God May Be Working in Ways You Can't See

Dannah Gresh: As you try to serve the Lord, are you facing any roadblocks? Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth says, “Don’t give up! Keep seeking the Lord’s will.”

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Do you ever wonder what God’s up to? You’re trying to obey Him, you’re trying to serve Him, you’re trying to make Him known, but sooner or later we discover that often the Lord’s plans and ways and means are different than ours.

This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Heaven Rules, for Monday, October 24, 2022. I’m Dannah Gresh. 

Well, October is winding down, and don’t you just wish you could spend all your time outside? I sure do!

Maybe that’s how you spent your weekend, watching a high school football game under the stars or visiting the neighborhood pumpkin patch with your kids. Maybe you spent an afternoon trapped in a corn maze (I hope you got out!). Do you remember the last time you tried to get through one of those?

At the beginning, you have an idea which way to go, but then as you turn a corner, and then another corner . . . you start to get confused! The stalks are towering over your head; you spin around and run into a dead end and then another dead endand you just don’t know which way to go! 

Hmm. Sometimes serving the Lord can feel like walking through a corn maze. Do you know what that’s like? You’re doing your best but your efforts just don’t seem to be going anywhere. You keep running into deadends. As you try to find the right way to go you may even find yourself wondering, What is God up to?

Well, today Nancy will encourage you to keep going, keep serving the Lord, keep seeking Him! You may not be able to see the way through, but God is at work behind the scenes. Here’s Nancy to explain, and to introduce us to one of her new best friends . . . Lydia.

Nancy: If you’ve been around me any length of time, you know how much I love biographies! I love reading the stories of men and women who have walked with God, who have been faithful to God, and they have found God to be faithful to them. I’m just inspired by their stories.

My favorite biographies by far are the ones we find in the Scripture. Today, and over the next couple of days, I want to introduce you to a new friend. Well, she’s not totally new. I’ve heard of her and you’ve heard of her, but I’ve just been soaking in her life in the Scripture over the last several weeks. She’s like my new best friend . . . at least for today.

And so, let me ask you, if you have your Bible with you, turn or scroll to the book of Acts, chapter 16. We’re going to just park in that chapter over the next few days. Again, as you listen to Revive Our Hearts, I hope whenever possible that you do it with your Bible open or on your phone.

Now, if you’re driving and you’re listening to Revive Our Hearts, please don’t open your Bible, but if you can, I want you to soak in God’s Word. I don’t want to just spoon feed you. I want you to be taken and your heart to be captured with the beauty and the wonder of God’s Word! 

The Holy Spirit will show you things as we’re looking at the Scripture that I didn't catch, I didn’t notice, or I’m not going to take time to emphasize. But it’s going to be fresh and special to you. So, Acts chapter 16, let me give you a little bit of background before we dive into the heart of this passage.

Paul and Silas are missionaries on their second journey taking the gospel. This is approximately fifteen years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. They come to a city called Lystra. This is a place where Paul had preached the gospel on his first missionary journey. 

And this time when he came to Lystra, he was joined by a young disciple named Timothy, who maybe had been converted on that first journey. Paul and Silas then go on, now with Timothy. They continue traveling from town to town, and they’re encouraging the churches that have been founded on that first journey. 

They’re instructing these new believers, sharing some direction they had received from the elders of the church in Jerusalem, specifically for the churches that had a lot of Gentile believers. There were some issues that had arisen, so Paul was taking the word of the elders in Jerusalem out to these different cities to these new believers, to tell them how they need to walk as believers in Christ.

Then we come to Acts 16:5: “So the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers.” Isn’t that a great description? Wouldn’t you love that to be true of our churches today? Like, it doesn’t get much better than that! And you can imagine that Paul could have thought, This is as good as it gets! Let’s just stop here and celebrate the victories!

But not Paul. Paul did celebrate victories, but he was eager to keep going, keep pressing on, and to preach the gospel in places where it had never been preached before. So that’s what he set out to do. We see this in verse 6: “[Then] they went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia” which is to the north of where Paul had been in Lystra.

Now, let me just pause here. Over these next couple verses, there are a lot of names of places. Most of them are unfamiliar to us because we don’t live in that part of the world. Some of these cities or these regions don’t even exist today. That’s why it’s great to have a Bible that has maps in the back.

