A Strategic God with Guest Host John Samson

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On today’s DL broadcast, guest host John Samson takes us verse by verse through Acts 16:1-15. There is much to learn about mission strategy as it relates to the circumcision of Timothy, the closing and the opening of doors for the gospel, and God’s activity in opening the heart of man.

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Hello, welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is Pastor John Sampson of King's Church in Phoenix.
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Actually, we're now meeting in a newer facility in Peoria, but it's still here in the Valley of the
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Sun, where it is well over 90 degrees already, and the sun is not done yet in warming us up.
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And it's a delight to fill in for Dr. James White, who is traveling in Florida and ministering over there, and keep up with all of his activities by means of the blog at aomin .org.
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And it's a delight to be with you. Anything you want to jump in and say, Rich, or you're good to go?
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Rich informed me as I came into the offices here that I had offended certain people with my story, at least a little part of the story that I started out with last time, regarding the scariest moment of my life when
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I referred to England as an island. Now, I'm not sure I'd get too many objections from the people in England, but those outside in the
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British Isles, particularly Scotland and Wales and the northern part of Ireland.
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Well, I did hear of this Scottish person who was trying to alert me to the fact that there is something called the
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British Isles, and it consists of more than England. And let me just say something in the way of kindness towards Scotland.
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It's common grace that you live your lives in Scotland so close to England.
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It is God's blessing. I know my mother and father lived 17 years in Dumfries.
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You will know of that town, those in Scotland. And the amazing thing is I was almost born in Dumfries, but my mum and dad moved several months before I was born to a place called
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Chester in England. And so I could be Scottish.
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I could be. But God had mercy on me. And I was born in Chester, which is about three miles inside the
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English border near Wales. Not to be confused with Wales, because it's inside the border.
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There's actually a funny story about Chester, because some years ago, the Chester soccer team, known as football over there, wanted to have a new stadium and they had all of the plans in place and they were trying to get approval from the council to start the building of this soccer football stadium.
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And the problem was the plans were leaked to the press and the press printed something of the vision of what was going to transpire.
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And it became apparent that part of the soccer pitch, part of the field was going to be over the border in Wales.
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It was three quarters of the field was in England, but the actual geographic boundary line meant that a third of the field would be in Wales.
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And so there was this great outcry. We're not going to go support the team that's in Wales.
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We're not going to do it. And they had to scrap the plans. They actually scrapped the plans because part of the field would have been in Wales.
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So they built it somewhere else. And that was the only reason. So there we go. How many have I offended now?
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If for anyone still listening, I'd encourage you and watching. Let's go in our
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Bibles to Acts chapter 16. I've been thinking about what to bring to the program today, what would best serve the viewing audience.
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And oftentimes, as you've been seeing me fill in for James, again, it's a huge privilege, huge responsibility as well, but something
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I take very, very seriously. And in the times I've had, I've sought to do some topical studies.
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I have taught some expositional verse -by -verse teaching through Acts 10, if I remember correctly, also
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John chapter 3. And that is the normal diet of what I would say is healthy in the local church setting, where a pastor is not just speaking on topics.
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There's no problem with teaching and preaching on topics as long as the verses that are being quoted are in context.
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And that's sometimes hard to do because you don't always have the time to make the context clear.
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But ordinarily, I believe the healthy diet of the church is that a pastor or teacher is taking the congregation verse -by -verse through certain books of the
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Bible. And that is one way to remedy the concept of a pastor just having a hobby horse, things he wants to teach about.
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And when you go through books, there are passages that emerge that you have to deal with because it's there in the text.
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And you know, 18 months before you get there or six months before you get there, that you will get there and have to deal with that particular topic.
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And that's healthy for the people of God. All of God's word, all scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable.
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And so knowing that, I think a verse -by -verse exposition is the normal healthy diet of the church.
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In recent weeks, since about January at King's Church, I've done a number of topical studies, but I always try to quickly go back to the healthy diet of verse -by -verse exposition.
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And the reason I'm thinking of doing this today from Acts chapter 16 is that I just preached on this this last weekend and I've received a number of just positive comments, feedback saying it was really helpful.
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And I just want to hope and pray that it would be helpful to all of us in our walk with God, no matter where we are in our growth.
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And let's go in fact then to Acts chapter 16. Let me take a little bit of English tea for the
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English. This is PG tips, the real stuff. Yep.
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It's the real stuff right, right there. It's like my little mug. Five -point
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Calvinist. Anything less is a confused Arminian. Again, that can offend a number of people, but there we go.
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Acts chapter 16. We're on a roll. Acts chapter 16 and we'll begin in verse one.
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And what I wish to do is read to verse 15. And as I say, when I pick up the scripture and begin to read it,
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I say this with all sincerity, ladies and gentlemen, this is the word of God.
