The slave girl from Acts 16 was demon possessed. So frightening. Her story reminds me of the story of Karla Faye Tucker who was addicted to cocaine from childhood and was often not in her right mind. She went over to a man’s home bent on revenge, planning to mess up his motorcycle. But it turned far darker and she committed a brutal murder of him and the woman asleep next to him. Yet in prison awaiting her sentence, a Christian ministry came in and she was drawn by their joy and “stole” a Bible from their give-a-way table. This is Karla before and after Christ found her.
Before Christ
After Christ
The devil is alive and still at work wrecking lives today. Are hallucinatory drugs one of his weapons? I think so.
It is interesting that the slave girl seemed to be preaching Christ, yet she was behaving so crazily that it turned people away rather than to Him, which indeed is the devil’s intent. It makes me wonder about some who are like her who may seem to be preaching Christ but are really controlled by the evil one. Keller says this is where social justice comes in, which when he preached this sermon simply meant biblical justice, not how the world has twisted its meaning today.
I have found that people who are at the bottom are often the most open to Christ and it can be pretty thrilling to be a small part of seeing Him change a heart and a life.
Let’s go – Oh Lord be with us!
Sunday:
- How have you experienced the wisdom, power, peace, or love of Christ this week?
Monday: The Text
2. Read Acts 16:16-18 and make 5 observations.
3. Read Acts 16:19-24 and make 7 observations.
4. What particularly stood out to you and why?
Tuesday: Keller Part I. The Contrast with Lydia
You can listen and read the transcript simultaneously if you like — it’s short. Begin right after Keller finishes with Lydia and says “Secondly…” We are taking 3 weeks on this single important sermon.
Here’s the transcript:
- The slave girl
Secondly, we have the slave girl and the gospel for the oppressed. This next case study clearly Luke chose the slave girl to tell us about because she is the opposite of Lydia in several ways. First of all, she is economically the opposite. Lydia was financially wealthy. She was financially independent, we’d say. The slave girl was not just poor; she was a slave. She was completely powerless. She was completely exploited.
They were also at the other ends of the spectrum morally and spiritually. Lydia was moral and spiritual and read the Bible and worshiped every Sabbath day. The slave girl wasn’t just irreligious; she was demon-possessed. I mean, that’s about as far in the other direction as you can possibly go. Lydia was quietly spiritually seeking, obviously. In a very quiet way, she was seeking God.
It’s kind of hard to say what this girl is because she was literally hounding Paul and Silas. She was hounding them, and she was saying, “These men are servants of the Most High, who are telling you the way to be saved.” She knew the truth. In other words, in some ways, of the three cases, she knew the most, and yet she was most troubled. She was most in pain. I mean, you can’t really say she was seeking. On the other hand, you can’t really say she was indifferent. She was filled with spiritual turmoil.
If Lydia is a business owner who lives on the Upper East Side, it might be helpful to think of this girl as a teenage, drug-addicted prostitute working under one of the East River bridges. How does the gospel come into her life? The most interesting thing for us to notice is how different this is. Lydia was reached through reason. Lydia was reached through a kind of rational discourse. This girl was reached through a power encounter, a deep existential power encounter in the deep recesses of her being.
5. Find all the contrasts between Lydia and the slave girl.
6. Remember when Keller contrasted Nicodemus with the Samaritan woman? His point was different people need different approaches. How do you see this again with these two women?
7. Challenge question: List the four different approaches.
8. Think about someone God has put on your heart with whom to share the gospel. What approach might be more effective than others?
Wednesday: Keller Part II. Conflict with Those Affected by Someone’s Conversion
8. So often there are people upset by another’s conversion. Remember how Lee Strobel gave his wife to “get over it” or he would divorce her? Do you know of a way this has happened?
Listen while you read this part of the transcript:
This is the most interesting thing for us to notice, especially for Christians. She doesn’t only have demonic masters; she has human masters. She is psychologically bound through the demons, but she is socially bound through human masters. She is exploited socially. She is the victim of social injustice as well as demonic oppression. See that?
When she is liberated by the gospel, she is liberated across the board. She is not just liberated internally, personally, and individually. She is also socially liberated, because when the demon is cast out, she no longer fits in the old exploitative economic system. Of course, the people who are making money off of her … Because she was demon-possessed, she was clairvoyant, and she could tell fortunes. The people who were exploiting that and making money off of her were furious because, you see, what Paul and Silas were doing was social action.
The powers that be were furious. That’s the reason why they were beaten. They were upsetting the social system. Because this girl, in order to be liberated by the gospel, was not just liberated in an individual way but a social way, not just on the inside, but also … In other words, she didn’t become a Christian just through an individual personal choice but also through the confrontation of the structures, the powers, that bound her spiritually, socially, and economically.
9. How was the slave girl liberated in more than one way?
10. What else stands out to you from Keller?
11. Did any of you come to Christ before your husband or close family members have? How did you or are you handling that?
