One
of the saddest things that you can possibly imagine is to worship in a place
where Jesus Christ isn’t present. Now,
that thought may seem a little strange to you at first. After all, if it’s a group of Christians and
they’re gathered together, then we just assume that Christ is present. We go back to our old default verse of
Matthew 18:20, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am
among them.”; a verse that actually has more to do with repentance and church
discipline than Christ’s presence during a prayer meeting, but that’s a whole
different discussion. No, what I’m
talking about is when we’re in worship or Christian fellowship, and the gospel
is nowhere to be found. I’ve seen these
types of Christians, pastors, churches, and services of worship. I’ve seen really smart, intelligent, and
articulate folks not come anywhere close to hitting the mark. My professor of preaching in seminary used to
say that a sermon that never made it to the gospel was like a plane that just
kept circling the airport. Eventually,
the gas (or in the case of the sermon, time) ran out and there was just a
chaotic collision. Every time he would
tell us that I would think of a plaque that sits in the home of my wife’s
grandparents (him being a retired Air Force pilot) that says, “Flying is the
second greatest joy known to man…landing is the first.” To put it in terms of preaching and the
gospel, digging away at Scripture and really getting to the “so what” and the
nuts and bolts of it is exciting for the Christian. However, finding Jesus, finding the gospel in
a text truly is the greatest joy known to man.
Since
our text from last Sunday, Paul really kind of had a fairly routine road. After leaving Athens he went to Corinth. Now, he spent a good bit of time there, about
a year and a half. He planted a church there,
evangelized, developed some new leaders in the persons of Aquila and Priscilla,
a husband and wife team. It’s there also
that he wrote both his 1st and 2nd letters to the church
in Thessalonica. He was particularly
evangelistic towards the Gentiles. And
seemingly for the first time, he actually garnered the support of someone in the
civil government, a man named Gallio.
Now, he may not have fully endorsed Paul, but at least he tolerated
him. He knew that there was nothing vicious
about what Paul was doing, so he allowed him to continue his ministry, which he
did for some time.
Then
we come to our text, which we could really divide into two, but I won’t for the
purpose of trying to paint a bigger picture here. After Paul left Corinth, that’s where our
text tells us that he went to Antioch.
Now, we’ve got some information there that if we had all the time in the
world we would explore, but we don’t; Paul got a haircut because of a vow, most
likely some sort of Nazirite vow.
There’s no other discussion about it, and he went off to Ephesus and
went to the synagogue to evangelize.
This is the rather non-climactic end of his second missionary
journey. It ends in verse 22 and his
third missionary journey starts in verse 23.
Now, why Luke, the author of this book, chose to shift the amount of
details given about Paul’s journeys here is anyone’s guess. It has been suggested that much of this is because
the focus is being removed here from the fact that Paul was going to what was
actually being done in these places.
Whatever the case may be, Luke’s attention turns for just a moment from
Paul to Aquila and Priscilla, and that’s where we find this man named Apollos.
You
see, Apollos was an exceptionally bright man.
We’re told that “he was an eloquent man, competent in the
Scriptures. He had been instructed in
the way of the Lord. And being fervent
in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus, though
he knew only the baptism of John.” Wait a minute!
If all he knew about Jesus was up to John’s baptism then he hadn’t even
gotten to the good stuff yet. How in the
world can you preach Jesus without knowing anything past his baptism? There’s no earthly ministry, no parables, no
miracles, and especially no cross.
There’s no death, no resurrection, and no ascension. I kind of wish I knew how in the heck he
preached about Jesus without all that information. Remember, he didn’t just timidly preach, but
he spoke boldly. Apollos was a very
intelligent and incredibly articulate man.
He was the epitome of a public speaker.
However, what he actually taught of Jesus was the Old Testament. I know some of you are sitting there saying
that Jesus isn’t in the Old Testament.
Well, you’re wrong, he’s all over it.
The whole thing is about him. All
the prophecies are ultimately about him.
All of the major figures in the Old Testament find their greater
fulfillment in Jesus. And he was even
there at the time of creation when God said “Let us make man in our image.” One of the things that we as Christians are
called to do when we read the Old Testament is to find Christ in the text. He’s there; we just have to look for
him. When someone comes to me and they
say that they really want to know Jesus and they ask me where in Scripture they
should start reading, I tell them to read one of the Synoptic gospels and then
go read the Old Testament.
Aquila
and Priscilla heard Apollos speaking and they could tell that he had
talent. They could tell that his logic
and intellect and knowledge of the Old Testament Scriptures were
second-to-none. However, they also had
to tell him that he was missing a great deal.
Verse 26, “He began to speak boldly in the synagogue, but when Priscilla and
Aquila heard him, they took him and explained to him way of God more
accurately.” And from there Luke
goes on to write about how Apollos became an even more effective teacher and
defender of the faith. You see, Aquila
and Priscilla saw the need for educating this man. They saw that he had some knowledge, but he
was still so lacking. There isn’t
anything in this text about debating over whether or not to educate this man
because it may embarrass him or hurt his feelings. No, they saw that he was in need of hearing,
as the late Paul Harvey used to say, “the rest of the story.” Aquila and Priscilla didn’t water-down their
gospel, but they helped Apollos to complete his. There was no compromise in them, only
truthful proclamation.
As
I’ve already said a few times, Apollos was a great speaker of biblical truths
and knowledge, but it wasn’t the whole truth.