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For they all knew that his father was a Greek. As they went on their way through the cities, they delivered to them for observance, the decisions that had been reached by the apostles and elders who were in Jerusalem.
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So the churches were strengthened in the faith and they increased in numbers daily.
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And they went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the
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Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia. And when they had come up to Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the spirit of Jesus did not allow them.
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So passing by Mysia, they went down to Troas and a vision appeared to Paul in the night, a man of Macedonia was standing there, urging him and saying, come over to Macedonia and help us.
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And when Paul had seen the vision immediately, we sought to go into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.
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So setting sail from Troas, we made a direct voyage to Samothrace and the following day to Neapolis and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a
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Roman colony. We remained in this city some days and on the Sabbath day, we went outside the gate to the riverside, where we supposed there was a place of prayer and we sat down and spoke to the women who had come together.
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One who heard us was a woman named Lydia from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple goods, who was a worshipper of God.
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The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul.
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And after she was baptized and her household as well, she urged us saying, if you have judged me to be faithful to the
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Lord, come to my house and stay. And she prevailed upon us.
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The hearing of God's word is always edifying for the people of God. And I'm impressed by the fact in history that most
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Christians throughout history never had access to the
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Bible like we have it in our hands and to whom much is given, much is required. We have such a blessing in having the scriptures available to us.
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Many times in the villages and towns of Europe, there might be one copy of the entire scriptures in the entire village.
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And that's why it was chained oftentimes to the pulpit of churches. And the only time people were exposed to the word of God was when they heard the word of God spoken from the pulpit.
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Paul told Timothy, give yourself to the public reading of scripture.
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What a privilege it is. As we look at chapter 16, we need to talk about the context and that context is the monumental event of chapter 15, which was the council at Jerusalem, where it was decided because of the grace of God given to the
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Gentiles, God the Holy Spirit moving upon the Gentiles, saving them, justifying them by the grace of God alone through faith in Christ alone, without the need for any
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Gentile to become Jews and no need of circumcision. The council mandate was, we're going to lay no other heavy charge on these people, these
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Gentiles, other than these small things that we say would be good to avoid, but we're not going to insist on circumcision for the
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Gentiles. It's not necessary. In fact, to insist on it would be to bring another gospel.
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And that is, in fact, what was happening in Galatia, where Paul was writing to the church there who had received the gospel, the free gift of God's grace.
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And yet Judaizers were coming in saying, you need Jesus, you need faith, but you also need something else.
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And anything that is added to Christ and that gospel is a false gospel. It's not close to it.
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You might see someone singing the same songs, believing in the same Messiah, having an orthodox view of God, perhaps even believing in the
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Trinity. None of those things were mentioned by Paul when they mentioned one thing and insisted on one thing other than simply faith alone.
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Paul says, no, no, no, a false gospel and anyone who proclaims that is a false brother.
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And so it's very, very clear. That's where Paul was on this. He was clear. He couldn't be clearer.
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The book of Romans is so clear on this. The book of Galatians is especially clear on this because it's dealing with that direct issue.
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So what on earth are we reading about in chapter 16, where we read about Paul coming to Derbe and Lystra and we're introduced for the first time in the
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New Testament to a gentleman named Timothy. Disciple was there named
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Timothy. Now notice this, the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer, but his father was a
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Greek. Now, Timothy was a half -breed in terms of the way
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Jews would look at this man. And Paul knew that in this missionary journey, if he took
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Timothy and his desire was to do exactly that, he wanted to have Timothy not be seen as a fraudulent member of the team.
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He wanted Jews as well as Gentiles to be able to receive Timothy as a minister. And it would be very hard in that culture, in that first century for Jewish people to embrace someone who was half a
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Jew and yet to be circumcised. He hadn't been circumcised and they knew it.
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And therefore, Jews would have a big problem receiving Timothy.
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In Paul's first missionary journey, he went to Lystra and then Derbe. Now the order is seemingly reversed because he's coming from the opposite direction.
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At Lystra we're introduced to this young man, Timothy. I always think of my own experience when
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I hear the name Timothy, because the gentleman I started out in ministry with back in 1987 after finishing seminary
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Bible college over in England was a gentleman by the name of Harry Greenwood. And he referred to me as his young Timothy.
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And he used that phrase so often that some people thought that was my name, but no, my name's
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John. But I understand the nurturing process involved of a father in the faith with someone who's young in the faith or in the ministry.
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And Timothy was exactly that. And Paul, as we know, wrote two letters of the New Testament to Timothy, first Timothy and second
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Timothy. And Timothy therefore has a prominent place in the
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New Testament. But here's the first time we're introduced to him. And immediately we're told that Paul, hear this, wanted him circumcised.
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And actually he made sure he was. He wasn't just going to say, that's a nice suggestion, pray about it, take a couple of years.
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No, in a hurry, Paul had Timothy circumcised.
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It's strange to our ears and our eyes when we see this, because what was the whole point of chapter 15?
