You're listening to audio from Faith Church, located on the north side of Indianapolis. If you'd like to check out more information about our church and ministry, you can find us at faithchurchindy.com. Now here's the teaching. Well, hey, good morning, everyone. Good morning.

My name's Joey, Pastor Joey. We've been walking our way through the book of Acts for quite a while now. The last 6 months of it though, as we've been walking through Acts, we've been following the travels and adventures of 1 of the church's first great missionaries, a guy named named Paul. We picked up with his missionary journey there in Acts 13, it's like on the bottom right hand corner there. And once Luke, the author of Acts, kind of focused in on Paul, he's kept his attention just riveted there.

For us, that's been 6 months of being in Acts where we've only been looking at what Paul has been doing until today. While Paul is off visiting again some of the churches he planted on his first trip, because we just finished the second one last week, while Luke takes us back to Ephesus. Paul's gonna show up here again next week, but today we're introduced to a dynamic young preacher named Apollos, figure that we're never going to see again after today. So why tell us this story? Why include it?

Well, that's what we're gonna jump in and together try to find out. Now, if you know me, you probably know already that, I've never really understood college sports rivalries. I mean, I understand them intellectually, but I've never, like, felt 1 or identified with with 1. I've lived here long enough. I've picked up on the fact that Purdue people really don't like people who went to IWU or IU or whatever it is.

I remember when we lived in Texas, there was one college in Texas that didn't like another college in Texas. Somebody gigged someone's horn or horned someone's gig or whatever. I don't know. I kept hearing about that, but I have learned that no one here likes the Ohio State. Is that one right?

K. Now, the closest I've ever come to a college sports rivalry that I actually felt is that classic Iowa versus Iowa State, since I grew up in Iowa, but my dad went to Iowa State, my mom went to Iowa. They seemed to get along fine, and neither one forced us to watch football games when we'd rather be doing something fun. So Now, what I do understand, though, are seminary rivalries. Yeah.

Now, if you don't know, seminary is the place where Bible nerds go to get a little bit more theological education, or pastoral training, or something like that. We there's a reason it rhymes with cemetery. We don't Seminaries don't usually have sports teams, though. So our our rivalries are all about, like, yeah, well, we just got the scholar from such and such a place, and, you know, or we have to take more credits than you, or our classes are way harder. Among the preachers on the teaching team here, we've got a pretty good rivalry going.

Pastor Jeff went to Covenant Seminary in Missouri. Pastor Nathan, Pastor Tom both went to Trinity in Chicago. Bob Blahnik went to Denver Seminary. You've probably never heard of it. But I went to Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas, Texas.

I Googled it today, and an AI article on the Internet said Dallas is extremely difficult to get into. I just just wanted you to know. Unlike unlike the wannabe seminaries that the other guys went to, Dallas students get a 4 year degree, not a 3 year degree. Okay? Like, we we think that pastoring is worth the extra work.

This is why it's why Dallas guys, they come out of seminary, like, they know their Bibles, they know how to preach, they know how to lead, and they know that they know all of those things. One professor told us, you know, it takes 4 years to get a degree at Dallas and at least 10, minimum, to get over it, Which is why the unofficial motto of the seminary is, you can always tell a Dallas guy. You just can't tell them much, because they think they already know. You know, it's actually not a great reputation to have. But you can always tell a Dallas guy because he's not gonna ever let you tell him anything.

It's a great reputation. Kind of goes against the very grain of what church is is all about, But rivalries, you know, rivalries work because they pull the focus off of something bigger or something greater, and they, like, bring the focus down on the individual or the the institution. Right? Trinity, obviously, is bad because Dallas is great. You know, IU is bad because Purdue is great, or the other way around.

I don't know which one it is. It's the same way rivalries start in the church, something that we see the potential of here in this passage. Because when the focus falls off of of Jesus, inevitably something else becomes the center. Usually, the the guy up front. So if you haven't already, turn to Acts 18.

We're picking it up in verse 24. Luke begins this short little story by introducing us to a new character to the narrative of the Jesus movement, this guy named Apollos. So verse 24, Luke says, now a Jew named Apollos, native of Alexandria, came to Ephesus. He was an eloquent man, competent in the scriptures. He'd 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.

