Introduction
Let’s
start with a reminder of the second missionary journey. Think of this as the
movie montage where they go through all the very brief scenes. Paul started in
Antioch, he ended up there after his first missionary journey, that was his
home base. He and his buddy Barnabas split up and he gets a new traveling
companion, Silas. During the first part, he is heading through the regions of
Galatia where he had already planted churches. He wanted to take the good news
from the Jerusalem Council (that the Christians didn’t have to become Jews, aka
circumcised). He picked up Timothy along the way because Timothy is from the
Lystra/Derbe area. Paul, Silas and Timothy head up to Troas at which point they
pick up Dr. Luke. They are probably trying to get to Ephesus, but the Spirit
says no. Instead, they head over the Philippi. While they are in Philippi
things go really well, they start a church there, but wherever Paul goes,
trouble seems to follow. A crowd gets upset, they beat Paul and Silas within an
inch of their lives, put them in jail, and then run out of town the next day.
They head over to Thessalonica, things are going pretty well there too, they
start a church there as well. The Jews there get jealous of Paul’s success, so
they get a big mob going, Paul and Silas get run out of there too. They head
over to Berea. They get better reception while they are there. The Jews and the
Gentile there are willing to hear what they have to say, but it turns out that
the Jews from Thessalonica don’t just want Paul out of their town, they want
him out of Macedonia entirely. They get together some thugs and head to Berea.
Paul has to leave so suddenly that he actually leaves Silas and Timothy behind.
The Bereans take Paul to Athens. He is there by himself for a little while
until Silas and Timothy join him. He can’t even get a church going there. He
gets some converts, but the response is so poor that he actually gets laughed
out of the city. That is where we pick up in Acts 18.
Acts
18:1 – Then Paul left Athens and went to Corinth
Ancient
Corinth
Corinth
is about 50 miles away from Athens. If you look at a current Google Earth shot,
this is Greece, southern Greece. The part to the north, cut out of the picture
is mainland Greece. This big island looking thing down at the bottom, that is
the Peloponnese. Corinth is at the tiny isthmus. It’s a strip of land that is
only about 3 miles across. It was a booming commercial center because of the
ports that it had in either sea on either side of it. Athens was the
intellectual center and Corinth was the commercial center. For ships to make it
over into Italy, they could sail all the way around the bottom which was really
dangerous. It was really hazardous water; storms could come at any time. What
they could do is sail right across Corinth which would save them 200 miles and
a lot of danger. Corinth today has a really cool canal cut across that
three-mile strip. But there were multiple attempts to build that canal in
ancient times, they recognized that it was a tiny area of land and that it
would be a good idea, but it turns out that rock is really hard. They didn’t
have modern equipment to get through the rock and it was too expensive and
dangerous, so they abandoned canal attempts three different times. The most
recent ancient one was under Nero and it just got to expensive. After he died,
they cancelled it. Instead, what they used was a road across the isthmus. It
was sometimes stone and sometimes logs. It’s still there today. What would
happen is, they would pull the ships up to the port on either the east or the
west side and it was actually cheaper and faster to drag the ships by hand over
land than it was to sail around the southern tip. The sailors would pull up, if
it was a small ship, they would drag the entire ship up to land and they would
hook it up to oxen or slaves and they would drag the whole thing across the
land. If it was a large ship, they would unload the cargo, transport the ship
and the cargo over land, and they would load it up on the other side and head
off over to Italy.
Corinth at
the time was a pretty massive city. At its zenith it was about 750,000 people.
To give you context, metro Columbus is about 800,000 people. There was an
ancient city about the size of Columbus and populations were much smaller back
then. It wasn’t that size when Paul went there because Corinth joined a
rebellion against Rome in 146BC and Rome doesn’t like it when you rebel, the
razed the city to the ground, they totally destroyed it. In 46BC Julius Caesar
realized that it was a pretty strategic area and decreed the city to be
rebuilt. By the time Paul got there in about 50AD, the city was starting to
grow and up to about 200,000 people. There was a large outcropping in the city
called the Acrocorinth. On top of there was a fortress, but there was also a
temple to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. If you consider this city, you had a
lot of people who were in and out all the time, it was a pretty transient
population. You also had sailors coming into town who had been out to sea for a
long time, so they could go up and “worship” with the temple priestesses who
were up at the temple. Are you guys picking up what I am laying down? The sad
part is that the temple priestesses were actually young girls who were sold
into slavery to the temple, so it was pretty raw, what was going on up there.