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We've just read it of a council that says circumcision is not necessary.
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And Paul is now insisting before we set foot on our missionary journey,
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Timothy, you get circumcised. Look at what it says. It says in verse three, Paul wanted
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Timothy to accompany him and he took him and circumcised him because of the Jews.
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Now notice, that's the reason why, because of the Jews who were in those places.
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Why? What's the reason? For they all knew that his father was a Greek. They had a problem with non fully
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Jewish people. They knew that's what Timothy was. And Paul says, you know what?
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You need to get circumcised. Does that just strike you on first glance as a contradiction?
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Some people look at this and other things like this and say, there you go. You can never understand the Bible. There's not even a gap of even a coffee break between the end of chapter 15 and chapter 16.
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And circumcision is not necessary. Now it is. I can never understand the Bible. The Bible is full of contradictions. And I always respond to that to them, those kind of challenges by saying, well, if it's full of contradictions, give me at least 20.
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And they don't often come up with one. I say, why 20? I said, well, if it's full, you can go to any page, right?
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You can go to any book and find contradictions. Come on, let a genuine, meaty, juicy contradiction.
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Give it to me for the Bible's full of it. And I'm still waiting to hear from these kinds of people who have these contradictions that they so -called, that cause them to not believe the
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Bible. But there we go. The Bible stood the test of time and here it is still the bestseller of all time.
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People know what it is, the word of God. Paul wanted Timothy circumcised.
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What? Isn't that scandalous? We're not reading about this in another book. We're not reading about this 19 chapters on from Acts chapter 15 in the next breath.
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Paul insisted on Timothy's circumcision. Now wasn't
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Paul going to the churches of Asia Minor to deliver the same very decree of chapter 15?
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Yes. Haven't we just been told that the decree was that from the church that circumcision wasn't necessary?
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Yes. And yet this same Paul makes Timothy get circumcised. Actually, actually, it actually gets more confusing because later on we encounter
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Titus. Remember him? There's a book written to Titus and Paul, hear this, adamantly refuses to circumcise him.
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If you're following along, I'd like you to go to just one little verse, Galatians chapter two, where we read in verse three of that chapter,
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Galatians two verse three, but even
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Titus who was with me was not forced to be circumcised though he was a
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Greek. What on earth is going on? Isn't there a double standard going on?
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Timothy, you need to get circumcised. Titus, no, no, no, no. We're not going to force you to be circumcised even though he was a
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Greek. How can we explain this? Paul circumcised
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Timothy, Paul, the same Paul refused to circumcise Titus.
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What do we do with that? Well, here's how we work this through.
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When someone attempted to require a Gentile to undergo circumcision,
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Paul would never allow it. He would not, he would not go there. He would stand resolute in the truth of the gospel.
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That's what we read in chapter two of Galatians over and over that phrase so that the truth of the gospel might prevail.
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I did not submit or subject myself to these guys for any length of time at all. I would not do it.
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First Corinthians nine says to the Jew, I became as a Jew to the
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Gentile as a Gentile. He had something we would call strategy. Here in Timothy's case,
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Paul thought it would be good missionary strategy to have him circumcised. That's how we explain it.
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That's why there is no contradiction. When people would say to be saved, to be justified in the sight of God, anyone with Gentile origins has to be circumcised,
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Paul would say, nope, nope, no, never, no. But missionary strategy, if I'm going to take
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Timothy to an area where there are bound to be some Jews, even though it's predominantly Gentile, I want
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Timothy to have an audience when he gets there amongst the Jews. So let's remove any scandal about him being a half -breed or whatever he is.
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Let's remove the scandal and has a strategy. Let's have
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Timothy circumcised. They were well aware of his background. We read of that in the end of chapter 16, verse three, they all knew his father was a
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Greek who did the Jews. They knew it as well as the fact that we know from the new
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Testament that Timothy's mother Eunice was a very godly woman as well as Timothy's grandmother
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Lois. And yet Timothy's mother was married to a
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Greek. And again, because we're not living in the first century, we don't realise what a rarity that was and how that would be perceived by Jewish people.
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You want to reach Jewish people, you've got to get into the thinking of Jewish people and avoid certain natural offences if at all possible.
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Whenever I've gone to a foreign nation and preached the gospel, I remember going to Mongolia of all places and people that were there who were either
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English or American who had been there for 10, 12 years, they sat myself down and the rest of the team that I was leading into one of the cities or the towns of Mongolia.
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I said, these are things you need to avoid. And I said, what kind of things? And they said, never put your
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Bible on the floor. I thought, really? Never put your Bible? No. To do that in this culture is seen as demeaning the
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Bible. Don't do that. And that was easy not to do. Just it was great that they told us because it could happen without any thought.
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I put the Bible on the floor as I sit on the seat, I put the Bible on the floor and then
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I'll pick it up when I go to preach. No, don't do that. Just good things to know about strategy.
