I. Traveling :18-21
From Corinth to Ephesus and Beyond
:18 – After Gallio’s favorable decision, Paul stayed on in Corinth awhile longer, teaching and preaching freely and without fear. God had affirmed his ministry and the fact that he’d be protected by the hand of God. Then, taking with him his friends Aquila and Priscilla, he left and sailed for Syria.
What to make of this haircut mentioned in verse 18? Haircuts aren’t usually newsworthy, and yet this one makes it into the Bible, and thus it’s worthy of at least a short mention. Paul had taken a vow of some sort, a promise between himself and God, and the haircut signaled the end of the duration of the vow. Usually, such vows were taken in thankfulness to God for blessings past, or in anticipation of blessings yet future, and the Nazirite vow, which is almost certainly the one spoken of here, involved abstinence from alcohol and from cutting one’s hair.
We don’t usually take vows that often, although we do so when we get married, when we appear as a witness in court, and after a fashion, when we make New Year’s resolutions. I don’t make them anymore, but I have held to one New Year’s resolution for almost 40 years. Before I tell you what it was, let me give you a tip on keeping New Year’s resolutions: make them easy! When I was a kid, I made a New Year’s resolution not to drink tomato juice. I’ve never since had tomato juice. But it was an easy resolution to keep, because I don’t like tomato juice! Actually, since I haven’t had it in almost 40 years, I might like it now…hmmm…not that that little tidbit has anything to do with today’s message, but I thought I’d toss it in. Luke doesn’t dwell much on this vow, though, so neither will we.
:19 – Aquila & Priscilla, new friends Paul had made in Corinth, moved their business from Corinth to Ephesus as they joined Paul on his trip, or perhaps they left their business in the care of another and just opened a new branch.
II. Transitioning :22-23
From 2nd to 3rd Missionary Journey
:22-23 – Paul transitions from his second missionary journey right into his third, the dividing line between the two being that he went back to his sending church, in Antioch, and spent some time there, undoubtedly giving a report of all that had been taking place (and what a report that was)!
• God had given him a vision to go to Macedonia (after God said “no” to us twice!), through a man who appeared to him in a dream
• Went to Philippi, where we got snot kicked out of us and thrown in jail
• But God broke us out of jail with an earthquake, and the jailer came to faith in Christ
• We went to Thessalonica, but had to sneak out of there at night
• We went to Berea, and they studied the Scriptures to figure out whether or not Jesus really was the Messiah, as we were teaching
• But the guys who gave us trouble in Thessalonica followed us there
• I went to Athens, and got to speak to the leading philosophers of the city
• Then I went to Corinth, and was kinda depressed, but Jesus appeared to me
Kinda ho-hum stuff, huh? Right…now, for the person who would suggest that living life as a follower of Christ is dull, or for the person who would suggest that real men don’t do that “religion thing”, that only girly-men follow Jesus, I offer the apostle Paul as Exhibit A to disprove those wrong assertions. Here was a courageous man’s man, who boldly served God though it cost him pain and humiliation, and ultimately his life. But I’m pretty sure that if we had the opportunity to interview Paul and ask him about his life, he’d tell us that despite the hardships and obstacles he faced, the pain and the problems, it’s a life he’d not trade for any other.
The hurried manner in which Luke describes both Paul’s arrival back at his sending church of Corinth, and Paul’s leaving again to venture forth on another mission, is likely indicative of the fact that Paul was eager to get going again. And thus he launches out for a third, and what would prove to be his last, missionary trip. Then in verses :24-26, Luke, the author of Acts, takes a few minutes to put a parenthesis into the text, and in so doing introduces us for the first time to a character who played a major role in the building up of the early church, a man by the name of Apollos.
III. Truth :24-26
From Eloquent and Fervent
to Accurate and Faithful
I want to spend the rest of our time together talking about the advantage of having Christian friends. I can’t stress enough the importance of this. We all need friends, a truth driven home to me more poignantly just the last several weeks as one of my best friends was suddenly taken from us. And for the follower of Jesus Christ, it’s absolutely indispensable to make solid, close, Christian friends. I didn’t say we need to give up our friendships with people who are not believers; that’s not true. But to cultivate relationships with people who share our faith and will share our eternity in God’s presence is a priceless thing. And so, from these verses, several truths about
Christian Friends:
• See the potential in us
When you looked at Apollos, there was a lot to see, and the Scripture records some of those things:
• Good speaker
He was so good, in fact, that there were members of the church at Corinth who followed Apollos and denigrated Paul, because Paul was not a silver-tongued orator. Paul addressed this in I Corinthians 3, reminding these Corinthian believers that he and Apollos were on the same team, but the reason why there was even controversy was because Apollos was such a great orator.