If you have your Bible there, see if you have some maps in the back. (If you don’t, you might need a new Bible. (laughter) The last map in my Bible is Paul’s Missionary Journeys, and as many times as I’ve read this and studied it, I had to go back to my map and remind myself where these places were, to get my bearings. So that’s a really useful tool in your Bible study.

So they went to this region of Phrygia and Galatia. But verse 6 goes on to say, “They had been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.” Did you know God sometimes tells you, “Don’t go there to minister.” Now, this was Asia Minor, modern day Turkey, that was to the west.

They tried to go there and God said, “No, don’t go there.” We don’t know how God communicated that, but we know it was clear. And then, verse 7, “When they came to Mysia [which is further north and further west], they tried to go into Bithynia [which is further north yet], but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them.”

I mean, it’s pretty clear: Paul is trying to reach new people with the gospel and God keeps saying, “Not there, not there, not there.” They keep getting stopped, because God had somewhere and something else in mind for Paul. The gospel would go to these places later, God would use other people, but now God wanted to send Paul somewhere different.

Do you ever wonder what God’s up to? You’re trying to obey Him, you’re trying to serve Him, you’re trying to make Him known, but it seems like everywhere you turn God is stopping, He’s frustrating your efforts to serve Him, to tell others about Him. You keep running into dead ends.

“I thought I was supposed to go there. I thought I was supposed to do that.” You meant well. Your heart was right. You had the best of intentions. But sooner or later we discover that often the Lord’s plans and ways and means are different than ours. That’s why we have to trust Him.

We have to follow the leading of His Spirit and not force something to happen just because it seems right or makes sense to us. You could envision Paul saying, “But these people need the gospel!” But he followed the direction of the Holy Spirit.

So look at verse 8: “Passing by Mysia [because the Holy Spirit said, “Don’t go there.”] they went down to Troas.” An important city. This is further west yet; it’s a city that’s located on the coast of the Aegean Sea.

All told, from Lystra to Troas is more than a four-hundred-mile journey. You say, “That doesn’t sound that far.” They’re walking! So this is a long way, much further than Paul had ever been before. It was here in Troas that God showed Paul the next place he was to take the gospel.

Verse 9: “During the night Paul had a vision in which a Macedonian man was standing and pleading with him, ‘Cross over to Macedonia and help us!’” Now where’s Macedonia? If you’re looking at the Aegean Sea here, Troas is on the east side of that. Macedonia is the region across the Aegean Sea, on the other side—the easternmost point of Europe.

Now Paul didn’t know that term, we didn’t have that term, but here is what you need to know: this was far from where the gospel had ever reached before. This is modern day Greece, by the way, southeastern Europe. God sends this vision with a man saying, “Come over and help us!” This was way different than Paul’s plan.

So what did Paul do next? He packed his bags and headed to Europe. Look at verse 10: “After he had seen the vision, we immediately made efforts to set out for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.” Listen, when God shuts down one direction for ministry, He has another place, He has another way that He wants to send you, that He wants to use you. 

That’s why it’s so important that we walk in the Spirit, that we’re sensitive to His leading and follow it, and that we yield our own plans. What seems best to us, what makes sense to us, isn’t always what God has in store for us.

Verses 11–12, “From Troas we put out to sea and sailed straight for Samothrace, the next day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi. . .” Now that’s a name maybe you recognize. We have the book of Philippians written to the church that was about to be birthed in Philippi. “. . . Philippi, a Roman colony and a leading city of the district of Macedonia. We stayed in that city for several days.” Now, Philippi was a prosperous modern Roman colony in the region of Macedonia at the eastern edge of the European continent. 

The population at that time people guess was about ten-thousand to fifteen-thousand people, which would have been a good-sized city. It was known for commerce, for its postal service, for a great system of paved Roman roads (I wish we could bring some of those roads to our part of the country! (laughter), for architecture. It was a modern city.

But in God’s providence, God had something even more significant planned for this city. It would start small, but it would have a lasting, monumental impact on the world. That’s what the kingdom of God is like, a little mustard seed Jesus said , the tiniest seed. It’s tiny, it’s unimpressive, it doesn’t look like much, but it grows! (see Mark 4:30–32)

The city of ancient Phillipi lies in ruins today, but what God did in that city—what we’re talking about this week in Acts 16—would have huge eternal impact! So Paul and his friends found a place to stay in Philippi.