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Paul knew the situation and Eunice, a Jew, had married a pagan, a
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Greek. And because Timothy's father was a pagan, Timothy had grown up never being circumcised.
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The mother didn't have the authority in the family to insist on circumcision, even though she was
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Jewish. The pagan father said he doesn't need to be circumcised.
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And that's what had happened in Timothy's life. The issue was this. Would the Jews hear
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Timothy? Would they accept him? Was he worthy of being heard? And Paul removed the issue, removed the problem, removed the scandal of an uncircumcised
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Jew speaking to Jews. Now, does it make sense? I believe it does. He got
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Timothy circumcised, not for the purpose of salvation, but for the purpose of missionary strategy.
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Let me quote James Montgomery Boyce at this point. When the essence of the gospel was at stake,
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Paul refused any compromise, whatever. However, when the gospel was not at stake, as was the case here,
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Paul was willing to compromise many things in order to win others to Jesus Christ.
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I would say a hearty amen to that. We learn about Timothy from other books of the
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Bible. For instance, the most clear passage about him is found in Philippians chapter two. If I just turn there for a moment, we can read what it says in verse 19,
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Philippians chapter two, verse 19 through 24, where Paul talks about Timothy.
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It says, I hope in the Lord Jesus to send Timothy to you soon, so that I too may be cheered by news of you, for I have no one like him.
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He's unique in that sense. There's no one quite like Timothy, who will be genuinely concerned for your welfare.
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They all seek their own interests, but not those of Jesus Christ. But you know, Timothy's proven worth how as a son with a father, he has served with me in the gospel.
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I hope therefore to send him just as soon as I see how it will go with me. And I trust in the
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Lord that shortly I myself will come also. And so it goes on, he speaks of Epaphroditus.
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But again, insight about Timothy, he's like -minded. Paul and Timothy, I'm sure had different personalities and different giftings, but they were like -minded in the things of God.
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Timothy cared for people. He had genuine affection for people. He cared for them, and he put their interests above his.
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And he was Christ -centered in the sense of he wanted Jesus Christ glorified in his life and in his ministry and his preaching.
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And he worked well with others. Now, if we look at verse four of Acts 16, it says, as they went on their way through the cities, they delivered to them for observance the decisions that had been reached by the apostles and elders who were in Jerusalem.
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Again, a reference back to the previous chapter. So the churches were strengthened in the faith and they increased in numbers daily.
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I wonder what word stands out to you in that particular verse, verse five, churches strengthening in the faith, increase numbers, that little word daily that intrigues me.
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How on earth did the early church increase in numbers daily? It's as I was reading one time through the book of Acts, I came across a concept that I then saw others refer to, and their insight helped my insight as if I'd seen a little crack in the door.
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And then they began to show me more things on this. And what was apparent to me that I think has been lost in the church at large was the fact that the early church met publicly.
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They had the Sunday gathering, all of the indications, both from scripture and from outside the
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New Testament, particularly things like the didache from basically late first century document of the early church, which is not inspired, but it's very good for us to understand historically what was going on in the churches.
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The churches met on a Sunday and yet they also met from house to house.
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And when you begin to see this, you can think that's how the churches were increasing in numbers daily.
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It's wonderful to have the home group. It's wonderful to have the public assembly.
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And that is what is being referred to in Hebrews where it says, do not forsake the gathering together of yourselves.
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It's not referring to you and maybe three or four other Christians. It's talking about the gathered assembly of the saints, which was the
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Lord's day meeting. That's very clear. Yet there was this double component publicly.
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They meet together house to house. There's fellowship, there's Bible teaching, and it's often there that people were impacted with the gospel for the first time in Acts chapter five.
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If we look back there, we see a verse in verse 42 that tells us of the activity of the early church.
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And it says an every day. And again, my ears prick up because we've just read the word daily.
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And here we read every day. I think those phrases are synonymous every day and daily.
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If you do something daily, you're doing it every day, every day in the temple, which was the public gathering and from house to house, they did not cease teaching and preaching
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Jesus as the Christ, Jesus as the Messiah. It was a dual ministry of a public gathering place.
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The gospel preached there, obviously, but also the gospel was being preached house to house.
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I remember having pastored. I was a co -pastor in England for three years and then pastored a church here in Phoenix for some time.
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And we grew to maybe 250, 300 people. And we had about 18 home groups.
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And one of the things I wanted to insist on was that every month we would be outreach oriented, have one time, at least a month where that house group reached out to the neighborhood or reached out to the office where certain one was working, but come up with a strategy.
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And the sky was the limit. As long as it could be classed as an outreach, this was how we're going to proceed as a church.
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I believe that if we do not have outreach and evangelism as part of the day -to -day mechanism of the church, we can lead to something like the
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Dead Sea, which is water coming in, but nothing going out. And it's just not a healthy thing.
