Acts 16:13-16

Chapter 55

Prayer

Almighty God, wilt thou fill us with thy Spirit? We would not be filled with wine, wherein is excess, but with the Spirit of the Living God. We seek not to be exhilarated, but to be inspired. In thy Spirit is life, and in thy Spirit is rest. Baptize us, in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, with the baptism of the Holy Ghost. Show us that we are indeed not our own, but that being bought with a price, we are thine body, soul, and spirit; and may we glorify thee at every point of our life, shedding light and fire along the whole course through which we move. May the Spirit of our Master, Christ, be in us, chastening and softening our whole nature, lifting it up to the level of his own, and causing it to bring forth all heavenly fruit, and to enrich itself with all heavenly beauty. Thou didst make us out of the dust, but the breath that is in us came from thyself; a special gift, a pledge that we are not wholly of the earth, but have in us desires after God and capacities which time cannot fill. Being thine, we would live for thee. With the coming light of every day we would ask to know thy will, and with the growing day we would grow in strength to do it all cheerfully, lovingly, with patient industry, with tender and immortal hope. Show us the littleness of all things that are under our feet, and all things that can be measured by our hand and skill. Lead our inner nature forward from day to day, to that noble issue which finds its rest in God. May we, by the power of an endless life, triumph over the dying day. When we speak, or think, or act, may our immortality assume its rightful dominion. Then shall we not listen to the utterances of time, to the policies of the earth, or yield to the cunning of selfishness; but with noble faith and triumphing love we will weigh the world and find it wanting, and will seek a city out of sight.

For all these religious aspirations we bless thee. They bring gracious tears to our eyes; they soften the natural stubbornness of the heart; they lift us up into new regions; they fill us with unutterable gladness; under their gracious dominion we see new heavens and a new earth, and great golden doors opening into infinite opportunities. May we encourage such aspirations, and do thou sustain them by the inspiring ministry in which they originated. Then shall thy Book be a new Book every day; thy Word shall be the word of all time the first and the last bringing with it all history and all prophecy, the Word of the Lord which abideth for ever; speaking every language; taking upon itself every colour; going into every land, claiming every heart; under its gracious and infinite sovereignty the whole world from age to age shall find light and progress, and peace. Give us more light. Deepen our confidence in things not seen. May we cultivate the inner and imperishable man. Grant unto us the very spirit of the Cross of Christ, world-redeeming, self-sacrificing, rising eternally to God with uplifting and love not to be uttered, of soul, and thought, and force of purpose.

We bless thee for the Sabbath day; for the place where prayer is wont to be made; for every opportunity of Christian fellowship and deepest communion. These are thy gifts in Christ, the Priest and Sacrifice. We would now take them with both hands and with warm, loving hearts, and find in them new pledges of heaven and higher service. Destroy our sin; take away, by mighty blood of atonement, infinite in purity and grace, all our guilt. Bring forth the best robe and put it upon us; put a ring on our fingers and shoes on our feet; and make thy heavens glad and all thine angels joyful, because thy prodigals have returned. Amen.

Act 16:13-16

13. And on the Sabbath day we went forth without the gate by a riverside [some affluent of the Strymon which is distant a day's journey], where we supposed there was a place of prayer [the proseuchæ were sometimes mere open-air meeting-places, near water, where the hands could be washed before prayer]; and we sat down and spake unto the women [Acts 16:1 , Jewesses, who had married Greeks, were found in such cities much more frequently than Jews] which were come together. And a certain woman named Lydia [a common female name; she was also a Lydian], a seller of purple, of the city of Thyatira, one that worshipped God [proselyte, Acts 13:16 , Act 13:43 ], heard us: whose heart the Lord [the exalted Christ extending his kingdom] opened, to give heed unto the things which were spoken by Paul ["God's opening her heart is one thing; Lydia's attending another; so her salvation had both its Divine and its human side." Chrys. ]

15. And when she was baptized, and her household [Acts 13:33 , Acts 18:8 , and 1 Corinthians 1:16 ; also the facts that Jews circumcised infants and Gentiles baptized them render it improbable the Apostles forbad infant baptism], she besought us, saying, If ye have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house [ Act 16:34 ] and abide there. And she constrained us [Luke 24:29 . This word denotes Lydia's vehement urgency, not the Apostles' unwillingness].