Now there's a lot we don't know about Apollos, but interestingly, there actually, Luke tells us quite a bit. He packs a lot of detail into just a few verses, more detail than he usually gives us for minor characters who appear and then disappear 5 verses later. We know this guy is a Jew, born and raised in the faith of Israel, a lot like Paul. He's dedicated to the worship of the one true God. He was raised waiting for the Messiah to come and restore Israel to her role as the people through whom God is going to bless the world.

But also, like Paul, he grew up outside of Israel itself. He grew up embedded in the broader Greek culture. He's a native of Alexandria. If you've ever heard of Alexandria, it's probably because of the great library of Alexandria that that burned in, like, 48 BC, something like that. But Alexandria was one of the great cities of the ancient world in Egypt.

And by this point in history, it's not odd for Apollos to have been born there. Jews have lived in Egypt for a couple of centuries at at this point and some estimates say there were probably around a 100000 Jews living in Alexandria alone. So a rich community there. And Luke also tells us that Apollos was eloquent. Literally, he was a he was a man of words.

Someone we might we might call a a rhetorician. These words has the flavor of, like, hey, he was a dynamic speaker. He was passionate. He was fervent. He was convincing.

This is the kind of guy that could hold you spellbound with his words. He could he could make an hour pass by in a minute. It just explained things in ways that just made sense, like you just got it when you heard him speak. And no one wanted wanted to go toe to toe with him in a debate, unless they absolutely had to. But he also knew the scriptures, what we call the old testament.

He knew them inside and out, and he knew the scriptures well, more more thoroughly than the word competent here implies. Competent is kind of an anemic word. I'm not sure why they chose it for this translation, because it's more like the word powerful. He's powerful in the Scriptures. He's able to to work through the old the Old Testament and point to how it it points to Jesus.

Says, he had been instructed in the way of the Lord. So we know he's a follower of Jesus already. He can open up the old testament and say, look, it points towards a suffering Messiah. One who would die and rise again. Somewhere along the way, he's received formal education in his faith.

Someone has taught him how to read the Old Testament as a Christian. And at this point in the narrative of Acts, if you've not read any further, if you don't know how how the rest of the story goes, we we could wonder, like, is this guy the new Paul? Is Luke setting us up to shift the narrative, like, oh, now we're gonna follow this this new character into his missionary journeys or some sort of rivalry going to break out between Paul and and Apollos? This guy who's just shown up on the scene, is his presence going to help spread the gospel or hinder it? Is the church about to lose focus on Jesus and let that focus fall on on someone else.

Let's keep going. Let's find out. Luke tells us in in verse 25, Apollos, he spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus even though he knew only the baptism of John. Now what does that mean? Well, we'll find out a little bit more next week when when Paul shows up in Ephesus and he encounters a dozen or so people who are kind of in the same boat where they they've heard about John's baptism, but not anything much beyond that.

But for now, I mean, remember, Acts is the 2nd volume in kind of a 2 volume work. The author, Luke, writes a story of Jesus's life. We call that book Luke. And then he wrote a story of Jesus's life through the church that we call Acts. And so Luke has already told us about John's baptism.

If we were to turn to Luke chapter 3, you know, volume 1, chapter 3, we we'd read there what Luke has to say about John. The guy we call John the Baptist, because the act of baptism, you know, dunking someone underwater and pulling them back out again, it was a huge part of John's ministry. John had been preaching to Israel, the Messiah is coming. Turn away from your sins, turn back to God, trust that he's sending the Messiah, and as a symbol of your repentance, get baptized. So John had kind of set up his his home base.

He traveled around a lot, but he set up his home base in kind of a curve of the River Jordan about a a long day's walk away from Jerusalem, and crowds of people had been flocking to him to see what was going on. Some were there because, yeah, they wanted to be ready for the Messiah. They believed what John was saying. Like, if the Messiah is coming, I wanna be one of the ones that's ready. They would repent.

