The DEEPEST Truth Paul Ever Taught

Have you ever read a book by Gene Edwards entitled Revolution? Yes, you have. You wouldn’t be here. Of course you have. Don’t tell me you have not. That starts with the day of Pentecost and ends with the day when Paul and Barnabas begin their church-planting trip. It ends with Paul about to make his second trip. Okay? I have written a book that covers both of those. One of them is called Revolution, which takes us up to Paul’s first church planting trip. And now, in October of 1998, there will be a book coming out entitled The Silas Diary, which will take you through—where does it take you to, Gene? It takes you through…you know something? I wrote the book; I don’t remember where it ends. Golly Moses, this is embarrassing. Well, it ends somewhere, and now I’m going to take up where that book leaves off. Obviously, The Silas Diary covers Paul’s second journey. I’m going to pick up at the very end of the second journey, and I’m going to take you through the third journey. I don’t even feel I have a right to speak to you unless you know what I’m about to tell you. Otherwise, I could be lying to you.

I’m going to take a book from the New Testament. I’m going to treat it in a way I’ve never treated it before. I want to present it to you, but I want you to know the whole story behind it first. By the way, stop me anytime and interrupt me, and tomorrow morning and tomorrow night…beginning this evening, I want you to keep your Bibles nearby. I’m not going to use mine tonight, but after that, we will use it constantly.

Well, let me review the second journey really quickly, may I? Paul and Silas go to Galatia, where there are four churches, and they revisit them. Those churches have just been really hurt by the Jewish…I want to say Blastinius Drachrachma, but you don’t know who he is. Anyway, they have been hurt by a Jewish gentleman who has come through there trying to circumcise the Christians in the four churches in Galatia, which are Pisidia, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. Paul and Silas come through and visit them.

Now then, Paul and Silas go from there and plod along, trying to go to the right and to the left, but they can’t make it. All they can do is go north, and they go as far north as they can, and the Holy Spirit stops them. So Paul has a vision, and there’s someone who says, “Come over into northern Greece and help us.” Did you hear what I just said? What did I just say? Did I say anything unusual just now? You didn’t, you didn’t hear that, did you? What I should have said…Macedonia. Sister, I was 75 years old before I found out that Macedonia was northern Greece. So, I’m saying northern Greece.  They landed in a town called Philippi. Philippi was named after Alexander the Great’s father. It was a town of about 300–400 years old, but it had been destroyed several times. It had been rebuilt by Augustus and Mark Anthony out of gratitude for the fact that the city sided with them during their war with Brutus, who had assassinated Caesar. And I know you are fascinated to know all of that.  The town of Philippi was made into a…we can call it a Roman colony, but that’s not true. Philippi was actually considered part of the city of Rome, even though it was in northern Greece. If you’re born there, you’re a Roman citizen. Everything in it is Roman. The buildings are Roman. The language is Latin. It’s all Roman.

Paul and Silas go in there and preach the gospel, and they do it at a most un…they find a lousy time to come into the city of Philippi to preach. Does anybody know why? This is a bad time to come into a town and preach the gospel. If you’ll give me a nickel, I’ll tell you: because just before they arrived there, just about the time they arrived there, the emperor, whose name was Claudius, passed the decree that all Jews had to leave the city of Rome. The news reached Philippi, which considered itself part of the city of Rome, and here were two Jews preaching the gospel. The fact that they were Roman citizens didn’t help. They were beaten, and they were thrown into jail. The jail is on the north side of the town, and it was hewn out of a rock. The rock is quite deep. There are bars this way. The front of the rock it was hewn out of had a steel door, and they put the “less criminal” criminals in the first part of this cave, a stone cave, and the bad ones in the very back, fettering them to a wall. That’s where they put Paul and Silas, and there was an earthquake, and they got out, and they baptized some folks, and in the meantime, a church was born.