There were about 1000 of them. At night those girls would come down into the
city and serve as prostitutes. Corinth was a city that was known for its pretty
raw living. The Romans had a term, “to Corinthianize” which meant to just get
drunk and sleep around. The Romans were not known for their pure living, they
weren’t prudes or anything so if the Romans are looking at the Corinthians and
thinking that their city is messed up… it has to be bad. Sailors would show up
with a pocket full of money, leave town a few days later when their ship made
it to the other side with no money but a t-shirt that said, ‘what happens in
Corinth, stays in Corinth.’ What we have in this city is a combination of
downtown New York with Las Vegas with Daytona beach on spring break. If they
had girls gone wild it would probably have been shot right here in downtown
Corinth.
It was
quite the city. It was really sometime to behold, and Paul shows up in Corinth
in kind of a rough state. He tells us in 1 Corinthians 2 that,
I was
with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling… (1 Corinthians 2:3)
If you
consider his missionary journey, there were some highs, he was really excited
about the church in Philippi, he got a really good reception there, people were
really supportive and when he left he felt like he was leaving them in a pretty
good position with some political support. But then in city after city he had
to leave Thessalonica, he had to leave Berea, before he had the chance to get
those churches established and then he gets laughed out of Athens. When he
shows up in Corinth, he is probably by himself. Not only is he lonely and not
sure what is going to happen with his ministry, but he is also really concerned
about the groups that he left behind. He admits in 1 Thessalonians 3,
[W]hen
I could bear it no longer, I sent [Timothy] to find out about your faith, for
fear that the tempter somehow tempted you or our labors might have been in
vain. (1 Thessalonians 3:5)
As he
heads into the city of Corinth, he is thinking, ‘I am not sure why I am here, I
am not sure what is going on with the churches that I have left behind, and I
am hoping that my buddies will be back pretty soon.’ The city of Corinth, he
walked into that, and it’s like being in downtown Vegas by yourself. Paul is
standing in downtown Corinth, if it were modern day, the neon lights will be
everywhere, and so what does he do? He tries to find some companions.
Tentmaking
There
he became acquainted with a Jew named Aquila, born in Pontus, who had recently
arrived from Italy with his wife, Priscilla. They had left Italy when Claudius
Caesar deported all Jews from Rome.
Aquila,
from Pontus, it was up on the Black Sea in northern Turkey. He ended up in
Italy somehow, we don’t know where he met his wife, but they were Jewish
Christians from Italy.
Paul
lived and worked with them, for they were tentmakers just as he was.
When Paul
gets into town, the first thing he does is he tries to find some people who
were of a similar trade that he practiced. He goes and finds a shop where
Priscilla and Aquila had set up their business. It’s cool to think that Paul,
lonely, sad, a little overwhelmed, the very first people he meets are Priscilla
and Aquila. Because he was a tentmaker, he asked to join up with them. This was
a pretty normal practice if you had a trade to go into a city to find what were
basically local guilds, almost like trade unions. This is a point that I think
is actually relatively important for us. At the time, it was very normal for
rabbis to also learn a trade. Paul was a rabbi and when he would have been
studying his rabbi would have taught him to learn the word to understand it and
to spend time studying but he also needed to learn a skill that would enable
him to support himself and put food on the table. We find that is the normal
state for most Christians today. When we talk about people who have jobs, not working
for the church, we often refer to them as tentmakers.
There is a
small subset of people who have given up careers to work for the church full
time, but that is not the norm. Most people in our fellowship have 8-5 jobs
that they are working to support themselves and I want to propose that is what
most of us should plan on doing. For a couple of reasons. One because a church
needs money in order to be able to run, who is going to make the money if not
the people in the community working at jobs and offices around the city. The
people who work those jobs are the ones that are paying the bills in order for
a church to be able to accomplish is work. Also, the people we are trying to
reach are going to be people in normal life situations. We call people to follow
God, they ask how we do it and if we say, ‘well I don’t have a job, I just
follow God all the time’ they are going to say, ‘that doesn’t really work for
me.’ Instead, we have a certain credibility when we go out there and say, ‘I
work a full time job, and it’s hard, but I work hard, I am a good employee, but
my primary love is the ministry that God has given me, and I do that with my
free time and that’s an awesome life.’ And you think, there were people in the
bible who were tentmakers, they worked normal jobs and did incredible ministry
on the side, including Nehemiah and Daniel. Thank God for the ability for some
of us to be able to leave our careers to work for the church, but even before
my husband and I started to work for the church (I guess I didn’t get hired by
the church, I quit my job when we had kids) but my husband and I both had
careers before he left his job to work for the church and we would have stayed
at those careers if God had called us otherwise. It was hard, but it was worth
it. Paul didn’t consider it beneath his dignity to work really hard.