They would be baptized just in droves, but quite a few were there just to kinda gawk at this lunatic in the wilderness, you know, who thought the end is nigh. John was such a powerful communicator. He he even had just rumors were starting to go around that maybe he was the Messiah himself, and he was quick to put the suspicion to to rest. John would would tell them often, like, hey, I'm baptizing you with water, but after me is coming 1, you know, the one I'm telling you about, the one who's coming. He's way more way more powerful than me.

I'm not even, like, worthy to tie his sandals, but when he comes, he's gonna baptize you with fire. Very different than water. He's gonna baptize you with the Holy Spirit. That's as much of the baptism story as Apollos knew that John had baptized people, and maybe even baptized Apollos, baptized them in water, but he doesn't know what Luke tells us at the beginning of Acts, you know, volume 2, chapter 1, that Jesus had told his first followers that that 120 scared folks in an upper room hiding in Jerusalem, after Jesus had had died, before they knew he had come back, when when Jesus shows up to them, he's, like, hey, John baptized with water, but you're about to be baptized with the Holy Spirit not too many days from now. Like, hang tight.

This is the part of the story that Apollos has has not heard. He's a believer. He's a follower of Jesus. Yes, but there's something about this that he hasn't quite gotten, and Luke doesn't tell us exactly what. That's not really the point of the story.

Point is that Apollos isn't teaching anything wrong about Jesus. It's just incomplete, which is where Priscilla and Aquila step in. In verse 26, Apollos, he shows up in Ephesus. Right. He begins to speak boldly in the synagogue, but when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside, explained the way of God to him a little more accurately.

Just like Paul, again, just like Paul always does in the synagogues he visits, Apollos 2 is speaking boldly about Jesus, trying to show that Jesus is the Messiah, and Aquila and Priscilla are there to they're there to hear him in the synagogue. They've adopted the same church planning strategy as Paul had used. Right? Start in the synagogue, talk to the Jews about the Messiah they're waiting for, show from the scriptures that the Messiah is Jesus, show how the whole story of the Old Testament points to Jesus. But as Priscilla and Aquila are hearing Apollos speaking, they notice that some of his teaching is incomplete.

Not wrong, not inaccurate, just, oh, policy. You know, you just gotta say a little bit more. Right? Probably anyone who teaches or preaches or speaks for a living understands that feeling. I know I do.

When I'm hearing someone else preach, whether it's here at faith or a sermon podcast from a friend's church or at a conference or something like that, every time I listen, I can't help thinking, oh no no no no. Say it like this. Or, oh, you really missed a chance for a joke right there. Right? Or, oh, if you told that illustration just a little differently, it would have been a little bit more effective.

It's not it's not pride, or at least it's not mostly pride. It's that that kind of professional interest in other people who do the same thing, the same kind of work that you do. In fact, after I preached this sermon 1st hour, I was talking with Jeff, and he was like, hey, you had a good joke, but if you've said this. See, when I'm listening to someone and I'm rewriting their talk in my head, it's almost always about style. Here, it's about substance.

Apollos knows the story, but he's missing a chapter near the end. He doesn't have the whole thing down. So Priscilla and Aquila pull him aside to help him figure it out, which is one of those conversations I wish I I could have been a fly on the wall. I mean, can you imagine how how that went down? Right?

Apollos is a Dallas guy, and you can always tell a Dallas guy. You just can't tell him much. See, this right here in verse 26, Priscilla and Aquila heard him. They took him aside. This is the point of conflict, the point of tension, where if we were telling the movie, or telling the story in a movie, it's like zoom in on their faces, like what's what's going on in his head?

What is he thinking? What are they thinking? You know, all of that. And I wish I could have been there to hear the conversation, because Apollos is a really gifted speaker. He's powerful.

He's passionate. He's eloquent. And if people back then have the same heart struggles that people today do, which spoiler alert they do, it's hard for someone with really impressive gifts, to not let those gifts go to his head. So how do we expect Apollos to respond? If he's like the rest of us Dallas guys.

But Apollos is pictured here as a pretty humble guy. We know he's humble, because he's he's welcoming correction and instruction. But even more than that, he's pictured here as humble, because despite the social norms at the time, he's he's okay with being corrected by tradespeople. Even more than that, breaking even deeper social norms, he's okay with being corrected by Priscilla. People don't listen to women teaching in this time in the world.

