Jesus 4 Everybody: Jesus For Everybody

Good morning. If you would find those black welcome pads at the end of your row, if you'll take those and pass them down. If you're new to our church in particular, we want to welcome you and find a way to follow-up with you and help capture your information, invite you into various parts of the life of our church.

We're going to turn our attention today to Acts chapter 16. We're reading together verses 11 through 34. I invite you to follow along on the stream. Join your voices with me as we read God's word aloud.

From Troas, we put out to sea and sailed straight for Samothrace, the next day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, a Roman colony and a leading city of the district of Macedonia. We stayed in that city for several days. On the Sabbath day, we went outside the city gate by the river where we expected to find a place of prayer. We sat down and spoke to a woman gathered there. A god fearing woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth from the city of Thyatira was listening. The Lord opened her heart to respond to what Paul was saying. After she and her household were baptized, she urged us, "If you consider me a believer in the Lord, come and stay at my house," and she persuaded us. Once, as we were on our way to prayer, a slave girl met us who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She made a large profit for her owners by fortune telling. As she followed Paul and us, she cried out, "These men who are proclaimed to you a way of salvation are servants of the Most High God." She did this for many days. Paul was greatly annoyed. Turning to the spirit, he said, "I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her," and it came out right away. When her owners realized that their hope of profit was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to the authorities. Bringing them before the chief magistrates, they said, "These men are seriously disturbing our city. They are Jews and promoting customs that are not legal for us as Romans to adopt as our practice." The crowd joined the attack against them, and the chief magistrates stripped off their clothes and ordered them to be beaten with rods. After they had severely flogged them, they threw them into jail, ordering the jailer to guard them carefully. Receiving such an order, he put them into the inner prison and secured their feet in the stocks. About midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly, there was such a violent earthquake that the foundations of the jail were shaken. And immediately, all the doors were opened, and everyone's chains came loose. When the jailer woke up and saw the doors of the prison standing open, he drew his sword and was going to kill himself since he thought the prisoners had escaped. But Paul called out in a loud voice, "Don't harm yourself because we're all here." The jailer called for lights, rushed in, and fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. He escorted them out and said, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" They said, "Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household," and they spoke the word of the Lord to him along with everyone in his house. He took them the same hour of the night and washed their wounds. Right away, he and all his family were baptized. He brought them into his house, set a meal before them, and he rejoiced because he had come to believe with his entire household. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Is There Good News About the Good News?

You know, from the last few years, there has been a lot of bad news about Jesus, about the church, about the people of God. That's come over and over. There have been all these articles even this year that have talked about from major news sources so much bad news about Christianity and the Christian faith. For example, the Wall Street Journal ran an article earlier this summer titled, "Why Middle Aged Americans Aren't Going Back to Church." The Atlantic read an article: "Why so many Americans have stopped going to church?" From The New York Times: "Why do so many people lose their religion? More than 7,000 readers shared their stories." Another from The New York Times: "Lots of Americans are losing their religion. Have you?"

This is a lot of the news that we're hearing right now and my question for us this morning as we turn to God's word is this: Is there any good news about the good news? Is there any good news about the good news?

And Acts 16 has a resounding yes to answer to that question.

So we pick up this passage. We have been looking through this entire summer at the book of Acts through the lens of its main character, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not an it. The Holy Spirit is a he.

We see the Holy Spirit powerfully at work in the book of Acts primarily pointing people to Jesus and so this morning, we're going to pick up that same theme and think about how Jesus is for everybody. I have three very simple points: Jesus for everybody then, Jesus for everybody now, Jesus for everybody here.

Jesus for Everybody Then

You know, a lot of people agree that as Luke writes this passage in Acts 16 about what's happening in Philippi, he is not recounting all the conversions that happened in Philippi but rather he's giving us three highlights—three representative conversions of what God was up to by the power of the Holy Spirit in the city of Philippi. It's as if he's saying, "Look, look at how God is drawing people from every social class, every background, every strata of Roman society to believe in Jesus."

I want to take a moment and briefly contrast these three people that we have here.

Lydia was a foreigner to Philippi. We're told she's from the city of Thyatira. She'd immigrated to this place probably for the purpose of doing business. She must have been a person of considerable talent and intelligence. In the first century, where women did not have the right to own property or the right to vote, this woman was a prosperous, successful businesswoman. She had clearly made it in a man's world. Here she is, a textile merchant and a very successful one.

