Closed Doors, Opened Hearts

Introduction

Have you ever wondered: how does God guide us? Or maybe you’ve struggled, does God ever actually guide me?

For many of us, we’ll have seasons when God’s guidance feels absent. What many of us want is for God to speak in some audible, divine voice telling us exactly what to do. We don’t want to mess up, make the wrong choice. And that’s why I love this passage today, it’s a passage that ends on this amazing triumphant note of the first European convert to faith in Jesus, but it starts with Paul and the other missionaries apparently not entirely sure where to go. They face closed doors even as they sought to do God’s will.

In this passage we’ll see two sides of God’s guidance, how He guides believers as we aim to do His will and be His witnesses in the world, and we’ll see how God guides individuals to Himself as the missionaries meet Lydia and she places her faith in God.

Our main idea today is this: Jesus guides His church with closed doors to open hearts.

Jesus guides His church to be His witness.

Timothy has joined Paul and Silas and they continue the second missionary journey that began at the end of chapter 15. Acts 15:36 describes the beginning of this: “36 And after some days Paul said to Barnabas, “Let us return and visit the brothers in every city where we proclaimed the word of the Lord, and see how they are.”” That’s their aim, to encourage the churches and, as was Paul’s aim so often, to expand the reach of the Gospel into new territories. Continuing to pursue that call to be Christ’s witnesses to the ends of the earth.

Paul doesn’t wait around, he doesn’t wait for the kind of moment we see at the beginning of his first missionary journey when the Holy Spirit speaks to them and sets him apart for the journey. He doesn’t need special instructions because he knows what he can be doing: loving the believers, encouraging and building up the church, and sharing the gospel along the way.

In the same way, God guides us through what He has already told us in His word. He has already told us what His objective is for us: to grow in Christlikeness and to be His witnesses. If you’re wondering, what does God want me to do in my life? Love one another! Love your neighbors and be like Jesus, share the good news of His death and resurrection. We don’t need a grand plan or a perfect road map to know that God wants us to love others in the name of Christ.

Paul sets his sights on the province of Asia, new territory, new country for the Gospel to reach. And what happens? It’s a closed door, the Holy Spirit forbids them to speak the word in that place. They adjust: on to Bithynia, but then the Spirit of Jesus, it says, did not allow them. So they continue on to Troas.

Again, a closed door, but they are not deterred. At this point, they have journeyed about 550 miles since Timothy joined them. Can you imagine? God did not give them the ten-step mission trip plan, the full road map of their journey. They discerned among themselves what might be their next stop, but God closed doors, the Holy Spirit a guardrail, slowly guiding them to their ultimate destination, Philippi, which they didn’t even know about!

This is so often how God guides us today, through closed doors. It’s rare that He gives us the whole plan—trust in God then becomes the invitation even as we can’t see everything in front of us. We have this great vision we’ve already discussed—to grow in Christ and to be His witness, but he often limits our visibility. We don’t see all the steps.

God uses closed doors like this to help us grow. A young child might need to be told every morning every step to get ready for school and have their clothes set out for them. Hopefully by jr high…maybe high school, they’ve matured enough to make those decisions on their own. God wants His people to be adults who can be trusted to make decisions in line with scripture and His mission. God seems to trust Paul and the missionary team. And though their visibility is limited, God’s isn’t. He sees every step, providentially at work working all things out; God knows what’s ahead for each of us, the things we can’t see and the things we could never anticipate.

Paul then receives this vision, maybe a dream, urging him to go to Macedonia. Finally, a destination! And what I want us to see here is the team’s reaction: v 10 “immediately we sought to go on into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.” First, it was immediate, they wanted to respond to God right away. But second, that word concluding—that’s a plural verb, meaning they together as a team made a decision, they discerned God’s will together. It wasn’t Paul waking up and saying, I got this dream, you all need to listen to me! This is another way that God guides us: through community, discerning the mind of Christ together.

