Gospel Meditation #49

The Conversion of Lydia & Paul and Silas in Prison

Acts 16:11-24

1. Find a quiet place without distractions.
2. Be comfortably alert, still, and at peace.
3. Say the Lord’s Prayer. Sing or cant the Jesus Prayer.
4. Pray for family, friends, neighbors, and yourself.
5. Slowly and carefully read the passage of Scripture.
6. Paul, Silas, Luke, and Timothy arrive in Europe, and stay in the Macedonian city of Philippi. They hear of and then visit a place of prayer (evidently no synagogue in the city) by a river on a Sabbath day.
7. The missionary/evangelists speak to a group of women gathered there. One of them, Lydia from a prominent city, Thyatira (modern day Turkey and one of the 7 cities of the Book of Revelation) has her heart opened by the Lord.
8. She is baptized, probably in that river, and also her household. (We have no details about the nature of the household.)
9. She invites the apostolic team to her home; Paul and company eventually agree to do so.
10. Fortune telling, divination, common in that era as centuries before, comes into view. A “slave girl” who makes big money for her handlers, follows the preachers and announce what sounds like an honorable and exalted spiritual authority and message. But Paul is annoyed.
11. At some point, Paul commands the python spirit indwelling the slave girl to come out of her. It does.
12. The result is she can no longer tell fortunes. Normally she would give knowledge of something in a person’s past thereby setting up a divination, which would be expensive.
13. Now her handlers are upset and seek to punish Paul and Silas. They are stripped, beaten with rods, and cast into a maximum security part of a prison. There feet in stocks, they cannot even move.