The gospel moves through every culture throughout history calling people out of darkness and into His marvelous light. From the rich, the poor, the elevated, and the marginalized, Christ is creating a people for His own possession—a community of salt and light, receiving and proclaiming God’s mercy.
If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those. First Peter will be our passage; we’re literally just going to look at it phrase by phrase. Before we dive in, though, this morning the Scriptures ask us to pray for peace in Jerusalem. I want to take just a moment or two to do that. I think, for you and me, we see things flare up over there quite often, and it’s easy to just go, «Oh, there it goes again.» However, I believe what you’re witnessing right now is quite unprecedented; you’d have to go back to the 70s to see something as brazen and crazy as what we’re seeing right now. It’s a complex political situation, but I’m not going there. I’m going with, «Okay, Prince of Peace, bring your peace to this part of the world, ” a part of the world that can’t seem to find it. So join me as I pray, and then we will dive into this passage.
Father, we thank you that we live in a place where such things are far from our imaginations—where there’s no low grade of fear at any moment that something could blow up, or somebody could be kidnapped, or people could just be murdered in front of us. Yet this is exactly the opposite of what’s happening in Jerusalem right now. I pray for Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip and that whole area, that your peace would reign there, that it would establish itself among peoples who can’t seem to find it, who keep moving past each other with two completely different worldviews slamming into one another. I pray specifically for those families who have lost loved ones or currently have kidnapped wives, moms, and children, that you would bring about peace in this part of the world. It’s not too hard for you, so we ask that you might bring it. Let it be, and as we see updates and scroll through things, may we remember to pray and to believe that you are able. I thank you that we got to sing this morning; we know how the story ends. I pray that you would keep our heads lifted up to the peace that will one day cover the earth like the waters cover the seas. It’s in your beautiful name I pray. Amen.
Amen. In Acts chapter 16, that’s not where we are today, but where we’re going to land. In Acts 16, we see the Apostle Paul show up in the city of Philippi. Now, Philippi was one of those ancient cities that made the world work. It was a coastal city with high trade; think of it like New York or LA—a cultural setting city. When the Apostle Paul arrives here, there are no Christians in Philippi. In fact, at this moment in history, there are probably only about 20,000 Christians on earth. This is a whole new thing. The Apostle Paul shows up, and on the outskirts of town, it looks like there’s a women’s Bible study going on. I don’t know if Jen wrote it or what, but there’s a women’s Bible study out there, and it is filled with Jewish women studying the Torah and a handful of what the Bible would call God-fearers. God-fearers were men and women who had rejected the Roman polytheistic view of the universe, where there was a god for everything, and all of those gods must be appeased if you were going to have the kind of life you wanted. They had rejected that but simultaneously didn’t know who God was.
So we find in this little women’s Bible study on the outskirts of town, Jewish women from the synagogue, and then sprinkled into that group are some God-fearers—some non-Jewish women who are curious about who God might actually be. One of those women is named Lydia, and she stands out among the people at this Bible study specifically because she’s kind of a fashion icon in her day. If you’re asking me why I think that, or why I would say that, it’s because what we read about her in Acts 16, starting in verse 11, is that she was a dealer in purple cloth—which means very little to you and me in an age of synthetic material—but back in the first century, the only way to make purple cloth was to find these snails that had just a tiny little drop of dye in them. You’d have to harvest thousands of snails to get enough dye to make it, which is why purple was the color of royalty. If Lydia is a dealer in purple fabric, then she is connected to the who’s who of the ancient world. She knows kings, senators, governmental authorities, the famous, and the wealthy.
What we learn about Lydia is she has a house in Philippi, but she also has a house in Thyatira. It’s like she has a place in the hills outside of LA but also on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. This woman’s got some wealth; she is a good leader because she obviously has a ton of people working for her. She’s at this little Bible study when Paul shows up and begins to fill in the blanks for her about who God is.
Matt Chandler - Hospitality and the Greatest Story Ever Told