Priscilla
and Aquila
Priscilla
and Aquila; let’s talk about this couple. They were Jewish Christians, kicked
out of Rome by Claudius Caesar. There is an actual edict that we know about.
Suetonius
referred to this in his Life of Claudius (25:4): ‘as the Jews were making
constant disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus (impulsore Chresto), he
banished them from Rome’. The people expelled he called ‘Jews’, but ‘Chrestus’
seems to mean Christ (the pronunciation of ‘Christus’ and ‘Chrestus’ will have
been very similar), in which case the Jews were Christians and the disturbances
in the Jewish community had been caused by the gospel.
John R.
W. Stott, The Message of Acts: The Spirit, the Church & the World, The
Bible Speaks Today (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press,
1994), 296.
This was a
pretty normal occurrence when some Jews were coming to Christ, the Christians
Jews and the non-Christian Jews would get in a lot of conflict. The Romans
didn’t have a very high opinion of the Jews, if they say and fighting,
apparently Claudius said, ‘all of you, get out.’ This happened in AD50 and it
appears that Priscilla and Aquila were in Rome and the time and left and went
to Corinth, which would make sense as it was a big commercial center.
They were
most likely already Christians when they got to Corinth because Paul never
mentions their conversion. One distinct possibility is that we know that there
were Jews from Rome who were in Jerusalem for Pentecost and they head Peter’s
speech and came to Christ. We also don’t know who started the church in Rome,
the founders are never listed. It’s possible that Priscilla and Aquila were
part of the group that was in Pentecost, heard Peter’s speech, and went back to
Rome and helped found the church in Rome. We aren’t really sure. They become
lifelong friends of Paul. We don’t know if Paul specifically sought them out
because he had heard of them, or if God just hooked them up but in Romans 16:4
he talked about Priscilla and Aquila and how they risked their lives for him.
They are going to be there together in Corinth and next week we will see that
they go with Paul to Ephesus and eventually they go back to Rome. When he
writes the letter to the Romans he says, ‘say hi to Priscilla and Aquila, they
have a home church and their place and are lifelong friends of mind.’ Paul, at
a time when he really needed some friends, he was given Priscilla and Aquila.
Priscilla
is usually mentioned first. Some commentators say it was because she was of a
higher class than he was, and that sounds lame because Paul doesn’t care about
that stuff. When people are usually mentioned in the bible they are listed in
an order of prominence. They are one of the first power couples in the bible
and the fact that she is mentioned first means that she might have been the
more dynamic of the two. Whoever thinks that the bible is against women leaders
has not read the bible. You see a lot of mention of women being used in really
powerful ways and you see too that strong men are not intimidated by strong
women, they encourage them, they are excited about the role they have to play.
Apparently with the couple, when someone would meet Aquila, they would be like,
‘Oh are you Priscilla’s husband?’ and he would be like, ‘I sure am.’ Both Paul
and Aquila were obviously really proud of Priscilla’s contribution to the
kingdom and encouraged her role.
There they
are, in Corinth and it says,
Each
Sabbath found Paul at the synagogue, trying to convince the Jews and Greeks
alike.
This was
his normal pattern, to go first to the people who had been exposed to the word
of God.
And
after Silas and Timothy came down from Macedonia, Paul spent all his time
preaching the word.
This is
another example of the Philippians generosity. They apparently sent so much
money that Paul was able to quit his day job so that he could spend all his
time telling people about Jesus.
He
testified to the Jews that Jesus was the Messiah.
