September 6, 2026

"Power Made Perfect in Weakness" (Acts 18:1-17)

Series: Acts: God's Vision For His Church Scripture: Acts 18:1–17

Hear now the word of the lord from Acts 18, verses 1 through 17. After this, Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. And he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla. Because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome, and he went to see them. And because he was of the same trade, he stayed with them and worked, for they were tentmakers by trade.

And he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath and tried to persuade Jews and Greeks. When Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia, Paul was occupied with the word, testifying to the Jews that the Christ was Jesus. And when they opposed and reviled him, he shook out his garments and said to them, your blood be on your own heads. I am innocent. From now on, I will go to the Gentiles.

And he left there and went to the house of a man named Titius Eustace, a worshipper of God. His house was next door to the synagogue. Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed in the Lord, together with his entire household and many of the Corinthians, hearing Paul believed and were baptized. And the Lord said to Paul one night in a vision, do not be afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent, for I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in the city who are my people. And he stayed a year and six months teaching the word of God among them.

But when Gallio was proconsul of Achaia, the Jews made a united attack on Paul and brought him before the tribunal, saying, this man is persuading people to worship God contrary to the law. But when Paul was about to open his mouth, Galileo said to the Jews, if it were a matter of wrongdoing or vicious crime, O Jews, I would have reason to accept your complaint. But since it is a matter of questions about words and names and your own law, see to it yourselves. I refuse to be a judge of these things. And he drove them from the tribunal, and they all seized Sosthenes, the ruler of the synagogue, and beat him in front of the tribunal.

Magalio paid no attention to any of this. This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated as you're taking your seat. Let's pray for the reading and preaching of God's word this morning. Heavenly Father, we have heard your word. But we pray that the words that have fallen on our ears would not fall on deaf ears. We pray that the word of God would not be snatched up from our hearts like the birds in your son's Parable, snatching up seeds on the hardened road.

We pray instead that you would give us your spirit, that we would have hearts to understand and eyes to see and ears to hear all the good news that is contained in the gospel of your son, our Savior, Jesus Christ. In Christ's name, we pray. Amen.

When it comes to a question of weakness, it's something we have a very difficult time appreciating. For example, yesterday college football started. And even though sometimes I wish it could be as a Nebraska fan, it is not a celebration of weakness. In fact, weakness loses. And that's not a fun thing for anyone to do.

You see this in life. Success comes from strength. And so we look at examples of weakness lived out in life, and we either look on them with scorn or with pity or with confusion. We look upon a young person battling cancer, or we see someone who has suffered in ways that are horrific, as have been in the news, or when perhaps we feel powerless to stand against evil. Some of those experiences can make us feel frustrated with the world and potentially even frustrated with God.

Why do these things happen? Why does God allow these things to happen? How long must we endure these things, O Lord?

In the Scriptures, weakness is something God never explains. He doesn't say, let me explain to you the mystery of weakness. Here's the math, here's the formula. Carry the two. There you go.

That's how weakness works. God never explains weakness, but he ever commends weakness as the primary tool by which he accomplishes his will in this world. I've experienced this personally and I've experienced this pastorally, that the times of suffering, the times of weakness, those are the times when God does His greatest works. And that's what the Scriptures everywhere hold out. If you doubt that, look at the greatest thing that God accomplished in this world, the cross of Jesus Christ, where God's power was made perfect in weakness.

Well, in this passage, we are seeing different aspects of Paul's own weakness. And we are seeing the perfect power of Christ accomplishing the will of God in each and every one of those areas and aspects of weakness. Our theme this morning is that Christ's power is made perfect through weakness. And we're going to see three sections where we see all of these facets. First, perfect power through limitations, perfect power through limitations.

Second, perfect power through weakness. And third, perfect power through persecution. Limitations, weakness and persecution.

1. Perfect Power through Limitations (Acts 18:1-4)

So we'll start with perfect power through limitations. And this sort of comes up in the.

In the course of these first four verses, but in verse one, it's sort of important to give the background here because we come to a very important city, biblically speaking. Paul left Athens and came to Corinth. And, you know, we've been in a lot of different places. A lot of places that you wouldn't be able to find on the map. I wouldn't be able to find on the map.

