📖 Acts Intensive — Unit 7: Macedonian Call to Mars Hill (Acts 16:6–18:22)

I. Closed Doors and an Open Vision

The second missionary journey begins with a series of closed doors. Paul and Silas, joined by Timothy, traveled west across the high country of Asia Minor. They were trying to preach in the province of Asia — the western coastal region with cities like Ephesus, Pergamum, and Smyrna. Luke says simply, "They were forbidden by the Holy Spirit to preach the word in Asia" (Acts 16:6, NKJV). They turned north to Bithynia. "The Spirit did not permit them" (Acts 16:7, NKJV). Two doors slammed shut, and they ended up at the port of Troas with no plan and apparently no guidance.

I want to stop on those two closed doors. Some of the godliest men in church history have stood at exactly that crossroads. They were sure of the call. They were sure of the gospel. They had paid the price to come this far. And the Spirit said no. Some of you reading this are sitting at your own Troas tonight, wondering why every door you have leaned into has held shut. Read on. Closed doors in Acts are usually setups for bigger ones. The Lord was steering Paul away from a continent and toward a continent. The two no's were the Lord's way of getting one yes onto the table.

That night a man of Macedonia stood before Paul in a vision and pleaded, "Come over to Macedonia and help us" (Acts 16:9, NKJV). Notice the word immediately in the next verse. "Now after he had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go to Macedonia" (Acts 16:10, NKJV). Notice also the pronoun we. Up until this point Luke has written they. From Troas onward Luke is on the team. The physician from Antioch — the man writing the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts — joins the missionary party at Troas, and the Lord ends up with His own historian on the boat. The gospel was about to step from Asia onto European soil for the first time, and the man who would write the record was going along to take notes.

II. Lydia, a Slave Girl, and an Earthquake

Paul and his party landed at Neapolis and walked inland to Philippi, a Roman colony in Macedonia. Philippi had no synagogue — there were not even ten Jewish men in town. So on the Sabbath the missionaries went down to the riverside outside the city gate, where there was apparently a place of prayer for a small group of God-fearing women. There Paul met the first European convert in church history. "Now a certain woman named Lydia heard us. She was a seller of purple from the city of Thyatira, who worshiped God. The Lord opened her heart to heed the things spoken by Paul" (Acts 16:14, NKJV). Read that pronoun. The Lord opened her heart. Lydia did not pry her own heart open with effort. She heard Paul preach, and the Lord did the surgical work inside her chest. The verse plainly emphasizes God’s gracious initiative in Lydia’s response. Reformed and Arminian Christians explain the relationship between that divine initiative and the human response differently, but both should allow Luke’s emphasis to stand: the Lord opened her heart to heed the gospel. She was baptized with her household, and she insisted on hosting Paul, Silas, Timothy, and Luke in her home. The European church was born in Lydia's house.

The first opposition came from an unexpected source. As Paul and his party went out to pray, a slave girl with a spirit of divination — a python spirit, Luke calls it, the same spirit that was thought to inhabit the famous oracle of Delphi — followed them around for many days, shouting, "These men are the servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to us the way of salvation" (Acts 16:17, NKJV). She was telling the truth. That was the problem. The same demonic spirit that had spoken through Pythia at Delphi for centuries was now putting its endorsement on the Christian missionaries, and Paul, finally exasperated, turned and addressed the spirit directly. "I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her" (Acts 16:18, NKJV). And it came out. Her masters' meal ticket was suddenly gone. Paul and Silas were dragged before the magistrates, beaten with rods, and thrown into the inner prison with their feet in stocks.

Read the next sentence carefully. "But at midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them" (Acts 16:25, NKJV). Their backs were a bloody mess. Their feet were locked in wooden stocks. They had been beaten with Roman rods, in violation of their citizenship, without a trial. By every human reckoning they had every right to be cursing the magistrates, cursing the slave girl's owners, cursing themselves for ever leaving Antioch. Instead, at midnight, in the inner prison, Paul and Silas began to sing.

III. Three Strings on a Violin

I want to tell you a story that has stayed with me ever since I heard it. On the night of November 18, 1995, Itzhak Perlman, the great violinist, came on stage to give a concert at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City. Perlman had been struck with polio as a child. He has braces on both legs and walks with two crutches. To watch him cross the stage is itself a sight — slow, painful, dignified. He reaches his chair, sits down carefully, lays his crutches on the floor, undoes the clasps on his legs, tucks one foot back, extends the other forward, and only then picks up the violin. The audience that night sat reverently while he made his way and got himself ready.

Then he began to play. He had finished the first few bars when one of the strings on his violin broke. The sound of it snapping went off in the hall like gunfire. There was no mistaking what it was. The audience expected the obvious — Perlman would put the clasps back on his legs, pick up the crutches, and limp his way off stage to find another violin. He didn't. He sat there a moment with his eyes closed. Then he signaled the conductor to begin again. The orchestra started, and Itzhak Perlman recomposed the piece in his head and played the entire concerto on three strings.

