Acts 19:1-10
You may be seated. Turn in your
copy of God’s word to Acts chapter 19. Today, we’ll be looking at
verses one through 10. As you’re finding your way there,
remember that Paul has begun his third missionary journey.
He’s resolute on getting to Ephesus where he’ll minister for about
three years. He’s member promised to return back to the Jewish
synagogue, and we’ll find today that he returns to that Jewish
synagogue to do ministry. And then they kind of don’t like
him, strange way, invite somebody and then run them off. But that’s
the nature of Paul’s ministry. Let’s look to God in prayer before
we read his word. Our Lord, we ask that Your scripture
would light up our path, that it would show us the way, not
only the way of salvation, but the way of growth and grace.
And we need your help and ask for it now. In the name of your
dear son, our Lord Jesus, amen. And it happened that while Apollos
was at Corinth, Paul passed through the inland country and came to
Ephesus. There he found some disciples
and he said to them, did you receive the Holy Spirit when
you believed? And they said, no, we have not
even heard that there is a Holy Spirit. And he said, into what
then were you baptized? They said, into John’s baptism. And Paul said, John baptized
with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe
in the one who was to come after him, that is Jesus. On hearing
this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
And when Paul laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came
on them and they began speaking in tongues and prophesying. There were about 12 men in all.
And he entered the synagogue and for three months spoke boldly,
reasoning and persuading them about the kingdom of God. But
when some became stubborn and continued in unbelief, speaking
evil of the way before the congregation, he withdrew from them and took
the disciples with him, reasoning daily in the hall of tyrannous,
This continued for two years so that all the residents of
Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks. This is God’s word for us. You can imagine the apostle Paul
making his way on this third missionary journey. He’s left
Antioch over in Syria and he’s made his way up the coast and
over the north of the Mediterranean Sea, where he’s revisited all
the churches that he began and worked through in his first missionary
journey, visited again on the second journey, and now visiting
again, strengthening them on this third missionary journey.
But he’s making a beeline for Ephesus. I don’t know how long
it took him to get there, but you can imagine in his mind,
in his heart, I must get to Ephesus. What do we say? Ephesus or bust,
right? Got to get there. Got to preach
Jesus to them and praying like crazy for conversions to salvation
through faith in Jesus Christ. I can remember A while back,
thinking about ministry, looking forward to it, thinking, oh,
how wonderful and ideal it will be. You’ll go here and there
and you’ll say things and people will do things. Well, that’s
not exactly how it works. And then you bump along in ministry
and people see the fun parts. People see maybe the good parts,
the positive parts. Not the sleepless nights, not
the difficult meetings, not the attacks or whatever that comes,
maybe internally, spiritually or externally, verbally. But
they see the good parts of the ministry and they say, oh, that
looks fun. I think I’d like to go to seminary
and maybe try this on for size. And maybe we could think through
hardships in ministry. And ours really don’t begin to
compare to what Paul endured and suffered. We still haven’t
gotten yet to his shipwreck. We still haven’t gotten yet to
his trials before all the Roman people, even his eventual death. But Paul’s ministry shows a pattern
of traveling by foot, lodging in various places for a stretch
of time, ministering to the Jews first and then to the Greeks.
But he will describe to the Ephesian elders later in his life of how
daily difficult was his ministry while he was among them. He will
speak of the coming after his leaving of ravenous wolves who
will come to eat up the people. He’ll speak of all the spiritual
and physical hardships that he endured to proclaim ministry,
the ministry of the gospel among the Ephesian church. But today
we get a glimpse of Well, some pretty good, pretty normal ministry. And I want us to think through
this passage through the life and the actions of Paul and how
we might think through doing some of these things in our own
church. The main thing being sticking to it for the long haul.
Paul is in Ephesus for a really long time. He’s there for a really
long time doing a lot of Bible work, Bible ministry, gospel
preaching and teaching. The first thing that he runs
into in our passage, he runs into a ministry of correction,
you might say. He bumps into these 12 disciples. And as he interacts with them,
he must begin to notice that something is amiss. Something
is not right in their beliefs. Something is not right in their
theology. Something is not right in their understanding of the
gospel. And something is not right in their discipleship. And so he begins by asking them
a question, and you see it here in our passage in chapter 19,
verse two, did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?