I want to take just a few minutes and relate this incomplete gospel that
Apollos was preaching to what we find in many churches today. You see, I’ve had the pleasure (and in some
cases displeasure) of speaking with many folks with very skewed views of the
gospel. Amy and I used to eat breakfast
with a coworker of her’s on a regular basis.
One time her husband joined us for breakfast and we began a somewhat
gospel-driven conversation, although his knowledge of the gospel was about as
vast as my knowledge of how a cell phone works.
I can push buttons. He knew a few
key things. But his understanding of the
gospel was that we are to just do our best to fulfill the Ten
Commandments. Now, not trying to
diminish the moral law at all, and not trying to discard the Ten Commandments
at all, but there’s more to the gospel that those ten words. Another guy that I’ve had conversations with
about the gospel and his view of it is along a similar line. He believes in God, I think in the sense of
the Christian God, but his view of heaven and hell is if you do good then you
go to heaven and if you do bad you go to hell.
Now, again, I don’t want discredit the moral law. I don’t want to cast out the very prominent
contrast that we see in the Old Testament (especially in the wisdom literature)
between the righteous and the wicked.
However, there’s something missing in both of these views of the
Christian faith and the gospel itself.
Do you care to take a guess at what that might be? Well, there are a lot of things that would be
correct answers because there are a lot of things missing here. However, I want point to two words that I
think are the most notably absent: faith
and grace.
You
see, when a gospel is preached that is devoid of faith and grace, then it is an
incomplete gospel. Apollos, in our text,
may have been able to truly tell some wonderful things about Jesus just from
the prophecies and the promises that God made about him in the Old
Testament. However, what Jesus actually
did is so much greater than what we could imagine simply from our looking to
the Old Testament. Guys, there’s a
reason why so many of the prophecies about Christ were missed during his
earthly ministry. The fulfillment of
many of them was so far beyond imagining.
The fact that God’s grace, His unmerited favor as we say in Reformed
circles, would be so great that He would pay the price for a debt that we owe
to Him is astounding; and not just that, but that the means by which He paid
that price was through the sacrifice of His only begotten son. We can take it even one step farther and say
that all of this grace and mercy is counted as our own righteousness, our own
complete obedience to the Law, and it’s not even based on our own keeping of
the Law.
Yes,
we are called to fulfill the moral law, which is summarized in the Ten
Commandments. We’re called fulfill them
and their summation, the Great Commandment.
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and
with all your strength and with all your mind, and love our neighbor as
yourself.” We’re called to do exactly
that. However, we have and will continue
to fail at this. We will continue to
fall vastly short of the standard that God has set for us. The bare minimum of what He wants us to do is
so far out of our reach that it almost seems laughable, almost. And that’s where faith comes in. You see, this entire fulfillment of God’s
will and the righteousness of Christ being counted as ours are because of faith
in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior.
It’s not about our good works, at least as far as earning our salvation
is concerned. We’ve said numerous times
that our good works are the right responses to God’s saving grace. They are our “thank you” letters to God for
what He has done on our behalf. Far too
often, the view that many people have taken of Scripture is that it is a big
book of rules and regulations for how we are to live our lives. If you meet that criteria then you get to
enter into heaven and if you don’t, well you end up somewhere else (we’ve taken
hell out of it). Well, to a certain
extent that is accurate, at least to the extent that there is some information about
our desired actions in our Bibles.
Unfortunately, Christians have concerned themselves more with outward
behaviors than inner faith. We’ve
focused so much on the way that people act and the things that they say and we
have neglected the very source of these actions and words.
I’ll
put it like this, imagine that there is a well that we get our water from. Well, that well has some type of mineral in
it that makes the water unsafe for us to drink it. So, we have to treat it. We have to run in through a series of filters
and electrical charges in order to get out the harmful mineral. Sure, the water is then safe to drink, but we
haven’t really gotten to the heart of the matter. That’s what it’s like when we just think
about the gospel in terms of outward actions.
The surface will be fine, and we may be able to get by, but something
more is needed. We might could say that
this would be like those folks who are only concerned with morality. Now imagine that there was something that we
could do to the water once and for all that would cause that harmful mineral to
dissipate from the well entirely, leaving us able to come to the well and
freely drink. In other words, there is
some sort of change at the source that causes everything else to change. Both options would leave us with drinkable
water, but only one solves the problem of having this harmful mineral at the
source.
Boiling
the gospel down to mere morality and right and wrong actions is just as
problematic as Apollos’ preaching about Jesus without any of his earthly
ministry. Probably even more so, and
that’s why Aquila and Priscilla saw as absolutely necessary to correct Apollos
in his preaching. They didn’t just take
the approach that many would take today and just say, “Well, at least he’s
preaching Jesus. I know it’s not exactly
correct, but it’s better than not preaching Jesus at all.” Friends, what we teach and what we preach is
more important that our simply preaching and teaching. If what we are teaching is in error or
incomplete, then we’re not having the type of impact upon the gospel that we
ought to have. When you see someone
teaching an incomplete gospel, don’t be afraid to correct and teach them. Now, the challenge in this first comes with
the fact that we have to know what we ought to be teaching and preaching. We accomplish that by spending time in God’s
Word and studying the theology, the things that we have learned about Him. Don’t just settle for Jesus to be preached
and acknowledged, make sure that it is the right Jesus, the right God that is
being proclaimed. After all, remember
that Satan and the demons acknowledged Jesus too. Any gospel that is preached that is not the
true gospel, is a gospel that brings about more destruction of God’s kingdom
than construction. Glory be to God; in
the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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