How should we evangelise in our postmodern world? How can we communicate the good news of Jesus to a world that is just as lost as the modern world was? I believe that we have a great deal to learn from the methods of the Lord Jesus and the Apostle Paul.

We have already looked at how Jesus preached (in the Sermon on the Mount) and how he evangelised (the Woman at the Well). We have also looked at how Paul preached in Athens. Now I want to consider how Paul evangelised. I want to take the example of how he dealt with three very different people in Philippi in Macedonia (in what is modern-day Greece). This is described in Acts 16:11-40.

Not everyone may ask explicitly, “What must I do to be saved?” (v.30) But all need to be saved, and each of these three people in Philippi needed to be saved. One of our great aims ought to be to get people to ask that question — because that is the most important question you could ever ask. Many people are asking that question. They might not put it in just these terms, but they maybe know something is wrong in their lives. It may be angst (guilty anxiety), or ennui (boredom), or addiction to some sort of evil and destructive influence. The gospel is about being saved.

Here were three very different people who experienced the saving power of Jesus Christ: a business woman, a slave-girl and a prison warder. These very diverse characters were the first three converts in Europe (at least under Paul’s ministry). It must have made Philippi a very interesting church! This is a reminder to us that Christ’s church is made up of all sorts of people, and therefore, in our evangelism we ought never to think that it is impossible for a certain person, or type of person, to be converted. All need the power of God. And his power is able to change the hardest heart.

A Woman Who Was Searching⤒🔗

Lydia was in many ways similar to a typical woman of the postmodern world. She appears to be a “liberated woman”. She was a businesswoman, running her own business. She was a dealer in purple (dye or cloth). She came from Thyatira in Asia Minor (modern day Turkey), a place famed for its purple dye, which means that she was probably running an export business. This dye was extremely expensive and was in great demand in the Roman empire, because of the association of the colour purple with the Emperor. This was particularly true of Philippi which was a Roman colony and had many veterans of the Roman army settled there.

All this means that Lydia was of independent means. She was rich and was either single or possibly a widow. She certainly ran her own household and was mistress of the house (v. 15). How did Paul and his friends come to meet such a woman?

They met her because she was searching — searching spiritually. Why was she searching? Perhaps it was because she was unsettled — unsettled by having to pull up her roots and move to a different area, into a different culture. She was far from her home, and even although there was the link that Thyatira was a Macedonian colony, the strongly Roman culture of Philippi may have seemed strange.

It also appears she was dissatisfied. She was a Gentile (non-Jewish) by background, but she was attracted to the Jewish religion. We know she was non-Jewish, not just from her name, but from the fact she is described as a “worshipper of God” (v. 14). It may have been in her native city of Thyatira that she had become a worshipper, because there was a Jewish colony in that city. Be that as it may, it is obvious that at some point she had become dissatisfied with paganism and was attracted to the Jewish religion. Judaism was, and is, far from perfect, but we ought to remember that people who are searching spiritually may very well be attracted to dead churches — churches that have some aspect of the truth, without the gospel, and it would be wrong for us not to have any contact with them. At the present time, there are many who are dissatisfied with materialism and are looking for some spiritual answer.

This leads me to the next point, which is: Paul and his friends met Lydia, not only because she was searching, but also because they were searching. They were searching for lost sinners. And where were they searching? One place where they always searched was the synagogue. Paul made it his custom to start off his mission in any city with a visit to the synagogue. It was his principle to take the gospel to the Jew first. They are the people of God under the Old Covenant. We ought not to neglect the Jew in our evangelism. Indeed they should still be given a priority. But it wasn’t just that he was taking the gospel to the Jew first. He was going where people were searching spiritually. It is as if he came to Peru and started his mission in the Roman Catholic church! This should alert us to the fact there are still today many spiritual searchers in dead churches and we ought not to neglect them.

But of course there wasn’t a synagogue in Philippi. There was only a group of women meeting for prayer by the river. This means that there wasn’t even the required number of 10 Jewish men to constitute a synagogue. However, this did not deter Paul and his friends. They were just as concerned for women as for men. There is a lesson there for us too, particularly in this age of feminism. We ought to treat women as equals – equally made in the image of God, equally in need of the gospel.

What did Paul do? What great evangelistic method did he and his team use? “They sat down and began to speak to the women” (v. 13). This is so simple and ordinary. The word translated “speak” is not the word for formal public speaking. It is the word for everyday conversation. They began to chat about the gospel. They told of something new and amazing. Jesus, who was crucified, is the Christ.