The Many and the One

IN Act 16:12 we read of "certain days." They were days which needed not to be named; they could be huddled together and spoken of in general terms. A rough and summary reference was all that was needed, for they were but days coming and going unmarked, without specialty of tone or colour the ordinary process of time. In Act 16:13 we read of "the Sabbath." The day that has a name; the one day into which all other days flow as streamlets and rivers flow into the sea. The Sabbath is never referred to as one of a number of days. It creates a space for itself. It builds its tent amid all the camp-field; there is none like it. Its banner is higher and redder, its lettering is more golden and distinct, and the silver trumpet which sounds from it makes all other music rough and earth-born. You need not bolster up the Sabbath by argument and theological preference or prejudice. You need not seek for proofs of the Divine authority and sanction and purity of the Sabbath day. All that is written in the heart, in the indestructible book of human consciousness and human love, and we shall see it to be so when once awakened and inspired by the Holy Ghost Any institution that requires to be kept up by skilful argument is a bad institution. Institutions must rest on the original logic of human necessity, human appreciation, and human sympathy. This is true also of Christian doctrine. If it needs to be supported by evidences, and defined and defended by cunning words of skilful tongues, it is not of God, whose name is Love, and whose heaven is as infinite as His own being. Christianity must be its own defence. The Sabbath must be its own argument. The benediction is higher than logic, and no controversial tumult can flutter or disturb its infinite calm.

"And on the Sabbath we went out of the city by the riverside." Church-hunting! A journey that was allowed. A walk that was constrained. To leave home thus on Sunday is to seek the greater home. You cannot stop at home on the Sabbath day. That were insult to the very home you profess to love. You do not know what home is if you think you are "staying at home' on the Sabbath day. To leave it is to seek it; to go from it is to get at it. Your house is the letter; the public sanctuary, a great, broad, common, warm home, is the spirit the ideal meaning, the poetic completion of that which at the local fireside we have in mere typology. We must go out on the Sabbath day, if the Spirit of Christ be in us, in order to help to complete the family-gathering. Who would eat his festival alone? Who would have his little piece of bread cut out of the loaf, and hasten to some sequestered corner that he might eat his crumbs in the fellowship of himself? Festival means eagerness of spirit, hastening of feet, communion of heart, marching together with common unanimous consent to a common centre and a common table. Let us not be led away by the foolish fantasy which seeks to teach that a man can read the Bible at home, or have a Church at home, in some sense which dispenses with the festival-reading and the festival-music, and the common joy of kindred sympathy and soul. Christianity is a fellowship because Christianity is a feeling of common humanity. Christianity does not isolate men and set them up one by one as if they had no relationships. Christianity brings men together in sacred, sympathetic brotherhood, and carries up the feeling, passion, and rapture of the soul to "dancing, and music," and tumult of joy! "On such a theme 'twere impious to be calm. Passion is reason; transport, temper here." We know what it is in strange places to seek the particular Church we know and love on the Sabbath day. We rise a little earlier; we inquire of passers-by. We know our own home when we see it, by its position, or form, or surroundings. We seek the well-trodden way. When we find it, a sense of homelike familiarity makes us quiet and glad. We know sympathetically the hymn, the tune, the whole way; escaping from local vexations and disappointments, we hold communion one with another, and the whole life becomes an organ of love.

"Where prayer was wont to be made." How singular is the cause of reputation or fame! There are famous battle-fields to which men make pilgrimages. How can a man be in Belgium's capital without feeling some constraint towards famed Waterloo? He knows there is not much to see. He has heard of the flatness of the land. He knows, too, that kind, all-healing Nature has grown her greensward over the blood-pools, and over all the marks of hurrying and battling soldiers. Still, he says he would like to see the place. That is natural. That desire can be Christianized. There are men who would make long pilgrimages to see where John Bunyan was born. He is not there measurably, yet he is spiritually there for ev. There are those who love to see famous churches, and to walk stealthily and lovingly up the steps of famous pulpits, which have been towers of the Lord in the day of evil doings and corrupt counsels. The land through which the Apostles passed was not destitute of historic interest, but they cared but little for the histories which have beginnings and endings; they lived in the nobler history which began in eternity and which continues through the everlasting duration. They sought the place "where prayer was wont to be made"; where soul-battles had been fought; where the very wine of the heart of God's love had been drunk; where angels came to take swift prayers swiftly up to heaven. A sacred place, with the invisible altar, with the Shechinah which shone only upon the vision of the pure heart, with the ever-present God. You might have known whither the men were moving; they were praying as they were going; wherever they were was a place "where prayer was wont to be made"; for they lived in it and had their being in it.

We must keep up the spiritual fame. Hirelings enough will sound the brazen trumpet, that can proclaim but momentary notoriety. It is for blood-redeemed and spiritually-enlightened men to keep for ever "a place called Calvary," and the mount of triumph, called by the sweet name of Olivet.

