Uniting What Is Torn Apart

That's it.

All right, here we go.

Acts 16.

If you have a Bible or an app, open up to Acts 16.

We didn't get to read the whole chapter uh publicly in front of the congregation, but we're gonna work through it verse by verse as much as we can.

We are in Acts part two, chapter 16 this morning.

Uh here's what I want you to do for a moment.

As you're turning there, think about your closest friends, right?

Think about your social circle or who kind of inhabits your group chats.

Chances are most of those people look a lot like you do.

Maybe they think like you do, or they live at roughly the kind of same stage of life as you do.

That's not an accident, right?

We didn't stumble upon that reality.

Our world has gotten really, really good at compartmentalizing and separating and sorting us out.

It sorts us by uh algorithms, by zip codes, ages, incomes, interests, until we curiously only ever bump into the same people who already agree with us.

Now we call that normal.

We call that normal.

We've grown very accustomed to that reality.

But it's actually just exclusivism that we've learned to live with.

And it's antithetical to the very nature and heart of the gospel.

You see, Acts 16, it drops us into this city called Philippi.

And it's a city that sorted people better and more rigidly than ours does.

A Roman colony who was proud of its citizenship, its class lines, its pagan gods.

And into that world, into Philippi, the Spirit sends Paul, Silas, Timothy, and now Luke.

And he sends them toward three individuals, three people, image-bearers of God, who have nothing in common with one another.

A wealthy businesswoman, an enslaved possessed girl in this Roman jailer.

And so we see in the text these miracles.

We see a vision from a man from Macedonia to Paul.

We see a possessed girl get healed and exorcised and liberated.

We see an earthquake open up a prison and the jailer and his family get saved.

We see these three distinct miracles, all in Acts chapter 16.

Acts 16 · chapter mention

But the miracle you and I are tempted to completely gloss over is that these three people and more become a family at the end of chapter 16.

That's a miracle that only the Spirit of God can produce in the lives of people who love people who look just like us.

That's not a coincidence.

That's not just something that happened by chance, it's the power and movement of the gospel uniting what the world strives to keep apart.

So let's watch how it happens.

First, in verses 6 through 10, we see that how the spirit sends the mission where the missionaries would not go.

The spirit sends the mission where the missionaries would not go.

Then while they're at Troas, this vision comes to Paul in the middle of the night, a man of Macedonia pleading with him, come over to Macedonia and help us.

You see, they were eager to see the gospel go forth.

They were eager to see the kingdom of God reach the very ends of the earth.

And so they're just sitting there waiting to know where will the Spirit direct us?

Where will the Spirit go before us?

Where will the Spirit produce gospel fruit in our striving?

And they hear, go to Macedonia, and they don't hesitate.

Luke says they immediately, out of this zeal for the glory of God, sought to go, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.

You see, the mission was never theirs to plan.

They were just called to be faithful.

They were simply called to go.

And this is not the first time we've seen in the book of Acts where the New Testament church was driven and directed by the Spirit to go where fruitfulness would be seen.

And so here, again, in their eagerness to see the gospel go forth, they immediately go, concluding that God had called them to preach there.

And it was the Spirit's empowerment and direction that brings them to Philippi.

And if we notice there in the chapter, Luke says, we for the first time in all of Acts.

You see, Luke, up until this point, had been recording the book of Acts as this secondhand perspective.

He'd been getting information from those who were there, and he was recording it to his best ability as faithfully as he can.

But now here in Acts 16, he incorporates himself among them.

We is heard.

He's just joined the team.

There at Troas, Luke is present.

And so what follows in this chapter and throughout Acts is not secondhand information anymore.

This is Luke's personal experience.

Then in verses 11 through 15, we see this wealthy Gentile merchant actually entering into the family of God through an opened heart.

You see, Philippi has no synagogue.

And so if you desired to worship the God of Israel, you would have to go outside of the city to a place of prayer, a place of ritual cleansing, a place where you were actually accepted for the faith that you confessed.

And so on the Sabbath, these missionaries walk outside the city gate down to the river, expecting, because they understand how these cities function and operate, expecting to discover a place of prayer.

