THE great missionary, Paul of Tarsus, stood on the shore at Troy, looking across the sea. Far off in the distance gleamed the mountains of Europe; and he wondered, as he looked across the sea to the other continent, if the great commission, "Go preach my gospel unto the ends of the earth," did not challenge him to cross and preach the good tidings of the gospel to the people of another land.
But he paused for guidance. Here he was in Troy, the land sung by Homer and Virgil, cradle of the Roman race, the seaport built by Alexander the Great. Helen of Troy and her world-famed beauty had changed the history of the country. Was a new adventure to be born on the historic plain; an adventure of the cross, to change the history of the world?
In the middle of the night came a vision to Paul; a man clad in European dress stood beside him crying, "Come over and help us!"
The vision: A cry from Macedonia.
The program: "Immediately we sought to go."
A man of action, Paul lost no time, after receiving his marching orders, in sailing across to Neapolis. A busy center for unloading ships, that harbor of Neapolis, so consequently little notice was taken of the four men who stepped ashore and started on their ten-mile walk along the mountain road to Philippi.
As he rested on the hill, his heart filled with the great adventure, Paul had his first view of the plains of Philippi.
Philippi was a military city, immortalized by Brutus, Cassius and Mark Antony in their fight for the conquest of the world. Romans, Greeks and a few Jews made up the population. Since there were not enough Jews to support a synagogue, a small house of prayer was opened by the river Gangites. It is very possible that the Jews had been forbidden to worship their God in the heart of the city. Or it might have been that the house by the river was chosen because it gave opportunity for the many ablutions required in the old Jewish service. Often, at the time of the national fasts, services were held on the banks of a river.
Paul and his comrades set out to seek the synagogue on the Sabbath morning, his first in Philippi, and not finding one in the town they made straight for the river bank, and there he found Lydia.
A successful business woman, a seller of purple, a Greek by birth but a Jewess in religion, was Lydia of Thyatira. Her home town was one of the important headquarters of the famous dye works, which held a secret formula for making the exquisite purple and scarlet dyes used for the robes of kings and princes. From a shell fish came the coloring for the dye. Legend says that a dog which was very fond of opening and eating shell fish arrived home one day with his mouth stained a glorious shade of red. His enterprising master, possibly a dyer, noted the kind of fish his dog ate, experimented in his vat with the color, and finally developed cloth of such rich scarlet and purple that the King of Troy ordered the dye to be kept for his royal family.
Why Lydia had moved from her home town to Philippi is not known. Possibly it was to open a new center for selling the beautiful purple and scarlet robes which had become so fashionable. She was a successful business
woman and must have had an interest in the bazaar she had started in the city. Although there was great opposition to women traders in those days, Lydia had made such a success of her new venture that she had established herself as a leader in the city. At the same time she took her religion very seriously. Living in a heathen city, where all the shops kept open every day of the week, Lydia insisted on closing her business establishment on the Jewish Sabbath at sunset on Friday, preferring to lose the trade of her best customers rather than keep her shop open for business on that holy day.
Wealthy and famous was Lydia, but very lonely in Philippi. She had lost her husband and had no children, and was living away from her home town, her friends and relatives. Evidently she had become a leader in the prayer group, the only religious meeting for women recorded in the New Testament.
That special Sabbath morning when she was leading the prayer worship of the women they heard footsteps and voices, and on the threshold of the little room stood four strange men. The Jews, banished from Rome by the Emperor Claudius, were not encouraged to
settle in the Roman colonies. They had to bear insults and petty persecutions, although as yet there had been no direct outbreak against their peculiar form of worship. The small company of women gathered together in the house by the river, "where prayer was wont to be made," were startled to see these four strangers at the door. What was their mission? Had they come to break up the services? Paul's familiar greeting, "The peace of God be with you," reinforced by the quiet attitude of the group, at once reassured them. Strangers they were, but by speech and dress devout Jews from a far country.
Lydia, a woman of grave beauty, with braids of hair coiled around a fine head, and probably wearing one of her flowing purple robes, rose to her feet with quiet dignity to welcome the strangers: Paul, Silas, Luke and Timothy.
