Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

I’m not looking for a show of hands, but I wonder how many of us believe that God wants us to be safe or healthy or prosperous or generally happy with our circumstances?

I mean in this life… I wonder how many of us (though we may or may not say it out loud) think it is some odd or strange occurrence if we or our loved ones are in physical danger… or mortally ill… or experiencing financial disaster… or in highly stressful or hostile or miserable life-circumstances.

Let me ask this another way… again, please don’t raise your hands… though it would be very interesting to know… Do you believe that God ever means for you to experience danger or illness or poverty or extreme relational/circumstantial discomfort?

… Do you believe that God ever intentionally creates such things in your life, or in the lives of anyone else, for the purpose of converting the soul… or producing spiritual maturity… or advancing the gospel… or building up the local church?

I believe our passage today speaks to all of this and more, and I pray that God will help us to come to know Him better and to love and trust Him more even as we consider the Scripture together today.

We are picking up with the Apostle Paul’s final leg of his second missionary journey.

Let’s read Acts 18 together, and (with God’s help) let’s try to draw out what we might learn and apply from there.

Scripture Reading

Acts 18:1–23 (ESV)

1 After this Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. 2 And he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome.

And he went to see them, 3 and because he was of the same trade he stayed with them and worked, for they were tentmakers by trade.

4 And he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath, and tried to persuade Jews and Greeks.

5 When Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia, Paul was occupied with the word, testifying to the Jews that the Christ was Jesus.

6 And when they opposed and reviled him, he shook out his garments and said to them, “Your blood be on your own heads!

I am innocent.

From now on I will go to the Gentiles.”

7 And he left there and went to the house of a man named Titius Justus, a worshiper of God.

His house was next door to the synagogue.

8 Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed in the Lord, together with his entire household.

And many of the Corinthians hearing Paul believed and were baptized.

9 And the Lord said to Paul one night in a vision, “Do not be afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent, 10 for I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people.”

11 And he stayed a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them.

12 But when Gallio was proconsul of Achaia, the Jews made a united attack on Paul and brought him before the tribunal, 13 saying, “This man is persuading people to worship God contrary to the law.”

14 But when Paul was about to open his mouth, Gallio said to the Jews, “If it were a matter of wrongdoing or vicious crime, O Jews, I would have reason to accept your complaint.

15 But since it is a matter of questions about words and names and your own law, see to it yourselves.

I refuse to be a judge of these things.”

16 And he drove them from the tribunal.

17 And they all seized Sosthenes, the ruler of the synagogue, and beat him in front of the tribunal.

But Gallio paid no attention to any of this.

18 After this, Paul stayed many days longer and then took leave of the brothers and set sail for Syria, and with him Priscilla and Aquila.

At Cenchreae he had cut his hair, for he was under a vow.

19 And they came to Ephesus, and he left them there, but he himself went into the synagogue and reasoned with the Jews.

20 When they asked him to stay for a longer period, he declined.

21 But on taking leave of them he said, “I will return to you if God wills,” and he set sail from Ephesus.

22 When he had landed at Caesarea, he went up and greeted the church, and then went down to Antioch.

23 After spending some time there, he departed and went from one place to the next through the region of Galatia and Phrygia, strengthening all the disciples.

Main Idea:

God works through both good and bad life-circumstances to bring about both the conversion (i.e., spiritual life and justification) and the edification (i.e., spiritual growth and maturity) of His people.

Sermon

1. Setting the Scene (v1-4)

“1 After this [i.e., after Paul’s brief time in Athens, where he had called philosophers, politicians, and social elites to repentance and faith… and where “some” had “believed” the gospel (Acts 17:34)] Paul left Athens and went to Corinth [about 50 miles West]. 2 And he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome.”

This event is hard to date precisely,[1] but, the expulsion of Jews from Rome had sent “Aquila… and his wife Priscilla” to Corinth, where Paul “found” or “met” them and “went to see” or “approached” them (v2).

Luke says explicitly that Paul went to them “because he was of the same trade [as him]” (v3), but the implication is that they were more than mere co-workers.

Paul and Aquila and Priscilla were “tentmakers by trade” (v3), but Luke says that Paul “stayed with them and worked” beside them during his time in Corinth (v3) while “he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath, and tried to persuade Jews and Greeks” (v4).

The implication is that Aquila and Priscilla were also Jewish Christians, who provided something of a homebase for Paul’s ministry.

Let’s take a moment to notice the significance of what I’ve just now explained.

I believe Luke is showing us that God uses the negative and even the terribly painful circumstances of life for His good purposes.

Historically, Christians have affirmed that God has foreordained whatsoever comes to pass, according to the counsel of His will and for His eternal purposes.[2]

In our passage, we see that Aquila and Priscilla were kicked out of their home and forced to leave the life they’d built for themselves in Rome, and they just happened to be in Corinth when the Apostle Paul arrived and connected with them.

No, they were in Corinth by God’s design!

And God used their terrible experience to bring about His good purposes.

God brought Aquila and Priscilla together with Paul, which provided Paul with a way to make a living while he evangelized the Corinthians (Acts 18:2-3).

God gave them a bond so tight, that Aquila and Priscilla became traveling companions with Paul when he left for Ephesus (Acts 18:18).