And there they meet this group of women, and among them is a woman named Lydia.

The Bible says that she's a dealer in purple cloth.

And that's important because it puts her in a class status.

You see, she dealt in a garment that only the wealthy and powerful with inside culture could actually afford.

We'll later see that her whole household was baptized.

No mention of a husband or even children.

It's assumed that Lydia was so prosperous in the marketplace that she had a home of workers and servants that came to faith through the gospel preaching of Paul.

And so here she is, this woman of means, not a Jew, but a Gentile from Thyatira.

The Bible says she's a worshiper of God.

So what that means is that she found her way into the worship of the God of Israel, but not becoming fully converted as a Jew.

And so she belonged fully to neither world.

She was not fully Gentile, worshiping pagan idols.

She was not fully Jew in her worship even of God.

She stood at the edge of both of these realities.

And there at the riverbank, she listens to Paul's gospel message and she believes.

But we have to stop and pay attention to Luke for a moment because he helps us understand the agent or cause of faith.

You see, Lydia didn't believe because of her intelligence and education.

She didn't believe because of her sincerity toward the Jewish religion.

She did not believe because of her social status.

No, the scriptures say the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul.

So here's what we see: the faithfulness of gospel preaching must be accompanied by the power of the Spirit's presence, or else there's no fruit on the vine.

There's no effect in the soul, there's no transformation of heart.

And so God in his mystery works in such a way that he invites humanity into his mission that we might participate in declaring the finished work and glorious good news of his son as the means of salvation for all people.

And the Spirit must break in and reach into our chest to tear out the heart of stone and put one that now beats with affection for God.

It's necessary.

Preaching alone can never do that.

Only the Lord can open a closed heart.

We believe this, we confess this.

Even in our own confession that we hold, the 1689 London Baptist Confession says distinctly and explicitly in chapter 10, paragraph 1, God enlightening their minds spiritually and savingly to understand the things of God, taking away their heart of stone, and giving unto them a heart of flesh.

We see the truth and reality that in the story of Lydia.

And then what happens?

She's baptized that very day.

And not just Lydia, but her entire household is baptized with her and insists the missionaries stay in her home.

The scriptures actually use she prevailed over us.

I love that language because here's what it means.

It means those guys were like, I don't know.

I don't think.

And she's like, no, you're gonna come into my home.

You're gonna be my guest.

You ever met a woman like that?

Yeah, I like them because if I say otherwise, they'll be mean to me.

But uh those women, they're just so powerful.

But here's what we really actually see: we see the natural implication of the gospel opening someone's heart to opening their home.

Those two things aren't separate.

The gospel opening someone's heart ought to work itself out in such a way that your home is open also to practice gospel hospitality with others who are in the family of God and others who are not yet a part of the family, but you are drawing them into by your witness and testimony of how you love them.

And we see that evidence in the life of Lydia.

Her heart was opened and her home was opened.

In verses 16 through 18, we see this enslaved girl entering the family through a broken chain.

So on the way to the same place of prayer, there's this very different person who crosses the path of these missionaries.

And it's this young girl, a slave girl, who's possessed by what Luke calls a divination spirit or a spirit of divination.

The original language actually refers to this python spirit.

So if you can think about a python, this constricting animal, right?

That entangles itself around you and chokes the life out of you.

This is the kind of possession that this young girl is experiencing.

Now, this reference to this specific spirit, it's surrounding the mythology of Delphi's Oracle.

What does that mean for you, right?

Here's why that's important.

Delphi's Oracle is the most famous fortune-telling shrine in the ancient world.

So it was the most recognized, most popular fortune-telling shrine in the ancient world.

So it's going to help us understand and make sense of the story.

You see, she had these two wicked owners.

So she was owned by this spirit.

She was owned by these wicked men who cared nothing for her.

The only thing they cared about was what she was able to produce for them.

They did not care for her, they only cared about what she produced for them because every prediction that she made made them money.

So they kept her bound.

Spiritually enslaved by this python and economically exploited by these wicked men.

And it says that for days she followed the missionaries, shouting these words.