Paul, a learned Jewish Rabbi, and Luke, a well known Greek physician, took time to sit down with a group of European women, asking and answering questions; following in the footsteps of their Master, who, in conversation with one woman proclaimed for the first time his Messiahship, and to another woman, Martha of Bethany, gave the greatest message
of the Gospel: "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live."
Into the story of the gospel Paul threw himself heart and soul, rejoicing that he was taking his Christ into a new world. Even to outline all the tremendous truth--that Christ the Messiah had lived, died, ascended, and that his kingdom on earth was established--must have taken hours. His enthusiasm struck fire in the hearts of the women. Lydia took the lead when Paul had finished speaking. Trained as she was to make prompt decisions in her business life, she stood up fearlessly, her eyes lit by an inner light, and declared: "I am ready to receive the Christ as the Messiah, the holy Son of God." One historian writes that Lydia was doubtless baptized that same day in the river flowing by the house of prayer.
"Come into my house and stay with me," Lydia invited the four missionaries, adding with humility "that is, if ye have judged me to be faithful." Perhaps Paul realized that her position in the community, her success as a business woman, and her enthusiasm for the new faith would make her home an important evangelistic center for building the church he longed
to establish in Philippi. Lydia's conversion, too, would encourage her weaker sisters, and her desire to render service as a woman missionary for the Kingdom of God was a gift of great strength to the cause to which Paul had devoted his life. So, Paul, Luke, Silas and Timothy went home with their new friend and stayed as her honored guests during their visit in Philippi.
The church in Philippi was started by two remarkable conversions: Lydia, the seller of purple, and the keeper of the prison. When it had become known in the city that their foremost merchant had joined this new faith, and was entertaining the strangers from Palestine in her home, a great stir was created all over Philippi. The little Jewish missionary, Paul, had grown too popular to please the people in power; and when one day he healed a poor woman possessed by a devil, the masters of the woman, who made money from the fortunes which she told, had Paul and Silas arrested, beaten and imprisoned. Hence followed the dramatic story of Paul and Silas singing in the prison, the earthquake, the jail doors shaken open, iron bands loosened, and the attempted suicide of the keeper of the prison.
He, too, asked the question: "What must I do to be saved?" and, following the example of Lydia, he entered into the Kingdom of God by baptism.
As Peter, released from prison in Jerusalem, knocked at the door of Mary, mother of Mark, so Paul and Silas, released by the earthquake, knocked at the door of Lydia, and she surrounded them with loving care until their missionary adventures called them away, leaving Luke in charge of the new Christian church, the first in Europe.
In ecclesiastical history every saint is represented by a symbol relating to some incident from life, and it is quite in order that Lydia, who has been placed by the Roman Catholic Church in their category of saints, should be given the symbol of an open door, for she threw open the door of her beautiful home to entertain the missionaries, and kept it open to all the members of the new church which Paul founded in Philippi.
The church at, Philippi was a symbol of joy to Paul, as Lydia was to him the symbol of perfect womanhood. Years later, in his Epistle to the Philippians, written from Rome, Paul specially recommends to this church he loved
the most, "those women which labored with me in the gospel. . . whose names are in the book of life."
From the time Lydia became the first Christian woman in the Gentile world in Europe, Christianity has ever been a religion of the home and of the family. Lydia is recorded as having her household baptized into the faith of Christ.
Courage had Lydia, courage to suffer for her faith, for in opening her home as a center for this unpopular religion she jeopardized her business in that heathen city, and perhaps forfeited her life in the persecutions which came to the new sect. Only a quiet little talk one Sabbath morning, with a small group of women in a house by the side of a river, about the Way of Life, but it brought forth a rich harvest, the church at Philippi, which remained steadfast during the great persecutions that followed.
Like Anna the prophetess, the woman at the well in Samaria, and the Magdalene on the morning of the resurrection, Lydia of Thyatira went forth to tell all she met the glorious news of the gospel of salvation.
Lydia, proud to earn her own living in those
early days; Lydia, proud to open her door to strangers so that others could hear the good tidings; Lydia, proud to witness for her Lord and Saviour in the midst of a heathen city: Is it too much to think that Paul had this fine woman of Philippi in mind when he wrote to the Philippians thanking God for his remembrance of them, and committing to the care of the church, "those women which labored with me in the gospel"?