I'd have to look it up. Okay. Oh, that's where that is. That's right. These places where Paul goes and preaches the gospel there.

Places that we know very little about. We know very little about what was happening on the ground, unless you are a trained historian of first century goings on. But we know a lot about Corinth. We know I'm comfortably too much about Corinth because we have two letters. There were, if you read the letters, other letters, probably at least two other letters that we don't have.

But we have two of Paul's letters written to Corinth. And we know that the city of Corinth and particularly the church in Corinth was a mess. It was marked by prideful division within the church, by rampant and heinous sexual immorality, by lawsuits waged against fellow believers, by chaotic worship services and divisive practices, even in the midst of the Lord's Supper, by false teachers who even undercut the doctrine of the resurrection of Jesus Christ itself. But if we know much about Corinth, historically speaking, this perhaps shouldn't come as much of a shock, because Corinth was a mess of a city in many ways. It was a very strong city.

This was not a place of weakness. This is a place of strength. It was a Roman colony, and therefore this was politically very powerful, very influential. This was a port on the coast, therefore there was a lot of prosperous trade. This is a very wealthy city, but this is also a city that was characterized by rampant sexual immorality.

If you read the commentaries, actually, there's a list of words that are some form of Corinthian in one way or another. That all meant some kind of a prostitute or some kind of a sexually immoral person. To call someone a Corinthian was one of the worst slurs you could use against anyone. As Darrell Bock writes in his commentary, Corinth was the Las Vegas its time. Well, in this city, as Paul comes to Corinth, he finds a Jew named Aquila, and he with his wife have recently been expelled.

Priscilla is her name. They've recently been expelled from Rome. We read during the time of Claudius. Now, this is one of the two factors that helps us to sort of pinpoint the timeline of where we are, we've just been sort of reading. And this decree was given in about 50 AD.

So about 20 years have taken place since the crucifixion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And here the church is continuing to expand in the world. And here Paul meets. They're most often known as Priscilla and Aquila, people who will become close friends of Paul. They will become traveling confidants with him.

If you look over to verse 18, the next verse, or the next passage with him, Priscilla and Aquila set sailed on his way for Syria. Okay, they're going to be listed in a number of his letters. They're very influential in the early church. But what is very important here that Luke brings up is that Paul spent a lot of time with them here. And this is where that relationship was really forged, working together in a trade.

Both of them were tent makers. They were tent makers by trade. Now, again, we know a lot about Corinth and a lot about his conversations with Corinth because of these letters. And in First Corinthians 1, chapter or First Corinthians 9, verses 1 through 18, Paul talks a lot about his tent making, the fact that he worked with his hands to supply and support his needs. What he says there is, he's the exception, not the rule.

He had the right to receive support from the churches for his work, but he chose not to, so that in his preaching he may present the gospel free of charge. That's the way he described this. And so in First Corinthians 9, verse 14, he says again, that's not the. That's the exception, not the rule. The Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the Gospel.

But he insisted that while he was here in Corinth, he should work with his hands to supply his own needs. Now, for six years, I was a bi vocational pastor. I didn't make tents. My family and I would have starved if that was my trade. I would not have been very good at it.

I did something different, but I was a tent maker. I worked bivocationally. I worked a full time job elsewhere to support our family while I worked multiple calls as a pastor and including for two of those years, I was an interim pastor where I was preaching every weekend and where I was working every day during the week. It was a busy, busy time. And there was a lot that I really loved about that.

I loved having one foot in the world and one foot in the church, there was something that I cherished about ministry from having work so much during the day, doing something different. There was a, a real appreciation for how special it was to get to preach the gospel on the weekends. And there were also some practical benefits during that time. The church that I served had a very hard time and had to lay off one of the pastors because there was not finances to support the pastors who were on staff. And I was unaffected because I was not paid by that church.

I didn't have to move across the country at that time, not by my own choice. I was able to continue doing what I was doing because my resources were provided elsewhere. But as someone who has done bi vocational pastoral ministry, Paul's insistence upon doing this kind of work fascinates me because I also know that in ministry there's so much to do. However, I also learned that full time ministry is not quite what you think. I remember my first week as a full time pastor after working six years as bivocational.