By the way, the fact that a person is a great speaker doesn’t mean he is worthy of being listened to. There are plenty of silver-tongued orators you can turn your TV to whose message leaves much to be desired, and I put that very mildly. We live in an American Idol culture, which causes us to make heroes out of people who can entertain us, and don’t think this doesn’t creep over into matters of faith as well. This is why it’s so essential that the first thing we do when we hear anyone claiming to speak for God is to line up that person’s message alongside the Bible and make certain that the two synch up, that the Bible is treated well (instead of a verse here or there being ripped from context to make it seem to teach something it does not!). God has blessed the church with people who are good speakers, but it’s more than that!
• Good student of Scriptures
He had what we call the Old Testament, and he’d diligently read and studied it; this is a great practice. If you are serious about your relationship with God, you must find a way to get the Bible into your brain. Our elders will be talking this evening about one such method that we might introduce here at Red Oak to help us all become better Bible students. Not only did he study the Bible, it’s possible he might have written some of it. Martin Luther was the first to surmise that Apollos might be the writer of the book of Hebrews (whose author is hidden to the ages); Luther might well be correct. At any rate, this was a man who knew his Bible.
• Well-instructed
Not only in the things of God, but also in general; Alexandria, in Egypt, rivaled Athens as a cultural center. We are not sure where Apollos got all this training; it could be that some of John Baptist’s disciples, who accepted Christ as Messiah, had ventured to Alexandria and won Apollos to faith, but regardless, he had a good command of certain of the truths of Christian faith.
• Fervent in spirit
This guy was sincere! And he was enthusiastic! If you break down the word “enthusiasm”, you find that it’s component parts mean “in God”; here was a guy who was jazzed about God, and it radiated over into the rest of his life.
• Accurate regarding Jesus
His basic facts about the life of Jesus, and Jesus’ identity as the Messiah, were right on as well. What he said was correct—but what he said didn’t go far enough.
• Knew only the baptism of John
He had a good command of certain of the truths of Christian faith. Apparently, though, he was stuck on John Baptist’s teaching, and had no knowledge of anything else.
John Baptist’s message:
1. What God wants is a repentant heart, more than animal sacrifices, and this repentance ought to demonstrate its reality in a life that is changed.
2. Baptism symbolized this repentance, a clean break with the past.
3. The Messiah was coming, One Who would take the work of God to its climax, and in Whom all of the truth would be revealed.
Question: What’s missing?
Cross? Resurrection from the grave? Coming of the Holy Spirit? These were foreign to John’s message, and likely foreign to Apollos’ as well.
Here’s where scholars are divided: does this suggest that Apollos, for all his learning, ability, and good intentions, was not yet a believer? Some believe that to be the case, and they are likely correct, that all that Apollos understood was the message that John Baptist preached, that Jesus was the coming Messiah, and that people needed to repent of their sin in order to be ready to meet the Messiah. One who takes this position says,
Listen to the words of Jesus in Matthew 7:
21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’
The point I’m making is that there are many people who will spend an eternity separated from God, who fully believe that they are in God’s good graces because they are good people, or nice people, or religious people. But whenever we try to make it on our own merits, instead of relying solely on the merits of Jesus, we are in grave danger of our eternal souls.
He was mistaken; his message was incomplete. He wasn’t giving people the whole story. But Aquila and Priscilla saw in this young man some incredible potential; here was someone who could make a great impact for the cause and the Kingdom of Christ. That’s what good Christian friends do. And I want to tell you, church, that I see a whole lot in so many of you, a great deal of potential to go beyond where you’ve ever been, to be more than maybe you think you’ll ever amount to. That’s what friends do.
• Don’t just tell us what we want to hear
We’ve got this twisted idea of love today, this poor understanding of friendship, that suggests that love means never confronting a friend, never correcting a friend, never suggesting that a friend or a loved one might be wrong. Love, according to this twisted definition, always gives me what I want. Here’s the way this plays out: churches and Christians who in love are willing to confront sin are called “judgmental” or “unloving” or “intolerant” or “bigoted”. Sure, there are some professing Christians who are unloving in their manner, and that’s just wrong. But to speak the truth in love is what the Bible compels us to do, and we do no one any favors to focus on speaking in love so much that we fail to speak truth.
I’m sure there was at least an element of embarrassment in Apollos’ heart. Here he’d been standing up and speaking, ostensibly for God, and come to find out, he’s been only giving a partial message. Though he was a truth seeker, he nonetheless must have felt that little sting of embarrassment to find out he didn’t have it right. In that sense, maybe he didn’t want to hear that he’d been wrong. And yet true Christian friends don’t just tell us what we want to hear; they tell us what we need to hear. That’s just what Aquila and Priscilla did; they took this well-intentioned, sincere young man aside, and had the guts to tell him that he didn’t have all of the story down.