And they said no. You can imagine Paul in his head,
I knew something was wrong, I knew something was amiss, something
wasn’t correct. And so he begins to correct their
thinking, to correct their theology. Now before we dive into this
too much, some of you are thinking, didn’t we bump into this last
week with Apollos? Apollos maybe believed some similar
things or lacked some similar truths. or lacked further understanding
of the redemptive work of Jesus that had come fully now in his
person and work and his suffering, life, death, resurrection, ascension,
and marching orders given to the church. And the answer is
yes, we did run into that with Apollos. And as we saw, he was
teachable by Priscilla and Aquila. Now Paul comes on the scene and
sees the same thing. And he speaks to them further
about the message, the ministry, the person, the work of the Lord
Jesus. And I want to stop there for just a moment and challenge
each of us today to think through what we know, or perhaps what
we don’t know about the scriptures. There’s a lot we don’t know.
There’s a lot of, um, what we sometimes call in the South,
grandma told me so, Christianity, right? Or maybe to bring in a
little popular culture, I heard it through the grapevine. And we pick up our theology sometimes
like a piece of lint. We just kind of roll along the
carpet and we pick up a little of this, a little of that. And
what Paul is doing here in his ministry is he’s correcting.
He’s doing what he will later write to Timothy, young Timothy,
the pastor who will be left behind at Ephesus when he says all scripture
is breathed out and is useful for teaching. But it’s also useful
for correcting. It’s also useful for rebuking
and fully furnishing the church. But when you think of that correcting,
we often think about maybe braces on our teeth. or maybe a cast
on our arm, or maybe we have a rod in our leg, our back, our
hip, or something. We have metal in us because we
needed something corrected. And let me encourage you as we
thought of last week with Apollos. Be a meek Christian. Be a teachable
Christian. Be a, well, a Berean Christian. Look up the scriptures to see
that the things that have been said to you are so. God will
hold us responsible for what we believe. He’ll hold the church
responsible for what she teaches. But we ought to be willing to
submit to, and the church also ought to be in a position to
have a corrective side of ministry. There’s so much out there. You
look around the world today, you read social media, you hear
stuff, you hear people talking, you read what’s on the back window
of their vehicles, and you think, boy, Christianity has picked
up a little of everything. And it’s really no Christianity
at all. Once it becomes so watered down or so mixed, it’s really
syncretism with a little Jesus sprinkled on it. And so Paul
here corrects these apostles or these disciples. These disciples
tell Paul, no, we did not hear of Jesus. We only heard of the
baptism of John. Now stop for just a moment and
do the math in your head. Jesus has been risen and ascended
for roughly 20 years. John the Baptist died during
Jesus’ earthly ministry. Remember, Herod wasn’t happy
with his marriage advice. And so, party, daughter, one
wish, off with his head, that story, remember? John the Baptist
has been gone for quite some time. It’s nearly 30 years later,
and these are disciples of John’s message of repentance to prepare
the heart to open the way for the coming of the Messiah. Well,
Paul informs them Messiah has come. Messiah has suffered. Messiah has been the spotless
lamb slain before the foundation of the world. Messiah has died
and been put in the grave and has risen again. And now those
who look on him in faith. receive the forgiveness of sins,
but Holy Spirit has come as well. And we are baptized into Jesus
and then receive the Holy Spirit. Now there’s an odd little story
here. There’s a little mini Pentecost
isn’t there. And I bet as we read that, you thought to yourselves,
I thought there was just one Pentecost. Well, let me remind
you in the book of Acts, there are four Pentecost. There’s the
big one. Maybe the capital P Pentecost
that we all know of in the early chapters of Acts where the Holy
Spirit came on all the foreign people in Jerusalem and they
began to speak in tongues. Babel was reversed and they began
to speak of Jesus in their own tongues and the gospel was able
to spread across the world. Okay. The gospel is not just
spreading through Peter. and Paul and other missionaries. It’s spreading through people
hearing the gospel and going back home with it and explaining
it in their own language, their own tongue to their own people.
