Speak, for I am with you
Acts 18:1-16

Lord God, take my words and speak through them, take our minds and think through them, take our hearts and set them on fire with love for you, you who are Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Athens
Paul and Silas have set out on a second missionary journey, picking up Timothy along the way. But after being pursued from city to city by some troublemakers, who wanted to harm Paul, he’d gone ahead of the others into Athens, while they stayed a while with the believers in Berea. Paul spoke to a group of philosophers in Athens, but didn’t get a particularly enthusiastic reception. So he moves on to the next town: Corinth.

Corinth
Athens is the more familiar city to most modern ears, but in Paul’s day, Corinth had surpassed it in importance. The Roman military had attacked and destroyed major portions of the city in 146 BC, after its citizens had taken part in an anti-Roman uprising, and it had remained in ruins for a century. But in 46 BC, Julias Caesar passed through, and saw its potential as a Roman colony, so the city was rebuilt.

By the time Paul passed through Corinth, it was probably the wealthiest city in Greece — a major multicultural urban centre, with a population of some 750,000 people. It was a bustling seaport on the narrow strip of land that joins the southern part of Greece to the northern part.

In addition to the financial wealth of Corinth, it had a wealth of religious options as well — most of them pagan. A noted temple to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, was there. Prostitution was so rampant in the city, that the Greek word meaning, “Corinthian girl”, came to be a slang term for a promiscuous woman. Corinth was also a centre of homosexuality, with a temple to Apollo, the epitome of male beauty.

The city had no time for a little Jewish tent-maker called Paul, who wanted to tell them about another Jew, called Jesus. Things didn’t look very promising for him, but he persevered.

Friends and enemies
Paul made many friends in Corinth, and many enemies. He stayed with a Jewish husband-and-wife team, Aquila and Prescilla, with whom he shared the trade of tent-makers. They were in Corinth because that’s where they’d gone when, along with the rest of the Roman Jews, Claudius ordered them out of Rome.

It was a custom in New Testament times to teach every Jewish boy a trade. Jesus had been trained as a carpenter. Paul learned the craft of tent making, which involved working with leather, hair and wool. It may be that it was Paul’s shared trade with Aquila and Prescilla that brought them together at first — not necessarily a shared belief in Jesus. That may have come as Paul sat cross-legged in their shop and gossiped the gospel to the customers as he plied his needle.

Evangelising the Corinthians
Paul begins his evangelisation of the Corinthians, by getting involved with the local Jewish community, and its weekly worship. He engages in dialogue with Jews, and with Gentile sympathisers. When Silas and Timothy arrive from Macedonia, they find Paul already fully engrossed in the business of the word, busy testifying to the Jews that the Christ, the life-changing and world-changing Messiah of Jewish expectation, is Jesus.

But he failed to persuade the whole community; Jewish resistance became so strong that Paul gave up on them. Shaking out his garments was akin to shaking the dust off one’s feet, as Jesus had previously instructed his disciples to do when they encountered resistance (Luke 9:5).

Depressed by the attacks of his enemies, and the resistance of materialistic Corinth, to any talk of spiritual things, he went to bed miserable. Then in the night he had a dream. He saw Jesus, who told him to cheer up: “Don’t be afraid, but speak out and don’t stay silent; for I, Jesus, am with you, and . . . there are many in this city who are my people”.

Sharing good news
Well, Jesus was right. There were many in Corinth who belonged to Jesus, though they didn’t know it yet. The church grew there until there were several different congregations, in different parts of the city. Eventually it was one of the biggest churches in the country, and the good news about Jesus fanned out from there to build growing congregations all over southern Greece.

This wouldn’t have happened if Paul had given up when things were hard. But the story of Jesus was like a fire blazing up in his heart. He just had to share it. You can’t keep good news bottled up inside you.

The siege of Samaria
We’ve just heard a perfect illustration of this in the Old Testament story of the siege of Samaria (2 Kings 6.24-25). All the people were trapped inside the city, while the army of the King of Aram was camped round it, waiting for them to starve.

The only people who weren’t inside the city were four men, and they weren’t allowed in because they were lepers. They squatted outside the city gate, starving like everyone else. Eventually they said to one another, “If we sit here, we die. If we go to the Aramean army camp, they might feed us, in which case we live a little longer; or they might kill us, in which case we die a little sooner. Might as well take a chance” (2 Kings 7:4).

So they hobbled up to the Aramean camp and found it empty — all the soldiers had done a bunk the previous evening, when they heard of an Egyptian army coming to attack them. The people inside Samaria didn’t know this, but the four lepers found food aplenty in the abandoned camp, and started to gorge themselves. But soon they realized they’d have to go back to the city and tell the others. You can’t keep good news bottled up inside you.

Don’t be afraid
You and I have some good news. It’s the good news that God loves us, every one of us, and that Jesus died on the cross to show his great love for us. You can’t keep good news like that to yourself, any more than the four lepers could’ve kept the good news of free food a secret from those who didn’t know about it.

There are many ways of sharing good news. God may be calling you to study until you can proclaim it from the pulpit. Or you may be called to gossip the gospel with your family, friends, and workmates. Or you may be one who proclaims God’s love, by showing love for your family and friends, your neighbours and people who are needy, until they can see the love of God shining out of you.

Whichever way God calls you to, don’t hold back because you think the task is impossible. Jesus says to you, as he said to the Apostle Paul, “Don’t be afraid, but speak out and don’t stay silent; for I, Jesus, am with you, and no one will harm you, for there are many in this place who are my people” — though they may not realize it, until you tell them, that Jesus loves them.

Amen.