12. How are we as Christians causing trouble for groups like Planned Parenthood or those with an agenda to advance LGBT thinking?
Thursday: Keller Part III. The Challenges of Justice
Keller uses the word “social justice” but don’t take offense. That term has now changed to mean something of which Christians do not approve. In the time of this sermon”social justice” meant showing mercy, embracing truth, and bringing true justice. Keller is showing it is complicated and we must be aware of that to be effective, and he is also saying that conversion needs to be accompanied by real help for an individual who is caught in an injustice system, as the slave girl was.
A contemporary example is that International Justice Mission has learned it is better to catch the perpetrators of sex trade than help girls escape, for the girls are so addicted to drugs that they willingly go back to those who enslaved them.
Listen and Read:
Now if you want an example of what I’m trying to get at, here’s a perfect example of it. A man named Robert Linthicum wrote a book some years ago. Because I know some of you will email me and say, “What’s the name of the book?” I’ll tell you now and save you the effort. Robert Linthicum wrote a book called City of God, City of Satan. He was a Christian minister. He tells about the fact that in 1957, he was, I guess, a student and worked in a church in an inner-city area of some midwestern city.
He worked for a church. He worked for a youth ministry for the summer. This is what he tells about one girl he met. He says something like, “I was working with poor teenagers in a government housing project when 14-year-old Eva began coming. She was exceptionally beautiful, but her life was a wreck, crime and drugs all through her broken extended family. She felt she had no future.
The school she attended was terrible. Teachers literally did nothing but discipline. She had almost no reading and writing skills at age 14, but through the youth ministry, she came into a personal relationship with Christ, and hope began to return. Just before I left at the end of the summer, she said to me, ‘Bob, I am really under terrible pressure. A large gang from the projects recruits girls to be prostitutes for wealthy white men in the suburbs. They make the money, and the girls are like their slaves. They’re trying to get me.’ ”
Linthicum remembers telling her something like, “Well, the Bible says if you resist the Devil, he will flee from you. Stick with your youth group. Keep up your daily prayer and Bible study, and you won’t fall into temptation.” He said something like, “I was naïve. I figured if she was a real Christian, a real Christian wouldn’t give in to temptation. Months later, I returned and found she had stopped coming to the study. I tracked her down, but she would hardly look at me.
‘Look. I gave in. I’m working for them, okay?’
‘How could you give in like that?’ I said, completely unsympathetically.
She said, ‘Well, first they beat my father, then my brother, who ended up in the hospital. Then they threatened my mother, so I joined.’
‘How could you?’ I cried. ‘Why didn’t you go to the police?’
‘Bob,’ she said, ‘who do you think they are anyway?’ ”
In one foul swoop, Bob Linthicum, who understood salvation completely in terms of an individual decision, suddenly realized the only way he could minister to Eva and minister to the people in Eva’s neighborhood was if he went after unjust social structures. She couldn’t go to the police because the police were part of the gang. They were behind the gang. How do you minister in a place like that? How do you bring liberation at a place like that?
What you have to do is you can’t just minister through individual decisions. The individual decision, the psychological conversion has to happen, but the social structure has to be confronted as well. What do I mean by this? Just this. People desperately want to put a church somewhere on a spectrum between liberal and conservative. Everybody wants to peg everybody else.
I’m not saying we’ve done it right. I’m not saying I know of any church that’s done it right, but if you’re true to the gospel, a church that is true to the gospel would be impossible to peg. Because, on the one hand, does the gospel bring profound psychological transformation? Of course! Look at the transformation of identity that is possible. Look at the deep power encounter that can go on, even with a demon-possessed person. Look at the absolute liberation that the gospel can bring.
Of course, but on the other hand, does the gospel bring social change as well as psychological change? Of course! Think about how the salvation came. Jesus Christ brought salvation. He triumphed through losing. He got wealthy through giving all of his money away through poverty. He got power by completely serving. The cross! When the cross comes into the center of your life, you can never look at the poor the same way again. You can never look at your own career the same way. You can never look at your money, your status.
Recognition. Those things don’t matter anymore, not if you understand the gospel. Therefore, any church that is being true to this gospel is going to be just as involved in social justice issues as in bringing people to radical conversion through the gospel. Absolutely!
13. What stands out to you from the above and why?
14, Read Micah 6:8 and list the three responsibilities we have as children of God.
Friday: Pedal to the Metal
For me, it is a challenge to reach out to those who may be high maintenance, like the slave girl, or simply those hard to love. There’s a gal at pickleball I distance myself from and one day another believer said to me, “She’s just a lost soul.” That was very convicting. I also think it is important to give and to pray to those who are doing justice, such as Discipleship Unlimited, International Justice Mission, or pro-life groups that are evangelical.
15. How are you doing with the challenge of Micah? Be specific. And what have you learned?
Saturday:
16. What is your take-a-way and why?