And we find through church history, all the places where the gospel
did spread. But there are three other places
where there was a little mini Pentecost in the scripture. And
it happens if you were to look back through the book of Acts,
if you were to go home today and be good Bereans and make
sure I’m not wacky and saying wrong things to you, you would
find that when Jesus says to his disciples, I will send you,
I will send my church, Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the ends of the
earth. This is the ends of the earth
here at Ephesus. There had been a previous mini
Pentecost with the Samaritans, with Philip. There had been a
previous mini Pentecost, if you will, when Peter preached to
the Gentiles. And this is the final one. And
so God is confirming on these 12 disciples, as he did in other
places, that you are indeed saved and you do have the Holy Spirit.
Now, some of you I know have maybe been in a Pentecostal background
and you’ve heard of the second blessing. And this is likely
the place where they, they get that and they preach, you know,
you need to seek the second blessing. You know, everybody’s in Jesus.
Everybody’s got a little of the Holy spirit, but if you’re a
super Christian, you get the second blessing. You can speak
in tongues and do some other interesting things. And, you
know, that’s a whole genre of the Christian faith, um, that
we see around the world today, particularly on television. Well,
what God is doing through Paul here when he lays hands on them,
is he’s saying, you are indeed true believers. The Holy Spirit
is coming on you in the fulfillment of Joel. Young and old, men and
women, boys and girls will prophesy. They will dream dreams, they
will receive the Spirit. And so these disciples are corrected
by Paul. Their understanding of Jesus,
they’re receiving the Holy Spirit. is an important moment in the
life of redemptive history. I thank the Lord that we live
in an era where we have the whole Bible. This was an era where
just say it’s about somewhere in the 50s of middle of the first
century. John, the apostle who will die
last will live another 50 years. He’ll write for books of the
scripture. It’ll be a little while before
the whole canon, the whole Bible is completed. It’ll be a while
before the apostolic era ends. I thank the Lord that we live
in the time where we have the full Bible, the full canon, the
full scriptures, and we can search the whole 66 books of the Bible
to see that these things are so. These folks were living in
an era where until the word got out or until the preachers and
missionaries came or until the scriptures were fully written
and fully distributed, you could live in a pocket of the world
where you didn’t know anything but say John’s baptism and thank
the Lord for Paul’s arrival at Ephesus. His prayers along his
walk and his desire to explain to people the fullness of the
meaning of the coming of Jesus Christ. And I hope you understand
that today. And if not, maybe let this moment,
this message be a time of correction for you. Or maybe it begins a
journey. I want to understand Christ more
fully. There’s a second thing that comes
up in this passage, not just the corrections that Paul makes,
but there’s the rejection by the people in the synagogue.
Our passage tells us that As soon after these disciples were
corrected in their understanding, corrected in their salvation,
as it were, he goes into the synagogue. Remember he had promised,
I’ll come back at some point. He had to go to Jerusalem and
make his vow. That is Paul. And he stayed a
while at Antioch. So it’s, it’s been, oh, nearly
two years. And he comes back to keep his
promise. And our passage tells us that he spoke boldly in the
synagogue. He reasoned in the synagogue
and he persuaded in the synagogue. Now, sometimes you all have to
be reminded of this. And sometimes we all, pointing
back at me, have to be reminded of this. The whole goal of a
speaking ministry is to persuade people that they need Christ.
And all of the persuading, all of the hot air, as it were, that
comes out of a person’s mouth, all of the listening that we
do needs to be for a worthy end, a worthy goal. And our passage
tells us that Paul went into the synagogue for three months
and he was desperate for his own countrymen, his fellow Jews. to come to a saving knowledge
of Jesus as Messiah and not to continue in their legalism or
to continue in their ritualism or to continue in their darkness. And so it says he spoke boldly. He had reasons to fear. I think
Apollos had been reasoning with them for some time. Now our passage
tells us he’s off in Corinth, but now it’s Paul’s turn to speak
boldly. But it often doesn’t go well.
It often turns into a stretch of rejection or even persecution. He reasons with them from history,
from the Bible, from the Old Testament, from scripture, from
prophecies, from use of logic, use of human skills to convince
and convert people to salvation. And he attempts to persuade them. to come to Jesus and to change
their hearts and their minds. But our passage tells us of their
rejection. And that’s the second thing we
want to think about, not just a ministry of correction to these
12 disciples, but there’s a ministry here that is full of rejection. He speaks boldly, he reasons,
he persuades. But notice what our passage says.
