Acts 6

Chapter 6. A Chapter From One of Paul’s Missionary JourneysOne night the Lord spoke to Paul in a vision: “Do not be afraid; keep on speaking, do not be silent.” (Acts 18:9)Finally, brothers, pray for us that the message of the Lord may spread rapidly and be honored, just as it was with you. And pray that we may be delivered from wicked and evil men, for not everyone has faith. But the Lord is faithful, and he will strengthen and protect you from the evil one. (2 Thessalonians 3:1-3)We have been sweeping with rapid flight over Paul’s great missionary journeys. Today we shall tarry for a while with him at one of his stations, and see the closing of his second great missionary journey in the city of Corinth. It is full of incidents fraught with instruction and inspiration to every Christian heart and missionary worker. His Coming to Corinth We saw him last at Athens, in a city cold and utterly heartless. He must have been glad to leave its cheerless atmosphere. He had probably seen from Athens, 45 miles to the south, a sharp cliff rising off the horizon, and perhaps he may have discerned the town nestling at its feet. Certainly he would have seen the beautiful harbors on either side and the countless ships docked there. Down this well-traveled highway he took his way to Corinth probably on foot, for we find him on other occasions walking many long miles. He went alone, for he had sent Timothy and Silas from Athens to Thessalonica to cheer the brethren there, for they needed them more. Paul was a bighearted friend and loved congenial company. His solitude, therefore, was due to his unselfishness. On his approaching Corinth the first thing he would have seen was the citadel known as the Acrocorinthus. It was a splendid crag rising 2,000 feet, a sheer cliff against the sky, and stood above the city of Corinth. The city was built at its foot, and at the top was a little city and powerful fortress. As he drew nearer he reached the narrow isthmus which joins the peninsula to the mainland of Greece. On each side was a splendid harbor—one the emporium of all the commerce of the East, the other reaching out to the western Mediterranean. These two harbors were crowded with the commerce of the world, and Corinth was the commercial metropolis of the earth. It was filled with Jews, Greeks and Italians. It was a place of immense wealth and vast trade; also, alas, of great wickedness, where all colors and classes of men constantly came together. So wicked was it that the word “Corinthian” has come down to our own day to describe the worst class of women. This was the city to which Paul was now coming, but with all its wickedness, it was a great relief to get out of cold, heartless Athens. It is easier to preach the gospel in Wall Street or the Bowery than in the chilling atmosphere of Fifth Avenue fashion. Paul was wise in choosing the great centers of life for his headquarters in mission work. The cities of the world control its life. And so God would have us as we go to preach the gospel, to work from the center to the circumference. Aquila and Priscilla What were his business and domestic arrangements when he came to his mission field? He did not have a big society behind him to send him large drafts each month, and it is not likely he had very many coins in his wallet. But he had a skilled and strong right hand. He knew how to weave hair cloth and put a tent together. When he reached Corinth he began to “look for a job,” as we would say. He soon found it in the factory or shop of two good people, Aquila and Priscilla, Jews, his own countrymen, who had been expelled from Rome through a decree of Claudius Caesar. The incident is given in profane history. Claudius Caesar had become so disgusted with the quarrels of the Jews about One named Christos or Christ, that he turned all the Jews out. Aquila and Priscilla went to the provinces to find a resting place. It is quite evident that at this time Aquila and Priscilla were not Christians. If so, we would have been told that Paul went to them because they were believers. Instead we are simply told they were of the same craft. They met in the workshop and then they invited him to their home, and he went with them. This was the beginning of that splendid stream of holy helpfulness that filled so large a place in ancient Christianity and in the story of Paul himself. There are two things well worthy of our notice right here: First, the honest, manly independence of the missionary. He did not carry his hat in his hand asking people to give him help, but worked for his needs and the needs of them that were with him. And he could do this and trust God, too. It is all right to trust God as well as your own right hand. The people that work can best trust. The businessman has just as good a chance to live the faith life as the man that has no business. Manhood is always at a premium in personal influence and Christian work. So Paul was always independent. Speaking from this very place a little later to the Thessalonians to whom he wrote, he speaks of his honest industry and tells them how “we worked night and day in order not to be a burden to anyone while we preached the gospel of God to you” (1 Thessalonians 2:9). Then again what a beautiful picture he gives of their fellowship in their daily calling. It was the beginning of a lifelong fellowship in higher things. What are you doing for the man that works alongside of you? And what about that woman that comes to help you in your household with her manual toil? Think about this, dear men and women, for most of us are called of God to the most honorable of all callings, that of honest independent labor, and in these days of restless speculation we cannot too much emphasize the honor and importance of honest labor and simple independence as honest working men and examples to