Opening Doors
Notes
Transcript
Thank you for yesterday, time commitment, contribution and commitment.
SPIT will meet again with Craig, and we will have the plan in plenty of time before our ACM for discussion and voting on.
Last week, it was the places, people and the presence of the Holy Spirit
This week, we move from a place of freedom and prayer to the chains of a prison
A person of Peace to unnamed characters such as the fortune teller and the jailer, who were not open to the gospel, yet had their lives changed.
and a ‘spirit’ not of God.
Almost opposite in every way.
So what is God getting our attention with here?
What does this say about God? What does it say about us?
Is there a command to follow, and who should I tell?
Today, we are looking at 3 stories
The fortune teller
The Jailer
The Iranian Pastor - a testimony that covers the last 2 weeks in today's context.
If we do consider this part two, or consider what is happening here in Phillippi, there are 3 evaglistic methods to reaching out.
Last week, we talked about people of peace, a concept from Luke 10, and Jesus sending out the 72 disciples to go into a town and seek people of peace.
Someone who likes you, listens to you and serves you.
This was Paul's key strategy, too. To seek first the Jews in a town who should be most interested in the message of the Jewish Messiah, but here, Lydia is the person of peace who begs them to stay with them. She is already seeking God, and God moves her heart to repent and believe Paul's message, and she is baptised.
Not the case with the next two.
The fortune teller
The fortune teller
Open your Bibles to Acts 16:16-21
Once when we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a female slave who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling. She followed Paul and the rest of us, shouting, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved.”
Here we are introduced to an unnamed female slave, with a ‘spirit’ by which she told fortunes, recognised Paul’s team as ‘servants of the Most High God’ and that they were offering ‘the way of salvation’.
In comparison to Lydia last week,
unlike Lydia, this woman is in control of nothing. She is a slave. Like Lydia, she earns money, but it belongs to someone else.
This passage is a warning to us that, as Christ followers, what the Holy Spirit entrusted to us is not.
For Fortune Telling - a person who tells you what they think will happen to you in the future - This is prohibited in Scripture because this is seeking understanding outside of God.
Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft,
This is because all these practices replace trust in God with alternative spiritual sources. It seeks guidance, power, or revelation apart from God from spirits that oppose God. Instead of these practices, God provides His own means of guidance—His prophets (people in relationship with God, and accountable to discern His voice from other spirits), His word, and His presence through the Holy Spirit.
Tarot card reading, Astrology & birth charts and AI‑enhanced divination tools
Attempt to control uncertainty
Open the door to spiritual influences, not from the Holy Spirit
A Christian version of Biblio - mancy — opening a book at random for guidance, and taking that one verse as guidance to live by instead of understanding its context and in relation to God.
2. It is not for our own profit or benefit - We see other examples in Acts (8:4-24 & 19:11-41) of a close connection between ‘magic, pagan or false religion, and the profit motive of humans.
As Christians, we are to practice discernment (Saturday), not fortune-telling, that cuases us to trust God more with the future and move deeper into a relationship with him.
The fortune teller, it would seem she is speaking the truth, but her message was false because it was being proclaimed by someone who did not really know what she was talking about. She did not desire to actually understand this pathway to salvation (unlike Lydia, who sought to be baptised).
And her claim could have been interpreted in a polytheistic culture, ‘for a resident of Philippi’, that this most high was just another of the pantheon. Salvation in material and spiritual ways in a Greco-Roman world was the object of vows and prayers to many gods, and this was another god to add to that list.
David G. Peterson, The Acts of the Apostles, The Pillar New Testament Commentary
The Acts of the Apostles 2. A Fortune-Teller and Her Masters (16:16–24)
Salvation in Luke’s understanding involved the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit through trusting in Israel’s Messiah, with the ultimate blessing of sharing in God’s eternal kingdom through resurrection.
What the slave girl was saying was true at one level, but it doubtless lacked these gospel perspectives.
Paul’s concern was that she was saying these things under the influence of an evil spirit and confusing his pagan audience.
On her lips, this claim could have been easily misunderstood, and the audience might have thought that similar spirits possessed Paul and Silas.
She kept this up for many days. Finally Paul became so annoyed that he turned around and said to the spirit, “In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to come out of her!” At that moment the spirit left her.
Whether or not the slave girl turned to Christ and received the salvation proclaimed in his name remains an open question.
But she clearly experienced the benefits of being in the presence of a prophetic figure like Paul and being liberated from the powers of evil by his authoritative command. The kingdom of God drew near to her in this way, and she had the opportunity to turn to the one in whose name she was released from the power of darkness.
So this is different to seeking a person of peace to having the same authority as Paul in the Holy Spirit, granted to us by Jesus as his disciples to bring freedom to the oppressed.
It said after many days, so Paul was patient, maybe he hoped that she would hear the gospel message and repent and believe on her own. But on this occasion, divine intervention was made, and she was released from the spirit that had enslaved her, and was free from people profiting off her.
Soul Care Principles - Identity, Repentance, overcoming family sin patterns, forgiveness, healing wounds, overcoming fears and deliverance
Restoration - Ecology perspective - you have to change the chemicals in the soil first before things will grow on the surface
In August, through prayer, we are going to create space for us to do that work.
Dealing with the chemicals in our own lives under the surface is what we might need to face in order to find freedom and maturity in Jesus. As the girl was released from the spirit that had her captive, Paul and Silas were physically detained and beaten.
The Jailer
The Jailer
Acts 16:22-34
About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them.
The devotion of the apostles’ hearts and the power of prayer are expressed here together, since in the depths of the prison they sang hymns, and their praise moved the earth of the prison, shook the foundations, opened the doors, and finally loosened the very chains of those who had been bound.