Finally, they go on, by ship, to Macedonia, to Philippi and on the sabbath they went to the riverside, “where we supposed there was a place of prayer.” You still hear in the language that they’re not entirely sure where to go. Even after the dream, it’s not a crystal clear path. And yet, even in the not knowing, they never despaired.

We do not need to be discouraged at dead ends and redirections in our lives. God can redeem them to draw us more fully into His plan and purpose for our lives. This passage focuses on how God guides us, it does not give a framework for every loss or hard thing you’ve ever faced. Not every painful thing is a signpost from God for something or somewhere better. But God is still present.

More often than not, it is only on the other side that we can look back and see how God had been so actively guiding us. But we can press on, like Paul and His team, knowing that the Lord had us and still has us.

A quick personal story, one with a resolution, I say that because I know that’s not everyone’s story. Twelve years ago we started an international adoption process, as many of you know, our son Enoch was adopted from Ghana. But when we started with our adoption agency, we were in the Ethiopia program. Six months later, our social worker reaches out about a new program in Ghana. We prayed about it, and felt the Lord’s guidance to move forward with this new program. We got all the paperwork in, shipped it to Ghana, paid all the fees. And almost two years later our agency calls: sorry, we’re closing the program in Ghana. You’ll have to start completely over somewhere else, a different country, new paperwork, everything. Talk about a closed door and a redirection.

We were discouraged and confused. But we still had all of our paperwork in Ghana, so I did a very spiritual thing, I started googling other agencies that were working in that country. And that same day, the same day our first agency closed, I was on the phone with a woman in South Carolina who said, “oh, we’ve got a two year old boy in our Ghana program, and in fact, we need a family that already has their paperwork in country!” And she sent us photos of Enoch that afternoon. God had redirected us, we would never have called this other agency if our first one hadn’t closed, and what felt like wasted time and wandering was the very thing that God used to bring us to our son. It would still be four difficult years before we got to bring him home and finish our adoption, but looking back we can’t help but see God’s hand.

But for many of us, we can think of times where a closed door felt like a door slammed in our face and what good ever came of that? And the truth is, there are situations and setbacks and trials and it won’t be for years or decades before we’re able to look back and say, I see what God was doing. It might not even come at all. But the invitation is to trust that, yes, his hand is still on me, he’s still guiding and caring for me, even if I don’t see. We sing a song about that, even when I don’t see it you’re working.

Jesus guides people to Himself by opening hearts to hear the Gospel

In our passage, Paul and the others are able to look back pretty quickly at the journey and see God’s guiding hand, for the whole journey leads to this amazing moment in Philippi, on the Sabbath at the riverside. There they meet Lydia, and I want to give a little context for Lydia and her background. She was from Thyatira (about 300 miles away), a city in the province of Asia, a region that Paul and his team were just forbidden from entering! Do you see the irony—Paul can’t go into Asia to preach, and God guides him to a woman from that region who is ready to hear the gospel.

Lydia has found herself living in Philippi, she’s a seller of purple goods, an expensive product famous from her home region. She probably would have been a member of a purple merchants guild, an association of sellers. Part of this guild would have been pagan worship practices, so it is interesting to note that Lydia was a “worshiper of God.” That’s why she was at the riverside on the Sabbath, it was a prayer group and they were there because it seems like there was very little Jewish presence in Philippi, at least not enough to sustain a synagogue.

I think of Lydia as a searching person, she had done well for herself, but she was looking for something. The idolatry and pagan practices of her peers were not satisfying and so she turns to the God of Israel to worship Him. But this would have been done at a cost to her social standing, potentially ostracized from the others in her association, her peers. Yet she persists, she’s there on the sabbath, worshiping YHWH. And yet, she still has not heard the gospel, the good news of Christ’s death and resurrection. How can she believe in him of whom she has never heard?

And who stumbles onto the riverbank on sabbath morning? Paul, Silas, Timothy, and with them Luke. The missionary team, desperate to preach the gospel of Jesus to anyone who would hear it. And what does God do? The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul…and after she was baptized, and her household.