And here's what's wild about this: she's shouting truth from the source of demonic influence, but yet at the same time, we see in the scriptures that even the demons know and acknowledge who Christ is.

And so we almost see evidence of this proclamation.

Here's what they say: These men, this possessed girl, following them around, shouting, these men are servants of the Most High God who proclaimed to you the way of salvation.

Now, Luke tells us that this instance stirs up this emotional response from Paul.

And if you're following along in the ESV, you're gonna see the word annoy.

I don't think that that's fair.

The original language really leans itself more toward like grieved, burdened.

So I don't want you to think that Paul's acting in this act of responsive anger.

He's so annoyed at this girl, he's just gonna demon get out of her, right?

I don't think that that's how the kingdom of God works.

But I do believe that he was troubled and grieved over this little girl, ached by watching this girl be exploited twice over by a spirit that owned her voice and men who owned her body.

And that grief moved Paul toward this girl's freedom.

And so, speaking in the name of Jesus Christ, the spirit is commanded to come out of the girl and it leaves immediately.

And there's no record of some type of struggle or some magical incantation used here in this moment.

Simply, Paul used the authority of Jesus' name to free her in such a way that nothing else could freeing this girl that these two wicked and greedy masters had chained.

And then there's a problem that arises.

So, verses 19 through 34, we see this Roman jailer enter the family of God through an earthquake and a groundshaking question.

Now, when this girl's owners actually realize that their income was just cast out of her, they drag Paul and Silas before the magistrates publicly.

They stirred up the crowd that's there, and they watch them be beaten with rods, stripes upon their back, thrown into the inner prison, and the scriptures say, with their feet put in these wooden stocks, they're bound there.

And you would think that these apostles, these missionaries, would find meaning or reason to murmur and complain, to be filled with anxiety and fear and doubt about what they're doing, why they're there in that moment.

But no, what does it say?

At midnight, they hear them singing praises and praying.

These apostles found joy in being counted worthy to suffer for the sake of the gospel.

So that prison cell did not mean that God was no longer with them.

That prison cell meant that they were being faithful to a God who is present and near with them, and they would glorify his name in the midst of it.

And they pray and they sing.

They weren't groaning or murmuring or complaining.

They were singing so loud that the other prisoners were even hearing them glorify God.

And then all of a sudden, the there's this earthquake that takes place, and the doors open, the chains fall off, and there's just this immense amount of chaos.

And in the midst of this, the jailer wakes up from his nap and he sees what's going on, and fear just grips him.

He sees the doors open, he sees the chains laying on the floor, and what does he do?

He draws his sword to end his own life.

Here's what he knew.

If truly all of these inmates had escaped under his watch, Rome would see that his life was over.

So he was going to take that moment into his own hands.

He wasn't going to give Rome the satisfaction of taking it for him.

But all of a sudden he hears from the distance this voice say, Don't do that.

No, no, no.

I'm right here.

You don't have to kill yourself.

Do not harm yourself, Paul shouts, for we are all here.

And so the man, this jailer who's about to kill himself over the fear of losing these prisoners, what does he do?

He falls trembling to the floor before these men, and he asks this earth-shaking question: What must I do to be saved?

And I love their answer.

I love their answer because it's it's bold.

Like they're not they're not trying to soften it, it's unapologetic.

They're not trying to make excuses for it.

It's clear.

They're not trying to zigzag their way around his feelings and emotions.

No, they speak with clarity.

Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.

So the jailer takes them to his house.

He shows this hospitality to these men.

And the sword that he was holding now is a washcloth that he's using to wipe the blood that's dried on their backs from the beating that they took.

I love how the early church father Chrysostom puts this in his homily in Acts.

He says about the jailer, he was he washed and was washed.

He washed them from their stripes and was himself washed from his sins.

Within the hour of this earthquake happening, this jailer, his family come to faith, they're baptized, and the man who guarded prisoners now sets tables for these men who were declared enemies of the state.

Then finally, in verses 35 through 40, we see the family is guarded or protected through this public reckoning that happens.