And then, something else amazing happened. Just sitting there by the river, listening to what Paul was saying, “the Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message”. In spite of her spiritual search, Lydia’s heart was closed. No amount of argument or preaching or conversation would open her heart. Only the Lord could open her heart. And he did! Salvation is God’s doing. Spiritual seekers need to be saved. And we need to depend upon God’s sovereign grace to save. What we have to do is tell the good news.

A Girl Who Was Enslaved←⤒🔗

The second person Paul and his team met was very different from Lydia. She was a slave girl. Not only was she not free because of her slavery to her masters, but she was also enslaved by an occult power. The expression Luke uses to describe her spirit possession implies an association with the Greek God Apollo and the oracle at Delphi. The idea is that this girl’s masters made a lot of money from her fortune-telling.

She was obviously someone who was fascinated by spirituality. She sensed something spiritual about Paul and the others and was attracted to them, following them around and drawing attention to them. The interesting thing is that her actual words were the sober truth: “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved.” (We will return to the significance of that later.) So it must have been something about the way she was saying it that disturbed Paul. She kept on repeating it, perhaps in a trance-like way. We would all feel the same if a drunk man came in here and started pointing at me and saying, “He’s preaching the truth! Listen to him!” It is clear that Paul did not want people to think that the God they worshipped had any association with the occult practices of this girl. At any rate Paul was so pained and grieved by the girl’s occult enchantment, that in the name of Jesus Christ he commanded the evil spirit to come out of her. He was troubled both for the girl and for the gospel. And he knew that it was only Jesus Christ who could free her.

In the postmodern age we are going to meet more and more people like this girl. Once the old rationalism of the modern age goes, and if people do not return to the revelation of God’s word, the renewed interest in spirituality lays people open to very real occult influences. Instead of turning from science to the Saviour, they turn to superstition.

In our dealing with such New Age people, we must have a very real concern for them, because they are enslaved. We must show the same love and compassion that Jesus had for people under occult influence. On the other hand there must be no compromise with the occult. Just because people are interested in “spirituality”, we must not think that they are all right! They need to be freed from occult influence — and only Jesus can do that. And we must remember that it is not only superstitious and New Age people who need to be freed from evil. “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4). Only the sovereign Lord is able to make “his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). Evangelism is a spiritual work. We must do it depending on God in prayer.

A Man Who Was Suicidal←⤒🔗

The third person that Paul and Silas met in Philippi was a very different person again. He was a prison officer. How did they meet him? Did they meet him socially? No! They met him in his line of business! They were thrown into prison!

Why did the Apostle Paul and Silas get put in prison? What crime had they committed? None! They were only guilty of freeing a girl from occult enslavement! The problem was that her owners had been making a lot of money out of her, and that nice little source of income had now dried up! That made them mad! They wanted revenge! But they couldn’t very well get Paul and Silas arrested for restoring the girl to normality! So they got them arrested for being Jews who were “throwing our city into an uproar by advocating customs unlawful for us Romans to accept or practise” (Acts 16:20-21). By and large, the Romans were tolerant of a variety of religions and Judaism was a permitted religion. That did not prevent prejudice and persecution, however. Here, Paul and Silas were beaten with rods (which was a vicious Roman punishment) without trial, though they were Roman citizens. In our own day India and Turkey may be supposed to be secular states with freedom of religion, but the reality is very different. In countries where we do have genuine freedom of religion, we ought to guard that privilege jealously, because a postmodern tolerance is likely to be intolerant to absolute claims to truth, such as Bible believing Christians must make for the gospel. It is interesting to note that Paul made full use of his privileges of citizenship, and not only on this occasion.

When we first meet this prison officer, he is simply going about his work. He is most probably a retired Roman soldier. He is ordered to guard these prisoners carefully, so he puts them in the inner cell and secures their feet in the stocks. Paul and Silas by this stage would be badly hurt and bleeding from their beating, but that is no particular concern to this hardened Roman.

In spite of his apparent unconcern, he would have had a lot to think about. First, there was Paul and Silas’ impact on the city. The commotion caused by the slave girl and what she had been saying would have been difficult to ignore. The furore caused by the girl’s liberation and the men’s arrest would have been well known. On top of all that there was the strange fact that these men, who were beaten and bleeding, were now praying and singing praise to God at midnight! In light of what happens next, we should never underestimate the effect of the joyful witness of Christians in difficult circumstances. Hardly anything gives more convincing proof of the reality of the Christian faith.