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If we look within ourselves and at ourselves, we begin to see the issues. Oh, brother George is here again.
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Oh, hi, George. And, you know, oh, there's Philippa over there. Yeah, she's here. And we see problems, we see issues.
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And I remember hearing of one man who described unity the way we normally understand it is we're all in a circle looking in on ourselves, gathered together, unity in Christ.
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But as we do, we're only looking at ourselves. And he said, change the model. We're still locked with one another, but now we're at the outside of the circle in unity looking outwards.
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And I thought that is the biblical picture of reaching out. And a gentleman came to me about two years after we'd launched these home groups and hadn't seen him in a while, basically because I canceled his home group.
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He said, well, at one Thursday night, we were meeting and we decided that we need to just get to know each other.
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We just need to be real as Christians. And we just need to study the Bible. We don't know what we need to know.
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And we don't even know how much we don't know. And let's just study. And on the night when others might be doing outreach, we just want to do more study.
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We're not ready to reach out. And I said, well, I'm not ready to receive you as one of our church's home groups.
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And they insisted they weren't going to do it. And I said, well, I've made it clear when we set this up, this is the one thing
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I want us to do. I'm going to have to insist on this.
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And I actually closed the thing down. And this man came to me and said, I've hated you for a year. And I said, well,
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I'm sorry to hear that. He said, I resented you shutting us down. I said, well,
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I try to make it clear. I tried to say we wanted this to be outreach oriented and don't do a group if you're against outreach.
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And he said, well, I still don't think we were ready. I said, well, I do. I disagree. And that was how it worked out.
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I believe that every church should have a strategy of reaching out. And that was our strategy may not be the best one, but I do think it's a biblical one.
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And my warrant for that is chapter five, verse 42 of Acts. But another one is
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Acts chapter 20 and verse 20. I like to remember this by thinking of having 20, 20 vision.
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Here it is. Acts chapter 20 verse 20, where the apostle Paul is saying farewell to the elders at Ephesus.
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And he says how we're just kind of jumping into the passage here, how I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable and teaching you in public and from house to house that we have that again, saying that concept of the public meeting and the house to house meeting.
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And Paul was key in that. It's something that he did in his own ministry.
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So how did the church grow daily? A daily increase, I believe, because they were meeting daily.
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Maybe one group was meeting on a Monday, another on a Tuesday. But as the church grew, maybe eight groups were meeting on a
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Monday and seven on a Tuesday. So it might go on. But the church were meeting daily as well as having the public gathering.
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Then we read back in Acts chapter 16, verse six, and it gets very, very interesting here when we hear what the apostle
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Paul wanted to do with his team, where he wanted to go. And what we read in Scripture is very interesting statement.
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Look with me in verse six of Acts chapter 16. And they went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the
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Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia. Now, right here is divine election, isn't it?
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Because if they go to one place, they're not going to another place.
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Not everybody even gets to hear the gospel. And if an apostolic team goes north, they're not going south.
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And though it looks like they wanted to go into the region of Asia, which is Asia Minor here, not the
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Asia we know of today, the Holy Spirit in some way forbade them.
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It says, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit. Now, I would love to ask Luke, in what way, how did this pan out?
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In what way did the Holy Spirit forbid? Well, we need to recognize it could be one of two things.
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One would be the gifts of the Holy Spirit flowing. And by means of a prophetic utterance, perhaps the missionary team were informed either amongst themselves or by someone else.
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But they certainly remember this or took this or received this as a word from the
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Holy Spirit not to go into Asia. They were forbidden. The Holy Spirit said no.
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That could have been the case, or it could have been simply a matter of providence. They tried to get there, but either they didn't have the resources or the ship they were trying to get to go wasn't going there.
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All the ships in the particular port were not going that direction. I don't know. We're not told. And it's foolish to speculate.
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But what we do know is the Holy Spirit in some way made it clear. I don't want you going there.
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I'm forbidding you to go there. I want to say this to some people that maybe have faced many closed doors in your life.
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Closed doors are guidance. We need to rather than be thinking
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God has abandoned me because the door's been closed. I've wanted to do this for eight years. I've trained for it.
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I've readied myself for it. I've shocked myself so that when this opportunity emerged,
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I'm ready to take it. And then I try to do it and the door is closed. God, have you got no purpose for my life?
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Well, yes, he does. It's just that that was not the door he wanted you to go through.
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And by means of providence, that is how it emerges that, okay,
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I thought for everything I'm worth, that God wanted me to do this, but obviously that door has been closed.
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Some doors God may want you to keep knocking on because the door will eventually open, but some have come to the place where they've tried to be a pilot and they keep getting their eyes tested.
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And every time they have their eyes tested, their eyes are not good enough for that which is required to be a pilot and all of their knowledge and training they think has been wasted.