Presumably, they were recovering from the long trip, the distance they had gone. But I’m pretty sure they were also doing some spiritual reconnaissance, checking things out, looking for an opening for the gospel. 

And verse 13 tells us, “On the Sabbath day we went outside the city gate by the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer.” Now, throughout Scripture we see that Paul intentionally sought out opportunities to share the gospel. He didn’t wait for them to come to him.

Sometimes they did come to him, like the man in the vision, “Come to us!” But Paul went out and looked for opportunities. He was led by the Spirit. He went out to find those who might be open to hear about Jesus.

His normal practice when he’d go to a new city was to go first to the local synagogue, the local Jewish house of worship. But in this case there was no synagogue. What does that tell us about Philippi? That tells us that there were very few Jews living in Philippi, because in order to start a synagogue you had to have at least ten Jewish men.

There apparently weren’t ten Jewish men in Philippi, so there was no synagogue. But Acts says he expected to find a place of prayer. In predominantly Gentile cities in the Roman world, where the Jews didn’t have synagogues, Roman authorities would often designate a place where Jews or Jewish proselytes could come to pray and worship.

Sometimes the place would be in the open air. Sometimes they would erect a small shelter. But these places of prayer were often located next to a source of water—next to a river or a stream or a sea, because they would have ceremonial washing of hands before they would pray. They had it near the water so the Jews could do that.

So the place of prayer in Philippi—which Paul expected to find and did find—was outside the city next to a river. I’ve actually been to this place. I had the privilege a number of years ago of doing a tour of the journeys of Paul.

We had a worship service there at that river. We gathered together at the river. We sat and prayed and listened to our group leader teach the Scripture as Paul and his friends did that day in this place of prayer.

Verse 13 goes on to say, “We sat down [who is “we?”—Paul, Timothy, Silas] and spoke to the women gathered there.” Now, in Paul’s vision he had been called to Macedonia by a man. Paul must have assumed from that vision that here was a place where people were eager to hear the gospel, people were eager for them to come and tell them about Jesus.

He must have had high hopes about what God was going to do in Philippi, for God to go to all the trouble to send them that vision and that man to be saying, “Come over here and help us!” He probably expected there would be a lot of Jews to preach to!

He couldn’t Google, “Tell me about Philippi; how many Jews are there in Philippi?” (laughter) But when they arrived, their first encounter (I think) was probably not all what he had expected. There was a small group of, not men, but women.

Humanly speaking, not a very promising start considering that women didn’t have a lot of influence and were not thought highly of in that culture. And you’ve got to wonder, were Paul and his missionary friends disappointed? Did they think, “Man, we hoped for more than this!”

But whatever they felt, it didn’t deter Paul. He saw this as a God-given opportunity and his response was, “I’m going to take the opportunity! God has brought these women here, that’s who God has sent me to minister to.”

He didn’t minimize those women. He didn’t go look for something grander or bigger or greater. It’s a reminder that we need to minister and be faithful in serving where God puts us.

I think of years ago as I was traveling with Life Action Ministries, doing women’s prayer and revival ministry. A lot of the places I was ministering to were very small churches. A lot of the groups of women who would come out were very small groups of women.

Some days I’d be speaking to five or ten people in a room. There was no big ministry, there was no Revive Our Hearts. But God did some really rich and sweet and amazing things!

Here’s a woman who shared today how forty years ago she heard me share at a church and something was said that day that stuck with her and ministered to her and has produced fruit in her life. You don’t know what God has in mind!

Some of you right now, your ministry is with three toddlers, or two toddlers and a newborn, or as a friend of mine was telling me recently about a woman she is ministering to who has infant twins, a three-year-old, and a seven-year-old who’s autistic—and she’s a single mom! 

That’s a hard place; that’s a small place. You can be in a situation like that and think, I wish God could use me! God has put you where He wants to use you. 

I think of my dad’s conversion. He came to faith in an old-time evangelistic meeting in Albany, New York. The preacher was a man named Hyman Appelman, who was a Russian-born Jewish Southern Baptist evangelist who was preaching. He didn’t know my dad at the time. My dad was a rabble rouser, a rascal, a scoundrel, but God put him in that meeting, and my dad came to trust Christ in that meeting. He was radically converted!

