, it's not. This was the place where I was going to end up quoting a bunch of statistics to you about exploitation in America and about exploitation right in our backyard and right where we live and in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
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How many of you know there's exploitation around us? Did you know that? I was going to quote these statistics, but I became so discouraged this week.
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It was a downer doing this research. It was so... It came to the point of unbelievability.
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It came to the point of incredibility. Like, not credible. Like, I felt like if I got up here and I shared some of the statistics with you, you're going to go,
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I'm going to have to double -check that. But I'd encourage you on your own to go to a website. It's called
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Women at Risk. You could do a Google search. It's a ministry that comes out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. WAR is the acronym.
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Women at Risk. And it is a ministry that we've had come in here and speak to us a year and a half ago or so, and then they came in and they did a women's tee and did all kinds of activities.
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And the thing is, it is going on around us all the time. There is genuine, true exploitation.
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And you talk about the sex trafficking and all of that stuff that's still going on today. We think of this as some barbaric, archaic thing that happened back in ancient times.
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There is slavery today in America. And it's still happening.
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We live in a world where we're able to turn a blind eye to the exploited all around us. We even have distanced ourselves so much from the lives of the hurting and exploited that we find it easy to judge those who are abused, exploited, even think about, what is your attitude towards a prostitute?
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How did we arrive at a place where we assume that those involved in prostitution are there because of their choices, because they want to, and shame on them for choosing that lifestyle?
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How did we get to that place? Or when we see the homeless, how quickly do we justify our inactivity with thoughts of, well, how did they get there?
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Have you ever been like me and had that thought cross your mind? Have you, or is it just me?
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I hope that I'm not the only one that's, have you been there? Does that thought cross your mind?
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You see a homeless person, you're like, I bet they must have been dealing drugs, they must have done this, they must have burned all their bridges. So what?
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Are they a person? Are they an object for God's grace and His forgiveness?
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Are they a candidate for His forgiveness? Did Christ die on the cross for them?
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It's challenging. It's been challenging to me this week to think about this. How do we not see hurting and broken and exploited souls?
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Souls created to soar with God and freedom. Souls meant to experience His grace and His love and His forgiveness.
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Maybe part of our problem is that we don't remember what it was like to be the slave girl. Some of us, that's the case.
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Some of you are closer to your initiation into the faith, closer to the place where you were that slave girl not too long ago.
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But somewhere in life, we can have a tendency to devolve into pride and arrogance, right?
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The remembrance of our slavery to sin can fade and we begin to assume that, you know, me and God, we've always been tight.
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We've always been close, which is not the case. We forget that aside from God's grace, we are homeless.
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We are prostitutes. We are exploited aside from God's grace. I'm hopeful here that none of us primarily in the text relate to the owners of this little girl and yet if we look down deep enough, we may realize that we have exploited others to our own ends.
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We've used others as tools to accomplish our goals, whether that's to get ahead at the workplace and as I said earlier, when you identify ways that you've exploited others, make it right.
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Go and apologize and repent, which is a fancy word for cut it out.
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Repent means stop doing it. Turn from it. In our text this morning, the power and love of God came to a little girl who is nothing more than a thing to the world around her but God used his people as a means of compassion to her.
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She was a throwaway to her culture, only useful because she brought profit but God saw something more and I want to challenge all of us to see something more.
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When we look at people, I'm asking you to change your perspective and consider what
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God might ask you to do on behalf of the exploited. What God might challenge us as a church together to do among the exploited.
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Support for organizations like Women at Risk might be a possibility. Again, that's an amazing organization that's offering rescue, hope and freedom for women around the world caught up in the sex trafficking industry but it's not just that narrow.
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They're dealing with widows around the world who in their culture are marginalized just because their husband has passed on and they end up not being able to make ends meet and things like that.
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Maybe involvement at the gospel mission would be something you could consider. A group of us went down, kind of scouted things out.
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They have, I don't know, maybe once a quarter invited us to come down and lead a church service down there at the gospel mission to be involved and sit in and we can lead and do different things and then to have a meal with the people who live there and get to know them and hear their stories.
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I heard some amazing stories and some opportunity to even shine God's light into those dark situations.
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Maybe that's what he would be leading you to. I want to point out though that Paul and Silas faced some personal loss in the process of releasing one young lady from spiritual affliction.
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They suffered a little bit for it, didn't they? And so the question that we all need to ask ourselves is what would we be willing to do in the cause of freeing the exploited in our community and around the world?
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What would we be willing to do to step up to the plate and help? The almighty
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God is full of grace and wisdom. His gospel is huge. His good news is amazing.
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His love is wide. It's meant to be shared with everyone. And nobody is too low to be a candidate for forgiveness.
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And that's what I want you to celebrate as we come to the table of communion today. If we really look into our own hearts, hopefully you can come to a place of humility and recognizing that you're not better than this little girl.
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You're not better than others. You're not better than the people down at the gospel mission. Just as much in need of grace as they are.
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And so as we celebrate and as we come to communion, let's come humbly. You see, Jesus came from the glories of heaven, lived a sinless life on this sin -cursed place.
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He was put to death by his own creation. And in that death, he paid the price for our sins. So we remember, as we come to communion, his body that was crushed for us when we eat that cracker.
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We remember the blood of Jesus that was spilled for us when we drink the juice. If you've acknowledged that Jesus is
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Lord and you've asked him to save you, I encourage you to come and remember his sacrifice as Rob comes and plays a song for us.
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There's a table set up in the back here. There's one in the front. We can form two lines up here, one line in the back.
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But let's consider and contemplate. Remember, this is about remembering what Christ has done for us.
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And in that remembering, consider what he might be calling us to do on behalf of the exploited. Let's pray.