Let me remind you of one upshot of this: there is such a thing as truth, and there is such a thing as error. More than this, while sincerity is a fine virtue when compared with insincerity, merely being sincere doesn’t count for much. There are plenty of people who are sincere in what they believe, but they are sincerely wrong. This was the case with Apollos; his sincerity never came into question, but his sincerity wasn’t enough. And there are people who live this life hoping that, in the end, God will give them brownie points for being sincere, good people—but it doesn’t work that way! Why should it? It doesn’t work that way in life! You can be sincere in believing that the law of gravity doesn’t apply to you, but test that theory by jumping off Stone Mountain, and see how much good that sincerity does you! Yet we think that, when it comes to God, all we need to be is sincere, even if we are mistaken!
Or try this one out: there are people who like to imagine what God’s like, and then live their lives on that basis. “I like to imagine that God is __________”, and then they’ll act in keeping with that belief. Can I suggest that if there really is no God, then that’s fine reasoning, sort of like imagining what the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny must look like. But if there really is a God in Heaven, then what you imagine Him to be makes no difference; how you like to “conceive of” Him is useless; the God you make in your own image is a false god. Chris and Eddie and I went to a men’s conference in Charlotte on Friday night, and a statement was made to this effect:
“There is the God we want, and there is the God Who is. They are not the same God. The turning point of our lives is when we stop seeking the God we want and start seeking the God Who is.”
Patrick Morley
Apollos had a truth encounter, and it changed him from being merely eloquent and fervent to being a man whose heart was changed from the inside out, a new creation, as II Corinthians puts it, a man who became accurate and faithful.
• Have our best interests at heart
Priscilla and Aquila could have publicly denounced him, ridiculed his incomplete understanding, taken up his shortcomings and deficiencies in understanding with everybody else. But because they saw the great potential in him, and because they were people who truly had Apollos’ best interests at heart, they took him aside privately and taught him the truth, in the hope that he would go on to real, full, deep faith in Christ. A real friend is looking out for what’s best for me, and that segues into the next:
• Are concerned that we glorify God
Here’s where a true Christian friend differs from those who are not followers of Christ: Christians should be more concerned that friends be holy than that they be happy, that they glorify God more than that they make a buck or get a promotion or whatever. In the end, the bottom line for the follower of Jesus is that in whatever we do, we bring glory to God. That’s what I want for my friends, that they draw closer to Him, that they live to please Him, that above all, they glorify God.
• Support us in our growth
As a Christian friend, I want my friends to be the best people they can be. Look at what happened in verse 27: the Christians “greased the skids” for Apollos in his desire to go to Achaia and be a witness of his newfound faith there. Undoubtedly, this young man grew not only in his understanding, but in his ability to minister; that’s pretty evident from reading the text, as this sincere but confused young man became an agent of God’s grace to the church in Achaia, and one who could effectively go toe-to-toe with those who opposed Christ and prove that Christ was indeed the promised Messiah of Israel. And backing him up were all these brothers and sisters in Christ there in Ephesus.
And the final point is more a summary than a fresh point; Christian friends
• Make us more than we could be alone
Sometimes, I need more than a little help from my friends. But I can’t imagine where I would be without the people God has brought into my life, the godly Christian people who have so greatly contributed to the person I’m becoming. Show me a person who calls himself a “self-made man”, and I’ll show you a prideful person who probably isn’t nearly the person he imagines himself to be.
I hope you’ll indulge me revisiting this subject again, but the sudden loss of my very close friend three weeks ago continues to be for me a sobering wakeup call. It’s made me think all over again about what’s important in life; I’ve come again to the conclusion that Jesus knew what He was talking about when He said, in effect, “love God. Love people. Everything else is just details.” I saw my old high school coach Monday for the first time in nearly 30 years. He made an impact in my life. I reconnected in Charlotte with a friend that I had only seen once in over 15 years, and that was at Rusty’s funeral. I’ve sent emails to some friends who’ve walked the road alongside me in the past, who’ve ministered to me, and told them that I was learning all over again the importance of friendship, and would it be OK if I gave them a call now and again instead of just doing life as though they weren’t around. I’ve remembered again that having friends—and being a godly friend—matters more than the stuff that we spend our lives trying to accumulate, the money we work to earn, any fame we might aspire to, the plaudits of this world.
As I look down this list of what Apollos’ friends did for him, I’m inspired again to make sure that this is the kind of friend I’m being to people. Take a few minutes around the tables, if you would, and just talk together about how friends have made a difference in your life, and specifically, if you are able, about how Christian friends have helped you get on, or stay on, track.
