I Keep Going to the River to Pray

I’m not an X Factor devotee but I caught the start of the ‘Live Shows’ earlier this evening. If you were watching you will have heard Paul Akister singing Ella Henderson’s Ghost. The song (first released in 2014) includes the lyric: ‘I keep going to the river to pray / Cos I need something that can wash out the pain.’ I’m not sure the story behind those lyrics, but for me there a real echo of a story found in the Bible book of the Acts of the Apostles.

In Acts chapter 16 the apostle Paul arrived in the European city of Philippi, and after several days, he and his friends headed down to the local river. There they expected to find ‘a place of prayer’. So arriving at the river, they find a group of women, and one of those women was called Lydia. Acts tells us that Lydia ‘was a worshiper of God’. Here was a woman who had a respect for God, who had some kind of background in Christian things, and who was ‘spiritual’ enough to be down at the river, a place of prayer. We know from earlier in the chapter Lydia was a businesswoman, she’d a family but there was something missing. Acts 16 vs 14 tells us that Paul started to share with her a ‘message’. We know from elsewhere that Paul’s message was a message about Jesus. A message about how through His death and resurrection lives could be washed clean, and pain could give way to peace.

So what does Lydia have to do? Well in many ways the big message of Acts 16 is that it wasn’t about what Lydia did, it was about God did. ‘The Lord opened her heart’. Time and time again this is how it works. God opens people’s hearts as His message is shared, His Spirit moves in, and lives are changed.  Lydia simply had to go with it … and all that from ‘going to the river to pray.’