Daily Lesson for July 31, 2019

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Acts chapter 16 verses 16 through 19:

16 One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave-girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. 17While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, ‘These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.’ 18She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, ‘I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.’ And it came out that very hour.

19 But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the market-place before the authorities.

In Philippi Paul and Silas were staying in the home of Lydia, a wealthy convert. Things were I would guess comfortable there and the young church was growing.

So when a slave-girl with a spirit of divinization in her began to ask Paul and Silas for help they were reluctant to get involved. They were there to preach the Gospel, I imagine them thinking, not get caught up trying to set a slave free.  That would be a distraction and would risk the spiritual mission of the church.

But the slave-girl wasn’t going to give up that easy. She kept at them.  She just would not give up, prophesying that Paul and Silas were themselves slaves of a much greater master than the one who had enslaved her. This greater master was “The Most High God” in whose name “the way of salvation” would be proclaimed. 

Worn out by this young slave’s persistence, and with his conscience finally pricked, Paul cast put the spirit of divinization which the slave-girl’s owners had been exploiting for their own gain. The spirit of divinization meant to keep her possessed — a possession of itself and her exploitative owners. But the Spirit of the Most High meant to bring her back into her own possession, and her own control. And she in fact took it upon herself by the Spirit of the God of the Most High within her to find her own voice and to demand her own freedom, even when Paul and Silas were reluctant to get involved. She found her own voice and demanded that they get involved. 

The church is too often too late to the causes of justice. Like Paul and Silas, we get comfortable enjoying the niceties of Lydia’s guest house. We get seduced into thinking we’re doing our mission, proclaiming God’s gospel. But the cry for justice can only be ignored so long. There’s a world in chains out there, millions exploited and oppressed in all our modern Philippis. And what the Spirit of the God of the Most High said there is the same thing the Spirit says now:

“These are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.”

And the Spirit just won’t shut up until we do . . .