1 Cor No.38 Opportunity & Opposition

Reading this morning, we turn to the 19th chapter of the book of Acts. Later on this morning we'll be hearing about how Paul stayed on in Ephesus because a great door for effective work had been opened to him. Those are the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 16.

Now, back here in Acts chapter 19, we have an account of Paul's ministry in Ephesus. So, Acts chapter 19. While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul took the road through the interior and arrived at Ephesus.

There he found some disciples and asked them, did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed? They answered, no, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit. So Paul asked, then what baptism did you receive? John's baptism, they replied. Paul said, John's baptism was a baptism of repentance.

He told the people to believe in the one coming after him, that is, in Jesus. On hearing this, they were baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus. When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them and they spoke in tongues and prophesied.

There were about twelve men in all. Paul entered the synagogue and spoke boldly there for three months, arguing persuasively about the kingdom of God. But some of them became obstinate.

They refused to believe and publicly maligned the way. So Paul left them. He took the disciples with him and had discussions daily in the lecture hall of Tyrannus.

This went on for two years, so that all the Jews and Greeks who lived in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord. God did extraordinary miracles through Paul. Handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them.

Some Jews who went around driving out evil spirits tried to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who were demon-possessed. They would say, in the name of Jesus, whom Paul preaches, I command you to come out. Seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish chief priest, were doing this.

The evil spirit answered them, Jesus I know and Paul I know about, but who are you? Then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on them and overpowered them all. He gave them such a beating that they ran out of the house naked and bleeding. When this became known to the Jews and Greeks living in Ephesus, they were all seized with fear and the name of the Lord Jesus was held in high honor.

Many of those who believed now came and openly confessed their evil deeds. A number who had practiced sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly. When they calculated the value of the scrolls, the total came to 50,000 drachmas.

In this way, the word of the Lord spread widely and grew in power. After all this had happened, Paul decided to go to Jerusalem, passing through Macedonia and Achaia. After I have been there, he said, I must visit Rome also.

He sent two of his helpers, Timothy and Erastus, to Macedonia, while he stayed in the province of Achaia a little longer. About that time there arose a great disturbance about the way. A silversmith named Demetrius, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought in no little business for the craftsman.

He called them together along with the workmen in related trades and said, Men, you know we receive a good income from this business and you see and hear how this fellow Paul has convinced and led astray large numbers of people here in Ephesus and in practically the whole province of Achaia. He says that man-made gods are no gods at all. There is danger, not only that our trade will lose its good name, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be discredited and the goddess herself, who is worshipped throughout the province of Achaia and the world, will be robbed of her divine majesty.

When they heard this they were furious and began shouting, Great is Artemis of the Ephesians. Soon the whole city was in an uproar. The people seized Gaius and Aristarchus, Paul's travelling companions from Macedonia, and rushed as one man into the theatre.

Paul wanted to appear before the crowd, but the disciples would not let him. Even some of the officials of the province, friends of Paul, sent him a message begging him not to venture into the theatre. The assembly was in confusion.

Some were shouting one thing, some another. Most of the people did not even know why they were there. The Jews pushed Alexander to the front, and some of the crowd shouted instructions to him.

He motioned for silence in order to make a defense before the people. But when they realized he was a Jew, they all shouted in unison for about two hours, Great is Artemis of the Ephesians. The city clerk quieted the crowd and said, Men of Ephesus, doesn't all the world know that the city of Ephesus is the guardian of the temple of the great Artemis, and of her image, which fell from heaven? Therefore, since these facts are undeniable, you ought to be quiet, and not do anything rash.

You have brought these men here, though they have neither robbed temples, nor blasphemed our goddess. If then Demetrius and his fellow craftsmen have a grievance against anybody, the courts are open, and there are pro-consuls. They can press charges.

If there is anything further you want to bring up, it must be settled in a legal assembly. As it is, we are in danger of being charged with rioting, because of today's events. In that case, we would not be able to account for this commotion, since there is no reason for it.

After he had said this, he dismissed the assembly. Now may God add his blessing to that reading from his word. And now, I'd be glad if you would open your Bibles at 1 Corinthians, in chapter 16.

And from the fifth verse we read to the ninth, inclusive. After I go through Macedonia, I will come to you. For I will be going through Macedonia.

Perhaps I will stay with you a while, or even spend the winter so that you can help me on my journey, wherever I go. I do not want to see you now, and make only a passing visit. I hope to spend some time with you, if the Lord permits.

