"Paul's Philosophy of Strategic Cities"

Hi there, this is Lon Solomon and I'd like to welcome you to our program today. You know, it's a tremendous honor that God has given us to be on stations all around the nation bringing the truth of God's Word as it is uncompromising and straightforward. And I'm so glad you've tuned in to listen and be part of that.

Thanks again for your support and your generosity that keeps us on the radio. And now, let's get to the Word of God. We are going to be studying today in Paul's first letter to the Church of Thessalonica and you can find it in the New Testament, 1 Thessalonians chapter 1. We'll be coming there in just a moment.

Now, a little bit of background. Remember the apostle Paul's on his second missionary journey. He has crossed over from northwestern Turkey, the city of Troas, across the Aegean Sea to northern Greece, the city of Philippi. Here in Philippi, for several weeks, Paul preached. He started a small church there and he divided his team there. He left Timothy and Dr. Luke, two members of his team, in Philippi to care for this church. And he and the other member of his team, a fellow named Silas, they walked along the famous Roman road, the Ignatian Way.

They walked 100 miles to the south to the town of Thessalonica. And here in Thessalonica, the Bible tells us that Paul went into the synagogue for three straight weeks, sharing about Jesus as the Messiah. And as a result, Acts 17 four, some of the Jews were persuaded and they joined Paul, as did a number of God-fearing Gentiles. Now, we saw last week that the unbelieving Jewish population in this city finally was able to get a mob together. They formed a mob and succeeded in running Paul out of town. And you say, wow, that's really sad. I mean, Paul only got three weeks in this town.

No, no. The truth is Paul was here a lot longer than three weeks. You see, when we interpret the Bible, we have certain principles we use to get it right. And one of these hermeneutical principles that's very important, we call comparing scripture with scripture.

What this means is that we go to other passages in the Bible and bring those passages to bear on the passage that we're actually looking at to make sure we get the passage we're looking at right. Now, when we do, when we compare scripture with scripture, what we find is that Paul was actually in Thessalonica a lot longer than just three weeks. Watch right here in First Thessalonians one, where I asked you to turn.

Look at verse nine. People everywhere, Paul says, tell how you Thessalonians turn from idols to serve the living and the true God. If you remember, Acts 17 said that in the synagogue, a number of God fearing Gentiles came to Christ. But friends, these are not the Gentiles Paul's talking about here. Those Gentiles mentioned in Acts 17 were Gentile converts to Judaism.

They had already given up all forms of idolatry. They were meeting in the synagogue with the Jewish people. That's where Paul ran across them. These Gentiles mentioned here in First Thessalonians are pagan Gentiles that Paul reached in ministry outside of the Jewish synagogue. And the language of First Thessalonians clearly indicates that the Apostle Paul spent much longer than three weeks among the pagan Gentiles of this city and that he had a significantly successful ministry in reaching them. Let's compare another passage of scripture. Philippians 4 16. Here Paul says to the Philippian believers, for even when I was in Thessalonica, you guys sent me financial gifts again and again when I was in need. Paul says, when I was living there in Thessalonica, ministering there in Thessalonica, and you guys heard that I needed money, you took up an offering and again and again, you sent it 100 miles south to give to me. Well, the language here clearly indicates that there was a time interval between each one of these offerings that they took up and sent to him.

And there's no way we can fit all of that into three weeks. So William Ramsey in his famous book, St. Paul, the traveler and Roman citizen writes this, and I quote, he said, Paul's writings clearly refer to a long and very successful work in Thessalonica. December 50 to May 51 A.D. seems a probable estimate of his residence in Thessalonica, or in other words, about six months is the actual time that Paul was in this city. Now, friends, let's ask ourselves a question. We know there was a high level of opposition against Paul in Thessalonica, high enough a level of hostility that they got a mob together and eventually ran him out of town.

So here's our question. If there was this much hostility in Thessalonica against Paul, if there was physical persecution and even mob action against him, why did Paul insist on staying in this city for six months? Well, you may not believe it, but the answer to that question is actually found by looking at a road map of the Roman Empire from the time of the Apostle Paul. Here you see the road system in the entire Roman Empire at the time of Paul. According to our best calculations, the Romans had built over 50,000 miles of Roman roads at the time of Paul. You say, oh, that's not that much. Friend, do you realize that the entire interstate highway system in the United States of America combined is only 42,000 miles?

So this is 20 percent more than the entire interstate system of the United States. Everywhere these Romans went, they built quality roads. As a matter of fact, let me show you a picture. This is part of the Ignatian Way right here that ran through Philippi.

And as you can see, it's still here today. They took these huge blocks of limestone and granite, dug the ground up, carted these things in and laid this road. Now you say, well, why would they go to all that trouble? 50,000 miles of road?