Priscilla and Aquila, remember, they're they're tent makers, they're tradespeople, and they're doing well for themselves, but the implication is they don't have a ton of formal education. They couldn't have gotten into one of those 4 year seminaries. Right? Maybe a correspondence course, taking an online class, but they certainly didn't have the level of education as someone like, like, Apollo, presumably not up to the level of someone like like Apollos, and Priscilla certainly does not. Women were not educated to the extent that men were.

But they've worked with Paul for at least a year and a half, learning from him, and and likely as Aquila's the one spending the majority of his time in the actual tent making trade, Priscilla's the one with the free time to learn more and learn more deeply from Paul. Of the 2, she's the one who's almost always mentioned first, because Priscilla is the one who's sat with Paul, learned from Paul, absorbed, you know, church planning strategy from him, learned how to read the Old Testament the way that he does so that it points to Jesus. She's heard the stories of the early church in Jerusalem, from Paul, stories that he heard from Barnabas and from Peter. She's absorbed his passion for for Jews and Gentiles to worship together in Jesus. So though the 2 of them pull Apollos aside, it's Priscilla, who's teaching and filling in the gaps for Apollos.

Again, not that he was wrong, it's just incomplete. Verse 25 says, he taught accurately the the things concerning Jesus. Verse 26 says, well, they explained it to him a little more accurately. There's just some stuff he were missing. Some gaps we needed to fill, important ones to prepare him for further ministry before he moves on.

Just immediately, Apollos wants to move on. He wants to go to Achaia, to to Corinth. Four verses after he intro he's introduced, he's he's gone again. On in Corinth, on to building up the church that Paul planted there, debating powerfully in the synagogues, proving that the Messiah is Jesus. And as far as the narrative of Acts is concerned, turn the page, and we don't hear from him again.

Which makes us ask the question again, why include this story? Right? Space isn't free on these ancient scrolls. There is no infinite scroll on the scroll that Luke is writing on. There's not just another page, keep writing.

So how did he make the cut? Why spend time on this guy? Well, I think there's a couple of reasons. A few that I want to focus on. Reasons that speak to what it means to be a church.

Reasons that speak to what it means for us to be a church, even though we're we're 2000 years removed from this, but we're part of the same movement. So just a few brief thoughts. First, just notice how the church grows. There are missionaries going around for sure. Professional teachers and preachers, but the church grows mostly through ordinary people.

Businessmen, businesswomen, whose work is taking them from city to city, and they're just sharing the new life they have in Jesus with people who've never heard of him. Priscilla and Aquila made, I think, quality tents, but their work also served as as the means through which they met and cared for people who didn't yet know Jesus. They were they were making money and making disciples in an unreached people group. That's what they were doing. What what about, I mean, what about your work?

And what about my work? How is our work opening doors to relationships with people who are becoming close to us but are still far from God? It's the main way that Jesus has always grown his church. Not the pros, but us. And second, and I've I've honed in on this a little bit already, but notice the character we see in Apollos.

He's he's eloquent. He's well versed in the scriptures. These are the thing that Luke's Luke tells us, but what he shows us is that eloquence is no substitute for knowledge. Powerful preaching is no substitute for character. Right?

Just because you talk good doesn't mean you know good or are good, which is a warning for us preachers as much as it is a warning for us when we're listening. Like, we're nothing special. And no matter how eloquent or or learned or how many credits we've taken, we still don't know everything. Luke makes it a point not to tell us what Apollos got wrong, just kind of the general idea. Yeah, it's something about baptism.

He doesn't tell us what Apollos got wrong. He tells us that even a preacher as powerful as Apollos needs to sit under good teaching, be corrected if he doesn't have it completely right. Whether he's a Talos guy or not, there's there's still a lot to learn. But 3rd and lastly, this little story, this this anecdote, you know, it's embedded in in the middle of the long story of Paul's travels. From chapter 13 all the way to the end, Luke keeps us just fixated on Paul.

Paul's not the main character. Jesus is the main character, but he keeps us fixated on Paul except for here. This little story is embedded in the middle of the long story of Paul, and I think that highlights an important, maybe a vital fact for us, that the church can survive. The church can even thrive without its celebrity teachers and preachers. This little church in Ephesus is is doing just fine without Paul.