But I will stay on at Ephesus until Pentecost, because a great door for effective work has opened to me, and there are many who oppose me. I was reading through the recently published biography of Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones yesterday. And my good friend Ian Murray, who authored the book, makes this significant complaint in a loving fashion.

Dr. Lloyd-Jones, if you go through his printed sermons, makes very little allusion to himself. And that always frustrates a biographer, because there seems to be little information that one can collate and eventually use in the production of the book that you have in mind. Fortunately, Murray has other sources of information, which he uses brilliantly in pulling together the first forty-odd years of the life of that very great man of God.

And it seems to me that one would have exactly the same problem when looking through the written ministry of the Apostle Paul, I mean by that the epistles that he penned, if you were trying to write a biography, because there aren't many occasions when Paul makes personal reference to himself. But now and again he does. It may have been the thought in your mind that, seeing as we have been on Corinthians now for some forty-odd Sundays or so, having now entered into the sixteenth chapter, one could accelerate, because here are just incidental little remarks that seem at first glance to have little relevance to us.

But I tell you that if I was to follow that practice, I would do us all an injustice. Because here in this sixteenth chapter, as I tried to show you even last week, in that very practical comment that had to be made on finance and giving to the Lord, there is much whereby we can profit. Paul is a very careful fellow, and when he engages in particular plannings of his journeys, he does so with a thoroughness which is most commendable.

And here, if you please, in the fifth, sixth and seventh verses, we've got a prospectus of his intention in travelling around Asia Minor and visiting again the people at Corinth. And yet he has to tell them, because they're sensitive on this issue, as becomes very plain in the first and second chapters of the next letter, he has to tell them that all his planning is subject to the will of the Lord. He will only do this and go there if the Lord permits.

The latter part of verse seven. Now Paul had said to the Corinthians earlier, in the fourth chapter of this opening letter that he writes, that it was his intention to come to them in Corinth, in that Greek city, as soon as possible. I will come to you very soon if the Lord is willing.

But the Lord wasn't willing. He wasn't willing for Paul to go back to Corinth, though there were urgent matters that needed to be attended to immediately. And why not? Well, the reason or the answer to that question is what shall fulfil our minds for the remaining part of my address this morning.

Because something tremendous had happened where Paul found himself at the point of writing to the Corinthians. Where is he? He is in the city of Ephesus. And so much is happening in Ephesus that Paul cannot, despite all the pressures to get up and to move to Corinth, he can't leave Ephesus at this moment.

Because, verse nine, a great door for effective work has opened to me and there are many who oppose me. As bees go to flowers and moths are attracted to illuminated lamp bulbs, so Paul is attracted to a great and open and effective ministry in Ephesus which he refers to as a door that swung backwards. Paul is attracted to an open door ministry.

And I want to say something that at starters you'll not understand, at least some of you won't, but in a moment you will. You can judge your Christian maturity by this yardstick. Am I attracted to an open door ministry? Do I have such a thing within the range of my objectives? You say, what is an open door ministry? When I was in Belgium a couple of years ago, ministering at a conference, a man passed me on the corridor.

He was moving very quickly. And someone later on said, do you know that guy? I said, there's an American who was talking to me, this guy. Do you know that guy? So I said, no, I don't.

I'd like to know him. And they said, well, that's Brother Andrew. Now, Brother Andrew is known to some of you through his books.

He's a Dutchman, flying Dutchman, always moving around from one place to another. And he has a ministry called the open door mission. And out there in Africa, as well as in Eastern Europe, he has penetrated with the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Brother Andrew believing in open doors, who has that quip that there's no closed country. You can get into any country in the world today and preach the gospel. Getting out is a different ball game.

But you can at least get in. Now, it's the concept of the open door that Paul has very much at heart as he's thinking in terms of where he now is in Ephesus. You see, the idea of the open door is very much part of Paul's missionary thinking.

Move over to 2 Corinthians, and you'll come across in the 2nd chapter and the 12th verse another reference to this term. Now, when I went to Troas to preach the gospel of Christ and found that the Lord had opened a door for me, I still had no peace of mind because I did not find my brother Titus there. In Troas, he has an open door, as he did in Ephesus.

He has a place where he can preach the gospel. He's a man with an open door vision. And do you know the gospel of Jesus? It's the gospel of the open door.

