We are beginning a new series today all about the Apostle Paul’s relationship with the Church at Corinth. In 2022 we will be studying Paul’s first and second letters to the Church at Corinth. I have entitled this series, To Corinth with Love. Today, I want to begin by looking at how the Church at Corinth began. We have an account of its founding by Paul in Acts 18:1-17. I have titled this message A Church Born through Crisis. Listen for God’s Word to you…
After this, Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. 2 There he met a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all Jews to leave Rome. Paul went to see them, 3 and because he was a tentmaker as they were, he stayed and worked with them. 4 Every Sabbath he reasoned in the synagogue, trying to persuade Jews and Greeks.
5 When Silas and Timothy came from Macedonia, Paul devoted himself exclusively to preaching, testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Messiah. 6 But when they opposed Paul and became abusive, he shook out his clothes in protest and said to them, “Your blood be on your own heads! I am innocent of it. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.”
7 Then Paul left the synagogue and went next door to the house of Titius Justus, a worshiper of God. 8 Crispus, the synagogue leader, and his entire householdbelieved in the Lord; and many of the Corinthians who heard Paul believed and were baptized.
9 One night the Lord spoke to Paul in a vision: “Do not be afraid; keep on speaking, do not be silent. 10 For I am with you, and no one is going to attack and harm you, because I have many people in this city.” 11 So Paul stayed in Corinth for a year and a half, teaching them the word of God.
12 While Gallio was proconsul of Achaia, the Jews of Corinth made a united attack on Paul and brought him to the place of judgment. 13 “This man,” they charged, “is persuading the people to worship God in ways contrary to the law.”
14 Just as Paul was about to speak, Gallio said to them, “If you Jews were making a complaint about some misdemeanor or serious crime, it would be reasonable for me to listen to you. 15 But since it involves questions about words and names and your own law—settle the matter yourselves. I will not be a judge of such things.” 16 So he drove them off. 17 Then the crowd there turned on Sosthenes the synagogue leader and beat him in front of the proconsul; and Gallio showed no concern whatever.
In this passage we see four crises in the life of Paul and how God used these crises to help Paul grow…
Crisis #1: Loneliness
While waiting for Silas and Timothy to arrive from Athens there was no one Paul knew inCorinth.
Tim Hansel has written in his book, Dancin’ Toward the Dawn, “Loneliness is not the same as being alone. Loneliness is feeling alone . . . no matter how many people are around you.”
Here was Paul in one of the biggest cities he had ever visited, hundreds of thousands ofpeople milling about, but he didn’t know a one of them. Certainly, he felt lonely in thosecircumstances.
Someone once said that there are few things more emotionally draining than being in a crowd of people you don’t know. You are looking into a sea of faces, but none of them are familiar, and so it is very tiring. Paul must have known the exhaustion of loneliness during his first days in Corinth.
But eventually God met Paul’s need for companionship. The Lord answered this need in Paul’s life by introducing him to Aquila and Priscilla. Paul would have a profound influence on this couple. However, the fact is that they had no less an influence on Paul.
I don’t think our need for love and friendship is ever fully met in this life. It is easy to look at people in the Bible, or people we read about in books, and think: Boy, they sure had it made. But when we meet real people, and really get to know them, we discover there isalways a residual loneliness in their lives, and in ours, that is never fully taken away. As TimHansel has written: “God is not going to take all the loneliness away and patch every hole in our lives. He is just going to give it meaning and purpose. He doesn’t promise to fix us—just make us whole and holy.” Even Jesus, when he rose from the dead, still had thewounds from the cross. It has been said that when we get to heaven, God will not measure our lives according to our diplomas or our medals, but according to our scars and how wehandled them.
How do you handle loneliness? Do you rush about trying to fill the emptiness withwhatever or whomever is at hand? Or do you take time, as I’m sure Paul did, to embrace the stillness—the aloneness?