Verse 15 tells us she had a house big enough to have guest rooms which was highly unusual in the first century.

Clearly, very successful. She knows how to trade in purple cloth which was considered a high class commodity for two reasons. One, the ingredients needed to make purple cloth were very expensive. Two, it was incredibly difficult to produce. She's very successful.

By contrast, the other woman mentioned in this passage is at the very other end of society: the slave girl. The slave girl is owned by other people, and she herself is a commodity. You couldn't be lower in that society than a Roman slave and particularly a female slave. She owned nothing, not even herself.

The passage tells us that she had the ability to predict the future. Literally in the Greek, the word here is that she had a python spirit. She was a pythoness. That comes from the cult around the worship of Apollo at the time and the Delphic Oracle in Delphi, where the symbol of that was the python. People would pay money because she would go into these trance-like episodes and give people a clairvoyant utterance. They would come and ask questions and she would fall into some kind of trance, speak in a strange way, and give them some kind of answer to their questions. People paid lots of money for this. She's not her own. She's owned.

The Roman jailer is somewhere in society between these two women. This is a middle class blue collar job. A Roman jailer would have been a veteran probably of the Roman military, and his job was simply everything related to prisoners. He's probably the one who was charged with beating Paul and Silas. He's the one who puts them in the stockade and if anything happens to them, it's on him. He is personally responsible. He's not wealthy but he's a family man, clearly, and has made somewhat of a good living for himself.

I want you to consider these three people and the very diverse needs that they come with.

Lydia is a put-together person, an intellectual, somebody who's accomplished. She has everything in that society that a woman could have at her stage. She has smarts. She has commercial success. She has a good lifestyle. She has a family. And yet, for some reason, Lydia displays some kind of questioning, some kind of dissatisfaction with her life as it is. So she shows up along the riverside in this discussion group, in this informal Bible study that Paul is leading. We know that she had come to understand who God was in the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible, and Paul probably opens up to her how Jesus fulfills God's law. Jesus is the answer to all of her questions.

By contrast, the slave girl, again owned by others, has a need that is deep and deeply psychological. We could probably liken her to an addict in our culture. She's somebody whose life is dominated by something they cannot control, something that takes over, something that renders her powerless, and something that also puts her in a position to be manipulated and controlled by other people. Her need was deep and psychological. She belonged in some way to the spirit that controlled her and to those people who owned her.

Finally, the jailer. In a sense, the jailer is sort of in between the two. His need is more acute than Lydia's and less than the slave girl's. What happens in the scene—remember, Paul and Silas, there's an earthquake in the prison and the doors fly open. At that point, the jailer assumes everybody's left. Everybody's gone. So he pulls out his sword to kill himself because he knows his life is forfeit if these prisoners go free. And yet at that very moment, Paul and Silas intervene. "We're all still here. Nobody's killed themselves." And he's at the end of his rope. This is a place of absolute moral need.

Now, it's easy to take each of these characters in the Bible and cartoonify the people in the Bible—make them kind of other than us and different from us. People who don't have the same intellect or same needs or same life situation, and therefore we think they're really removed from us. So it's easy to read the Bible and think, "Of course. Of course these people came to faith. That's what happens in the Bible. People come to faith."

I've been reading the research of a man named Doctor Larry Hurtado, and his PhD thesis is this question: Why in the world did anybody become a Christian in the first century? That's the title of his PhD thesis. And the answer—the very simple answer to his PhD thesis—is no good reason. There was no gaining in terms of your family, your social status, your finances. In fact, what you did in aligning yourself with the risen Roman captive Jesus who had been put to death by the Roman state was social suicide. Your family ostracized you, your business took a hit. Everything about the first century did not set up for any of these people to become Christians. There's nothing logical or easy about it. They became Christians despite all that.

All of them, though—all of them—find in Jesus something compelling. All of them find in Jesus something that answers their deepest needs and their deepest questions and their deepest longings. So yes, there's a universal appeal. But the gospel doesn't come like a hospital gown. You go to the hospital, they give you the hospital gown, and nobody looks good in a hospital gown. The reason is it's one size fits all. It just sort of wraps and barely covers. That's what a hospital gown is like. The gospel doesn't come to us that way. The gospel comes—Jesus does this over and over by the power of his spirit in the lives of people—with a custom fit, tailor made.