I got a full time call and I remember thinking, there's no limit to what I can do. I have endless time now because this is my full time job. I'm not trying to juggle everything. It'll be wonderful. I'll be the most relaxed person on the face of the planet.

And then I found that so many things actually happen in the life of a pastor. This is not the only day that I work, contrary to whatever rumors may be out there. And that time just kept filling up and suddenly I was, yes, it was my full time job, but I was extremely busy. But here we have Paul and we read that every Sabbath he's reasoning in the synagogue with the Jews, trying to persuade both Jews and Greeks. And in 5, 5, when Silas and Timothy arrived, Paul was occupied with the word.

How much more could he if this had been his full time work? But what Paul does here is instructive. He embraced a limitation on his time and the power of God became perfect even within that limitation. Now I want to talk to you because I think time is something all of us are juggling. Maybe you're feeling a tug where you wish you could do more ministry, you wish you could do this full time.

Or maybe you're looking at your life and wondering, how can I possibly serve? Or how can I possibly come to the evening service on Sundays, or how can I possibly do this or that in ministry if my life is so busy everywhere else, where would I possibly find the time to do this? We're all wrestling with time. Well, I Want to share with you an illustration that when I was a Sunday School teacher, a teacher shared with our class. I've never forgotten it.

I do not remember the teacher who did this, but the lesson itself has never left my mind. She brought in big rocks, and she brought in some sand and some water and then a big jar. And she said, all right, well, we're going to put these all in this jar. Now, here was the trick. If we started with the sand and put that in first and then tried to put another sort of a layer of sand on the bottom, and then trying to put the rocks in.

The rocks do not fit. They don't fit. If you start filling up that much sand and then start to put in the rocks later, the rocks just don't fit. They bulge out of the top. You don't have enough room for it.

But if you flip this and you put the rocks in first, you know what the smaller sand particles do? They fill in all the gaps. And there's room for both those rocks and for the sand and the water, well, that's even smaller in its particles, and so that's able to filter all the way through. You can get everything in, so long as you put the rocks in first. And my Sunday school teacher, bless her heart, I don't know where she is or who she is or what's going on in her life.

But an important lesson that when we put God first and when we put everything in our lives around him, we never have a lack. But when the Lord gets our leftovers, we're already starting from a lack. If we put in the sand first and the rock of what God is and should be in our lives tries to go in next, there's not enough room. But if God gets our first and our best, if he is the rock around whom we structure our lives, then time becomes a resource that. That we will not lack anything that we need.

Now, let me give another illustration of this. It's back in First Kings, chapter 17. It's when the Lord commands Elijah to go to the widow of Zarephath. And he says, go to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and dwell there. Behold, I have commanded a widow there to feed you.

And so he goes there and he says, can I have a little water? And she had some leftover water. And so she gladly shared that. But then he says, can I have a morsel of bread to eat? And she says, I don't have any leftovers.

I have just a little bit of flour, a little bit of oil. I'M going to bake this for me and my son, and that's all we have. And then we're going to die. But Elijah challenged her, and he says, do not fear. Go and do as you have said.

But first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me. And afterward make something for yourself and your son. For thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, the jar of flour shall not be spent, and the jug of oil shall not be empty until the day that the Lord sends rain upon the earth. And she went and did as Elijah said, and she and he and her household ate for many days. The jar of flour was not spent, neither did the jug of oil become empty.

According to the word of the Lord that He spoke by Elijah if God gets your leftovers, you're starting from a place of limitation. But if he gets your first and your best, if he's the rock around the rest of your life, then you'll never have a lack. I want to press you in just a couple of points in this one is the way you structure your days. I talk to a lot of people. Are you reading the Bible every day?

Oh, I just don't know when I'm going to have time. I want to press you. Is that true? Or in the course of your day, what would happen if you gave God the first and the best of your day and then built the rest of your time around that? If you read in giving him the first and the best of your time, studying the Bible and in prayer, and then everything else would just go where it was, rather than trying to fill your life with sand first, building your life on a foundation of sand rather than on the rock.

Or what about your week? Again, I talk to people this Lord's day, are you giving this your first and your best? The Lord set apart one day in seven as holy is sanctified to him, not a morning the day. Can you come back to the evening service? Can you give the Lord the entirety of this day and build your week around this day?