Sometimes we need to embrace the loneliness of life and drink the cup of aloneness to thedregs. Other times we need to reach out for friendship but do it without grasping desperately. It is only as we get quiet before God that we will know which we need to do. It is only as we embrace our aloneness with him that he can begin to fill our empty cups.
Crisis #2: Poverty
The second crisis Paul faced in Corinth was the crisis of poverty. Paul was forced to make tents as a means of supporting himself. Later he wrote to the Church at Philippi:
I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything, through him who gives me strength… when I set out from Macedonia, not one church sharedwith me in the matter of giving and receiving, except you only; for even when I was in Thessalonica, you sent me aid again and again when I was in need.
Apparently by the time Paul got to Corinth even this support from the Philippians had dried up. But the fact that Paul was able to make money by tent-making in Corinth was also partof God’s provision. Then when Silas and Timothy did show up, perhaps they broughtfinancial support with them, for it was then that Paul devoted himself exclusively topreaching.
In the ups and downs, the ins and outs of everyday life, Paul learned to trust the Lord to provide for him and rest content in that provision, whether the Lord provided for Paulthrough tent-making or through the gifts of friends. Jesus said, “But seek first his kingdomand his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” (Matthew 6:33) If we put God first in our lives then we don’t need to worry about provisions. As Paul wrote tothe Philippians, “And my God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.”
When my father quit organized crime and committed his life to follow Jesus, he also set about repaying everyone from whom he had stolen money over the years. When he was finished making restitution, he and my mother had nothing left except the clothes on their backs. But God provided for their needs step by step. Within days of having to move out of their home, God brought a man into my father’s life who offered a house for our family to live in. When my father needed a car, someone else came along and offered that. When my parents were down to no money in the bank and my father was flat on his back suffering the effects of polio, suddenly a check appeared in the mail.
The example of my parents’ life has always encouraged me in the financially lean times. I have learned through it all that there is a time to pray and there is a time towork. Whether through the work of our own hands, or the gifts of others, the Lord provides for his own. We can go to the bank on that, just like Paul learned to go to the bank of heaven on it.
Crisis #3: Failure
The Jews, whom Paul was trying to reach with the Good News about Jesus in Corinth, opposed Paul and became abusive, so much so that Paul shook out his clothes in protest and said to them, “Your blood be on your own heads!” Later, the Jews made a united attack against Paul and brought him before the court of Gallio. Gallio was the proconsul of Achaia from AD 51 to 52,[1] and brother of Seneca, the philosopher and tutor of Nero. The conflict Paul experienced with his fellow Jews must have been especially painful for him since he loved his own people and even wished that he himself could be damned if they could be saved (Romans 9:3). But God used the impartiality of Gallio to protect Paul from harm. And just when Paul was probably tempted to think that he had failed in Corinth, Crispus, the synagogue ruler, and his entire household became believers. Not only that, but many ofthe Corinthians who heard Paul believed and were baptized.
As Michael Green has noted in his book, To Corinth with Love: “We are not called to constant success. We are not called to instant glory now. We live between the ages; heirs to all the failure and frailty and fallenness of this age, heirs too to the power and life and loveof the age to come. We live at the cross roads. The Master suffered . . . and rose. So will hisapostolic church . . .”
Do you ever wonder why you seem to be failing so much in life? Do you ever feel like youare the worst Christian in the world because of your failures? Maybe you wonder if you area Christian at all because you have gotten it into your head that Christians don’t fail, they succeed all the time, don’t they?
Maybe you better take another look at the heroes of faith in Hebrews 11. Do you think Abel felt successful when his brother Cain was about to kill him? Or what about Abraham when he was wandering through the desert without a home or an heir? Or Joseph when he was sold into slavery? He must have wondered if the dream God had given him would ever come true. Or how about Moses tending Jethro’s sheep—do you think he felt like he had accomplished something in life? The writer to the Hebrews says that all these heroes of the faith had their weakness turned to strength. They weren’t known for their successes, but for their failures, and how God used those failures. Hebrews 11:35-38 reads:
Others were tortured and refused to be released, so that they might gain a better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to deathby the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted, and mistreated—the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground.