"The women which resorted thither." Were they all women? Probably so. Have men forsaken religion and left the women to keep it up? To some extent. Is it not the mocker's taunt that "women keep up the Church "? It may be; but it is a fool's gibe! The woman does keep up the Church God bless her! But she keeps up more. Oh, thou blatant, mocking fool, to taunt the very saviour of society! Sweet, beauteous, noble woman! Thou unclean tongue! She does keep up the Church, but she also keeps up the love of the world; the patience of the world; the home that covers your unworthy head, mocker, fool, hard of heart! Yes, she keeps it all up. There be those who, with self-inflation that would be damnable if it were not contemptible, say that women fill our churches now; the men have given them all up. Yes, but only in the same proportion in which they have given up love, purity, patience, home! I hardly forgive myself for the momentary anger which I spent on the contemptible mocker. If I gave way to vehement scorning of the evil giber, I had forgotten that I was defending the pureness and the self-sacrifice of womanhood, which need no apology. They are not my friends who despise world-saving women. I would hate them if I had time to think about them. Woman keeps the roof over your head, you late-comer, you truant wanderer, you world-worshipper. Woman keeps the fire alight for you; she touches with tender hand your wound and pain; she cries bitter tears, long after your shallow waters of grief are exhausted; she denies slumber to her eyelids, long after your tired eyes have taken upon them the sleep of oblivion. She does keep up the Church, and God will in turn keep up her dear, great heart.

"And a certain woman named Lydia " This is like the reading we have just perused about the "days." The days were spoken of, in Acts 16:12 , in general terms; and in the thirteenth verse the Sabbath was particularized as the one day. Now we read of the women generally, and of a certain and particular woman named Lydia. What subtle little harmonies there are in this inspired Book! How part balances part! As there are days that may be mentioned in the plural number, so there are men and women who may be mentioned in their plurality; but as there is one day which is always named alone, so there are individuals who do not, so to say, mix with the common list, but which head, gleamingly and significantly, every catalogue; names which have whole lines to themselves. Look at the case of Lydia. She was first of all a business woman "a seller of purple." So, then, women of business may be women of prayer. Women who sell purple one day may go to church to pray the next. We ought to have more women of business. It is a foolish conceit which forbids, in any degree, women to engage in honourable business. Such business enlarges and educates the mind, gives happy distraction to thought which would often turn to vexation if fixed upon unworthy centres. It is one thing for a woman to be a slave, and another for a woman to work and to love her work. The reason why your work appears to you to be slavery is that you do not like it. He, or she, who loves work, makes all the week a kind of introductory Sabbath to the great religious rest. I would that all women were Lydias in this respect of having something definite to do every day and doing it, and finding in industry a balance to piety. A piety that sells no purple will come to live upon itself, and eating its own vitals, it may end in religious melancholy and madness. Lydia was also a religious woman; she "worshipped God." There are many religious persons who are not Christians. It is one thing to be religious and another to be Christianized. Some people are born, so to say, with religious veneration. They must worship. They will turn a stone into a god; or they will imagine a god folded within the garments of the sun's blazing light; it is easy for them to pray. Other people seem to be born destitute of the religious instinct; they are earthly, servants of time, grubbers, heapers together of dust that has no binding in itself, and must eventually be dried by the sun and fall away into the meanest particles, that have in them no self-cohesion and no abiding masonry. The fear is that the religious man may allow himself to be cooled by those natural atheists. It is so easy to cool a fire. It is so easy to discourage souls, that sometimes the hereditary atheist born with a hollow place in his head where there ought to have been a mountain of veneration it is so easy, I say, for such people to chill and discourage the ardent piety of others.

Lydia was not only industrious and religious, she became Christianized. Religion is a general term; Christianity is a specific form of religion. Beginning in sacrifice, in self-crucifixion, in suffering for Christ, in pardon through the mystery of sacrificial blood, it grows up into absolute sympathy with the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. It is not enough for you and me to be religious, we must take upon us by the mighty ministry of the Holy Ghost a particular form, and that particular form is Christianity. The Spirit of Christ makes us Christians, as the blood of Christ makes us saints or holy ones. In this respect Christianity is a heart-opening; a heart enlargement; a fire set to love; a marvellous transformation of being. When Lydia became thus the subject of Christian influence, what course did her thought take? At once she would have a Church in the house "If ye have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house and abide there." In that suggestion there is a whole philosophy. That was impulse Divine. When the two travellers felt their hearts burn within them, by reason of the converse of the third Man, they said, "Abide with us." These are the impulses that are underlaid by whole rocks of logic and philosophy. Lydia would have a fellowship at once. Souls that are kindred must never leave one another. If any have gone out from us, it is because they were not of us. They were using us for their own convenience; it suited them for a while to play the false part, and to assume a kind of interest in our society and actions. But when they go out from us we know that they were never of us, in the true and deep sense of the term. Christians must abide together. In the olden time they that feared God met often one with another, and spake soul to soul, and the music entranced the attention of God, and the listening Father wrote their names in his book, and called them "Jewels."