The jailer had no time to think about these strange occurrences, because the next thing he knew he was rudely awakened out of his sleep by a sudden violent earthquake! The first thing he saw was that the prison doors were open. In the panic of the moment, he jumped to the conclusion that the prisoners had all escaped and he would face execution for failing to discharge his duty. This left him with no alternative, he thought, but to commit suicide.

In light of his subsequent conversion, this has something to teach us about the sin of suicide. Suicide, like any other murder, is a sin. However, in light of this passage we cannot conclude, as some have, that suicide is an unforgivable sin. Jesus taught us that the thought is as sinful as the act. This man most definitely committed the sin in his heart, yet he was forgiven. Therefore we ought not to conclude, in the tragic cases where Christians have committed suicide, that this is an indication that they could not have been Christians at all.

Be that as it may, this jailer was suddenly confronted with the reality of death. He was about to launch himself into the darkness without hope. And at that moment he was aware of life and death in a way he had never been before. They say that at such a time your whole life flashes before you. It was at that very moment that Paul spoke to him.

Death is still a great apologetic opening for the Christian. There is still a fear of death in the human heart. Fear of the unknown. Fear of non-being. Even fear of judgement. Woody Allen, the American comedian, put it in his own inimitable style: “It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” The sheer despair of the non-Christian in the face of death has never been expressed better or more poignantly than by the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas:

Here among the light of the lording sky
An old blind man is with me where I go
Walking in the meadow of his son’s eye
On whom a world of ills came down like snow.
He cried as he died, fearing at last the sphere’s
Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
And caught between two nights, blindness and death.
O deepest wound of all that he should die
On that darkest day. Oh he could hide
The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.
Until I die he will not leave my side.

What message do you have for such a man? “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved”? Wrong! That comes later. That was not the first thing that Paul said to him. The first word of the gospel the jailer heard was: “Don’t harm yourself!” How is that the first word of the gospel? It is the first word of the gospel because it is a word of hope and it is a word of love.

This is very much the first word that people in our postmodern world need to hear. They need to hear that we care for them in their predicament. They need to hear that there is a reason for living. They need to hear that they are made in the image of God and it matters whether they live or die. Human life has worth and significance and dignity. You are not just a highly developed animal or a complicated biochemical machine. You are a human being created to have a relationship with the Creator of the universe! You matter!

These words would have had all the more impact on the jailer because they came from a man whom he had treated badly. Without compassion he had thrust Paul, hurt and bleeding, into the inner cell and chained him there. But this same Paul is now pleading with him not to take his own life! Such selfless love is the prerequisite of effective evangelism. People will not listen unless they know that you care!

The jailer is now overwhelmed with fear and amazement. Fear because of his confrontation with death. Amazement because of Paul’s care for him. He comes trembling and falls down before Paul and Silas and asks the famous question: “What must I do to be saved?” What did he mean and why did he ask this question? He clearly did not mean “saved from death”, as Paul had already achieved that by his shout. The prisoners were all there. There was no need to commit suicide. But what did he mean? Did he mean all that we would mean by the word “saved”? Probably not. But there are two reasons given in the context as to why he would have used the word. The first is the fact that, although he was now delivered from the immediate prospect of death, the thoughts that had welled up within him — the fear, the guilt, the hopelessness — did not go away. He wished to be delivered from that. His specific choice of the word “saved” may have had another reason. Another form of the word — “salvation” — had become notorious in the city of Philippi. This is the word used by the occult-enslaved girl to describe the message of the gospel: “These men … are telling you the way of salvation.” At any rate, it is probable that the jailer deduced that these men had some message that was relevant to his condition, and he asked them, “What must I do to be saved?”

Whatever precisely he meant by his question, Paul and Silas had a precise answer: “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved”. In fact their answer is so definite that we are told they both said the same thing, apparently simultaneously! The answer to them was so obvious. This means that they accepted his question as entirely valid. They did not quibble about what exactly he meant by “saved”. They did not view him with suspicion because his change of heart had happened in a crisis situation, where he was possibly reacting in superstitious dread of these two men who perhaps caused the earthquake! Nor did they enter into a debate about the respective roles of Divine sovereignty and human responsibility in salvation! No! They accepted his question and gave a direct answer.

