Acts 16:11-13
By a river side, where prayer was wont to be made
No synagogue, no building, and the first congregation in Europe is a group of women outdoors on a sabbath morning.
People of the Bible
Lydia
The first convert in Europe was a foreign businesswoman at a riverside prayer meeting with no synagogue in town.
Philippi is a Roman colony and there is no synagogue there, which in that period meant fewer than ten Jewish men in the city. So on the sabbath Paul goes out by a river side where prayer was wont to be made, and speaks to the women who gathered there. Lydia is from Thyatira, which is back across the sea in Asia, and she sells purple, the expensive dye. She is a worshipper of God already, an outsider twice over, trading in a city that is not hers.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Lydia
- 01
- 02
Acts 16:14
Whose heart the Lord opened
She is already a worshipper and already listening. What changes is stated as something done to her attention rather than to her morals.
- 03
Acts 16:15
She constrained us
The invitation is framed as a test of their own judgement of her. It is the first recorded hospitality of the European church and it is insisted on.
- 04
Acts 16:40
They entered into the house of Lydia
Released from prison, they return to her house to see the brethren and comfort them, and only then leave. The church there has an address.
Why it matters
The sentence Luke uses is careful: whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken. Then she and her household are baptized and she makes an argument out of it. If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house and abide there. Luke adds that she constrained us, which is the only note of pressure in the passage. That house becomes the church at Philippi, and after the earthquake and the prison Paul and Silas go back to it before leaving town.
2 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