That is a description of the “normal” Christian life. It hardly sounds successful, does it? Only God can really count success or failure, for only he sees all our lives accurately, from an eternal perspective. Paul must have felt like a failure in the synagogue in Corinth when his fellow Jews rejected his message about Jesus. But he only needed to wait a little while tosee the fruit the Lord was going to bring about amidst seeming failure.
As C. S. Lewis once said, “It is not your business to succeed but to do right: when you havedone so, the rest lies with God.”
Crisis #4: Alienation
Paul must have felt like he was in an alien land when he was in Corinth. It was the furthestdistance he had ever traveled from his home in Tarsus, and the city presented many things which conflicted with his Jewish upbringing.
Corinth was on the main trade route between Rome and the eastern Mediterranean. It was the capitol of the province of Achaia. It was a wealthy and intellectual city, yet at the same time Corinth was notorious across the Roman Empire for moral corruption.
Michael Green has written, “Corinth was the Vanity Fair of the ancient world. Aphroditewas worshiped there as Porne (prostitute), her temple on the Acrocorinth was given over to debauchery, and the very name of Corinth was used to denote fornication(“Corinthianizing”). The city was sex mad.”
The temple of Aphrodite which once stood directly above the city was home to a thousandmale and female temple prostitutes. Thus, Corinth attracted worshipers of Aphrodite from allover the Roman Empire.
How did Paul handle the sense of alienation he must have felt in Corinth? The chief source of Paul’s encouragement amidst an alien land was a fresh vision of Jesus Christ:
One night the Lord spoke to Paul in a vision: ‘Do not be afraid; 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.’
As a result of that vision Paul stayed for a year and a half in Corinth, longer than he hadstayed anywhere else, and he taught them the word of God. Furthermore, from Corinth Paul wrote great letters of encouragement to the Church at Thessalonica. This should remind us that the place of many crises can also be the place where God uses us to comfort others. Paul was able to thrive instead of just survive in the crises of loneliness, poverty, seeming failureand a sense of alienation because he had a clear vision of Jesus Christ.
I have stood on the “bema”, the raised judgment platform where Paul was brought beforeGallio. Today, on that very spot, stands a large, square stone inscribed with these words of Paul from 2 Corinthians 4:17, written both in Greek and in English:
For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.
Paul goes on in the next verse to say:
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
As Paul stood there on the “bema”, the judgment platform, I imagine he thought of the judgment platform on which he would one day stand before God. As Paul stood on the bemabefore Gallio he could see plenty of temporary things: in the distance was the temple of Aphrodite on the Acrocorinth, right across the street was the temple of Apollo with its massive Doric columns, before Paul stood a beautiful Roman fountain, and to his left was a thriving marketplace. Paul saw all of this with his physical eyes, but he also had the God-given ability to close his physical eyes to what was temporary and open his spiritual eyes to the eternal.
The Lord’s great word of comfort to us amidst an alien culture is: “I am with you.” In fact, as we saw last Sunday, one of Jesus’ names, Immanuel, means “God with us.”
Paul was right: everything in Corinth was temporary; Corinth lies in ruins today. Paul certainly felt alienated in that city that was filled with things and activities completely foreign to his belief system. Paul was not at home in Corinth. He realized, as we all need to realize, that his home was with God. As Paul later wrote to the Philippians: “our citizenship is in heaven.” (Philippians 3:20) And in the shadow of the goddess of love Paul told the Corinthians what real love was all about, a love that could heal humanity’s greatest alienation—her alienation from God.
The good news is that God can use our crises of loneliness, poverty, failure, and our sense ofalienation in this world, just as he used these things in Paul’s life, to draw us closer tohimself. If that is the result of each of these crises then each one is worth going through, just so we can come out on the other side having grown closer to our Triune God.
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