I find this
so interesting to think about, that today, if you meet someone and start
talking to someone, everyone has heard of Jesus. What we are trying to tell
people is that Jesus was more than just a good person or a good teaching, that
Jesus is the Messiah, the savior that every person needs. Back then, when Paul
was talking to the Jews, he was trying to convince them that the Messiah they
had been waiting for was Jesus. He didn’t come to save them from the political
oppression they were living under, he didn’t come to set up a new nation for
the Jews, he came to offer an even greater freedom than that, and that is
freedom from your sins. He would have used the scriptures to convince them that
every person, even the Jews, are born separate from God and because of their
sins, actually stand under God’s judgment, but that when Christ came it was in
full knowledge that his whole purpose in life was to die and the purpose of his
death was to pay for our sins because he was sinless. He would have been
showing them from the scriptures that what they actually needed was salvation
for their sins if they were willing to admit it. He was able to do that most
days of the week, again, because of the financial generosity of the
Philippians. But of course, the message that people need saved from their sins,
was not a very popular message.
Moving
on
But
when they opposed and insulted him, Paul shook the dust from his clothes and
said, “Your blood is upon your own heads—I am innocent. From now on I will go
preach to the Gentiles.”
This term
opposed and insulted him; it is possible that they actually flogged him. The
Jews had the authority to do that, but whatever happened, they not only
rejected his message, they rejected him and in really uncertain terms, too.
Paul said, ‘Fine, I fulfilled my responsibility of explaining this to you guys,
you have made it clear that you are not interested, that is your problem, I’m
going somewhere else.’ I want to spend just a moment thinking about this idea
of moving on. When it comes to bringing the message of Christ to people, it is
a hard message for people to hear. There will be some people who, even though
it is hard for them to hear, they are still excited about it, they see a need
for it eventually, not everyone responds immediately, but there will be some
people who decide that they are not interested. It’s easy to think, ‘If I love
them, if I hang in there with them, I’m not going to give up on them.’ I would
like to argue that could actually be the wrong thing to do for a couple of reasons.
One is because moving on actually respects people’s free will. God wants people
to make a decision for him that involved their will. He doesn’t want to force
anything on anybody, God is a gentleman, he offers a relationship with himself,
he is the one who paid for it, and yet he is not going to force anyone to
accept that. If you have a guy who keeps asking a girl out and she keeps saying
no, at a certain point he becomes a stalker. And God is not a stalker. At a
certain point, when people say no, ‘that’s cool, that’s up to you, I can’t
force anything on you.’ And so, we want to communicate that same message to
people. Also, staying with someone and presenting them with the gospel over and
over and over again might actually inoculate them against it. Every time they
say no to God, they have to harden their heart just a little bit more. If you
keep forcing your way in there, it might actually be doing spiritual harm to
them because they night need some time to think about, and who know what will
have to happen in their lives. Finally, we will miss finding the willing
people. If you keep focusing on the same three people who aren’t interested,
there might be 15 people over here who would be interested, they don’t know
until they hear it. We need to be wise about this, and that is not to say that
we aren’t patient with people, that is not to say that we don’t try to overcome
some of their obstacles and barriers, (that is what people did for me) but to
keep hammering on people over and over again, really the point is that we need
to trust God’s sovereignty. We need to believe that if we back off, it gives
him room of accomplishing things in their lives that we are not capable of
doing. They might need to go through several different experiences for their need
level to rise and before they are willing to admit that they need God in their
lives. That is what Paul did.
Then he
left and went to the home of Titius Justus, a Gentile who worshiped God
and
lived next door to the synagogue.
Paul’s
like, ‘you want some shade? I’ll thrown some shade, I’ll set up shop right
here.’ That’s like leaving a Mexican restaurant and setting up a taco truck in
the parking lot. Justus apparently had a nice big house.
Crispus,
the leader of the synagogue, and everyone in his household believed in the
Lord.
That’s not
looking too good for the synagogue, not only does he set up shop right next
door, but he gets the leader of the synagogue and his whole family converted.
You can tell Paul is proud of this one, remember when I lead the leader of the
synagogue to Christ?
…I
baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius… (1 Corinthians 1:14)
Moving
out into the Community
Many
others in
Corinth also heard Paul, became believers, and were baptized.