Jesus, our Lord, is depicted in Revelation as being the one who stands at the door of the heart and knocks for entry. And if that seems to be a sentimental point that I have brought to your attention, listen to the apostle Paul as in the Acts of the Apostles and later on in the 14th chapter, he rehearses all that God has achieved through his ministry as he has brought the good news to the non-Jewish world. Verse 27, Acts 14, on arriving there, back at the church in Antioch, they gathered the church together and reported all that God had done through them and how he had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles.

And they stayed there a long time with the disciples. You know why Paul couldn't go back to Corinth to deal with some of the radically important issues that had cropped up while he's been travelling around? Because in Ephesus, there's a great door. It's an effectual door.

It's an effective work that Paul is engaging in. He is a man who has within his spiritual perspective an open-door attitude. And I ask you, do you have the same? Now, let it be said that this open door at Ephesus was not always open to the apostle.

You say, what point are you trying to make? Well, look again at verse 9. It's sometimes interesting just to concentrate on the tenses of the verbs in Scripture. And here the apostle, referring to the opportunities that Ephesus says, because a great door for effective work has opened to me. There's no idea there of Paul giving the door a shove with his shoulder.

There's no idea of Paul rushing through that door. It's almost a concept of mystery that's behind the image as the door at Ephesus suddenly swings open and Paul is able to go and preach the gospel. Who opens doors, my friend? Who gives opportunity for gospel witness? Who brings a man and a woman to himself? Human ingenuity, human effort.

You're fooling yourself. It's God who controls the nations. It's God who has the hearts of men within his hand.

And it was God's purpose for Paul at a set time to come to Ephesus and God swings the door open and the man from Tarsus goes through and he starts to preach a ministry that spans more than 36 months as he declares the greatness of the gospel in Christ. You see, Paul had wanted to go to Ephesus for a long time. And this is the point that I'm trying to underline.

Way back in an earlier missionary journey, we read in the 16th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles and the 6th verse that Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the Word in the province of Asia. They wanted to drop down to Ephesus. They wanted to move into that area of Asia years before.

They tried to get there. The 7th verse of Acts 14 goes on and spells it out very, very clearly. But the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to.

And so they passed to Troas and on into Macedonia and ultimately down into Greece. The point that I'm trying to make is this. That when doors are open for a significant work of God to be achieved it's the Lord who opens the door.

You see, Ephesus and Paul are bound to share a common experience. As true as God is in His heaven, that man from Tarsus will one day go to Ephesus. But he has to be prepared first for his ministry and the Ephesians have to be prepared for him.

So God does certain things. in the experience of Paul before he can come to Ephesus. What does he do? Well, God knows full well that at Ephesus there is a baptism of fire that awaits Paul.

Because an open door ministry successfully achieved, as I shall show you, brings tremendous demands. And when God has a man or a woman in His hand and He's preparing them for a ministry, sometimes He will tutor them in a way that they will be able to gain spiritual strength and stamina for the test as to when that door opens and great demands are made upon them. So Paul moves not into Ephesus at that particular time when the idea springs to his mind.

He moves on from Troas, gets on a boat and crosses the Bosphorus, comes into Macedonia and ultimately he drops to Philippi. And what happens in Philippi? He's arrested. He and his companion are thrown in jail.

And before that happens the skin is flayed from off their backs. He is going to have an experience of singing songs to the Lord in the night although his body is wracked with pain. He's going to know what it's like at Thessalonica for an uproar to break out as the crowds are hostile to his ministry.

He's going to be taken down into Athens and there he's going to receive the mockery of the intelligentsia of the philosophers and the teachers who say, Paul you're mad. You believe in the resurrection. You must be deranged.

You've departed from your senses. The reason why all this is happening in the experience of Paul is because God has this man in His hand and He's bringing him to that point so that when he moves into Ephesus, when the open door of Ephesus is available for Paul to pass through, he shall have the spiritual stamina for the baptism of fire that shall wait for him in that Ephesian port. Paul is being prepared to go to Ephesus at God's time.

But what is more, Ephesus is being prepared for Paul. There's a man by the name of Apollos and he is a Jew who is a mighty man in the scriptures. He's been helped by a Christian couple.

We'll not go into the story as that would take too long. And he moves into Ephesus and there he starts to turn over the heavy soil, so to speak, of the Ephesian people waiting for that moment when Paul shall arrive and Apollos, God's preliminary servant, shall be back in Corinth. And then when Paul comes into Ephesus, the place at least will have been prepared to some degree for the ministry of Paul.