A minute ago, I told you that Paul and Barnabas went on a church-planting tour. Now, sister, you’re really good at this. What should I have said? Missionary journey. You don’t know. Missionary journey. A missionary journey, which is one of those little things that so damage our thinking without our realizing it. Because if they were missionaries, then that’s something foreign, and what they’re doing has nothing to do with us here. We can have a pastor, a pulpit, a pew, a church building, because we’re not missionaries. They’re out there, and they’re kind of strange and peculiar.

Paul and Barnabas, and Paul and Silas, did not go on a missionary journey. They went out and did what we ought to do. They planted churches the way churches should be planted. Now, the loveliest thing about what Paul and Silas did was they got up and left a little group of Christians, and they left them, and they left them, and they left them. And they left them at that time without elders. I realize that for some of you, this is utterly unimportant, but if you live on the mission field, have you ever been an elder, sister? Yes. Have you been an elder? Have you been an elder? Now, sister, let me ask you a question. Is there a chance that they chose you to be an elder because you were enthusiastic about the Lord and believed everything they said, and then, when you kind of got bored and a little upset with the fact that everything was organized and they were all Americans and they weren’t leaving, were you still an elder?

Alright. I don’t know if you got the point at all. One of the most beautiful things about the New Testament is that time when they leave brothers and sisters all on their own to work out the expression of the ecclesia without pastors or missionaries or whatever you want to call them, church planters, breathing down their throats and causing them to do whatever they’re told.

Now, I have an application to make to the brothers and sisters who meet here in Constance, and that is, I wish, first of all, that there were about 15 of you, and we have to do something about that. But you are Deutsch, and you are Swiss, and you are not—I hate to break this news to you—but you’re not Puerto Ricans. There should be a time when you get to be Deutsch and Zwei Deutsch.

They then went to the capital of northern Greece, which was Thessalonica. A church was raised up there in a very short length of time. The brothers, Paul especially, were pushed out of town and headed for Athens with their young companion Timothy. Then he went on to Corinth and spent two years there — about 18 months —and met… now this is all in Greece, by the way—they’re now in Achaia, or southern Greece —and they also planted a church in Berea after they were pushed out of Thessalonica. Then they went to southern Greece and raised up the church in Corinth. By the way, and again, I know you’re wondering where in the world this man is going, I’d like to tell you just a little bit about Corinth. May I tell you a little bit about Corinth? This is northern Greece, this is southern Greece, and right down here is the city of Corinth. It’s nine miles to the sea this way, and it’s six miles to the sea this way, but there’s more of Greece down here and a lot of islands. When you want to go to Rome, you have to go this way, and these are some very tumultuous, very dangerous places to navigate. So, over the centuries, there grew up the custom of landing in the little town of Cenchrea. They dragged the ships across the land to the other port over here, and Corinth became the broker city where everybody did their trading. Sometimes they would take their ships and go back. Ships from Rome would come this way, but sometimes they were dragged across, usually when they were headed east or when they had vast cargo bound for Rome. Rome was entirely dependent on ships for its food. All of its grain and a lot of other things; most of what they had was imported.

Corinth was a town with four major languages and many dialects, and when you walked into the city, the first 30 stores that you came to sold wine. You’ve heard all of the terrible things about Corinth, and I won’t go into them, but it was a wild place, and it had a temple given over to immorality and all of those things. Paul was there 18 months, and he was never able to tame that church, right down to the day he died. And if we were to believe Clement, who wrote to them, even 50 years later, they were still having Corinthian problems in Corinth.

When he finished Corinth, he decided, before he went home to Antioch, that he would make a very, very short trip to the city of Ephesus. And he took with him a brother and a sister. Jan, what were their names? I love it the way you folks know the Bible. Tychicus? Tychicus was a boy. Did you say two people? Yes, from Corinth to Ephesus, which, by the way, is going back east, a city that the Lord did not let them go to earlier. Does anybody here besides who, huh? Priscilla. Priscilla and Aquila. That’s right. Okay, thank you. He dropped them off there (in Ephesus), and he went home.