The Custom-Fit Gospel

I want you to see this in this passage. For Lydia, Jesus is the fulfiller of the law. She's been studying the Hebrew scriptures, and what she finds in Jesus is that Jesus is the one who did all of the law, did everything we couldn't do, and fulfilled all of it for us. For the slave girl, she finds in Jesus the liberator of the oppressed. There's a breaking of the power over her life and a setting her free in a way she'd never known before, oppressed by this evil spirit. And for the jailer, he finds Jesus to be his substitute in a very visceral way with Paul and Silas.

See, Paul in a way demonstrates the whole of the gospel message to this jailer. Here is an unjustly accused prisoner on death row awaiting sentencing. And here's the jailer who in a real sense is really the prisoner. The prisoner is the one who is truly free, shown when he is freed, and then offers freedom to the jailer. He intervenes in this man's self-destruction.

Which one of these is Jesus? The fulfiller of the law, the liberator of the oppressed, or the substitute? He's all three of those. This is what we see in this passage. Jesus is all of those things.

The custom fit of the gospel—and the gospel always comes to us as this rich, robust story, the fullness of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ—and yet the application of that to your life, to my life, is absolutely custom fit. I would venture to say if we would go around and have an interview time in this room and ask story after story of where you were when Christ became real to you for the first time—for those of you who are Christians—it would be radically different. We'd find different aspects, different parts of the gospel story that deeply connected with each of them. Each of us. And we see that in this passage.

Lydia comes with her questions. She comes debating and wrestling. Paul goes as he does in all the cities. He goes first to the synagogue and then out to the open sphere and debates and talks to people. It's an intellectual back and forth. Some of you have come to Christ because of an intellectual digging, research, wrestling. "I don't know what's really true. I don't know if I can actually believe this."

There's a great story by a man named Sheldon Van Auchen who was taking English classes at Oxford and came to know C.S. Lewis, the literary scholar and professor at Oxford. He began to talk to Lewis about his intellectual objections to faith, wrestling over and over again. C.S. Lewis was great about saying, "Look, an unreasoned faith is an unreasonable faith." So he began to interact with Sheldon Van Auchen, and as Van Auchen began to wrestle with what the Christian faith and message was, he discovered something. He said, "The problem with Christianity I have is it seems to be a leap of faith. Have you heard that phrase before? A leap of faith? Like, I've got to sort of take this blind stab out into the dark."

But as he began to wrestle with the Christian faith, this is what he found:

I found that there's not just a gap in front of me to believe, but there was a gap behind me as well—between the probable and the proved. How was I to cross it? If I were to stake my whole life on the risen Christ, I wanted proof. I wanted certainty. I wanted to see him eat some fish. I wanted to see things written in the sky and fire, and I got none of that. As I continue to hang about on the edge of the gap, I found out there was a gap behind me as well. There was a leap not just to believe, but a leap of rejecting the faith. I could not reject Jesus ultimately. There was only one thing to do since I'd seen the gap behind me. I turned away from it, and I flung myself over the gap toward Jesus. One can only choose a side. So I now choose my side. I choose beauty. I choose what I love. It's all I can do is to choose. I do not affirm that with that I'm without doubt, but I ask for help having chosen to overcome it. I do but say, Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.

The Christian faith has to be reasoned.

The Transforming Power of Jesus

The Slave Girl shows us, secondly, that there's no lifestyle that Jesus Christ cannot change. There's no lifestyle or problem or complex of issues that a person can be stuck in that Jesus cannot free them from. That he cannot bring them to a place of flourishing.

And finally, what about the Philippian jailer? The jailer shows us that there's no lifestyle, there's no place of absolute hopelessness and despair out of which Jesus cannot rescue. Here's this man on the point of suicide and comes to faith in Jesus. It's really doubtful if the Philippian jailer even knew what he was asking when he said, "What must I do to be saved?" He just said, "I'm at the end of my rope and I need a savior."

Now, these are great stories, aren't they? Stories of how Jesus custom fit these three people in their lives back then. But here's the question for us: Is this still happening today? Is Jesus for everybody today? Or is this just a great gathering to review a history lesson?