Imagine for a moment that our passage today was an episode of a TV series on the book of Acts, this one would cut back and forth between the stories. The missionaries trying to figure out where to go next, a long journey with dead ends, God guiding them. The other side is a strange woman in a far off city, going about her life. Not fulfilled in the things she had or the success of her work, turning away from the way of the culture, searching and longing.

The two stories converge when Paul stumbles into the riverside prayer meeting. A viewer might roll their eyes, oh of course, it all came together. It might even feel contrived. There’s even a term for this in stories where the solution comes suddenly from out of nowhere: deus ex machina, it literally means God from the machine, the old theater trick of lowering God onto the stage from a crane to fix the ending of a play. In our post-modern world we call it contrived, bad writing. We don’t like it because we want the hero to save themselves, to figure it out and push through. But that’s not life, we can’t save ourselves, we actually need God to enter in out of nowhere and rescue us.

This is what God does! He enters in, gives eyes to see, sets the captives free. He brings salvation when there was no hope / and understanding where there was confusion / satisfaction where there was longing.

That’s the story today: God at work in every step of the story, guiding these people together and then, at the pivotal moment, he opens her heart so she can hear and believe! Lydia needed God to intervene, she could not be saved otherwise. She needed her heart to be opened, otherwise she could not believe in the Gospel.

This passage shows us the importance of evangelism, of our witness. We might be tempted to say: why speak at all, if God is the one who opens hearts? But see the text: God opened her heart to what? “to pay attention to what was said by Paul.” God providentially guided Paul to this woman, to speak a message to her that she could then believe. God uses our witness to reach those he has already been preparing, but he does use our witness and our words.

Lydia’s heart being opened wasn’t the first time that God moved or worked in her life. He had been preparing her, drawing her to Himself, her worship of Him was preparation for her to hear the Gospel. Her devotion was God’s orchestration, His drawing her, in order to bring her into faith. But it’s not until that moment of heart-opening, is she able to truly believe and be saved. And see the evidence of her faith: she prevails on them to come to her house and stay, she wants to be with these men who know Jesus. She wants to leverage her home for the sake of God. She’s ready to go all in!

She prevailed upon them to stay, that word appears one other time in the whole New Testament, and it’s also from Luke, the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24. After Jesus was raised, he walked with these disciples, who had heard rumors of the resurrection. Jesus explains how scripture points to Himself, but all the while they did not recognize Him. When they arrived at their village it says that they prevailed (same word) upon him to stay, and when he broke bread it says that their eyes were “opened,” same word to describe Lydia’s heart. Those disciples, they were literally with Jesus, but what did they require: their eyes and hearts to be opened to see and respond to Him. Just as it was with Lydia, just as it is with us today. We need God to open our hearts so we can believe and respond.

In Lydia, we see God’s heart for the individual—yes, he wants Paul and the others to reach cities and new nations with the message of Christ, but God also sees Lydia and cares about her. He sees you and your faith, and he sees your doubts, your struggles, your longings.

Maybe you’re here today like Lydia before Paul shows up, curious, open, reaching. Looking for guidance. Maybe today is the day, has God opened your heart to respond in faith? If that is you today, come talk to us, share with the person you came with.

And maybe you’re still wondering about our big question, is God guiding me? Are you struggling with closed doors and wondering if he cares? If that’s you, my encouragement is to look at your faith, because your very faith is evidence that He has guided you to Himself.

We see it in the passage, He guided Lydia to Himself, He has done that for you. If nothing else, God has guided you to Himself. Because of Christ’s death and resurrection the dividing wall has been torn down, and we can have this gift of faith that comes from Him. Therefore be encouraged, live in the hope of the resurrection of Christ because God has given you a heart to believe.

I think of what Paul writes in Philippians 1:6 “6 And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” Paul wrote that to the church in Philippi, to the church that started that day on the riverside with Lydia. And when He opened your heart to hear the Gospel, that was not the day the good work began in you. That was the day you had eyes to see it. He had begun a good work in you long before, and He will bring it to completion.

Brothers and sisters, that is a promise more sure than anything in this world. That is our hope today. Amen.