Well, it's very simple. When you've got an empire as vast and as spread out as the Roman Empire, you have got to be able to get armies wherever you need to get them to quickly to defend and deal with crisis all over the empire. And so these roads were built to enable Roman goods and Roman armies to move to any part of the empire they needed to move quickly and in a facile way, regardless of the time of year. However, there was a corollary that developed, a benefit that developed as a result of these roads that the Romans never planned on. And that is now the common people living in the Roman Empire suddenly had easy travel. They suddenly had safe roads they could move around on. And so as a result of all of these roads, the people traffic moving through the Roman Empire became huge. To put it in another way, because of their road system, the Roman Empire created the first truly mobile society in world history. Now why was this a factor in the Apostle Paul staying six months in Thessalonica?

Well, let's remember the question we're answering. If you lived in the first century and you wanted to spread the message of Jesus Christ to every corner of the Roman Empire, but you don't have TV, you don't have radio, you don't have cell phone, you don't have book publishing, you don't have newspapers, you don't have the internet or mass communication, how do you do it? The answer is found in this road system. You see, the answer is you set up shop in one of these strategic cities that these roads ran through. You set up shop in a commercial center that had a lot of this people traffic moving through it on Roman roads. And then what you do is you go down to the docks where people are arriving and you share Christ. You go on the roads at significant resting spots and you share Christ. You stay in the city and you hand out literature at every restaurant, every bar, every bed and breakfast, every hotel where all of this people traffic is moving through town. And the hope is that some of these people moving through town on their way someplace else will hear the message of Christ.

They'll believe the message of Christ, and they will then take the message of Christ with them wherever it is they are going on these Roman roads throughout the far flung regions of the empire. We like to call this the honeybee strategy. And the reason we call it that is because you know how honeybees work.

They pick up pollen as they fly along and then they end up transporting that pollen with them to flowers miles and miles away from where they originally picked it up. Well this is what Paul's strategy was. He tried to pollinate people spiritually with the message of Jesus Christ and turn them into honeybees who there whenever they flew all over the Roman Empire they took the pollen of the message of Christ with them back to these far flung regions. You say well Solon, was Thessalonica one of these very strategic commercial cities?

Well let me show you. Let's zero in on Thessalonica and what I want you to see is that all of northern Greece, today you know Macedonian Thrace, all of the Balkans, today Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Yugoslavia, Romania, all of these countries, all of southern Europe, today the countries of Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and even southern Russia over here and southern Ukraine, every single one of these regions was accessed by roads that emanated and started right here in Thessalonica. This major port city and so what Paul did is by setting up in Thessalonica he said the way I'm going to reach the Balkans, the way I'm going to reach southern Europe, the way I'm going to reach the Ukraine and southern Russia is by reaching people coming through this town who are heading northeast, north and northwest out of this town on these Roman roads.

Did it work? Look at verse 8 right here 1 Thessalonians 1. The Lord's message rang out from you, Paul says, not only to the people in Greece, but your faith in God has become known everywhere.

In fact, people everywhere tell us how you turn from idols to serve the living and the true God. Paul would get somewhere and people would say, Hey, have you heard about what's happening in Thessalonica? And Paul would say, Well, yeah, sort of.

Yeah, I kind of know what's going on there. The Serbian Orthodox Church of today, the Macedonian Orthodox Church of today, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Albanian Orthodox Church, the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the Church of Bulgaria, all trace their start, their beginning back to the first century AD. And all of this can be traced back to the Apostle Paul's ministry right here in Thessalonica. That's where all these churches got started, where people moving through town meeting Paul, and then taking the message of Christ to all these different places north of Thessalonica. Hey, you know, Paul followed this very same strategy when he spent two years in Ephesus.

Ephesus was the third leading city in the Roman Empire, a major commercial center on the western shores of Turkey. And here's what the Bible says Acts 19. It says as a result of Paul's ministry, all the Jews and Gentiles who lived in the province of Asia, heard the word of the Lord. Paul set up shop in Ephesus for two years, Smyrna, Sardis, Phaetira, Pergamum, Philadelphia, Hierapolis, Laodicea and Colossae. Every one of these cities had major churches started.

You say, how do you know? Well, because there's letters to all these churches in the book of Revelation. There's a letter in the Bible to the church of Colossae that mentions the church in Hierapolis. And yet Paul says, I never went to any of these places.

I've never been any of them. I've been two years in Ephesus. But what I did is I pollinated a bunch of honeybees coming through town, and they took the message of Christ and reached this whole Roman province. We even know the name of one of these honeybees. He's mentioned in the book of Colossians. His name is Epaphras. And Paul says, I didn't bring the message to you. Epaphras did. But I met him in Ephesus, made him a honeybee in Ephesus, and look what happened. Folks, this isn't even just an ancient strategy.

It's been used in our modern world. I don't know if you know the name Adonirim Judson, but Adonirim Judson was an American missionary who went to Burma and landed there in 1817. But, you know, he thought when he landed there, this is crazy.