God
blessed this move away from the synagogue to go straight out into the
community. This seems really cool, but then you start to think about it and you
realize that most Christians would be like, ‘wait, he left the religious
people, the people who were listening to the word, and he headed out into the
community, to the people who were living these raw, sinful lives? I don’t know…
it just seems like there are some people who are too far from God and who would
not be interested in hearing what the bible has to say, especially about sin,
that is not what they are interested in hearing.’ Sometimes this is true, but
that attitude could indicate a couple of possible underlying thoughts. One
might actually be self-righteousness on the part of Christians. To say that
they are sinners and they would never be interested in the claims of Christ
because they are so sinful, (unlike me) could be part of it. Some of it could
be intimidation. To look out at people who are living really sinful, messed up
lives, who seem far from God, it’s just easy to look at that think that we
couldn’t relate to that, and what do I have to offer them? But we find, time
and again, that the people who are farthest from God, might be the closest to
admitting their need for him. The people who are out there, who are not even
trying to live according to God’s standard in any way, they are just chasing
experience after experience, drug after drug, sexual episode after sexual
episode because there is a deep void in their life, and they know that nothing
is meeting it. Maybe this next experience or thing, and then it doesn’t.
Chris’s
Story
That was my experience. I grew up in a religious household, I even went to a religious
school all through high school. I was taught that good people go to heaven and
that it is by going to church that you are a good person. And yet, I knew, deep
down, even as a little kid that I was not a good person and I worried about
that. But, thought that was what I was supposed to do and that was what good
people do. Except, the shame and the guilt were there and then just got worse
when I became sexually active in high school. I started dating a guy and was
with him for seven year and so we started having sex in high school, it was
shortly before my senior year that I got pregnant with him and got an abortion,
which made the shame and the guilt even worse. And yet, I determined that I
would stay with this guy. In the back of my mind I thought that would make up
for the decision that I had made. I stumbled through my senior year, miserable
and depressed. I grew up in upstate New York and we ended up at two separate colleges.
I ended up
at Penn State for my first two years of college. I got in with a crowd of girls
who were a year older than I was. They were already into the party scene and
knew where all the frats were. I went out to all the frat parties with them. I
had not been a drinker in high school but it’s not that hard to become a
drinker in college. I started going to those parties, looking back on it now, I
think it was God’s provision that I was still dating that guy because that kept
me from getting into a lot crazier experience than what I went through. My
first two years it was drinking more and more, but there were certain bounds on
that. At a certain point, halfway through my sophomore year, my boyfriend who
was at the different college said that I should transfer and live with him. The
only good part of the story is that the college that he chose was Ohio State.
The reason I am in Columbus is because I followed a guy here.
We moved
in together, lived together for a year. Of course, halfway through that year he
decided that he was going to start seeing other people. The other unfortunate
thing was that he was really into pornography, so his computer was sitting in
our computer and the screensaver was about 50 different pictures that just
cycled through, so I had to let that be in my living room. About ¾ of the way
through my junior year he said he didn’t want to live together anymore. I
didn’t know what to do and didn’t have anywhere to go so I joined a sorority.
At this point we were basically broken up, but we were still kind of together,
if you know what I mean.
But
heading back into the fraternity lifestyle was back in drinking, started
messing around with other guys, and so it was two full years of that. To the
point where I am looking around and I’m like, I don’t think I have any friends
left. My drinking had expanded such that, it started our Friday/Saturday, and
then it becomes Thursday/Friday/Saturday and then it becomes
Thursday/Friday/Saturday/Tuesday which was also gobbling up a large part of my
income. When you go to the frat parties, the beer is free for the girls, but
not when you go to the bars. So, I was spending more and more of my income on
alcohol to go out and get drunk almost every single night of the week. It was
to the point where Wednesday was the only night that I wasn’t going out because
there was no one to go out with.
It was at
that point that for some reason I drove back out to upstate New York and I was
hanging out with a friend of mine whose husband had just started medical school
and she was saying she was really lonely. I don’t even know why these words
came out of my mouth, but I said, ‘you should find a bible study or something.’
And I’m driving back to Columbus and I’m like, ‘I should find a bible study.’ I
had a friend who worked at the coffee shop down on campus who I knew was in a
bible study and I walked up to her and was like, ‘Can I go to your bible
study?’ and she was like, ‘Yeah.’ So, I went. I am going to date myself a
little bit here, my first college home church was a harvest meeting in fall of
1997 when the college group planted their third home church. I am sitting
there, this was in the basement at 16th, that was where we used to
meet for CT and there were guys who lived in the basement. It was a very
strange place. But I remember sitting there at that harvest meeting and I was
like, there’s something different. I started coming out to home church, I
started coming to central teaching, I went to almost every single meeting for 6
months and I was sitting under the word and I had this weird combination of the
religious background and the sinful background and so on one hand I felt really
bad about myself but on the other hand I felt like a good person.