So the next morning comes, and the magistrates send this word kind of quietly and privately to let Paul and Silas go.

But for Paul, that quiet release, it's not acceptable.

It's not what he's going to participate in.

You see, Rome, they only tolerated recognized religions within their state.

And all of a sudden, there's this new message being proclaimed: a new way of salvation by means of a new God named Jesus.

And so this unsanctioned faith was fragile.

And an unsanctioned faith that was accused just the day earlier of disturbing the city could be crushed by any Roman official who felt like it.

And so Paul is smart.

He sends word back to the officials.

Come yourselves.

You beat us publicly, you imprisoned us publicly, you're gonna free us publicly.

Because what's that gonna do?

It's gonna bring credibility to the faith that they're proclaiming.

And so Paul and Silas, they've kept this quiet up until now, but it turns out they're Roman citizens.

They're Roman citizens.

Ones who were beaten without trial, hurried in some pathetic um uh sense of imprisonment, this all being illegal.

Under Roman law and making that public, making their release public, would bring this legal covering for this new church that was being planted in Philippi.

And so the magistrates, they come and they meet them in the prison, they apologize, they walk them out publicly.

And we start to come to the end of the passage.

And what we see is that this family that was born in a prayer service by a river, delivered from bondage of oppression, forged in the catastrophe of an earthquake, now stands protected against the very city that it resides in.

And so this businesswoman who's wealthy from purple cloth, this enslaved girl with nothing left to sell, and a Roman jailer with a sword in his hand stand there as a family.

You see, nothing about their lives should have ever brought them into the same room, into the same place, let alone into the same family.

But by the end of this chapter, we see this beautiful language, brother.

Brother.

Because here's what we have to wrestle with the gospel unites what the world keeps apart.

The gospel unites what the world keeps apart.

Pause for just a second and actually hold these three lives next to each other.

This wealthy Gentile businesswoman with her own household, her own staff, her own trade, her own resources, an enslaved girl with no name that Luke even records for us.

No possessions, no control over her body or over her voice, a Roman jailer, this government employee sworn to enforce the very laws that had just left Paul and Silas beaten and bloodied in prison.

There was different genders, different social statuses, different ethnicities, different relationships to power itself.

One commanded it, one was owned by it, one enforced it.

If you stood in Philippi's marketplace that week and guessed which of these three might end up eating at the same table, praying the same prayers, singing the same songs, calling each other brother and sister, you would have guessed none of them.

None of them.

Every social instinct in that city and everyone inside of you sorts these three people into separate rooms and keeps them there.

But not the gospel.

Not the gospel.

That's what makes verse 40 so staggering.

Luke doesn't end this chapter with three separate conversion stories.

He ends it with the brothers.

One family gathered in Lydia's home.

This is what the whole chapter turns on.

It's not the vision of the Macedonian man, it's not the exorcism of the possessed girl or the earthquake in the prison cell.

It is the central miracle of Acts 16 is that people who had every reason to remain strangers became a family on the same terms with no distinction between them.

You see, the gospel didn't just save three individuals that week.

Lydia, the girl, or the jailer.

The gospel built something that the Roman Empire, with all of its power and infrastructure and knowledge and armies and wealth, could have never built in their entire lifetime.

A real, eternal, lasting unity across every line that divides us from one another.

And if the gospel could do that in Philippi, in a city that was built on class and citizenship and Roman pride, then it can do that here among us.

And so the question this passage is about to press on us isn't whether the gospel can unite what the world keeps apart, it's whether we will allow it to unite us.

You see, we have this problem.

We resist the unity that the gospel accomplishes.

We resist the unity that the gospel accomplishes.

Ask any of us in this room, if the gospel unites every class, background, ethnicity, stage of life, and we'll just sit there and shake our heads, yep.

You're not going to say no, right?

But all of a sudden there's a gap that's observed.

There's a gap, and it's observed between what you confess to believe and how you function in your everyday life.

When we watch how we live, we see a different answer emerge.

Sunday mornings, what do they become?

They become grabbing coffee to catch up with people you already know.

You join a mission group, right?

But your search for the right one isn't about where you live and how you can express authentic, genuine gospel diversity.