our fellow men. May the day never come when labor will be discounted! Paul’s father, though he must have been rich, and certainly gave Paul a good education, taught him a trade, and every true father and mother should teach their children some trade or occupation by which they may be independent. Still another question comes up—what about the people that live with you, and the people with whom you live? Aquila and Priscilla took Paul home; they were true home missionaries. That is where the greatest of all preachers begins, the mother, and where our influence tells more intimately, more continuously and more eternally than anywhere else. Beloved, is your family circle, where they live with you, a place where your life is speaking for God, even as the story of Paul and Aquila and Priscilla? Their friendship is one of the most blessed pictures in the whole story of Acts. Here we have the beginning of it. They were thrown together in the same family circle, and Paul’s influence over them led them to Christ, and their influence with Apollos and others made them his helpers in the gospel. A Sabbath at Corinth—His Public Ministry Now the Sabbath has come. There is a synagogue there. On the Sabbath day they are gathered in it, and Paul, of course, finds his way there. He keeps the Sabbath. No man ought to be so busy that he loses God’s day of rest—the day that God wants not so much for Himself as for the good of man. You will never lose anything by taking care of God’s holy day. Next we find him in the synagogue, in his place in the congregation. He began at doors that God had opened and he did not turn his back upon the Jews and the synagogue until they turned him out. That is the place for us to begin, and if they turn us out God will open other doors. We are told very simply that he went to the synagogue and reasoned with them on the Sabbath, and persuaded the Jews and the Greeks. Those two words “reasoned” and “persuaded” give us the whole gist of Paul’s splendid ministry. He gave them facts, foundations, the truth; he appealed to their understanding, he took the Scripture and opened it up to them. But it was no cold logic nor all logic. When he was through reasoning, he began to persuade them. Oh, how the tears would get into his voice and the fire would burn in his tones! The first appealed to the intellect, and the second appealed to the conscience, the heart and the will. So he began his ministry, and for a time there seemed to be little result. But now something happens. Reinforcements—Silas and Timothy We come to the next act in the drama, and we find a new inspiration coming to our missionary. “When Silas and Timothy came from Macedonia, Paul devoted himself exclusively to preaching, testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ” (Acts 18:5). Something happened; two dear hearts had arrived. It was the touch of the hand of a friend, and thank God for the touch of the hand of a friend! How it cheers the heart of the lone worker on the field when he sees the new missionary coming! It is like fresh waters to a thirsty soul to have news from a far country. Let us think of our lone workers and help to cheer them by sending reinforcements. Now Paul could preach. He got up the next day and they wondered what was the matter with him as his face glowed and his voice rose into notes of passion, and he pleaded and warned and wept until they thought something must have happened. Do you help people that way? Does your coming to them make any difference in their work? Have you a bright face and a warm handclasp? We sometimes receive more help from faces than from words. God has ordained this blessed ministry of comradeship. Are you standing true to it? Opposition—The Jews Next the devil comes upon the scene. The new inspiration with which Paul had been baptized was met by a countermove of the adversary. “The Jews opposed Paul and became abusive” (Acts 18:6). Speaking of them in his letter at this time from Corinth, he refers to them as those, who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to all men in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit. The wrath of God has come upon them at last. (1 Thessalonians 2:15-16) The situation now became impossible, and in the most solemn manner, as directly commanded by the Lord on such occasions, he shook his raiment and said unto them, “Your blood be on your own heads! I am dear of my responsibility. From now on I will go to the Gentiles” (Acts 18:6). The crisis had come. The Jews in Europe had rejected their Messiah as they had already done everywhere in Asia. His Letter to the ThessaloniansHe had written one epistle to the beloved disciples in Thessalonica, and soon after he adds his second; and now begins that marvelous ministry of the written epistle, and later the printed page which has created through the progress of Christian literature the largest pulpit and constituency in the world. There is no doubt that today the printed page reaches a far wider circle than even the spoken message, and that the Bible Society is doing more, perhaps, to evangelize the world than even the multiplied voices of many thousands of missionaries. One of the special features of this letter to Thessalonica was a request for prayer with which he closed his second epistle, “Finally, brothers, pray for us that the message of the Lord may spread rapidly and be honored, just as it was with you. And pray that we may be delivered from wicked and evil men” (2 Thessalonians 3:1-2). The rest of this chapter is a remarkable illustration of the way God answered this prayer. Answered Prayer

1. First it was answered by the opening of a wider door at Corinth in the house of Justus, hard by the synagogue, where the two congregations doubtlessly met every Sabbath, and the Jews could see how God was blessing the apostle’s work.