So, the
grace of God took a while to sink into my thick skull, but I had actually gone
to church service at my old church down on campus. I was sitting there one
night, and I looked up and what was illuminated in that building was a
stained-glass cross. I was sitting there after 6 months of sitting under the
word and was like, ‘that’s what God did for me.’ The grace of God says that he
knows everything that I have ever done, he knows everything I ever will do, and
he endured the cross so that he could pay for my sins. So that he could bring
me into a relationship with him, and all I need to do is admit it and ask for
it, and I did. I opened my heart that night and the love of God poured into my
heart. I remember sitting in that church service and the love of God rose up
off of those pages in a third dimension that I had never seen before. To think that there are people who are far
from God, God looked out and he saw me, and he was like, ‘yes she is far, but
she is mine.’ God didn’t take that attitude with me; Paul certainly didn’t take
that attitude with anyone in Corinth. He spent his time in Corinth trying to
convince that they had been saved.
For
consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the
flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things
of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world
to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the
despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the
things that are, so that no man may boast before God. (1 Corinthians 1:26-29)
These
Corinthians, they were like, ‘I’m so messed up, I have made so many wrong
decisions,’ and Paul’s like, ‘Yeah, that is the point. Then the emphasis is on
God’s grace.’ And praise God for that. How’s Paul feeling at this point?
Excited about how his church is going, it is growing by leaps and bounds, God
has really blessed his ministry. Well, apparently, not because it says,
Paul’s
Vision
One
night the Lord spoke to Paul in a vision and told him, “Don’t be afraid! Speak
out! Don’t be silent! For I am with you, and no one will attack and harm you,
for many people in this city belong to me.”
I like the wording better, ‘I have many people in this city.’ Paul, ironically, at the
time when his ministry was going the best, was maybe feeling the worst. Some of
it may have been that God has an enemy and when he sees that things are going
well, Satan comes in and just comes after us and makes us think, ‘are you sure
this is going to work? Are you sure that this is going to come to anything?’
Paul was very realistic about all the troubles that he had run into. It’s
possible that part of what he feared was another beating. Paul was not a
sadist; I am sure he wasn’t looking forward to that in any way. I think, though,
that Paul is looking at all these Corinthians coming into relationships with
Christ and he is afraid that he is going to get run out of town before they
have a chance for a foundation to be built. He knows that they didn’t’ grow up
knowing anything about what it means to follow God. What if I have to leave
these little baby Christians behind who have never even seen the word until
they walked into the house that I am in. What is going to happen? And what does
Jesus say? He says, ‘It’s okay. You don’t have to be afraid.’
This is
not the only vision that Paul gets. Jesus confronts him once to be like, ‘Stop
persecuting me, follow me.’ And then there are multiple other visions where he
comes and he encourages Paul, which I find encouraging. He is so tough, he is
the guy that at Lystra they stoned him and left him for dead and after
everybody leaves, he stands up and walks back into the city, that is tough. I
look at that and I’m like, I don’t even understand what that is like, and yet
here is Paul in Corinth and he is apparently so discouraged, so afraid that
Jesus himself visits Paul to say, “Don’t be afraid.” Fear not is the most often
recorded command in the bible, which means fear must be a pretty normal thing
to struggle with. I know that I get afraid of a lot of things. To read
something like this, I think, that’s encouraging. He is telling Paul, ‘The only
thing that I need you to do right now is to not quit. I need you to hang in
there.’ I like this quote from the book 1776, I love reading biographies of
leaders because you see that they are actually pretty normal people. This one
is about George Washington.
[Washington]
was not a brilliant strategist, not a gifted orator, not an intellectual. At
several crucial moments he had shown marked indecisiveness. He had made serious
mistakes in judgment…[But] above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake
and he never gave up.
David
McCullough, 1776 (NY, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 294.