But Hyman Appelman didn’t know my dad at the time. He didn’t know that my dad had been saved. From his perspective there wasn’t much happening in that meeting. This was in the days when people would go and preach somewhere until God moved them on.

Sometimes they would stay for weeks or months, but early in that meeting Hyman Appelman said, “Let’s go on to another place because there’s not much happening here.” He didn’t know that God had saved a young rebel named Art DeMoss, and these two men would become great friends. God was about to do something very significant in a place where it looked like nothing—or little—was happening.

What is God putting in front of you today? There may be no believers in the place where you work or in your family. Just remember, God is always at work in ways and in places that you cannot see. These women were praying. Even when there were no men to worship with them, God was there and God heard those prayers and God answered those prayers.

 

And their prayers, the prayers of this little group of women gathered at the river, prepared the way for the gospel to be planted, to take root and to spread in the European continent—the power of praying women! God is there, God hears, and God moves!

The Scripture goes on to say, “[We] spoke to the women gathered there” (v. 13). Scripture doesn’t tell us what the message was about, what the text was, what the theme was, what the topic was. But we know what Paul talked about, because it was the same message he gave everywhere: “Jesus! Jesus is the promised Messiah that the Jews had been waiting for!”

He talked about His life, His death, His resurrection: “Repent of your sin, believe in Christ for your salvation!” That’s what he talked about, because he always did. There is no greater message, there is no other message that the world needs to hear.

Then in verse 14 we’re introduced to my new friend: “A God-fearing woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth from the city of Thyatira, was listening.” The word “Lydia” literally means, “the Lydian woman.”

Now, that may have actually been her name, but it could also mean that she was the Lydian. She was originally from the city of Thyatira, which is in the Greek region of Lydia, which is now western Turkey. Lydia also includes the cities you may be more familiar with: Ephesus, Smyrna, Sardis and Philadelphia. Remember the letters [in Revelation] to the churches in those cities?

How did there come to be churches in those cities? Is it possible that God used Lydia to go back to her hometown and to take the gospel that she had heard at the river in Philippi this day? We don’t know.

We know she had moved to Philippi, which was about two-hundred-and-forty miles from her home—a huge move in that day. She was a dealer in purple cloth. She was a professional woman, she was a noble woman, she was a businesswoman. How do we know that?

Well, Thyatira—her hometown—was well known for its dyes. One commentator said this was the most expensive and sought-after dye in the Roman world. They were known for making textiles with gorgeous colors: crimsons, purples. 

Purple is a sign of royalty in Scripture. You could think of a couple places where we read that. Luke 16:19, “There was a rich man who would dress in purple and fine linen, feasting lavishly every day.” This was rich people’s clothing. Mark 15:17 says, “They [the soldiers] dressed [Jesus] in a purple robe, twisted together a crown of thorns, and put it on him.”

What were they doing? “Here’s your King, the King of the Jews!” They were mocking him. But the color purple, the purple robe, was associated with royalty. So Lydia was a textile dealer, a merchant, maybe the agent of a purple dye company in Thyatira. 

She was enterprising, she was marketing her expensive textiles. Maybe she sold expensive silk clothes to wealthy customers. There is no reference in this passage to a husband. Some think that she may have been widowed and carried on with her husband’s business, because it would have been relatively uncommon for a woman to be a business owner, but in the Roman world it certainly could happen.

Others believe she was an unmarried woman who supported herself with her business. We don’t know about her marital status, but there’s no indication that at this point she was married. We also know that in Thyatira there was a well-known guild of dyers. This was a prestigious group, and probably Lydia belonged to that guild.

The guild was often associated with pagan religions, with feasts and immorality, so she may have had a lot of exposure to just worldliness and demonic practices and religions. We do know that she lived in a male-dominated society.

So she had to have been a woman of courage and strength and natural gifts and abilities; an independent woman, successful businesswoman. We see as we get further into this passage that she was able to maintain a house that was large enough for herself and for her to have company, to bring others into.

But here’s what I want you to see before we pick up tomorrow with the rest of this passage. I want you to see the providence of God in Lydia’s story . . . and in your story as well. First, we see that God in His providence had prepared her heart. She was a God-fearing woman, and she was listening. She was there, she was listening. 