I can't go chomping around into jungles with a machete as some foreigner from America. How am I going to reach this country? So what he said is, I'm going to follow the strategy of the Apostle Paul. He went to Rangoon right here, the capital along the Bay of Bengal, and he began sharing Christ with all of the people, traffic moving through the city of Rangoon, that was headed up into the hinterlands of Burma. Eleven years after he arrived in the year 1828, there was a young man, the man's name was Kothai Bu, who came to Rangoon. He met Adonirim Judson. He came to Christ. Adonirim Judson discipled him and then sent him back to his people, the Karen people, K-A-R-E-S, in eastern Burma, western Thailand, western Laos, and a huge revival broke out because of Kothai Bu taking the message back to them. Even today, almost 200 years later, the Karen people have hundreds of Christian village schools, Christian high schools. They have over 850 self-supporting churches and over 150,000 believers today, and Adonirim Judson never left Rangoon, but he met a honeybee who did and took the message back to his people. Now that's as far as we want to go today because all of this leaves us with a profound question, and you know what our profound question is, so everybody ready? Here we go, one, two, three. So what?

Right. You say, Lon, so what? Always wanted to know where the Karen people is, now I can win Trivial Pursuit, God bless you, thank you very much. Now what difference does this make for me? Well, friends, when it comes to Paul's philosophy of strategic cities, I want you to understand that this is still a key strategy for reaching the world today, and we live in the most strategic city in the world, Washington, D.C. Change Washington, you can change the world, and it's probably the only city left that you can say that about. But you say, hey, Lon, wait a minute, stop, stop there right there. You're contradicting your own self. I mean, you said earlier today we've got all this modern technology, we've got Christian television, Christian radio, we've got Christian internet, we've got Christian publications and books. We don't need this old strategy of Paul's, this is an anachronistic strategy, it doesn't work anymore, we don't need it, it's superfluous.

No, it isn't. Friends, do you realize that there are huge segments of the world's population today for political reasons that are not open to Christian television, Christian radio, or Christian publications like China, like Indonesia, like the Muslim world and the Communist world? Do you realize that there are other large segments of our world for economic reasons that aren't available to all of this mass Christian communication we have, like countries in Africa and South America and other third world countries where people can't afford a television, where they can't afford a radio, where they can't afford a PC to go get on the internet? As a matter of fact, the best way still in our world today to reach over 50% of the world's population is to use the exact same strategy the apostle Paul used, the honeybee strategy, right here in Washington DC to set up shop and to pollinate significant members of each of these cultures as they come through this city. They come through here as diplomats. They come through here as military attachés. They come through here as foreign students and as embassy workers and as employees at the World Bank. And friends, if we can pollinate the people who come through this city that are then going to go back one day to some of these countries that we can't get into with modern technology, that is still the best way to reach half of the world's population. But this isn't just a foreign mission strategy.

It's also still a very effective strategy to reach America. Do you realize here in Washington DC we have the brightest, sharpest, most upscale young Americans in this country coming through this town? They graduate from Harvard and Yale and all these other places and they come to town here. They come to work on Capitol Hill to clerk at the Supreme Court, to work as an intern in a law firm or in a business, to be a junior officer in the Pentagon. And they want to change the world.

Well, you know what? If we can reach them while they're in this town and pollinate them with the message of Jesus while they're in this town, then maybe when they leave this town and spread out all over America, they'll go change the world, but they'll go change the world for Jesus and not for themselves anymore. This is an American strategy and a world strategy and it's why our mission statement is what it is, that we're here to make an impact on the secular people in this city. We're here to rock this city for Jesus Christ.

We're here to pollinate hundreds and thousands of honeybees in town and then help dispatch them around America and around the world to reach peoples that we can't get to any other way. You say, well Lon, that's wonderful that we're doing this as a church. I'm all for this. I mean, that's great.

Wait a minute, friends. What we're doing as an institution, what we're doing globally as a church is not the so what here. I mean, we are doing some things globally. We've got the radio and we do the house down in Anacostia and we have, you know, turkey outreach and we have angel tree Christmas and we have services like this and we have outreach July 4th down on the mall. We do some of that.

But friends, you know what? That is not how you pollinate honeybees most effectively. The way it's always been done most effectively and the way it's still done most effectively today is one person touching the life of one person. That's how Paul did it in Thessalonica. He didn't set up big global programs. He just went out one person at a time and touch people's lives. That's how Adoniram Judson did it in Rangoon.

He didn't have any big old programs. He just went out and met people one person at a time. And what I'm really saying here is if you believe in this strategy and you say, yes, Lon, I buy into our vision, then what I'm saying to you and me is the only way we're going to get this done is for you and me to become honeybees in this town, for you and me to make it our personal mission to go out and pollinate people everywhere we go, every day in this city. That's the only way it's going to happen. And I love how Peter said it. Peter said, be always ready to speak up and tell anyone who asks you while you're.