The Thessalonian Story Part 1 – Background and The First-Century Church

Alright, here we go. They bid the four churches goodbye. And now they are about to begin their second church-planting trip. I want to just talk to you for a minute. I want you to be impressed with some things because you hear this story so often, you may forget. Paul was doing something that… The man who’s standing up there on the stage, front and center, he has a position, not a pastor, that has slipped away from us completely. You never see him doing what he and Silas are about to do. What he and Barnabas did. Paul of Tarsus is a church planter. I do not mean what that means in our day, if it means anything at all today. It does not mean that he went out, rented a storefront, put little pews or benches here, some more here, put a podium here, a little stand here, and preaches to ten people in the next month, twelve and fifteen and twenty and maybe and finally gets where they can build the church building with pews and a pulpit and a Sunday school building.

There’s something different going on here. Here is a man who is itinerant; if that word doesn’t mean anything to you, it means he moves around. He does not stay and preach to those people. He starts; he raises up a church. And having raised it up, he leaves it. And the only thing there is a living room with a group of people who don’t know much about the Bible or anything else, and they are sitting there enjoying their Lord, singing, caring for one another, and they may not see the man who raised up their church for months or years, and they don’t have anyone who took his place. It’s a free-for-all; nobody in charge, it’s a bunch of happy, sappy heathen Gentiles with no religious background, no Judeo-Christian background, and those two men as they leave that office they hold is desperately needed again today.

We live in an age where there are a lot of seeking Christians who really are, excuse me for saying this, we are bored to death. Checking in the church on Sunday morning at 11 a.m. and sitting there until our eyeballs turn to concrete and walk out again and come back the next week. If there’s anything that we’re going to be doing as we go on together, it’s to catch the atmosphere of the first century. So, pick up part of the luggage with me, would you? Timothy picks up the scrolls, Paul picks up the food, and he picks up the tent-making equipment, and Silas picks up everything else, which must have been quite a load for their travels.

Now, if this is Galatia, then this is East and this is West, and one of the most important things ever to happen to the Christian faith was they tried to move east and they got checked inside here, something was not at peace within them, and the Christian pays attention to his internal parts. So, they moved a little to the west, trying to go east again. Got a check in again. Went west some more, tried to turn east again, still got some more checking. And so finally they just started west.

Now that’s taking them on a course toward the Greek-speaking world of Macedonia and Acacia; you and I know it today simply as Greece. And the day that Paul of Tarsus, walking along on the road, steps over some invisible line that is not even noted there on the map. He steps out of Asia Minor. He steps out of the East. He steps out of the Orient. And he is an Oriental, and his story up to now is about Orientals. He steps past that line, and he is now in the Western world for the very first time. And the Gospel has come to the outer edges of the land of Europe. and the very first place they come to is a town called Philippi.

Now, I’m not a betting man, but I got money in my clothes that says that before Paul got to Philippi, he had made inquiry in other villages previously asking whether or not there was a Jewish synagogue there, because the first place Paul ever went any time was to a Jewish synagogue, and there he would preach, and there he would speak, and there he would try to win converts. And what he has learned is that he has almost marched off the Jewish map. There is no synagogue in the city of Philippi. He has discovered probably that there is a group of Jewish people in that community. He may even know the name of one of those people, for all I know. But he waits in Philippi until Saturday and goes out to the river, because Jews go out to the river on Saturday when they don’t have a synagogue for their washing, cleansing, and rituals. And Paul goes out to the river there to meet the Jews. And now we come to a fascinating story, and that’s what we will cover next.

Well, the scene opens at a river, and there is a group of people, maybe five, six, seven, not more than that. And they are performing some sort of very unusual ritual, at least it would be that to the eyes of a Gentile. Paul and Silas walk up. They meet the people there. It is a poor man’s version of a synagogue. It is simply Jewish people meeting beside a river, going through the ritual of purification. and they introduced themselves, and the only name that we have among the people who were present at the river is a lady by the name of Lydia, everybody’s favorite. And all I can tell you is that she’s Jewish. She’s probably very well-to-do. She is called a dealer in purple, and that simply means she’s in the dry goods business; she sells materials, and she sells them from all over the world. And all indications are she’s middle class or upper middle class, which, by the way, is a very, very rare breed of people. But then she’s Jewish, and they’re good business folks even when they’re women. And they meet together.

I can only tell you this: something happened at that river, and everyone in that little synagogue was converted to Jesus Christ, believed in Him, did not give up the Jewish faith, but extended it to the knowledge that their Messiah had come. And they were invited, Silas and Paul, into the home of Lydia. They refused. She pressured them, and they were going to stay there, except for an incident that took place.

It seems as though in the town of Philippi, there were some men who owned a slave and a young girl, and the girl had a clairvoyant spirit. Now, that means she was a fortune teller. But it also seems, it appears, she was demon-possessed. Well, this was none of the business of Paul and Silas. They went about there, witnessing, doing some preaching, but wherever they went, this young girl went after them. And she had this real bad habit of saying…and you’ll excuse me for doing this, but it’ll help…’Those are men of the Most High God. Hear them!’ And it sounds strange. And instead of it being a good advertisement, everyone knew this very odd girl was, in a real way, insulting these men.

Now, here is proof that Paul of Tarsus was not Pentecostal. If he had been Pentecostal, he would have turned around and cast the demon out of her, and he didn’t. He let that girl follow him for days and days, and he didn’t bother her, bothering him. Finally, one day, it got on his nerves, and he really did turn around and cast the demon out of the girl. She got in her right mind. She became a believer, but there were a couple of men in Philippi who were now out of the job because they were paid to have this girl tell fortunes and predict the future for people, and that was one of the big elements of religion in that day.

Anyway, this got our two brothers arrested. Now, the thing I want you to know about both of them is that they belonged as citizens of a city called Rome. There were not many people who could stand in Rome and say, I am a citizen of this city. It wasn’t a nation, but a city. Both of them were Roman citizens, and what is about to happen should not have happened. The two men, indignant at what had taken place and that they had lost their income, went to the city officials, got everybody up in a stir. Something brand new happened, never happened before. Paul of Tarsus, for the first time, is thrown out of the city by someone who is not religious. It’s now the civic government that does it.

And they are enraged at these two scoundrels who’ve come among them. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Italy, but you might see, still in northern Italy and sometimes in Sicily, a bundle of birch branches that are tied together, and the axe you cut it down with is stuck inside the birches. And that is actually the symbol of the Roman Empire. Well, for good reason. Men in authority of the city government, leaders, motion to him. Two men hold him foot and hand and take these birch rods and walk over and begin whaling the daylights, I’m not doing this, they are, whaling the daylights out of these men until their backs are bloodied and beaten. They’re half dead. Paul first, then Silas.