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And yet God says, no, I don't want you to be a pilot, not of a commercial airlines or not in the military, but you can, you can do this off here where, whereas a pilot, you can still serve me on missionary enterprises and, but maybe not be the flyer, the pilot of a jumbo jet, but you can do this with the eyesight you have.
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And that's where I wanted you all along. Hindsight is always a 20, 20, as we say, but closed doors are guidance.
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Don't think God has abandoned you. He's just making sure that you don't go in something, into something he does not wish for you.
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He's got another door ready for you. And God would want you to be ready when that door opens.
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I started off in ministry in church as an 18 year old at the church where I was as the church cleaner.
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And, um, it's, it's kind of funny to me because, uh, I'm not much of a church cleaner.
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I don't know as I cleaned as best as I could as a young man, a man, first of all, a young man cleaning a church.
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Um, I don't know how clean I got. I did the best I could. I, I honestly did it as genuinely and sincerely as I could.
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I'm sure that between Thursday, when I'd finished the cleaning and Sunday, when the meeting started, uh, some ladies came and helped me behind the scenes and went under flower pots and John missed here and, you know, made it look good.
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But that's where I started. And I remember cleaning the pulpit one time and the pastor of the church, a man by the name of uncle
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Sid, who was never five feet tall, probably four foot 11, small guy, but mighty in the
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Lord. He came up to me and saw me, uh, late at night cleaning the pulpit.
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And he said, son, and he had the right to call me son. He said, son, do a good job with that pulpit.
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And maybe one day God will have you stand behind it. I never forget that. I never forgot those words.
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Very encouraging. Here we read of God opening a door later on in the passage, but before, before we get to the door being open, we get more doors that are closed.
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Look what it says in verse seven. And when they'd come up to miss here, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the spirit of Jesus did not allow them.
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Interesting phrase, the spirit of Jesus. Again, a reference to the Holy Spirit, the
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Holy Spirit's mandate is to lift Jesus up. You see someone full of the
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Holy Spirit. They'll not be talking so much about the Holy Spirit, but of Jesus. He's the spirit who makes
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Jesus a reality to people. So door number two closed.
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Verse eight. So passing by miss here. Why did they pass by miss here? Because the
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Holy Spirit, the spirit of Jesus did not allow them. So passing by miss here, they came down to Troas and a vision appeared to Paul in the night.
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A man of Macedonia was standing there urging him saying, come over to Macedonia and help us.
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And when Paul had seen the vision immediately, we sought to go on into Macedonia concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.
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Now with divine guidance for the third time, this is where we make the mistake. We think that God was giving guidance to Paul only from verse nine onwards.
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No, he was giving guidance from verse six onwards. Door number one closed.
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That's guidance. Door number two closed. That's guidance. Door number three opened.
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That's also guidance. Concluding that Macedonia was the place they were going to go to in their missionary journey.
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And therefore, God being a God of strategies knows what's going to happen when they obey the call.
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And what happened is what we see unveiled from verse 11 onwards. Do you remember that phrase?
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It's in Revelation three, verse eight, where it talks about, behold, I've set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut.
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That's the Jesus who's mandating the missionary activity of the church.
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This place, Macedonia, was across the Aegean Sea from Troas. And so setting sail from Troas, we made a direct voyage to Samothrace and the following day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi.
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Why would they go on this missionary journey anyway? Because Jesus commanded them. The great commission, if you remember,
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Christ's love compels us, Paul wrote in second Corinthians five, and the world desperately needs to hear the gospel.
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So over the sea to Macedonia, they went. What is significant about this particular passage is it's the first time we see of the early church, or especially the gospel here, going to what is modern day
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Europe. This was historic. This was something spectacular.
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It's opened up much more than this little area, but to be a pioneer, you have to do something for the first time.
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And this was the first time, the first time Europe really heard the gospel. What also is interesting to me as I read through Acts 16 is the way the writer,
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Luke, refers to himself and the company of this missionary party.
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And with one, he would say the word we, and with the other, he would say the word they.
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I wonder if you can see in verse six, it says, and they went through the region of Phrygia.
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Look at verse seven. And when they had come up to Mysia, look in verse eight.
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So passing by Mysia, they went down to Troas. Look at verse 10.
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And when Paul had seen the vision immediately, we sought to go on into Macedonia.
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What this tells us is somewhere along the line, the they became the we because Luke had joined the missionary party.
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He was now going to see Paul in action firsthand. He was now part of this process.
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Paul had joined, excuse me, Luke had joined the missionary party. You go to verse 40 in this same chapter,
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Acts chapter 16 and verse 40. It says, so they all the time from verse 10, right through 39.
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It says they, they came and apologized to them and they took them out and kissed them to leave the city.