I want to tell you a couple of stories about the good news of how Jesus is at work in the world today. In modern-day Lydias, in modern-day slave girls, and in modern-day Philippian jailers.

Jesus at Work Today

First, China. Two weeks ago, two Sundays ago, if you were here, you heard a couple of our former students who had been at NC State and had since moved to China. They'd been working at tent makers in China and also been helping out and encouraging the local church, the local house church.

The stats on the Chinese church are mind boggling. What's happened over the last forty years is absolutely unbelievable. Forty years ago, there were 1,000,000 Christians in China. The China Partnership today doesn't like to advertise numbers because doing so sort of puts the church in the crosshairs of the government. But I've got a good friend who is a pastor very involved with the China Partnership. This is what he tells me: "At present, the Tim Keller of China has been in prison for the last nine years. Faith and the Chinese church faces daily persecution, and yet the China Partnership—this is just an arm of our denomination—it alone has seen over a thousand churches planted in the last fifteen years in 180 cities, all reformed, urban, upwardly mobile, culturally engaging, very much like our church. A church like this in 180 cities. A thousand churches like this planted in 180 cities. And the China Partnership unofficially estimates the number of Christians in China today as over 100,000,000."

That's a growth in forty years of 99,000,000 Christians. Now, that's not history. For many of you, this has happened within the scope of your lifetime. The last forty years—most of you have been born in the last forty years. So what that means is that you are living in what missiologists of history look at as one of the greatest moments of conversion in the history of the world. Do you realize this? All these modern slave girls, under incredibly oppressive circumstances, coming to faith and thriving in faith in China.

Well, maybe some of you are saying, "Well, that just happens overseas."

Maybe that just happens overseas. No. One of the great stories of the last two years of conversion has been that of Michaela Peterson, daughter of the famous 12 Rules for Life author Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson became an international celebrity for his debates and his teaching and lectures and writing. In his teaching, one of the things that Peterson is known for is looking at the Bible as archetypes. He doesn't believe any of this is true, but he says these are foundational stories that help us make sense of the world.

Well, his daughter over time has wrestled. She grew up in a home where this was the norm. The Bible viewed as a cultural artifact. In 2021, Michaela Peterson recalled experiencing four really significant hardships in her life, all related to things going badly for her own health, the health of her parents, and her own divorce. So over 2021, she flew to Austin, Texas. She ended up befriending a man who told her, "What you really need is the Lord." And she said, "But I didn't know how to access the Lord. I didn't know how to connect with the Lord." She said, "I went home that night. I was pretty upset about the four major problems going on in my life and I prayed. I asked God to help me."

The next day, all four problems shifted. Something significant changed for her. She woke up with a sense of calm that she said she couldn't place her finger on anything besides that prayer from the night before. Over the next couple weeks, Michaela began pouring over scripture, reading her Bible every day, and praying. She began talking to people who are believers. And then she began at a point of second guessing. Maybe I'm just making all this up.

And then she writes this: "I had the most wild dream one night. I woke up at 5:30 in the morning and I had a dream, a loud thundering voice yelled at me, 'Do it.' I woke up at 5:30 in the morning thinking, 'I just got yelled at by God. I think that just happened.' That's what that felt like and it occurred to me that I meant to go all in with God, not just 75% in. It's been a wild month. I'm doing well. I'm just a little bit shocked."

Michaela came to Christ like the Philippian jailer—at a point of deep personal struggle, deep personal crisis. So again, is Jesus losing? Is this all history? No, friends. Maybe conversions are just happening outside the Bible Belt. Again, no.

One of the most publicized stories of this past spring is that of Molly Worthen. Worthen is a UNC Chapel Hill professor and a journalist who's done an extensive amount of writing about the church and religious news over years, but always from the perspective of an agnostic and a skeptic. Well, she was doing a research story last year on the rise of Summit Church and Briar Creek in the Triangle, and especially about J.D. Greer. And she began going to church, and she began listening and asking questions. She began reading voraciously on the reliability of scripture. Is this really true? How can I know that Jesus was raised from the dead? How do I know if this book is actually for real?