They were stubborn. They were hard. They were stony. They continued
in their unbelief and they spoke evil of the way. Can you imagine
a ministry like that? I was telling you earlier about,
you know, you can list some hardships in ministry. And I mean, I’ve
had people wait for me at the back door and say a mean thing
or two. I’ve had people sit in church with their arms crossed,
you know, daring me to speak or preach. But could you imagine
the murmuring in the synagogue? them speaking evil from their
stony hard hearts of the way. And what it did to Paul, it provoked
him, it angered him, it hurt him. It was hard on him. You
know, we talk in learning to preach about not creating emotional
noise. You know, there’s things you
don’t bring up in preaching. There’s words you don’t say.
There’s images you don’t call to mind. There’s often emotional
noise in the life of the preacher. And sometimes you can see on
the faces of people in the audience, in the congregation, and you
can see their hardness, their stoniness. But can you imagine
to hear it spoken of and murmured about among the congregation
of the synagogue? And there comes a point where
Paul says, it’s time to move on. And so this rejection is
a difficult thing for him to endure. But we know Paul well,
he knows the scripture. And I think of Psalm 95, a psalm
we often use as a call to worship. Oh, come, let us worship. Let
us bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord,
our maker, for he is our God. He is our maker. We are his.
And then the psalm turns and it gives a very strong warning.
It says, today, if you hear God’s voice, do not harden your hearts
as the people of God did at Meribah. And I imagine Paul has this on
his mind as he speaks to the people and sees the hatred, the
unwillingness to yield their hearts to Christ. And we have
to take warning from Psalm 95, don’t we? While the voice of
God is being spoken, we ought to take heed of it. It’s a mercy,
it’s a grace. Several years ago, I was sitting
in a church and they were reading in this service, the Old Testament.
And it was the passage of Noah building the ark, all the animals
going in two by two. And the person reading this passage
was an elder in the church. And he got kind of teary eyed
and he said when he got to the end, when it says, and God shut
the door, he got teary eyed and he was a tender, type guy and
he seemed to say God was tucking Noah in, almost like tucking
them into bed, tucking them into the ark. And I’ve always taken
a different, I don’t know, different view of that verse. I think God
is shutting the door and the sound of the hinges, the sound
of the bulwarks hitting the frame of the boat and the click of
the lock. God is saying, my servant Noah
preached for a hundred years. As he hammered and nailed and
cut, he also proclaimed to a generation that needed this ark, that there
is salvation inside this boat. But that you have now rejected
it and the time has now come, the doors are closed. And I didn’t take it as a sweet
tucking them into the ark, though it was a grace and a kindness
of God to give them that ark of safety. The brothers and sisters,
friends of the church, we need to listen to God’s voice. We
need to take its warnings, heed its judgments and its calls and
listen while God is speaking lest he come and shut the doors
of the ark and the time of salvation be passed. Isaiah says, seek
the Lord while he may be found. Call upon him while he is near. Think of this with young people. It’s said that a child’s heart
is often cemented or completed or finished by about the age
13 or 14. And I think we’re seeing that
in our culture. We have several generations of
children now who maybe have grown up doing churchy things, you
know, youth groups and fun things, carowinds, whatever. And there’s
a there’s a time and place for all that. But were they ever
discipled in the Lord? There’s a time where with our
young folks, we should encourage them, seek the Lord while he
may be found calling him while he is near, calling him before
your heart is set after the things of this world. So many testimonies
I hear. from people. Oh, I was brought up in the faith.
I gave it up for a while, but thank the Lord I came back. But
friends, there are some who never returned to the church. And so
if you hear the voice of God today, don’t let the day pass. Without seeking to know more
of him, more of Christ. And so in this passage, we see
Paul’s ministry of correction. We see the Jews rejection of
him, but also we see a happy picture of instruction and we
see it for quite a while. Paul takes the rejection from
the people of the synagogue whose stony, stubborn, hard hearts
would no longer put up with his reasoning. His pleading, his
persuading them to come to faith in Jesus. So he takes the disciples,
those who in the room called on the name of the Lord, and
they go right next door to the hall of Tyrannus. Now I’ve never
wanted to be a church planter. I think that’s really hard work
and that’s not something I’m good at, but this is an exciting
moment in the life of Paul’s ministry. Just three months in,
four months in or so, He’s got a group of people and every day,
the best we can figure from about 11 o’clock to about four o’clock
every day, that’s seven days a week. They’re having church.