Not try to fit in whatever you can do on this day, around the rest of your week, the Lord gets your leftovers. You're always going to lack. But if he is the rock around which you build your life, your time becomes a resource that the Lord will never give you a lack.

2. Perfect Power through Weakness (Acts 18:5-11)

Well, as Paul continues, we see that not only in his time is there a limitation, but also in his strength. The second section, perfect power through weakness. Again, despite the time limitations, we see that when Silas and Timothy arrived, Paul was occupied with the Word. But there was opposition and reviling, verse 6. So he had to shake out his garments.

Your blood be on your own heads. I am innocent. From now on, I will go to the Gentiles. And then he went and he went to worshipers of God Gentiles at a house next door to the synagogue. And there was Faith Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue.

That's the equivalent of a ruling elder in the New Testament church. Crispus believed in the Lord together with his household. Many of the Corinthians. By the way, we know from First Corinthians, chapter 1, verses 14 through 17, that Paul baptized Crispus. And we know that Paul baptized others as well, but not many.

Paul said he didn't baptized many people. But in the midst of this, where there's opposition and where there's growth, look at what the Lord says in verse nine. And the Lord said to Paul one night in a vision, do not be afraid. Now stop there. Why would the Lord need to say this?

Well, apparently Paul is afraid. Apparently Paul is experiencing fear.

Now, this isn't my own speculation. Paul himself tells us that when he came to Corinth, his arrival was marked by fear. We don't know all the details, but in 1 Corinthians, chapter 2, verse 2, Paul says, For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. That was his message. And then verse three.

For I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. And my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. Paul, for whatever reason, experienced some level of fear in this to such a degree that the Lord had to actually tell him, do not be afraid. Go on speaking. Do not be silent.

When Paul was apparently struggling, we see him as a superhero, as superhuman. But here's Paul struggling, here's Paul experiencing fear. And here's the Lord coming and promising him that the Lord will be with him and encouraging him to go on and not to be silent. For he goes on saying, for I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you. For I have many in this city who are my.

I find this fascinating. Why is there such an emphasis on fear here, on weakness, on trembling, on these limitations?

I think Paul became this picture of the anti Corinthian mindset again. Corinth was a place of pride and power and wealth and strength, and especially, especially sexual promiscuity and bravado and here Paul comes and in his flesh he is marked by weakness and frailty and is fearful. And so the Corinthians looked at him and said, this is nothing like the kind of man that we want to follow. This is nothing like the kind of mindset that we want to adopt to get ahead. This is the opposite.

That puts us at the bottom. Why would any self respecting Corinthian want to follow in Paul's footsteps? And you can imagine Paul fearfully, tremblingly trying to preach to such proud, arrogant people.

And the discouragement he felt so that at the end of the day, when people came to Christ, do you know who couldn't boast about a successful evangelistic campaign? Paul. Do you know who couldn't boast in his flesh as though he had accomplished something of significance? Paul, do you know who got all the glory? God.

Maybe today you have a great deal of weakness and you hate it. You're sort of wrestling with it, wishing you could get out of it. A relationship that's going wrong and you feel powerless. A relationship with a parent or a child, a significant other or a spouse or a friend, and your life feels like it's coming apart. Maybe work isn't going well, maybe your finances don't add up.

Maybe you feel like you are swimming in uncertainty and a lack of clarity about the direction of your life. It's easy to look at these weaknesses and say, I'm failing. And to say, is God displeased with me or what am I doing wrong, Lord, that here I am.

But the Lord says to you, do not be afraid what you cannot accomplish in your flesh, what you cannot accomplish by your own strength and bravado, is precisely where the Lord will be powerful in the midst of your weakness.

3. Perfect Power through Persecution (Acts 18:12-17)

And as we start to think about weakness, we come to the third and final section where I'm not going to say much about this because we talked about a lot of persecution, but here again we have persecution. Paul is arrested, brought before Gallio. By the way, that we know that Gallio's reign or rule or his work as proconsul ended as late as it might have been earlier than this, but as late as 54, likely Paul was in Corinth between AD 50 and AD 52.

But as Paul is brought before Gallio and they're making accusations again, it's very interesting to see what happens. Gallio will not take up the case. He says, this is for you all to determine. I do not want to be a judge of this. So in one sense, Paul gets off the charge.