This is vitally important in our age. People may come with all sorts of mixed up ideas, using spiritual-sounding language, but if they are genuinely seeking, we ought to react positively to them and give them a direct answer. For instance they may use the word “redemption”, but they may not mean by it what the Bible means. Nonetheless, we can explain to them the true way of redemption.

Paul and Silas accepted his question as entirely valid. They didn’t say, “No need to get too worked up. You’re not such a bad fellow, really! And anyway it’s not wise to try to sort out such things when you’re too emotional.” No! They encouraged his belief that he had a desperate need to be saved, because they knew that we all need to be saved from the guilt of sin, the addiction of sin and the judgement of sin. And they knew it must be sorted out urgently. “Now is the day of salvation.”

They also gave a very definite, precise answer: “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved.” They clearly believed in such a thing as absolute truth. There was no “perhaps” or “maybe” or “Well, this is our view, but there may be other ways to God”! No! There is only one way to be saved.

Jesus said, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.” And as Peter said, “There is no other name under heaven, given among men, whereby we must be saved.

The absolute truth is that faith in Jesus is absolutely necessary for us to be saved. No one else, no Pope or prophet, can save us — only Jesus. No works can save us — only personal faith in Jesus.

This is a message that is unpalatable to a postmodern, pluralist world which believes that there are many truths, many stories, many ways to God. But we must not modify the message because of that! We must understand our world. We must learn how to communicate with our world. But we must not trim our message to our world’s ideas. It may be an unpalatable message, but it is the only hope for this poor lost world, and we need to tell it. There will be those, like this jailer, to whom these words are like nectar, like a letter from home, like rain on dry ground.

Notice too that Paul and Silas directed him directly to Jesus. They did not say, “Well, we have a certain theology that you will have to become familiar with. You’ll need to read all Paul’s letters, the Westminster Confession and Calvin’s Institutes as well, before you can really understand what is needed!” No! They said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ!” Theology is important. The Scriptures are supremely important. But we do not invite people to theology. We do not even invite them to the Bible. We do not invite them to a church. We invite them to a Person. We invite them to believe in the Lord Jesus. Now this man needed to learn a lot about who Jesus is and what he has done, and Paul and Silas proceeded to speak the word of the Lord to him (told him theology, if you like), but the primary emphasis is on faith in a Person. This is crucially important for us today too. Postmodern people are suspicious of organisations and dogma, but they are interested in relationships and experience. We have exactly the right message for them! We are calling them into relationship with the Creator and into the experience of personal trust in Jesus Christ.

Having said all that, however, we ought not to pass over lightly the fact that Paul and Silas then proceeded to teach the jailer and his family exactly what was involved in Christian faith. “Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all the others in his house.” Nowhere in the New Testament do we find justification for obtaining an emotional “decision” for Jesus, or encouragement for the idea of faith as “a blind leap in the dark”. Rather, we constantly find, as here, an emphasis on ensuring that people know what they are being asked to believe.

We should also notice that Paul and Silas laid an emphasis on the jailer in the context of his family. They said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved — you and your household.” In the Bible we do not find the sterile individualism that has plagued modern life. There is healthy emphasis on community — the community of the family, the community of the Church and the community of the nation. Faith is not seen as a purely individual thing. Yes, each person must make that choice for themselves as individuals, but it is a choice that impinges upon others and a choice that brings us into fellowship with others.

Again, this is an emphasis that we may find has more resonance with postmodern people (and with premodern people, of whom there are still many particularly in the underdeveloped world), than with those still adhering to the modern emphasis on individualism. Our message ought to have an emphasis on community — the community of the family, the community of the church and the community of society at large. The Christian is not called to be a hermit. He is called to interaction with others — to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.

Conclusion←⤒🔗

So, in Acts 16 we have seen the Apostle Paul in action as an evangelist. We have seen him in personal interaction with three very different people — Lydia the businesswoman, the demon-possessed slave girl and the Philippian Jailer. I trust that we have learned something of how to relate to different types of people in the postmodern world, and how to relate the gospel to them.

And I hope that in this series of lectures, as we have considered the preaching and evangelism of Jesus and Paul, you have learned from the Master and his student how to communicate the gospel. Particularly, I hope that you have seen that the Bible is an incomparable textbook in methodology as well as message, and that in your varied ministries you will continue to draw on its resources in our fast-changing world.