We look
now and we talk about George Washington and what an amazing leader he was, well
the two main things that made him a really good leader were that he learned
from his mistakes and he never quit. That was a war of independence that, on
the one hand, as an American I am glad we won, but on the other hand, a million
years from now are we going to be talking about the war of independence? But a
million years from now are we going to be meeting the Corinthians that are in
heaven because Paul didn’t give up? Are we going to be meeting people who know
God because you didn’t give up? Because you hung in there, because you trusted
that God still had a plan.
So Paul
stayed there for the next year and a half, teaching the word of God.
The
Church at Corinth
If I am
not supposed to go anywhere, I won’t go anywhere, and I will stay right here.
Thank God he had a year and half because consider the church at Corinth. If you
have ever read the book of 1 Corinthians, you know that this church was insane.
Chapters 1-4 is all about division in the church and competition, he has to
spend a long time talking about it not mattering what leader you follow because
we are all following Christ, which is interesting because if you think about
it, on the one hand, it was a lot of people from really raw backgrounds, slaves
and who knows how many of those temple priestesses and sailors, but it wasn’t
just the lowest of the low who were being won, you see in Romans 16,
Erastus,
the city treasurer greets you…(Romans 16:23)
They were
apparently winning people also from high socio-economic status. They won the
leader of the synagogue; they won that guy Justus and he had a large enough
house for Paul to meet in. In fact, if you go to Corinth today, you can see a
stone out in the middle of the field, it says, “Erastus” and then it says underneath
there, ‘this stone paid for because he donated the money.’ You know how when
you go to parks and they have the bricks with people’s names on them because
they have donated money? That is apparently what Erastus had to do. The
collectors were coming around trying to collect money to build the road in
Corinth and Erastus being the city treasurer was like, ‘Alright,’ it’s like
when your friend has the girl scout cookies and you have to buy a box just to
be nice. And, true story, this is out in the middle of a field, it isn’t marked
in anyways, and it turns out if you just walk through and archeological dig
like you know what you’re doing and walk and stumble around in the field and
you look down and take a picture and then the people at the dig are like, “hey
you aren’t supposed to be here!” But it’s there! It’s clear evidence that a guy
named Erastus really was a city official just like Paul said he was, just like
Luke said he was.
Chapter
1-4 is division and competition and chapters 5-6, sexual immorality including,
‘can you tell the one guy not to sleep with his stepmom?’ Because even the
Corinthians think that is gross. And, Christians bringing lawsuits against one
another. Chapter 10 you have the Corinthians unbridled arrogance, they were not
that far from Athens, plus they were really wealthy, plus they felt like they
‘we are rich and have travelling philosophers all the time, so we are really
smart.’ And Paul has to tell them that they aren’t that cool, compared to God’s
wisdom you aren’t even that wise. You also have chapter 11 where he has to tell
them to quit getting drunk at communion. This is after he left and spent almost
two years in Corinth explaining how to follow God and the he is following up
later to be like, ‘yes wine at communion is fine but not for that much
drinking’ plus the rich people were eating in front of the poor people. It was
complete chaos in this city. He invested a lot of time and energy into laying
the right foundation but then he had to do a lot of follow up. Which is another
cool thing about Paul. He liked moving on to the next city, he liked bringing
the message out to as many people as possible about God’s grace, but he was
willing to stay with people as well, for as long as necessary in order to get
those churches established.
So Paul
stayed there for the next year and a half, teaching the word of God. But when Gallio
became governor of Achaia,
Who is
Gallio? It turns out he was a really well-known government official. He was
sent to Achaia to be the governor of that province. There is an actual stone
that talks about Gallio, exactly when he was in Achaia. One of the reasons that
this is important is that it is one of the most precisely dated points in all
of Acts so we can date everything else out from that because Gallio arrived in
Corinth in about July/August of AD 51 and proconsuls only stayed for about a
year, plus he got sick, so he had to leave by about 52. So, we know exactly
when it is that he was brought before Gallio, it was fall of 51. Probably what
had happened was that the Jews saw that there was a new governor in town, so
maybe they could work some stuff in order to get Paul run out.
some
Jews rose up together against Paul and brought him before the governor for judgment.
This word
judgement is the word Bema, so they brought him before the Bema seat. That was
a platform that was in front of Gallio’s house. If anyone had any problems,
they could bring the case to the house and Gallio would come out on the
platform so that he could hear the case and make a ruling. They brought Paul
before the Bema Seat.