No, it becomes a search for people who kind of look like us and are maybe in our same stage of life.

Many of us, we run out of this building the moment the gathering ends, while new people who've come to this church stand alone in the lobby without anyone offering them the warmth of gospel hospitality, without anyone instilling dignity and value into the image of which they bear in their personhood.

You see, the family the gospel promised oddly narrows down to people who we already feel comfortable with, familiar with, and if we're honest, people we have deemed easy to have a relationship with.

That's the real gap.

It's not unbelief, it's not a wrong answer to the question, it's the distance between what we affirm and how we live.

And left alone, that gap starts to harden and crystallize in our life.

Some of us, we stay apart completely from the unity that the gospel has accomplished.

We stay apart from the unity the gospel has accomplished.

Some of us never actually step foot into the family at all.

Listen, when Christ saved you, he did not just reconcile you to the Father through himself.

He reconciled you to his body, the church, the bride of which the bridegroom spilled his blood for.

It's not just about you and Jesus.

That's the most egocentric thing we've ever allowed to be invited into the church.

It is about you and the glory of his name and the beauty and splendor of his church, of which he has poured his blood out for to buy and purchase and ransom.

And then you, you get to be a part of that.

You get to then join him in being reconciled to his mission to see the glory of his name fill this earth like the waters inhabit the seas.

You see, we call ourselves Christians, we believe the right things, but when it comes to church membership or real relationships, being known, opening our life to people who might complicate it, all of that, it stays very conveniently unpursued.

Others of us, we we we just build this spiritual life completely removed and outside of the local church, right?

You have a podcast preacher and a YouTube teacher who doesn't know, and look, I love accessibility.

I love that you have accessibility to an infinite amount of better preachers than me.

That's great.

But when your marriage is falling apart, when your kid looks like they're abandoning the faith, when you don't know what to do in your career and occupation anymore, when when your world starts to crumble, you you're gonna DM them?

Hey man, you don't know me.

Why do we have the local church?

The local church is here so that we can actually live out the truth and mystery of the gospel together.

This is the gospel.

Unless the gospel is connected to something like the local church, it remains this abstract, idealistic thing that has no real impact or transformation on the world or the lives of individuals.

The church is us living in the gospel.

And so all of that is real.

Your podcast preacher, your YouTuber, all of it's real, but none of it is a family who actually knows you, who actually cares for you.

Some of us we're willing to take a seat on a Sunday, but somehow we never find ourselves in a living room with others who call sacred mission home.

Sure, we'll occupy these chairs, but the chairs inside of the homes of others, we remain absent from.

Here's what it's like: it's like many of us stay tethered just enough to the local church that it appears as though we're here, but if ever the time comes for us to leave, it doesn't actually cost us anything.

Right?

And so we play house, we play relationship, we play this thing called the church, but just enough.

You see, to be fully known, to truly be known by others always feels like too much risk for us who are always looking for the way out.

And some of us were members here, covenant members in good standing on paper, who seem to set our own terms of how we're going to be present within the body, how we're going to serve and contribute with our gifts, not just our finances, but the way the Spirit of God has put a gift within you so that my faith may be strengthened and encouraged and fortified in this world that's trying to tear it apart.

I need you.

I need you.

You need one another here, not just inhabiting space, but getting your hands dirty in the work of ministry to see one another be spurred on and persevered to the end.

That's why you're here.

But no, we just want to show up when something's convenient.

We only want to be generous when it's easy.

We never fully surrender to a family where we genuinely strive for their ultimate good.

So whether we never come in or we come in on our own terms, what do we do?

We stay apart from the family that Christ has already made through the gospel.

That's one way we stay apart.

Here's another.

And this one is often harder to spot because it looks like commitment.

But there's a lot of us in this room who fragment the unity that the gospel has accomplished.

We fragment it.

Here's what I mean by that.

Some of us, we only feel at home with people who look like us, think like us, behave like us, vote like us, live like us.

Man, we're faithful to show up.

We'll serve in a ministry.

We'll be generous toward the church and toward others.

