THE WRONG SPIRIT

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

Once when we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a female slave who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling. She followed Paul and the rest of us, shouting, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved.” She kept this up for many days. Finally Paul became so annoyed that he turned around and said to the spirit, “In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to come out of her!” At that moment the spirit left her.

When her owners realized that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to face the authorities. They brought them before the magistrates and said, “These men are Jews, and are throwing our city into an uproar by advocating customs unlawful for us Romans to accept or practice.”

The crowd joined in the attack against Paul and Silas, and the magistrates ordered them to be stripped and beaten with rods. After they had been severely flogged, they were thrown into prison, and the jailer was commanded to guard them carefully. When he received these orders, he put them in the inner cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.

Acts 16:16-24

This ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

In the sixteenth chapter of Acts, we have found a real focus on the Holy Spirit.

First, we saw how the Spirit drove Paul to where he was to go to do what the Lord wanted him to do. We read where Paul traveled throughout the regions of Phrygia and Galatia because the Holy Spirit kept him “from preaching the word in the province of Asia.”

Later, Paul and his companions “came to the border of Mysia” and “tried to enter Bithynia but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to.” And so “they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas” where Paul had a vision of a man begging him to come to Macedonia. And so Paul, led again by the Spirit to preach the Gospel in Macedonia, set sail from Troas and eventually ended up in Philippi.

There we saw another by product of the Holy Spirit’s work for on the Sabbath, Paul visited a group of women praying and encountered Lydia who we read had her heart opened by the Lord to receive Paul’s message before having her entire household baptized and then inviting Paul and his missionary entourage to stay at her home. Through this, we saw where the Holy Spirit will lead us into encounters with others and as Christians, we need to be prepared to make sure that every encounter counts.

Now, everything we have read about in these opening fifteen verses shows us the right kind of Spirit and the benefits one gains by having it working in and through them. We’ll look further at this right kind of Spirit tomorrow and the day after that but before we do, we are shown what the wrong spirit looks like in our scripture passage for today. Look again at these words here:

Once when we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a female slave who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling. She followed Paul and the rest of us, shouting, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved.” She kept this up for many days. Finally Paul became so annoyed that he turned around and said to the spirit, “In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to come out of her!” At that moment the spirit left her.

When her owners realized that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to face the authorities. They brought them before the magistrates and said, “These men are Jews, and are throwing our city into an uproar by advocating customs unlawful for us Romans to accept or practice.”

The crowd joined in the attack against Paul and Silas, and the magistrates ordered them to be stripped and beaten with rods. After they had been severely flogged, they were thrown into prison, and the jailer was commanded to guard them carefully. When he received these orders, he put them in the inner cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.

Here we find Paul, Silas, and their missionary entourage traveling together to a place of prayer. We don’t know how long it had been since they had departed Lydia’s home but that isn’t really significant here. For onto the scene comes a female slave “who had a spirit by which she predicted the future” which was used to earn “a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling.” The girl started traveling with Paul and his companions, proclaiming:

“These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved.”

She repeated this “for many days” until Paul was fed up. The scriptures tell us that he “became so annoyed that he turned around and said to the spirit” within the girl:

“In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to come out of her!”

And immediately, we read where “the spirit left her”.

Before I move onto what happened next, it’s important to note that there are indeed right and wrong spirits in the world. We see both at work in verses 16 through 18.

First, the wrong spirit, the spirit within the slave girl.

What made it wrong?

Well, first off, the girl’s slave owners were profiting financially off the work of the fortune telling spirit within the girl. No one using the right spirit, the Holy Spirit, would do so for monetary gain.

The other sure giveaway that the spirit within the girl was the wrong spirit came when Paul commanded it to leave the slave girl in the name of Jesus and the spirit immediately left her. In other words, through the power of the right spirit, the Holy Spirit, Paul eradicated the wrong spirit.

So what happened when the right spirit prevailed over the wrong spirit?

We read where the slave girl’s owners were not very happy. The Bible tells us that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil (1 Timothy 6:10) and those words come to life after Paul’s exorcism through the name of Jesus.

For the scriptures tell us that the slave owners “seized Paul and Silas”, dragging them “into the marketplace to face the authorities” after “their hope of making money was gone”. We read where Paul and Silas were taken “before the magistrates” with the following charge pronounced:

“These men are Jews, and are throwing our city into an uproar by advocating customs unlawful for us Romans to accept or practice.”

Note here how they weren’t really telling the real truth as to why they brought Paul and Silas forward. They didn’t testify in regard to losing their source of income from the fortune telling spirit which had been within the slave girl. No, they framed it under the guise that Paul and Silas were causing trouble and disruption in the city by preaching and teaching principles contrary to Roman religious practices.

Unfortunately, they were successful in swaying the crowd in their favor. For we read where the gathered crowd “joined in the attack against Paul and Silas” after the “magistrates ordered them to be stripped and beaten with rods”. As a result of the order, the Christ apostles were “severely flogged” before being “thrown into prison” where “the jailer was commanded to guard them carefully”. And so he “put them in the inner cell and fastened their feet in the stocks”.

On the surface, it may appear at this point that the wrong spirit had won the day but as we’re going to see across the net two days, the Holy Spirit was once again going to make itself known in a big way. I hope you’ll come back to read about it.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

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