Anyone who knows the violin knows that is impossible. Perlman knew it was impossible. The audience knew it was impossible. But that night Perlman refused to know it. You could watch him modulating, changing, retuning the strings as he played, finding sounds in those three strings that had never been there before. When he finished there was a long silence in the hall, and then the place came apart with applause. Perlman raised his bow to quiet the room and said quietly, "You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left."

That is the sermon of Acts 16:25. Paul and Silas were down to three strings. Their backs were one. Their hopes for a successful European mission looked like another. Their freedom was the third. Three strings was all they had. And they made music with what they had left. The earth shook in answer. The prison doors were thrown open. The chains fell off every prisoner. The jailer, fearing for his life, drew his sword to kill himself. Paul shouted, "Do yourself no harm, for we are all here" (Acts 16:28, NKJV). The jailer rushed in, fell down trembling, brought them out, and asked the question every preacher waits a lifetime to be asked: "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" (Acts 16:30, NKJV). Paul gave the simplest answer in the New Testament. "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, you and your household" (Acts 16:31, NKJV). The jailer washed their wounds. They preached the word to his whole house. The whole house was baptized that same hour. The man who had been about to fall on his sword was setting out a midnight meal for the men he had locked in stocks.

Friend, every person reading this lecture is going to lose a string somewhere along the way. Milton went blind and wrote his greatest poem after he could not see. Beethoven lost his hearing and composed the Ninth Symphony after he could not hear the orchestra play it. Pasteur was a paralytic at forty-six and found the cure for rabies after a stroke. Helen Keller was deaf, blind, and unable to speak — and went on to lecture on five continents. The cross looked like defeat to the disciples. It looked like defeat to the world. It must have felt like defeat to Jesus. God made it His greatest victory. When your string snaps, do not call it the end of the music. The Author of the score is still in the orchestra pit, and He has been writing pieces for three strings since Calvary.

IV. Thessalonica and Berea

The morning after the earthquake the magistrates sent word to release the prisoners. Paul, who had not used his Roman citizenship until now, suddenly produced it. "They have beaten us openly, uncondemned Romans, and have thrown us into prison. And now do they put us out secretly? No indeed! Let them come themselves and get us out" (Acts 16:37, NKJV). The magistrates, when they heard the word Roman, came to apologize personally. Paul and Silas left town with their dignity intact and the Philippian church planted in Lydia's house. Luke, by the way, stayed behind in Philippi for several years — the next we in Acts will not show up until Acts 20.

Paul, Silas, and Timothy traveled west on the Egnatian Way to Thessalonica. Three Sabbaths in the synagogue, reasoning from the Scriptures, opening and explaining how Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead, and many believed — including a great many devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women. The unbelieving Jews stirred up a mob, dragged Jason (Paul's host) before the city rulers, and used the line that may be the highest compliment ever paid to the early church. "These who have turned the world upside down have come here too" (Acts 17:6, NKJV). Brothers, may the same complaint be filed against us.

Run out of Thessalonica by night, the missionaries traveled to Berea. The Bereans were of a different temperament. "These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so" (Acts 17:11, NKJV). I want to print Acts 17:11 over every Sunday school door in every congregation in Mexico. The Bereans heard Paul, took it home, and went to the Scriptures with open Bibles to test what the apostle had said. They were not gullible and they were not cynical. They were students. The mark of a Berean church is not that it accepts every preacher's word as gospel; it is that it tests every preacher's word against the gospel. Many believed at Berea — until the same Thessalonian rabble showed up to stir up trouble there too. The brothers got Paul on a boat for Athens.

V. The Man of Vision in a City of Idols

Athens. The intellectual capital of the ancient world. Five hundred years after Socrates and Plato had argued in those streets, the philosophical seminars were still going on every afternoon in the marketplace. And while Paul waited for Silas and Timothy to catch up with him, he walked through the city, and Luke gives us a sentence that should haunt every Christian who travels. "His spirit was provoked within him when he saw that the city was given over to idols" (Acts 17:16, NKJV). The Greek says he was paroxysmed — same root as the disagreement with Barnabas, except this time the target was idolatry. Athens had been called the most religious city in the world. The Roman satirist Petronius joked that his own corner of Italy was so full of gods that it was easier to meet one than a man; Athens could have made the same boast. There were statues for Apollo, the god of light. Statues for Bacchus, the god of wine. Statues for Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Statues for Mars, the god of war. And, just to be safe, in the streets below the Acropolis, an altar inscribed To the Unknown God — they had not wanted to leave any deity off the list and offend it.

