Matt Chandler - The Second Wave

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab them. If you don’t have a Bible with you, there should be a hardback black one somewhere around you. If you don’t own one, that’s our gift to you; feel free to take that. We are in week nine of our study through the book of Acts, and here’s something that is happening now—starting this week, what we’ve shown is a lot of what you just saw, which is the spread of Christianity through the ancient Greco-Roman world. We know it keeps spreading, and we know that it continues to spread because we’re here, and we don’t have a lot of ties to being Jews in Jerusalem. We are here because the gospel message continued to spread, and so we’ve been covering these last nine weeks how that happened, what was actually going on, and now what’s going to happen in week nine as well as the rest of the weeks. We’re just going to see more of what we’ve already seen: more people hearing the gospel, more people responding to the gospel, more people mocking the gospel, more people trying to destroy the gospel, more churches planted, and more churches that were planted planting churches, and on and on we could go. What I want to do starting this week—and I’ll tweak this as we move through the rest of this series—is take things from the macro historic level down to the micro. I want you to feel this, to smell this in a way that maybe you haven’t before. So far, we saw 3,000 people come to know Christ at Pentecost, which is basically our help migra. From there, we saw 5,000 men become Christians at Solomon’s Portico. From there, we saw all these other groups and the gospel working in these cities, where whole cities began to be transformed by the gospel. In fact, we know historically that by 350, 51% of the Roman Empire will proclaim Christ as Lord. Depending on which side of the debate you’re on, my belief is that Constantine did not make Christianity but that Christianity made Constantine. If you are the emperor, you are going to hop on what is popular, or you might get stabbed 30 times in the shower, one of which might be your best friend. If you don’t know Shakespeare, I can’t help you. Now, from there, I want to take it out of these large groups of cities being impacted, and I want to hopefully put it in a place where you can feel things that maybe you haven’t felt as we’ve taken this high macro view of the historic and biblical spread of the gospel. One of the ways I lament about how we approach the Bible—many of us approach the Bible—is that I think we read it wrongly. What I mean by that is we don’t use our imaginations when we read. Now, when I say use our imaginations, I’m not saying to imagine something that’s not there, because that would be heresy, all right? We’re not talking about that. Rather, I’m saying as we read the word of God, we should put ourselves into it in such a way that we can smell it and feel it, allowing it to shape us and show us what’s true about God and, therefore, what is true about us. We should be moved by a text rather than just reading it. What I just described is a lot like the movie «The NeverEnding Story» versus just reading the newspaper. With that said, I want us to look at some individuals, how they came to know Christ, and see if we can’t learn some things about God and also about ourselves. So let’s look at Acts chapter 16. We’re going to start in verse 13. If you’ve read ahead and are thinking, «You’re leaving out some significant portions of the story, ” I am sorry. Verse 13: On the Sabbath day, we went outside the gates—this is in Philippi, by the way—to the riverside, where we supposed there was a place of prayer. We sat down and spoke to the women who had come together. One who heard us was a woman named Lydia, from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple goods, who was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul, and after she was baptized, along with her household, she urged us, saying, „If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay.“ And she prevailed upon us. Let’s talk about Lydia. Here’s what we know about Lydia: we know that she is religious, that she is moral, and that she has done very well for herself in the domain of fashion. She is from Thyatira, which is a massive port city in the ancient world, and she is in Philippi. It might be helpful to think of it like New York and London or Hong Kong—cities that shape the economic force of the world, like Thyatira and Philippi—and she’s got a house in both places; she’s doing well. We know she’s religious; she has rejected Roman paganism.