Sermon Tone Analysis

My Youth Group Was Crazy

My youth group was crazy.

Punk rock concerts in the basement of our church.

Or on the roof of my parents house.

Not kidding.

I tried to find a picture of that.

Kids driving kids downtown to do scavenger hunts in the mall or capture the flag at the Elementary School… until the cops kicked us off for trespassing.

I was not a Bible scholar, though I was a weird kid and studied the Bible a lot and went to sleep every night listening to sermons on the radio.

Chuck Swindoll, Chuck Smith.

I was teaching Bible Studies.

I really only had one skill and one book.

Someone would say “Let’s study angels!”

I would open Strong’s Concordance.

Here’s all the references to angels.

Or the index at the back of my NIV Study Bible.

Boom.

Throw those on a page.

Add three or four fill in the blank questions on those passage.

Boom!

We got a Bible study.

Best Bible Study ever?

No. Nope.

But it got us in the Word.

It was a seed planted in me to study and teach the Scripture.

How much do you need to know to be the expert?

How much does someone need to know before they should teach, before they should preach, before they should minister or serve?

How high is the bar to ride this ride?

At youth group growing up, that bar was dangerously low.

Let the kid teach, that’ll be fine!

The Expert

Paul Goes Home and Back Again

Paul takes a Nazarite vow, briefly, for reasons we just don’t seem to know.

Why does Luke record his haircut?

More about that later.

Now Paul is gone from Ephesus.

He was there a very short time.

The expert has left the billing.

The Billy Graham crusade has moved on.

It turns out that Paul isn’t the only missionary in first century Christianity.

We have been following his path because that is Luke mentor and teacher, and that is the history that Luke set out to tell.

But God is working through others, and one of those others comes to Ephesus.

Apollos - Ignorance on Fire

Native of Alexandria.

Egypt.

Apollos was walking like an Egyptian, talking like an Egyptian… because he was!

Second largest city in the Roman Empire, intellectual leader, on the Northern coast of Egypt, right on the Mediterranean Sea.

The famous library of Alexandria, the lost wonder.

It was in Alexandria that Jewish scholars translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek for the first time, the Septuagint.

So Apollos could be from Harvard, from Yale, he may be top notch when it comes to the Scriptures.

“Competent” here could also be “Strong, powerful.”

“Eloquent” man here could be “learned man”.

This is a smart guy.

He knows some things, he knows the Hebrew Scriptures.

And what’s more: he knows Jesus.

Instructed by who?

We don’t know.

He taught what he knew.

Fervent.

On fire.

Enthusiastic.

Passionate!

What did he know?

Not everything.

He knew about Jesus.

Did he have baptism right?

Nope.

Did he understand the Holy Spirit and the Trinity?

Nope.

What is the baptism of John?

John preached “repent, for the KIngdom of God is near!” Repentance for sins, baptism that would wash away those sins, more like a temporary ritual cleansing before going into the temple than the baptism into Jesus’ death and resurrection.

and, this is crazy, we’ll see next week.

It was wrong enough that those he baptized didn’t initially receive the Holy Spirit.

Wow! That’s a whole thing!

That’s pretty wrong!

And that says something powerful about baptism, by the way.

We will dive into that more next week.

Apollos didn’t understand these things, he didn’t do them right.

But he had passion… and he had Jesus.

And he didn’t need anything else.

Or rather, better to say, he didn’t need anything else to get started and God would make sure He got what else he needed.

In fact, God was already in the process of preparing what he needed.

Mentoring the Mentors

Aquila and Priscilla.

Emperor Claudius kicked all the Jews out of Rome, and this coincides with other historians talking about unrest in Rome because of a Jew named “Christus.”

It is quite possible this was just another Jewish rebellion, of which there are several… but it is possible that “Christus” is a misunderstanding of “Christ” and the word of Jesus has already reached Rome and is already causing trouble there.

Either way, the Emperor gets fed up and says “Everybody OUT!” and these two flee.

They connect with Paul, he lives with them:

And then, when Paul leaves, they decide to go with him.

More than 18 months later...

For more than a year and a half these two have been coworkers with Paul, he lived with them, roommates!

They are soaking in the teaching, somewhere along the way they become believers.

If you’re with Paul you are getting discipled in the Way, in the Way of Jesus, in the teaching of Jesus.

So a couple years ago they knew nothing, but now…

And Paul leaves them there:

When he takes leave of “them” the “them” is both the folks of Ephesus and Priscilla and Aquila.

They are in Ephesus and they hear this new kid in town, this Apollos, and he is preaching passionately, he is preaching powerfully, fervent in Spirit, he knows Jesus.

But they hear him, and they must hear that he is passionately and fervently wrong about some things.

They took him aside.

In private, that’s important.

Best way to correct your preacher, by the way.