Bede - monk, historian, and scholar from the 7th century
In other words, when we face trials, ran to Jesus. pray and sing to gladly glorify God in our infirmities, so that the power of Christ may dwell in us.
We join Paul and Silas within the darkness of the prison, and as we read in many of the Psalms:
Psalm 32:7.
You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance.
Yesterday, we heard that many people wanted to hold up prayer as a core practice of our church.
To be disciples soaked in prayer
COMMUNITY – We seek God Together
Through prayer, shaped by worship, and shared spiritual practices.
Paul and Silas are worshipping and praying with all their heart in their situation.
And it says the other prisoners are listening, and the jailer is listening.
Here, the witness of Paul and Silas’ devotion to God, faith that can shake the earth and open prison doors
If you've got pain, He's a pain-taker
If you feel lost, He's a way maker
If you need freedom or saving, He's a prison-shaking Savior
If you got chains, oh, He's a chain breaker
A song by Zac Williams
The Jailer witnesses this power in relation to Paul and Silas’ faith and asks
He then brought them out and asked, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”
Last week, a person of peace - they want to know more about who God is
Here we see another model, 2 people, not what we would describe as people of peace, but God gets their attention:
God gives Paul authority to cast out the spirit - she is free, God has her attention
Paul and Silas bear witness that in their chains, they will give God the glory. This brings freedom, and this gets the jailers' attention
So it is our words and witness that God uses so that others will seek to repent and believe in the Good news, that it is only through Jesus that we are saved from the penalty of Sin and saved into a kingdom of chain-breaking, into restoration.
The Iranian Pastor
The Iranian Pastor
This week, I was encouraged and challenged by this story in my prayer time, and I want to share it with you as I think it perfectly sums up Paul and his team's time in Phillippi, yet is a very recent story, highlighting the persecution still occurring and God still at work.
This is the story of Pedro, an Iranian pastor, who experienced a dramatic conversion behind the doors of his home in Iran. Leaving a life of addiction and depression, with nothing other than the Bible, the presence of Jesus in his life and the encouragement of his wife, he began to pray and witness to his neighbours.
To discover how you can pray for believers like Pedro, you can connect with the work of Elam, a ministry serving the Church in Iran and beyond.
After I encountered Jesus, I was excited to share my faith with others. Many people became Christians by God’s grace.
In the days of my addiction, my home had been an opium den, but now it became a small house church with twenty members. As we continued to worship and witness, over the next six months, our church grew to a hundred people, and four churches were planted across our small city. There wasn’t a day when we were not busy evangelising.
One morning at 7 am, there was a loud banging on our door. I opened it to find fifteen men and three women, Iranian Revolutionary Guards and members of the secret police.
They were here to arrest me. For three months, they had been listening in on our conversations. Despite our church speaking in code, they suspected that we were spreading the gospel. They turned our house upside down and found two thousand copies of the New Testament.
Without being able to speak to my wife, who had no idea where I was taken, I was thrown into a prison run by the Revolutionary Guard.
My cell was three metres by four metres, with no windows, and the lights on night and day. I shared this small space with four other men, all considered major political criminals.
We ate there, we slept there, we never left except for harsh interrogations and for the 15 minutes each week when we could go onto the rooftop surrounded by barbed wire for fresh air.
When I arrived, they asked me, “What was your crime?”
“Preaching the gospel”, I said. “I’m here because of Jesus Christ.”
I chose to be myself, to not be ashamed of the gospel while in prison. I knew Jesus sent me here with a mission. Each night, I would stand in the corner of the cell and softly pray so my cellmates wouldn’t wake up. Later, I learned they had been listening to my prayers.
I witnessed to them by my behaviour. I would praise God before I ate. When food came, they would wait for me to give thanks. When they were led away to be interrogated, they would turn to me, asking me to pray for them.
By the time I left, three of the men became warm towards Jesus, believing in the power of prayer in his name.
I even shared communion in prison. One day, another prisoner came by with things to sell. He had biscuits and cake, but I jumped when he offered red grape juice. I saved the juice and gathered up bread from our meals to make up the elements for communion in my cell.
It was only the Lord’s Supper and prayer that filled me with the presence of the Holy Spirit and reminded me of Paul’s courage in the face of persecution in Acts.
The leader of the prison was known as ‘The Executioner’. He was a violent, aggressive man. On my first day, through the prison cameras, he heard me talking to the others, and he burst into the cell with an electric shock machine used for torture. He said, “If I hear you talking about Christianity with these men, I will kill you.”
Each night, I prayed for my cellmates. I also prayed for the leader of the prison, asking God, “Father, I have forgiven him. Please forgive him and touch his heart.”
On the day I was freed on bail to await trial, the prison leader called me to his office. As he handed over my possessions, he said to me, “Pedro, you are a good man.”
“Why do you say that I am good?” I asked.
He said, “One evening I stopped outside your cell door , and I could hear you praying for me.”
This was a ‘kairos’ moment. ‘The Executioner’ stopped at the exact moment I was interceding for him. It is the light of Jesus in us that changes the lives of others.
What is God getting your attention with? Reflect on it, Holy Spirit, Recognise, speak to others after the service or in the share time, Respond to it, what is actually going to change?
We have heard that God uses different methods but is always seeking people to experience freedom, to be reconciled in a relationship with him.
As people, we are not to seek alternative sources, but come to the One true God and be the light of Jesus that changes lives.
That is what we are to obey: to seek God in prayer and worship and lay down any chain or sin that is oppressing us, not God’s best for us.
To tell - Conversation starter - what would God need to do to get your attention? The past two weeks, God has used a dream/vision, delivered a girl from spiritual and economic opression and worship that caused an earthquake. Ask someone, what would God need to do to get your attention?
Prayer