2. Next followed the conversion of Crispus, the chief ruler of the synagogue, and the most influential of the Jewish party. This was followed by many conversions, including well-known families, like the household of Stephanas, and Gaius, afterwards so familiar a name in the writings of both Paul and John. There was also a large number of the humbler classes, for, writing later to the Corinthians, the apostle reminds them, “Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth” (1 Corinthians 1:26). There was another class whom Paul welcomed most gladly of all, that immoral and depraved multitude, the drunkard, the thief, the prostitute, of whom he says, “And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11). So there came into the Corinthian church a blessed revival and a glorious company of ransomed sinners.
3. The next answer was a voice from heaven. Paul no doubt had been deeply discouraged by the opposition of the Jews, and affected still more by the painful stand which he had taken in withdrawing from the synagogue. Was he justified in this? The Lord saw that he needed the reassuring word, and how sweetly it now came and moored his tossing ship to the throne with an anchorage that would hold amid all the testings of the coming years. “Do not be afraid,” the Master says, “keep on speaking, do not be silent. For I am with you, and no one is going to attack and harm you, because I have many people in this city” (Acts 18:9-10).
4. Next came the open assault of his enemies and their ignominious defeat. At this time a new governor had come to Corinth in charge of the great province Achaia, of which it was the capital. It was Gallio, the brother of the famous philosopher, Seneca, who speaks of him in one of his writings as a man of high character and uprightness, and at the same time of easy indifference such as we see in his later treatment of the Jews at Corinth. Supposing that he would be ready to please their party by a little bit of favoritism, and at the same time, taking advantage of his supposed ignorance of the local situation, they summoned Paul from his tribunal under grave charges of promoting a new religion contrary to their law. Paul was about to answer for himself, when Gallio turned on the prosecutors and sharply rebuking their miserable quibbling about questions, about words and names and their own law, he nonsuited them. And as they still seem to have lingered and pressed the case upon him, he finally and evidently with some impatience “had them ejected from the court” (Acts 18:16). The mob waiting outside as usual to join the winning and fall on the losing side, immediately turned on Sosthenes, the chief prosecutor, and beat him before the judgment seat, while Gallio, true to the character that his brother had given him, “showed no concern whatever” (Acts 18:17). Leaves Corinth Finally the trial ended, Paul quietly settled down to a long season of successful work, planting numerous churches throughout Achaia and finding, it would seem, his sweetest revenge even in the conversion of Sosthenes himself, the leader of the mob that brought him before the tribunal of Gallio. We cannot, of course, demonstrate the fact that the Sosthenes who attacked Paul was the same Sosthenes whom Paul a little later, writing back from Philippi by the hand of Stephanas, associated with himself in his epistle to the Corinthians as “our brother Sosthenes” (1 Corinthians 1:1), but it does look as though he was drawing a very strong contrast between Sosthenes the bitter enemy and Sosthenes the now loving brother. May it not be that we shall some day find that as he lay there bleeding under the blows of the mob, Gallio caring not, and the crowd crying, “served him right,” that Paul went up to him and kneeling by his side prayed him back to life, took him home under his loving care and won him to Christ? Surely that would be the most supreme triumph of faith and love. Finally, we have not space to follow him as he closes his successful work in Corinth, sails across to Ephesus for a brief stay accompanied by Aquila and Priscilla, and then presses on to Caesarea, Jerusalem and Antioch. Close of Second Missionary Journey As we thus close with him his second missionary journey, we cannot fail to note, first, the presence of the Master all through these missionary scenes, and the fact that He who “began to do and to teach” (Acts 1:1) is still continuing to work and lead his missionary army. Secondly, that the power promised at Pentecost is still the equipment and enduement of the militant Church—power to win souls, power to pray until both earth and heaven answer, power to hold back the hate of men and control the very officials in the judgment hall, and power to build up and establish the Church of God in the face of the opposition of earth and hell. Thirdly, we cannot fail to notice the ever-aggressive spirit of the gospel witness. Pressing forward from center to circumference, we still find it reaching out to the uttermost part of the earth. Rejected by the Jew it is given to the Greek, and now from its home in the continent of Asia we have seen it spreading over all the cities of Greece, and from the great commercial world-center of commerce, sending forth its influence through all the earth. And last of all we have not only seen the splendid example of the great apostle to the Gentiles and felt our own lives dwarfed into littleness beside the grandeur of his life and work, but we have also seen that there is room for the humblest of his brethren by his side. If you cannot be a Paul in the pulpit, you can be an Aquila in the workshop and a Priscilla in the home. Or you can be a Timothy, bringing a word of cheer and the handclasp of comradeship to the tired worker. Or you can be a Thessalonian saint praying over yonder until it reaches both earth and heaven as it was so marvelously answered at Corinth. God help us so to help as in those days of old.