BY A RIVERSIDE, WHERE PRAYER WAS WONT TO BE MADE

These words are clarified in the Revised Version: ‘by a riverside, where we supposed there was a place of prayer’. Such a place was usually found in a city where no synagogue had been built, due to the absence of ten men to form a congregation. It was usually a modest structure, sometimes consisting of a circle enclosed by a wall without a roof, and sometimes having no outward sign of enclosure whatever.

Our passage refutes the suggestion that only Christians can pray. So does the story of Cornelius of Caesarea, Acts 10. 2. If Lydia and her praying friends had heard something about the good news which was advancing towards Europe, they may well have been praying that it would soon reach Philippi. It is hard to believe that there was no connection between their prayers and the arrival of God’s messengers. Church history, including records of the planting and growth of assemblies, is not lacking in examples of divine blessing being poured out in answer to the earnest prayers of unknown women.

But Lydia had already learnt, before Paul and his colleagues arrived in the city, that prayer involved more than making known her requests to God. She was a worshipper, v. 14, a word hard to define but surely involving both abasement and adoration. God had been preparing Lydia for the gospel long before it reached Philippi. Her response was prompt and unreserved. It is not that she received the message because she deserved God’s favour, for she was a guilty sinner like the rest of us, and needed a little divine open-heart surgery in order to receive the gospel, 14. But evidence of her new birth was unmistakable, not least in her hospitality to God’s servants. And we can be sure that her prayer life blossomed out in the succeeding days, as she began to feed on the precious truths of the gospel.

The call to prayer comes to all Christians at conversion. Each of us needs a place of prayer; a sanctuary to which we may retreat each day to have dealings with almighty God. We can scarcely conceive of a more vital activity. To neglect it will undermine everything else we do. To fail here is to fail everywhere.