We're present every Sunday filling a seat, but the moment that someone different walks in the room, we're friendly without ever becoming family.

Right?

That surface level, like, hey, I'm so glad you're here.

You're like a Walmart greeter.

Like that dude's always glad I'm there.

I don't know his name.

He doesn't know my name.

I don't see him as much as some as you are assuming I do.

But but the reality is that we have this like false, beautiful exterior of hospitality that never dives into the dignity of other human beings to know them, to ask how they're doing in their relationship with Jesus, to get your hands into the things that bring them fear and hurt.

Some of us we we join a mission group, but somehow it's the one that we've been able to with precision sort by age or stage of life or interest until this word called community conveniently just means people who are already like us in a different room.

There's nothing wrong with the group inherently.

There's something wrong, though, with assuming that that is a faithful portrait of gospel family when we've hand curated who belongs in that circle and who doesn't.

And some of us we've confused our kind of church with the gospel's church.

And some of you in this room, you love sacred mission deeply, and I know that for sure.

But there was somewhere along the way that comfort became the unspoken price of belonging here.

And we never noticed that conveniently we we've drawn this line around ourselves and around others that we feel really comfortable around.

And we've called that church or family or community.

And it's incredibly hard for other people to get inside of that line.

Shame on us.

We fragment this very thing that Christ died to bind together.

So both of us, the one who stays outside of the family and never truly enters in, or the one who narrows it from the inside, we need to see clearly the family that the gospel has created.

You see, Jesus, he was torn apart.

In the way that we try to tear apart this world around us, Christ was torn apart so that we would be eternally united in him.

Jesus was torn from community.

Look, when Jesus was crucified, he wasn't executed inside of Jerusalem's gates.

No, the scriptures tell us clearly that Jesus himself was taken outside of the city.

He was cast out among his people as one who was unclean.

He faced exactly the kind of exclusion that Lydia and her friends knew when they had to walk outside of Philippi's gates just to find a place to pray and to worship.

The book of Hebrews tells us Jesus suffered outside the gate, and that was for a purpose.

He suffered there so that everyone permanently outside of the family of God, because of our own sin and rebellion and hard-heartedness, everyone that the city keeps at arm's length because they're different than them could finally be brought all the way in into a city's gates that are eternally founded for their family in God's kingdom.

Christ was also torn physically.

Stripes were laid across his back in the way that Paul and Silas's backs were laid open in that Philippian jail, but their wounds only ever pointed toward his.

The gospel of Jesus.

How will the world know that you are my disciples?

By your love for one another.

This is what I'm trying to get to.

This ain't about you and Jesus.

That's the worst thing that you could try to embody in your faith life.

This has everything to do about you and the person sitting next to you.

Because the if the gospel doesn't mean anything for that, it doesn't mean anything for you.

So we're not trying to just be a nicer church.

Right?

One of those churches where you go out when you pull in the parking lot, you've got those lame people with like signs like you look great today.

Some of you don't.

Just being real.

I'm one of them.

We're not looking for a more diverse lobby to have some type of social equity.

We're looking to live out gospel family.

So genuinely united together that the watching world has no explanation for what they observe.

Because the world has never built anything like it before.

You see, this truth, it's not just to believe, it's to live out.

This truth has to reorder our affections so rightly that what we actually do with our Sundays in our mission groups, that open seat at our dinner table reflects the truth we say we believe.

Think about the first, think about the two only commandments.

All of the commandments of the Old Testament distilled down to these two.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

We tend to stop there so conveniently, don't we?

But the second is like it, Jesus said.

To love our neighbor as ourself.

Here's what Jesus was clearly saying there is no separation between you loving God and you loving the person sitting next to you.

None.

So the same spirit who opened Lydia's heart, who freed a girl from chains, and turned a jailer's sword into a washcloth, has not finished building his family.

He's still doing it here, even among us now.

And so the world, they're gonna keep sorting us into categories.

They're gonna continue separating us into different rooms.

That's what it's always done.

We should expect nothing less, but for us.

But for us.

Let the gospel unite, but the world keeps apart.

Amen.

Let's pray.