She read and read and read. I'm not going to spoil her story. I encourage you to go listen to the hour-long interview with Colin Hansen on his podcast. His podcast is called "What Happened to the Historian Molly Worthen." And it shares how she became a Christian after months and months of wrestling, asking questions, digging. It's a remarkable story. And it's a reminder to us that the Lord's arm is not too short to save. God is at work.

I mean, one of the most cynical groups of people I find often are Christians—cynical about God's power to work in the lives of other people. We tend to think, well, there are those hard cases out there, forgetting that you and I are those hard cases. Forgetting that for the Lord, nothing is too hard. The Lord specializes in hard cases. The interview is a reminder to me that God is powerfully at work right now and right here.

Jesus for Everybody Here

Jesus for everybody now. What about Jesus for everybody here? What is this Holy Spirit's intention for the church? What's the Holy Spirit up to?

I think that question is not just a theoretical question or a rhetorical question. It's an incredibly personal question. Because the Holy Spirit's intention for the church is wrapped up in a very personal question for us: Are you willing to be a part of another person's story?

This section of Acts 16 is really fascinating because it's one of the few "we" sections of the book of Acts. Here's Luke who's been writing all these things down, doing his research, and at this point, he's wrapped up in the story. And one of the things we see in this passage that's really fascinating is how these lives intersected with Paul and Silas and Luke and this entire group. None of it seems intentional. All of it seems almost accidental. We were going to a place of prayer. That's where we met Lydia.

This girl is following us around, driving Paul nuts, annoying him. That's how they met the slave girl. They're in the stockade. That's how they met the Philippian jailer. But one of the things that's striking to me about this passage is how very different all three of these people are from the apostle Paul. Paul is a freed citizen. He's well educated and he's Jewish. He has nothing in common with any of these people. And yet he allows himself and the party that he's with to allow themselves to be pulled in and inconvenienced to be a part of the lives of other people that God puts across their path.

The Holy Spirit's intention for the church is that we would likewise be inconvenienced. Likewise, be willing to be a part of someone else's story of how God's at work in them. So this morning, as you look around this room and it's so encouraging to see our church gathered all together in one service, but I want you to think about who's not here because I believe it is the intention of the spirit to fill other seats in this room with people that we would consider hard cases and least likelies. Philippian jailers, people at a place of incredible despair and hopelessness. Lydia's, people who are wrestling with theological and intellectual questions. Or even slave girls, people who are under incredible oppression in their life.

I want you to imagine a scene. Twelve years after the events in Acts 16, here's this little church in Philippi gathered together on a Sunday morning like we are this morning and somebody shows up and says, we got a letter. We got a letter from the apostle Paul. They begin to open it up and read it and as they hear the words, I want you to think about how this hit.

Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion. — Philippians 1:6

And I can picture Lydia nodding her head. That's exactly what God did in my life. Or hearing these words:

Children of God in a crooked and depraved generation

You can better believe that the slave girl who had known what it's like to be part of a crooked and depraved generation stood up and cheered. That's what God delivered me from. Or:

For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.

You better believe that Philippian jailer was like, that's exactly the case. God delivered me from sure death. And finally, when they all heard these words:

I want to know Christ, the power of his resurrection, the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so somehow to attain the resurrection of the dead. — Philippians 3:10

I bet that congregation sat up and cheered because they knew the power of the resurrection.

Do You Believe?

Brothers and sisters, as we walk through the series, we're going to close it up next week on the Holy Spirit. My question every week has been, do you believe? Do you believe in the Holy Spirit? Do you believe in the Holy Spirit? The power of the spirit that's not just in the history books but is at work in us today.

My request for you today, as you think about answering that question, is to do so in light of the people who are in your life, who are not here this morning, who don't know Jesus, who don't know the hope that you have. If we stood and we sang these songs, beautiful songs of praise, I was overwhelmed this morning by the heartfelt worship of this congregation. And yet, who's not here? Who does the Lord want to call to himself and will you be part of that?

Let's pray together. Lord, we thank you that the gospel comes to us as universally good news, that you are the fulfiller of the law, you are the one who liberates the oppressed, you are the one who meets us in our hopelessness and despair. And yet, Lord, we thank you also for the custom fit, the way that you have called us to yourself. Lord, we pray, Father, for more of your work through this congregation. We pray, Father, for the seats that are empty around us. Lord, who would you be calling to faith? We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.