God brought Aquila and Priscilla to Ephesus so that they might edify and help a masterful preacher of the gospel (Acts 18:26).

God later established a church in Ephesus that met on the Lord’s Day in Aquila’s and Priscilla’s house (1 Cor.

16:19).

And their ministry among the church in Ephesus was so long-lasting that Paul mentioned them both in his second letter to Timothy, which he wrote during the very last season of his life (2 Tim.

4:19)… And all of this, because God had previously ordained that the sinful circumstances in Rome would provoke a pagan emperor to expel everyone of Jewish ethnicity from the city they called home.

Friends, we must come to grips with the fact that we cannot believe God is in charge of the good but not the bad.

Either God is sovereign over whatsoever comes to pass, or He is not sovereign at all… Sovereignty is the sort of thing that is by definition unlimited, unrestrained, and all-encompassing.[3]

In our passage today, the Jewish expulsion from Rome was only the beginning of the painful, difficult, and even hostile events which God ordained for His purposes.

And God had also ordained or designed ongoing missionary efforts, greater gospel preaching among the Gentiles, and the strengthening Christian disciples all over ancient Achaia, Asia, and Syria.

We not only see Christianity expand in the first century despite difficulties and hardships, but we also see God use the very circumstances we would easily recognize as bad to bring about His good ends or purposes in the world… and in the individual lives of His people.

And yet, the reality that God is sovereign over all things does not eliminate human responsibility or culpability.

People are responsible for the bad they think, say, and do… and that’s highlighted in our next couple of verses.

2. Rejecting the Messiah (v5-6)

Let’s pick up our passage in v5… Luke says, “When Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia…” that is, from Berea particularly.

Remember that Paul was the focus of a hostile mob in Berea, so some of the “brothers” or Christians there had helped Paul get out of town (Acts 17:14).

Silas and Timothy had stayed in Berea, but Paul sent word back for them to come along as soon as possible.

When Paul arrived in Athens, he was still alone, and he boldly witnessed for Christ during the brief time he was there (and that’s a really quick summary of Acts 17).

By the time Silas and Timothy caught up with Paul, he was already in Corinth.

And Luke says Paul was doing what he normally did in any new town; “Paul was occupied with the word, testifying to the Jews that the Christ was Jesus” (v5).

As v4 told us, Paul was “reasoning in the synagogue every Sabbath,” trying to “persuade” his hearers.

Persuade them about what?

Well, he was trying to persuade them that “the Christ was Jesus” (v5).

As we’ve noted several times already, this was the central theme of the message proclaimed by the earliest Christians, and it’s the same theme we ought to understand as central to the gospel today.

Jesus didn’t come out of nowhere, and He wasn’t merely a new religious guru on the stage of human history.

No, Jesus was the culmination of God’s plan to glorify Himself through the salvation of sinners, which God Himself had been unfolding since the beginning of time.

God created everything, including humans, and God made everything good.

But Adam sinned against God, and he earned – for himself and every human after him – God’s curse.

All creation began to groan with the pain of wickedness, calamity, and sin of all sorts.

Storms destroy, nations rage, and people live lives full of dysfunction and sorrow until they finally die.

But God had promised, right from the beginning, that it would not always be this way, and He would somehow make the relationships right again… God with man, man with other people, and all relations with creation itself.

And the repeated promise God made was that there would one day be a snake-crusher, a more fluent prophet, a more effective priest, and a more righteous king… God would send His Messiah or Christ, His anointed one, who would redeem sinful people, restore God’s dwelling with man, and renew all creation.

And then, it happened!

God Himself became a man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus healed the sick, delivered the oppressed from the devil, and He even raised dead people back to life again.

And all of this was to show that He had the power to do what God had always promised to do in and through His Messiah or Christ.

But, when Jesus came, He was not received by those He came to save.

Instead, He was rejected, despised, and ultimately murdered by the hands of both Jewish and Gentile leaders.

But just like we’re seeing in our passage this morning, God’s glorious plan of victory often travels right through the way of shame and apparent defeat.

It was exactly according to God’s plan that the Christ would suffer and die, and it was also God’s plan to raise Jesus Christ from the dead… putting on marvelous display the fact that God had done as He said He would and that the redemption, restoration, and renewal of all things was at hand.

And then, the resurrected Jesus took His seat of highest authority in the universe, and He commissioned His followers on earth to tell everyone the good news.

Therefore, Jesus Himself preached, and so did all who believed in Him, God commands all people everywhere to repent and believe or trust in the Christ!

If you do, then you will enjoy all the benefits God has been promising for millennia.

But, if you don’t, then… well, as Paul said to those who rejected his gospel in v6, “Your blood be on your own heads!”

But, even in the rejection of God’s Messiah, God showed that His plan of redemption was far bigger than only those of ethnic Jewish decent.

By the Jews of Corinth rejecting Paul’s message about Jesus as the Christ, God thrust Paul into a powerful evangelistic ministry to the Gentiles there.

Once again, we see the theme of God’s providential work… He ordains even that some would reject the Messiah, so that others might benefit from the gospel.

And yet, those who reject the gospel are fully responsible for their rejection of it… Their blood is on their own heads.