When an open door is effectively moved by the Lord and a man comes along anointed by His Spirit, then what follows is going to be splendidly successful. The moment has arrived in Ephesus. In God's timing.

Every idea needs its moment. Every burden needs to be discharged at the right time. And here is Paul who has tremendous responsibilities back in Corinth.

But he's moving into Ephesus because there God has opened a great door and Paul is prepared. And what is more, the people of Ephesus are ready. Now, one might think from what I have just shared with you that what follows is going to be an extravagant story of tremendous success.

Paul is going to receive immediately the feelingful response of all the citizens in Ephesus. But that is far from the case. For, as the reading set out so clearly that Andrew brought to us, when Paul got to Ephesus, he wasn't exactly a welcomed person.

Ephesus itself was the center of the worship of Artemis, or Diana if you're following the authorized version of the Bible. This was one of the great religious cults of the ancient world. There was a temple erected to Diana which was known as one of the seven wonders of the world.

Can you believe it? That centuries before, as a result of a meteorite hitting that particular spot, they had got an image which seemed to be in the form of a multi-breasted woman. And around that image had been built this temple. And the cult of Diana had spread from Ephesus throughout the whole realm of Asia Minor.

And wherever you went, you found people were worshiping this God. And when Paul comes in the name of Jesus, he is on a collision course at Ephesus with Diana and all those who will worship her. Now the apostle knows that the devil is as a roaring lion who seeks to devour all that he can in this world.

And he does not allow people out of his lair without a fight. So when Paul, hotfoot from Philippi and Thessalonica and Athens, reaches Ephesus, there's tremendous problem that's in store for him. First of all, he runs across the unions.

We've heard of union trouble, but that's not a child of the 20th century. The Smithists, those who worked in silver, when they heard of the ministry of the apostle Paul, and all that he was achieving, they got together and they created some difficulties for Paul. You see, they were doing a fair trade.

Here they were with their little silver statues of Diana Artemis and they were selling them to the tourists, to those who came to worship her. And when Paul's preaching starts to be effective, then their business spirals downwards and they don't like that. It's not that they're religious men in and of themselves, rather they're men who are losing out because this man is preaching.

And Paul falls foul of the Smithists at Ephesus. And at one stage you remember how the whole crowd rushed forward into the amphitheater which at Ephesus seats more than 25,000 people. And they have a mass worship service in honor of their God and they chant for two hours.

Could you imagine the frightening impact of that? Two hours, monotonous chant, Great is Diana of the Ephesians. The inscription that's on their coin becomes the cry that they shout up to the heavens. And the cry is threatening the ministry of the apostle Paul and his colleagues.

And then Ephesus is saturated with the occult sorcerers, magicians. The people are infested with this whole practice of magic. There are even Jews who come along who have an ability to cast out evil spirits and they try to use the name of the Lord Jesus to do exactly this.

And Paul is hemmed in on either side with tremendous problems at Ephesus. Even the orthodox Jews after he's preached in the synagogue for three months, they evict him and Paul is on his own as he tries to bring the gospel to the Gentiles. But when Paul writes to the Corinthians and excuses himself for not going back to Corinth he says so, that the reason or rather he says that the reason is because a great door for effective work has opened to me and there are many who oppose me.

Paul takes the very difficulties in the open door ministry as being an even greater challenge for him to continue and to exercise a testimony for Jesus Christ. And as he continues in Ephesus some remarkable things happen. He stays there for over three years I think it's three years and three months to be precise.

Thrown out of the synagogue he finds in God's grace that there's a lecture hall open next to the synagogue which is made available to Paul and from eleven o'clock to four o'clock in the afternoon he is preaching the word of the Lord. Presumably before eleven o'clock he's ministering as a tent maker earning his keep because he's got no support. And after he continues to preach for goodness knows how many months he's beginning to see a remarkable happening in the whole of Ephesus.

It seems as though the city itself is being shaken by the power of the gospel. We are told in the twentieth verse of Acts 19 the word of the Lord spread widely and grew in great power. Some who were in the grip of sorcery, in the grip of the astrologers they came to the apostle Paul and they brought all their scrolls and all the practices that are associated with witchcraft and they burnt them a huge bonfire to the total amount if I put it in modern currency of three quarters of a million pounds.

