Most importantly, Lydia was a believer whose heart the Lord opened and transformed by grace, so she gladly offered her home, her staff, and herself to Christ—the firstfruits of gospel harvest in Macedonia and in Europe.

Eager to spread the good news throughout Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) but banned by God’s Spirit from entering Asia and Bithynia, Paul, Silas, and their apprentice Timothy reached Troas, on the Aegean Sea. There Christ clarified His reason for closing those other doors. In a vision, a man—note, “man”—from Macedonia appeared to Paul, pleading, “Come over to Macedonia and help us” (Acts 16:9). Paul and his team (now including Luke, the narrator of Acts) immediately set sail for Macedonia, the homeland of the late, great Alexander, to proclaim an infinitely greater King, Jesus (Acts 16:6–10).

It is striking that the first recorded convert in Macedonia (on the continent of Europe) was not a man, but a woman, whose textile import trade had brought her to Philippi. Who was Lydia? The six verses devoted to her in Acts (16:11–15, 40) introduce her.

Lydia’s origins lay in the region that Paul’s team had bypassed. She came from Thyatira, in the province of Asia. Thyatira was well known for producing purple dye and luxury fabrics in that hue, the raiment of the rich and the royal. Her import business must have thrived, since she had a residence maintained by a staff of household servants that was spacious enough to offer accommodation to Paul’s missionary team.

More important than Lydia’s affluence was her identity as “a worshiper of God” (Acts 16:14). This term identified gentiles who were drawn to the living God of Israel and who followed His law’s moral commandments, but who stopped short of full conversion to Judaism with its ceremonial requirements (see Cornelius in Acts 10:1–2; 11:3). The spiritual thirst of Lydia and other women drew them each Sabbath to gather at a “place of prayer” by the river outside the city gate (Acts 16:13). Typically, when Paul and his team entered a city, on the Sabbath they would attend the synagogue where Jews, proselytes, and gentile “God worshipers” gathered to hear God’s Word and to pray. Jews sometimes called their synagogues “places of prayer.” But since Luke consistently uses the word “synagogue” to refer to such buildings (see, for example, Acts 9:20; 13:5; 14:1), and since there were no men in Lydia’s group, Philippi’s “place of prayer” was not a synagogue. The Jewish community in Philippi was so small that it lacked the requirement of ten men needed to constitute a synagogue. There were, however, women whose thirst for God drew them, Sabbath by Sabbath, to this riverside.

Read More