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And that is all part of what Luke is enjoying. But then verse 40, they went out of the prison and visited
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Lydia indicating what? Verse 40 indicates that Luke was being left behind or he remained behind in Philippi when
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Paul and the others left for Thessalonica on in our
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Bibles just for a moment to chapter 20 and verse six. And we read this Acts chapter 20 and verse six, it says, but we sailed away from Philippi.
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So Luke was there for all of that time. The missionary party had gone on without him, but when they came back, he joined again and we sailed away.
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Interesting. Then the, we stops in chapter 21. We're back today again.
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And then back in chapter 27, we have we with Paul, um, on his way to Rome, getting shipwrecked in Malta.
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If you remember Malta is actually the place where my mother was born. She was born in Valletta, the capital town, the capital city of Malta.
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And again, historically where Paul was shipwrecked, but that's an aside back to the passage we read in chapter 16, verse 11 of the activity of the missionary team.
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From there, they came to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia, a
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Roman colony. And we remained in this city some days. And on the Sabbath day, we went outside the gate to the riverside where we suppose there was a place of prayer.
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And we sat down and spoke to the women who had come together. This is intriguing because what we have here is a group of women who were gathering under the leadership of a businesswoman named
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Lydia. I call her a business woman because that is born out from the text in verse 14,
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Lydia. It tells us that she was a seller of purple goods.
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In our day, it's easy to get the color purple, uh, with a mixture of, uh, various different, uh, ingredients.
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You can get purple quite easily. That was not the case in the ancient world. Uh, historically in the first century,
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I'm told this, that purple dye was extricated or extracted from shellfish or from a certain plant.
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And it was therefore very rare. And that's why, uh, you and I would read of, uh, Roman emperors and Kings and Queens of that day having purple because it was so unlike the commoner who would not have access to it.
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It was very expensive to get the color purple. If you wanted a purple robe and you had one, you were in many ways, a wealthy man.
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And the prestige of that purple color was often elevated to the point of royalty.
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Only the Royals would enjoy a purple robe. And so Lydia being a seller of purple goods is first century shorthand to say, she was good at selling.
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She was a good business woman. She was good at this. And she had some business acumen.
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She was able to have a house. And later on in the passage, this house was big enough to house the entire apostolic team.
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The missionary team stayed at a house. We're not told she was married. We can speculate, but, uh, normally it would be the case that there would be a husband.
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And, uh, if so, he would be mentioned. He's not mentioned. Was she divorced?
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We don't know what she widowed. We don't know. What we do know was that she was basically over this house was a person of wealth and she was a worshiper of God.
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It's obvious that the Holy spirit was drawing her to the true
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God of Israel. And that happened by means of them gathering together, worshiping
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God as best they knew. And then Paul was now sent because of the vision he had of the man from Macedonia saying, come out and help me and help us.
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And there in obedience, he goes, finds this group of women and starts teaching.
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That's all he knows to do. And that's all he's required to do. He goes teaching and one who heard it says in verse 14 was a woman named
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Lydia. It's a setup. God has been drawing her. Now he's going to act on Lydia's heart and draw a completely to himself.
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He's going to say, this is the day you're coming home. You're my elect Lydia. I've known you from all eternity.
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I've chosen you. And now I'm going to act as the word is being preached. And again, we see here the ends and the means coming together.
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The ends are God's elect coming to faith in Christ. Jesus said in John six, verse 37, that all that the father has given me will come to me.
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And so the coming is a result of the giving. God gives a people to Christ in eternity past and says, they yours.
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Then in time they come. One who heard was a woman named
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Lydia from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple goods, who was a worshiper of God. Now look at this next phrase.
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The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul.
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Every word here is pregnant with meaning. Oftentimes you hear a preacher say to a congregation, open your hearts, young man, open your heart to God.
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And it's interesting, but it's not a concept that you see in the Bible because you don't find that phrase, the opening of the heart, except here.
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And it's not Paul saying to Lydia, open your heart. It's information from Luke, the writer saying the
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Lord acted and opened the heart of Lydia.
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He opened her heart. The opening of the heart is the activity of God.
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What we have here is what we can now look back on with an anachronistic type of understanding and say, this is a very
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Calvinistic passage. This is God working. It's God opening the heart.
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A closed heart doesn't choose to come open. God has to do a miracle.
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God has to shape the heart. God has to change the disposition of the heart, take out a heart of stone, put in a heart of flesh and God, the
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Holy Spirit, the one who had sent the missionaries to this region was now working on someone in the crowd opening the heart.
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The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul.
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I remember in my own life, going to a service, didn't want to be there, age 14, looking at my watch and realizing it had only been seven minutes and the meeting was still going and we were still in the first song.
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Yes, it was that kind of a church. And the preacher got up. I was not interested. And halfway through,
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I began to be interested. And by the end of the service, I wanted to know this Jesus. I wanted to be right with him.
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And I realized that I was stripped naked and could not stand before the Holy God. And I wanted what
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I didn't want before. I wanted Christ. Christ stepped off the pages of history into reality in my life.