Priscilla and Aquila, they're making progress. People are coming to faith. New teachers are being raised up. Smaller groups are forming. People are building community together across ethnic boundaries.

And, yeah, when Paul comes, it's just gonna explode. It's gonna be incredible, but Jesus doesn't need Paul for the church to grow, and he doesn't need me, and he doesn't need the other pastors. He just needs us to be focused on him. The reason Apollos can take correction from tradespeople, from a woman with less education than himself, the reason Apollos is fine with being corrected is because for Apollos, the focus isn't on him and what he knows. The focus is on Jesus.

Being eloquent and powerful and competent and knowing the Bible inside and out, that's certainly helpful, but church isn't about whoever's on stage. In fact, when a church begins to be identified with the personality of a preacher rather than the person of of Jesus, the church begins to lose sight of the reason it exists in the first place. When we lived in Dallas, there was a church there that was just exploding. It was huge. It was doing I mean, exploding in a good way.

It was just, you know, campuses popping up all over the place, and the church was doing generally good stuff, but there was one thing that really kind of bothered me about this particular church, and that was their merchandise. All the stuff you could buy, because it all had, like, this small little logo for the church on the back, and on the front, it said, I heart my pastor. It was like, oh, I think you missed the point. Unless, I mean, the guy does have a private jet, $1,000,000 salary, and a quarter $1,000,000 housing alliance, so maybe he's got something figured out. I don't know.

No. Obviously, that's sarcasm, because when the focus falls off of Jesus and lands on the guy up front, you end up making the guy up front the new Messiah. Instead of Jesus. And no one is immune. Even Apollos, when he goes to Corinth, becomes a divisive figure in the church, because he's eloquent and powerful and Paul's a little more, like, rustic and confrontational, and there's people in the church of Corinth who are, like, now this is the kind of guy we want preaching.

Like, I like I like his style. That's the kind of people we want to be. Apollos eventually is like, I don't think me being here is very good for this church, and he has to leave. See, no one's immune. No church is immune, not not even faith, whether it's pastor Jeff or pastor Nathan or pastor Tom or or me.

No church can survive very long if one of us becomes the reason you're here instead of Jesus. When the focus falls off of him and lands on one of us, that's crushing, and we won't be able to survive it. So, where's your focus? Why are you here at faith? I mean, Is it because one of us, you know, it's because of one of us preachers?

Or maybe it because of a specific teacher that the church has? Or because of the programs we offer, you know, it's the kids ministry, or the worship services, or the mission's emphasis, or maybe we're just better than the church you used to be part of, or maybe you're here because you're fairly confident that most of the people here vote for the same side of the party that ticket that you vote for, Or this is where my friends are, or I don't know. I grew up here. I didn't know you could choose to go to another church. None of those reasons are bad.

They're just incomplete. It's not enough. Every single one of those things is a good gift from God, but every single one of those things can change. Pastors leave, programs end, your best friend gets a new job and moves across the country, the church building floods again, or maybe it burns down this time. I don't know.

And we don't have the building or the place anymore. I'm not saying I want that to happen, but when when we're left with nothing, what do we still have that binds us together? Yeah. We still have Jesus. One thing.

There's only one thing that remains when everything else changes, and it's Jesus. But the moment our focus falls off of him onto any of these other things, I mean, we slowly begin to crush the the reason we're here. So why are you here? If it's not for Jesus, then it might be time to shift your focus. Alright.

I think we need to pray. Father, in this brief moment of silence, I hope that each of us is wrestling with the question of where our focus really is, because it's so easy for our focus to shift from the ultimate thing from Jesus to the good things, the good gifts you've given us. As small as they are, they can't compare to the infinite weight of who Jesus is, and yet if it's the closest thing to us, it's the biggest thing in our field of vision. It's so easy to make those little things the thing we cherish instead of who you are and what you've given us in the gift of your son and the presence of the spirit in us. So father, I pray for each of us, help us to move our focus, shift our eyes off of this stuff, as good as it is, and onto your son.

Pull our focus back to him as we see what he has done for us and keep our eyes fixed on him and him alone. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.