God had prepared her heart to be receptive to the gospel. We’ll talk more about that tomorrow. But then we also see, as I’ve been looking at these maps and seeing these places and where Philippi is in relation to Thyatira, her hometown, and where Paul had started and how he ended up in Philippi, hundreds of miles away over land and sea, including this vision in the night and trying to go other places. You see that through all of this God was sovereignly arranging Paul’s steps and Lydia’s steps to bring them both to Philippi at this very time!

Marvel at the sovereign providence of God—how He orders and orchestrates our steps in ways we can’t see until we’re looking back. We say, “Oh! That’s what God was doing!” And much of it we still can’t see and know.

As you look back, how have you seen God orchestrate your steps, your life? How have you seen Him orchestrate your life to introduce you to Jesus in the first place? I think of how my dad came to faith in his mid-twenties.

My mother came to know Jesus as a senior in high school, in a public school in an elective class, studying the Bible. She just needed one extra credit, so she took this Bible class. There was a Christian teacher (they used to have these classes in public schools) and my mother came to know Jesus through reading the Bible.

So she was a teenager, my dad was quite a bit older when he had come to faith. The Lord brought my dad to Charlotte, North Carolina from Albany where he lived. My mother lived in Charlotte. He was speaking at an event where she was singing. They met each other, and God brought them together.

They were married. I’m their first-born child, born nine months and four days after they got married! (laughter) And from earliest childhood I was introduced to Jesus. How did God do all that, to bring Art and Nancy DeMoss together so that I might come to know the gospel?

But think of also how God has led you to others sovereignly, providentially, who need Jesus. I was telling somebody the story this weekend (haven’t thought about it in a long time). Decades ago when I was in college as a music major at the University of Southern California, there was a gal in my program whose name was Marilyn. We were both piano majors.

I had the opportunity during our course of study there to share the gospel with her. But there was no indication that she was open or interested. She didn’t trust Christ. I never heard anything from like, I want to say thirty years, until I got an email from this woman saying, 

You may remember me from when we were both piano majors at USC. You shared the gospel with me. I wasn’t ready that day, that season, but God planted a seed in my heart.

Then she told me how God had watered that seed and she had come, years later, to faith in Christ and had ended up being on the staff of a Christian ministry doing evangelism. She said,

I’m just writing to tell you thank you for sharing Jesus with me all those years ago. 

The providence of God in bringing you to faith and in taking you to places where He wants to use you to introduce others to Jesus!

O Lord, thank You for Your great, beautiful story that You’re writing in and through our lives! Thank you for Your providence. Thank You for the noes and the disappointments and the unexpected hindrances and roadblocks that sometimes You put in front of us. Thank You for those moments when we sense so clearly Your call and Your leading to go somewhere we hadn’t planned to go. And thank You for how You’re always working in people's hearts.

This day, You’re working in the hearts of women who are listening to Revive Our Hearts. They just accidentally—it seems that way humanly speaking, but it’s no accident—turned on the radio or got this podcast, or someone said, “You need to listen to this.” And now they’re listening, and You’re speaking to their hearts, and You’re introducing them to Jesus. Oh God, You’re always at work. Thank You! 

May we be sensitive and listening and ready to move, to go, to share, even when it seems like there’s not much happening. May we trust that You are at work. You are planting seeds of the gospel, and You are building Your church, and we give You thanks, in Jesus’ name, amen.

Dannah: Amen! That was Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. This week she is encouraging us to open up our Bibles to learn from the life of Lydia. Are you facing roadblocks in your life? I hope today’s program has reminded you that God is always at work, even when you can’t see His hand.

One way you can remind your heart of this precious truth is with the all-new calendar from Revive Our Hearts. This year’s theme is Heaven Rules—and the calendar features some of Nancy’s favorite personal iPhone snapshots, some of her Scripture verses, and inspirational quotes that will strengthen your faith day after day.

Request the 2023 Heaven Rules Calendar when you make a donation to the ministry of Revive Our Hearts this month. Visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959. Do you want to see the people around you come to faith in Christ? Oh, I do! 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth says one of the most important things you can do is pray that the Lord will open people’s eyes. Tomorrow she’ll share how you can extend an invitation to those around you. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth is calling you to believe that God is at work behind the scenes, and to experience freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the CSB.

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