They
accused Paul of “persuading people to worship God in ways that are contrary to
our law.”
Notice
that they left it a little ambiguous because is it contrary to Jewish Law? Is
it contrary to Roman Law? They know it isn’t contrary to Roman Law, but maybe
if they just say Law, they will think Paul is breaking the law in some way and
Romans were not kind of people who broke the law.
But
just as Paul started to make his defense, Gallio turned to Paul’s accusers and
said, “Listen, you Jews, if this were a case involving some wrongdoing or a
serious crime, I would have a reason to accept your case.
Gallio, he
was the younger brother of the stoic philosopher Seneca and Seneca was like,
‘there is not a nicer guy than Gallio,’ but the Romans were really
anti-Semitic. He had no interest in helping the Jews in anyway, but he was also
very discerning, so he saw right through what the Jews were doing, and he was
like, ‘Yeah, I don’t think that Paul is actually doing anything wrong, so
whatever.’
But
since it is merely a question of words and names and your Jewish law, take care
of it yourselves. I refuse to judge such matters.”
It wasn’t
exactly a ruling for Paul, because before he even got the chance to get a word
out of his mouth, the case was dismissed, he wasn’t interested. But it was also
not a ruling against Paul, and this is a really important point because if we
think that Acts was actually a legal brief written by Luke for Paul’s defense
in Rome, part of what he is showing is legal precedent here. Gallio was a very
well-known Roman official, he was headed back to Rome after he got sick and
left Achaia, and so the whole point of this is that Romans officials never had
a problem with Paul and Christianity, it was only the Jews that had a problem
with Paul. It is Gallio saying that Paul hadn’t broken any Roman law and so
Luke wrote that down. This is actually a really helpful ruling both for Paul
and Christianity.
And he
threw them out of the courtroom. The crowd then grabbed Sosthenes, the leader
of the synagogue, and beat him right there in the courtroom.
This is
the guy who must have replaced Crispus. Sosthenes was apparently part of the
crowd who thought it was a good idea to bring him before Gallio, and not only
were they dismissed but they were completely humiliated. So, what does the
crowd do? They turn on Sosthenes.
But
Gallio paid no attention.
Again, he
was really anti-Semitic and not helpful. It’s possible that they even flogged
Sosthenes right there too. But check this out. This is so cool. This is the
start of his first letter to the Corinthians.
This
letter is from Paul, chosen by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ
Jesus, and from our brother Sosthenes. (1 Corinthians 1:1)
It’s not a
very common name back then. We don’t know exactly how it happened, but what I
picture is Sosthenes lying there, beaten, abandoned by his fellow synagogue
members who are really pissed at him and Paul walks over. ‘I’ve got a house
right next door to the synagogue. You want to hang there?’ And Sosthenes
apparently went with him. It would have been really easy for Paul to be bitter
at this guy but instead he reached out to him and apparently actually won him
to Christ.
Conclusions
That’s
Paul’s time in Corinth.
It’s
always too soon to quit. Paul was dejected when he got to Corinth, he was
apparently pretty depressed halfway through his time there, and yet he decided
that he was going to hang in there. The best leaders, but especially the best
leaders for God are not always the most gifted (although Paul was really
gifted) they are not always the toughest (although Paul was really tough) they
are the people that refuse to quit, they are the people who hang in there no
matter what. There will be so many times when you will be tempted to quit.
Either when things are not going well and so it is easy to just jump ship at
that point, and sometimes when things are going well and it’s overwhelming and
Satan is moving against you in ways that make you feel so bad about everything.
It is a victory just to hang in there sometimes.
God
encourages his servants. He finds ways to move into our lives, you are probably
not going to get a vision like Paul, that would be cool but that isn’t the way
that it works. It wasn’t just the vision from Jesus he also had his friendships
with Priscilla and Aquila, Silas and Timothy showed up, it turns out that they
actually had good news from the Thessalonians, and he got to see people’s lives
transform. There were many sources of encouragement that God provided for him
and you’ll find the same for you as you try to serve God. The more you serve
God, the more encouragement he will provide for you.
You might
be surprised about who responds to the gospel. Paul did not decide ahead of
time who would be receptive, he just took the gospel to as many people as he
could, and he let them be the ones to decide. That church in Corinth apparently
continued on. It had its problems, but there were really good things going on
there after Paul left that city.