It Started With a Vision
A cts is largely a sequence of events. Because we don’t want to read long passages before teaching a lesson on it, we often break it up into manageable chunks. We might for example, talk about how Paul cast a spirit out of a damel. We might talk about Lydia. We might talk about the Philippian jailer. All of these stories stand on their own in our head, but we lose sight of the sequence. All of those stories I mentioned are connected with a cause and effect relationship and it all started with a vision. Paul saw a vision in the night of a man of Macedonia saying, “Come over into Macedonia and help us.” Why there’s a sermon on missions right there. But what we find is that because of the vision, Paul and his companions travel to Philippi, which was the chief city of Macedonia. On the Sabbath, they meet Lydia and some other women in a prayer group. After baptizing Lydia and her household, they stayed in her house. But while they were doing that, they encountered a damsel possessed by a ...