Acts 18:18-23 The Words of God

 

Good morning! Turn with me in your Bibles to Acts 18:18, page 927 in the pew Bibles.

Our text for this morning is not unique in the historical narrative that is the book of Acts. “Some people were here and did some stuff, then they went over there and did some other stuff.”

But there are questions for us to consider as we look at this text, big questions, possibly life changing questions. It’s going to be so obvious to you all when we read it, I promise!

Before we look at the text I’d like to remind you of 1 Timothy 3:16-17 which says,

¹⁶ All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, ¹⁷ that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

The “man of God,” or more accurately, the “human being of God,” the one who belongs to God, the Christian.

And so being reminded once again that the Word of God is the words of God, let’s ask for His help as we examine the words of God in the book of Acts.

Let’s pray.

¹⁸ After this, Paul stayed many days longer and then took leave of the brothers and set sail for Syria, and with him Priscilla and Aquila. At Cenchreae he had cut his hair, for he was under a vow. ¹⁹ And they came to Ephesus, and he left them there, but he himself went into the synagogue and reasoned with the Jews. ²⁰ When they asked him to stay for a longer period, he declined. ²¹ But on taking leave of them he said, “I will return to you if God wills,” and he set sail from Ephesus.

²² When he had landed at Caesarea, he went up and greeted the church, and then went down to Antioch. ²³ After spending some time there, he departed and went from one place to the next through the region of Galatia and Phrygia, strengthening all the disciples.

So what is the big, life-changing, and obvious question that comes to mind after reading this text? What was that about?

I suppose it’s not the question that is life changing. It’s possibly not even the answer that is life changing. It’s your response to the question that can change your life.

What are your options when you read a text that doesn’t seem to have an obvious point to it?

Do you just shrug it off as one of another million things you don’t understand about the Bible? Just add it to the pile!

Or do you dig in and try to find some meaning in it? What does that look like? Where do you even start?

I’d like to read a quote from a book that I highly recommend you all read. It absolutely changed the way I study the Bible. It was written by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart. It’s called, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth.

If you can remember me ever saying that the Bible can never mean what it never meant, that’s from this book. A single idea that changed the way I looked at Scripture forever.

Here’s the quote:

 

“Many of the urgent problems in the church today are basically struggles with bridging the hermeneutical gap, that has to do with moving from the ‘then and there’ of the original text to the ‘here and now’ of our own life settings. But this also means bridging the gap between the scholar and the lay person. The concern of the scholar is primarily with what the text meant; the concern of the lay person is usually with what it means. The believing scholar insists that we must have both. Reading the Bible with an eye only to its meaning for us can lead to a great deal of nonsense as well as to every imaginable kind of error – because it lacks controls. Fortunately, most believers are blessed with at least a measure of that most important of all hermeneutical skills – common sense.

“On the other hand, nothing can be so dry and lifeless for the church as making biblical study purely an academic exercise in historical investigation. Even though the Word was originally given in a concrete historical context, its uniqueness is that that historically given and conditioned Word is an ever-living Word.

“Our concern, therefore, must be with both dimensions. The believing scholar insists that the biblical texts first of all mean what they meant. That is, we believe God’s Word for us today is first of all precisely what His Word was to them. Thus we have two tasks: First, to find out what the text originally meant; this task is called exegesis. Second, we must learn to hear that same meaning in the variety of new or different contexts of our own day; we call this second task hermeneutics.”

That was a long one, I know. Figuring out what it meant to them then, and what does that meaning mean for us now. Because the Word of God can never mean what it never meant.

So how does this apply to our text today?

Here is our best example: who got their hair cut?

We tend to assume that it was Paul but is that what the text says? It doesn’t. It could have been Acquila.

Well, whoever it was, why did they get their hair cut? Because of the vow, but what was the vow? When was the vow made? Why does it matter? What does any of this have to do with Jesus?

In truth, we have to go back to our original potentially life-changing question: what was that about?

Our response will show whether or not we truly care about what the Bible actually says, that’s the response that can change our lives.

So, who got their hair cut, Paul or Acquila? We don’t know.

What was the vow? We don’t know.

When was the vow taken, when did it start? We don’t know.

What is the point of this discussion? We don’t know…

Actually the point is to challenge us, to encourage us, as a family to think about what we are reading. To take the time to consider the question, “What was that actually about?” and try to find the answer.

What are the context clues? What do the passages before and after have to say about it? How does it fit in the paragraph it’s in, or the chapter, or the whole book?

What other resources are available to me to figure out the answer to my questions? Who do I trust to get answers from? Friends, authors, preachers, and teachers?

I highly recommend you get your own copy of How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. You can’t borrow my copy, it’s falling apart and I’ll never get it back.

More importantly, read your Bible, it truly is God’s Word to you, to me, to the church, and to the whole world. This is how we get to know what God is like, who Jesus is, what He wants for us, and from us, and what He has done for us.

After all, it is written, “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whosoever would believe in Him will not perish but have everlasting life.”

Amen.