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And to this day, I've never been the same. It was an act of God. Now I know theologically what was happening.
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According to John chapter three, the Holy Spirit, he's like wind. You don't see his activity.
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No one knows where wind comes from or where it's going. So is everyone who's born of the spirit.
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And certainly that's what's happening here. The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul through the means of the preaching, not apart from the means, but through the use of the means.
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God, the Holy Spirit says through the preaching of the gospel, I'm going to win and shape and change the heart of my elect.
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Now we don't know who they are. I'm sure Paul did not know who they are at this point, except that Lydia responded and it was a genuine conversion.
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And Luke writes of it and says, it was God's activity. It wasn't Paul. It wasn't
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Paul's great mannerisms, his great prowess at preaching. The accolades go back to God because you can get everything right as a preacher and still the heart will be closed.
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That's why prayer is needed from and by the preacher regarding what he's going to preach.
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The Holy Spirit would accompany him and others pray for those who are going to hear as well pray for the preacher.
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We need the Holy Spirit so much more than we realize, because only the Holy Spirit can change the disposition of the heart, do heart surgery.
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We may not even be aware surgery is happening. I wasn't halfway through that sermon, but looking back, the
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Holy Spirit, like wind, was active. He opened my heart. He opened
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Lydia's heart. This was a lucrative enterprise for Lydia and what her business was.
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She would be named as the first European convert. If this was the first missionary activity in what is now modern day
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Europe, this was the first European convert named at least. There were other
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Gentiles who'd come to Christ, but none were named before they were worshiping God. Paul started teaching.
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Then Lydia invited Paul and the others into a home and that home became a church.
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Isn't that amazing? That home became a church. The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul.
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And after she was baptized, why was she baptized? I'm sure because that was part of the teaching.
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Repent, believe, then be baptized. And her household as well.
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Again, we don't know whether this is simply referring to servants in the house.
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That is a legitimate understanding of what that phrase household, the word household could mean.
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It does not mean there were children there. There's no reference to that. We don't want to build any doctrine on words that are not in the text and concepts that are not born out of the text.
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It just says her household. And that could just simply mean all her servants because she was a lucrative businesswoman.
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She had people working for her. And that's what could be meant by that word household. They obviously would believe they were baptized just as she was.
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Her household as well was the reference there to they were also baptized. She urged us saying, if you've judged me to be faithful to the
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Lord, come to my house and stay. And she prevailed upon us.
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What is true for Lydia is true for every true convert. It's a work of God.
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All the credit goes to him. What Paul was doing, although it's not explicitly said, we know what
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Paul's up to. Anywhere he goes, he's preaching the gospel. He's not going to be talking about things that are extraneous to the gospel or superfluous.
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He's going to preach the gospel. There's a group of women that worship in God. Let me tell them the true gospel.
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That's his heart. Woe unto me, he said, unless I preach the gospel. So what was said by Paul was the gospel.
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And God used that preaching of the gospel to open the heart of his elect.
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She was baptized. Again, that concept is there throughout the book of Acts.
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Converts are immediately baptized on profession of faith. It's not a six -week process whereby they have to bring forth fruit and we can watch it for six weeks and then see if it really stuck.
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No, we baptize people who may be frauds, who may not be legitimate, but on the profession of their faith, we baptize.
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And oftentimes that's the phraseology I will use as I'm baptized on the profession of your faith.
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We baptize you now in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So how old were the children here?
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We don't know. No children are mentioned. We don't know. Again, never build doctrine on what we cannot prove from scripture.
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We're out of time for today. And hopefully as we've gone through this passage, it gives you an insight as to how verse by verse preaching goes through a text and then makes application of the text to ourselves.
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And what I would say to you is simply this, if you're going through some struggles and doors seem to be closed,
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God has an open door for you yet. He's not shocked that you're still alive and he thinks, oh no,
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I don't have a plan for this one. What am I going to do? Can we have a think tank angels and come up with something? No, your days are numbered by the
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Lord and he has a plan if you're breathing. And part of that plan is that you glorify him and you serve him.
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And should the Lord open a new door for you and it might be slightly different from what you thought it might be, be ready.
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When it comes to preaching, be ready, be ready with some sermons, be ready with some teachings, learn all you can, make, if you're a driver, use your car as a university, listen to sermons that are healthy and sound and will build you up in your faith.
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And I've done that since I had my own car. I study on my own, but I also use my car time as a study time.
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And over the years, there's been tens of thousands of hours put into it. Make yourself ready for whatever door
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God will send you through. It's been a joy to come to you here on The Dividing Line. My name is
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John Sampson. You can find my blog at effectualgrace .com.
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The church I pastor in the Phoenix area is kingschurchaz .com.
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Thank you for listening. Pray for Dr. Whiteout in Florida. The joy to come to you. God bless you as you walk in the light of his word.