And we hear that those who had responsibility from Rome in that area, influential men were on the side of the apostle Paul as they warned him of dangers that threatened him in Ephesus. Here is, you see, the apostle in this open door ministry. He's been prepared for it.

He's had all the preliminary run in Thessalonica in Philippi down there in Corinth and then at the right moment, filled with the Holy Spirit, he comes into Ephesus and by God's grace as he passes through that open door he shares the burden of his heart with the people in that magic drenched city. And Elan he sees them released. Extraordinary miracles are done.

A whole town is affected. And Paul's ministry during those three years become the most consequential in his life. Not only in Ephesus but throughout the whole of that area he preaches the gospel.

The church in Colossae. The churches in Colossae are founded then. Those seven churches that you read of in Revelation chapter 2 Revelation chapter 2 and 3 they're founded as a result of Paul's ministry in Ephesus.

From Ephesus instead of it being a center from which the worship of Diana can penetrate Asia Minor it becomes the very headquarters in that area for the spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ. One man and one city both prepared by God and at the right moment as the door swings open and Paul goes through there's a mighty revival the like of which I have never seen myself or heard witness of in the latter part of the 20th century as a whole town is moved despite the problems that the ministry of Paul creates for himself. The town is moved by the power of the gospel and a strong emerging church sends out its representatives throughout that area.

So you see that's an insight and this is the reason why I've spent my time this morning in giving it to you. That's an insight into the type of life that Paul was spending as he has in mind the situation at Corinth and as he writes those letters to the people there he has tremendous need to go to Corinth but he's got even a greater need at this time in his life to stay at Ephesus and so he does because a great door for effective work has opened to me and there are many who oppose me. You say well that's alright it's pure church history.

My friend it's more than that. For what reason? Well let me spell it out in the last couple of minutes in the final book of the Bible the Revelation God gives a word to the church at Philadelphia and he says to that church behold I have opened a door that no man can shut and the point of the revelation was simply this here were the Christians at Philadelphia and they were to engage in ministry for the Lord because he had sanctioned them so to do and I believe that the word of God to this congregation of people here this morning is summed up in that phrase to the Philadelphians behold God has opened a door for us here in the center of Worthingtown which no man can shut it's an effective door for evangelism it's a door that you and I are to pass through which leads on to ministries that you and I alone can do in this town it might cost a lot in terms of time and effort and the opening of our hearts and the opening of our homes but this is God's word for us an open door here with these fine premises centrally placed opposite the town hall an open door for these premises to be used more and more so that people can say as the mayor remarked to me only a few months ago it looks as though your church is a hive of activity an open door so that an operation seafront can perhaps be mounted so that many of the retired people well to do who occupy those flats on the seafront and know nothing of the Christ of God and are not prepared for heaven can be reached by the ministries of this tabernacle an open door so that many young people and older people can be trained in evangelism skilled in the word of God to go on and to pass it to others and perish the idea of a one man ministry an open door so that our shops may increase in their effectiveness and the whole properties here can be further developed and made a tool for the Lord if God's spirit says anything to the tab at the moment he says I've set before you an open door and the only people who shun open doors are those who can't stand the pain and the sacrifice of giving their lives unreservedly in the service of Jesus Christ and that's why I spent such a long time with the history of Paul this morning and I don't excuse myself for so doing he was prepared and he offered his life Thessalonica, Philippi, Corinth, Athens, but this was just a run up it was a practice until the time when God took him to Ephesus and all hell was let loose or so it seemed but Paul who was always game for a fight reckoning that those who are against us are insignificant when compared with the power of him who is with us was able to establish one of the greatest periods of his evangelistic and bible teaching ministry making Ephesus a very headquarters of Christianity and doing down the testimony of Diana the so called God of the Ephesians. God swung open a door and Paul went through it.

Come through the door that God swings open here with me and let's achieve for God what he wants us to do more and more in this downtown location in which we find ourselves Amen Give me a hand, it is over, Give me a passion for the Lord. I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall souls be reminded, Until Jehoshaphat prays for peace, His love throughout my weary years He will have. I would not make such tests, my God, To live for Jesus my own son, Serve my name for all the world, O Savior, carry us onward.

Father, you who are the God of the open door, Open the door into our hearts, And claim us for an open door ministry, To take the message of the evangel to others. If there was any ring that was authentic from the throne room of heaven, About what was shared this morning, Then may it continue to resound in our memories, Stimulating us to active service for you, Here in this locality, for Jesus Christ's sake, Amen.