They’re having Sunday school. They’re having discipleship.
You might can plug in some of our language. They’re learning
the catechism, right? They’re, they’re learning the
building blocks of the faith. They’re taking their faith in
Jesus and adding to it knowledge and understanding. And they’re
learning the height and the width and the breadth of the love of
God in Jesus Christ. And I think about the church
today. Used to be people would gather
together as God’s people and they would sit and they would
learn, you know, through sermons, through Sunday school, maybe
a Bible study before a prayer meeting, a certain thing. We see today, I think a famine
of the word of God and the land. And I think about a lot of fellow
ministers that, that maybe I came along with and you bump into
them somewhere, maybe at a preaching conference or a denominational
meeting. And tell me about your ministry. And I’ve always heard
the trick of the trick question is what you’re preaching on Sunday
night. Cause then you find out if they’re preaching indeed on
Sunday night, but you find out a lot of churches, they only
have one message at one main event. And that’s not the way
Paul sought to fulfill the great commission by making disciples.
Now I know it’s a little nuts to every day from 11 to four,
drop what you’re doing and go to church or go to the Sunday
school class, but you understand the culture. Every day they took
a little break. It was the hot part of the day.
Paul probably made tents all morning long. And then he came
and faithfully taught during, well, siesta, nap time. And so
you see the commitment of these early Christians. You see the
commitment of this church planting, Christ preaching missionary.
It was to gather the people and to pour into them the knowledge
of Christ. the way of salvation to pour
into them what likely affected elders for the church at Ephesus,
what likely brought as fruit deacons for the church at Ephesus. It strengthened Priscilla and
Aquila and Timothy and all the others. And one of the things
that’s such a blessing here, and we only see it when we have
the rest of the Bible, is when it says that everybody from Asia
was hearing what Paul had to say. I think that’s my little
paraphrase. You fast forward to John’s seven
letters to the seven churches. And they’re the seven letters
to the seven churches in Asia. And this little region where
Ephesus is is referred to as Asia, not Asia as we know it
today, the East, but this region of Asia. Can you imagine people
coming back, people listening, people hearing, people taking
the gospel, and it goes up into the valley where the church at
Colossae will be started. It goes up to Sardis and Thyatira
and all the places named in other parts of the scripture. And it
helps us, I think, to see and understand Maybe the concept
of water on rock, you know, the constant drip over time, the
constant being washed with the word over time, how it goes back
into our homes, it seeps into our workplaces. It gives us a
Christian work ethic. We take it to our universities.
We speak of it in the doctor’s office when our faith shows in
the waiting room to someone who else who is there scared out
of their wits, and they say, how are you so calm? And it radiates
out of our places of learning, growth, instruction, discipleship,
and it radiates through the ends of the earth. Something reminded
me of maybe happier days gone by in our American political
system. I was thinking of George Bush-isms. And he came up with,
it’s not rocket engineering. Isn’t that one of the things
he said? It’s not rocket engineering. The church is simpler than we
make it. The church is easier than we
make it. Jesus simply said, go make disciples
and baptize and tell people everything I told you. That’s it. We’ve
complicated church with these campuses and buildings and all
these programs and sort of things. And they’ve really eclipsed the
main thing. We should become and we should be taught. And
then we should go wherever we’re sent. And that stuff should ooze
out of our lips. It should be well represented
in our lives because the Holy Spirit has changed us. And so
let me encourage you as we think of this ministry of Paul of correction
and rejection, but also instruction. We should have hope that from
a little place like this, the gospel could emanate, it could
spread, it could radiate to the ends of the earth from a little
place like this. If our faith in Jesus is strong
and if our commitment to growth and grace is there over time,
what mighty things God will do. Let’s pray to that end. Our Father,
we pray that you would bless and keep and watch over us as
we gather for worship and discipleship As we gather to learn more of
who you are and what you’ve done, help us to spread these things
to the ends of the earth. We pray in the name of Christ,
our savior. Amen.