Paul preached in the synagogue, then in the marketplace daily with whoever would listen. The Stoic and Epicurean philosophers heard him and sneered. "What does this babbler want to say?" (Acts 17:18, NKJV). The Greek word translated babbler literally means seed-picker — a slang term for a beggar who scratches around the marketplace picking up dropped scraps of food. They were calling Paul intellectually homeless, a man who had picked up a few stray ideas and was trying to assemble them into a religion. The same accusation gets thrown at faithful preachers in every century. Take it as a compliment.

They brought him up to the Areopagus — Mars Hill, the rocky outcropping where the city council met under the open sky. Paul stood in the middle of it and gave one of the most carefully crafted sermons in human history. "Men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are very religious; for as I was passing through and considering the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you" (Acts 17:22–23, NKJV). Paul started where they were. He used their own altar inscription, their own poets, their own categories. He preached the unknown God they had been guessing at. He told them this God had made the world and everything in it. He told them this God did not dwell in temples made with hands. He told them this God had set the times and boundaries of every nation so that they might seek Him and find Him. He told them this God had appointed a day on which He will judge the world by a Man whom He raised from the dead.

At the resurrection the audience split three ways. Some mocked. Some said, "We will hear you again on this matter" (Acts 17:32, NKJV) — the most dangerous response of all, because it is a polite no. And some believed — including a member of the council named Dionysius the Areopagite, a woman named Damaris, and others. Athens did not see a great revival. Paul did not preach there a second time. But the few who believed were the seed of the Greek church. The Lord did not measure that ministry by the size of the crowd. He measured it by the faithfulness of the preacher.

VI. Eighteen Months at Corinth

Paul left Athens and traveled fifty miles west to Corinth — a port city, a sailor's town, heir to an old reputation: Greek Corinth, destroyed by Rome two centuries earlier, had been famous, Strabo says, for a temple of Aphrodite with a thousand cult prostitutes. To Corinthianize a verb in Greek meant to live like a moral sewer. If Athens was the intellectual capital of the world, Corinth was its red-light district. Paul arrived in Corinth, by his own later admission, in fear and much trembling. He stayed eighteen months.

In Corinth Paul met two of the most strategically important friends he ever made. Aquila and Priscilla — Jewish refugees who had been expelled from Rome by the emperor Claudius's edict against the Jews — had a tentmaking business. Paul, also a tentmaker by trade, joined them, and the three of them worked side by side stitching leather and goat-hair canvas while the apostle preached every Sabbath. Notice the labor model. The greatest theologian in church history made his living with his hands so he would not be a financial burden on the new churches. Paul will refer to that pattern decades later when he tells the Ephesian elders, "These hands have provided for my necessities, and for those who were with me" (Acts 20:34, NKJV).

The Corinthian synagogue ejected him after the usual conflict, and Paul moved his ministry next door — literally — to the house of a God-fearing Gentile named Justus, whose front door was right beside the synagogue door. Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, was converted along with his entire household. The Lord appeared to Paul one night and gave him a sentence that has comforted ten thousand discouraged pastors. "Do not be afraid, but speak, and do not keep silent; for I am with you, and no one will attack you to hurt you; for I have many people in this city" (Acts 18:9–10, NKJV). I have many people in this city. The Lord knew His people in Corinth before Paul knew their names. Friend, when the Lord plants you in a city, He plants you among His people, even if you have not yet met them. Preach. Stay. He has many in your city you do not yet know.

Eighteen months in, the new proconsul of Achaia, a man named Gallio, threw out the case the Corinthian Jews brought against Paul, ruling that it was a Jewish theological dispute and not a Roman criminal matter. Paul stayed several more days, then sailed for Syria with Aquila and Priscilla. He stopped briefly at Ephesus and promised to return. He sailed for Caesarea, went up to Jerusalem to greet the church, and went back to Antioch. The second missionary journey was over. Three churches had been planted in Macedonia (Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea) and two in Achaia (Athens, Corinth). The gospel had crossed from Asia into Europe, and Europe was never the same again.

VII. Three Lessons Home

First, closed doors are not God's no — they are usually His detour. The Spirit slammed Asia and Bithynia shut so He could open Macedonia. Some of you have spent the past year staring at a closed door and feeling abandoned. You may be standing at your own Troas. Wait for the man of Macedonia. The Lord did not waste Paul's miles, and He is not wasting yours.

Second, three strings is enough. Paul and Silas in the Philippian jail with their backs torn open are the model for every Christian whose life has stopped going to plan. When the strings of your life snap, do not give up the concert. Sing at midnight. The Lord has been writing pieces for three-string violins since Calvary, and He is not finished with yours.

Third, the gospel is for the marketplace, the synagogue, and the senate house. Paul preached at a riverside to women, in jail to a jailer, in synagogues to Jews, in the marketplace to philosophers, on Mars Hill to the city council, and in a tentmaker's shop to working people. There is no class of people the gospel cannot reach, and no setting the gospel does not belong in. May the Lord give us the courage of Paul to walk into both the prayer meeting and the philosophy department, the slum and the senate, with the same uncompromised message — Jesus and the resurrection.

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