But then when the Jews start beating Sosthenes, the ruler of the synagogue, in front of the tribunal, we don't know whether he's a believer or not. It seems likely if that's why they're beating him. Or maybe he just didn't tamp down this insurrection of the Christians or whatever it was. But Gallio looks at this and pays no attention to this. Darrell Bock writes, the Roman government is just not interested in Christianity.

It's not an ally of Christianity, but it's not an enemy of Christianity, which maybe is like the United States. We have some laws that protect us, especially the First Amendment, but this country is no friend to Christianity. Here, then we find tremendous persecution against Christians in Corinth, so that he soon leaves. But I want to come back to this question of weakness, because here we see Paul, who is in some sense out of control. Paul, who in some sense is stop himself from being persecuted.

Paul, who is weak in the middle of this. And what we are saying is that the Lord is pleased with Paul, despite the fact that he is not strong, despite his lack of words of wisdom he talks about, despite his lack of attractiveness, he wasn't an attractive leader to follow, despite his lack of popularity. God is pleased with Paul, and he's pleased with us. Not because he has low standards. It's the opposite, really.

God has infinitely high standards that all of us fall short from. But God is pleased with Paul, and God is pleased with you not because of anything that you have done in your own strength. God is pleased with you because of what His Son, Jesus Christ, did for you in your place. God sent His Son into this world to endure and experience all of this.

Jesus Christ's time was limited. His public ministry was only three out of his 33 years. Jesus Christ experienced persecution. Jesus Christ was strengthened in the garden of Gethsemane by an angel sent from the Lord when he was so fearful and trembling that he was sweating great drops of blood in his anxiety.

Jesus Christ has experienced all of this weakness, and he experiences it for us. And as Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthians, in second Corinthians 13, verse 4. For he was crucified in weakness, but he lives by the power of God, for we also are weak in him. But in dealing with you, we live with him by the power of God. Weakness is something that God never explains, but he everywhere commends and holds forward.

And indeed he did not spare his own son, but sent his Son as the example of walking in the midst of weakness, not relying on the strength of the flesh, but in the God who has power to save sinners.

God is pleased with you, not because you were a good person, not because of what you have accomplished. In fact, God looks at all all of that and counts it as rubbish, counts it as filthy rags before him.

But God is pleased with all of those who embrace by faith the promises that were sealed to a little child earlier in our witness. God is pleased with all those who look by faith to the God who justifies by faith the God who saves the ungodly by faith, the God who redeems weak and wounded sinners, sinful people, not by anything we do, but by everything that we only receive from him. As passively as this baby received the sprinkled waters of baptism, we simply receive what God has done. And in his power, or in our weakness, his power is made perfect. Because, as you may remember, as Paul himself was struggling through a time of pain where there was a thorn in the flesh.

We sang that line a little earlier about the thorn in the flesh. And he's pleading with God three times to take it away. The Lord appeared to him again, and we read this at the very end of Second Corinthians, saying to him, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. And Paul says, therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses for so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. That's fascinating.

The first time we read about Paul's entry into Corinth, we read about his fear. Do not be afraid. The final words that Paul has, that is, that are written to the Corinthians. In second Corinthians, chapter 12, we have this emphasis on weakness, that God's power is made perfect in weakness. And all of this is against the backdrop of a culture of pride and arrogance that rested in its own strength, much like our culture today.

And so in our culture, where everything looks to pride and strength and power, brothers and sisters, we are called to look to the Lord. We are called not to be afraid. We are called to look for the power of God which is made perfect in weakness. Are you living by your strength or living in weakness? Are you living by power in God's spirit through faith in Christ who died for you and rose for you, that you might be saved.

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we pray. Pray that you would teach us our limits, you would teach us our weakness, our frailties, that you would make use of the fears of our lives, not that we would wallow in them, but that those would drive us to you, to your strength, to your power.

And in this Father, we pray that you would, by your spirit strengthen us as we follow in the footsteps of Christ our Captain, and even in the footsteps that Paul, your apostle himself, had to walk in.

Father, I pray that we would be a people who give the first and the best of all that we have, especially our time, both on this Lord's day and every day through the week, that we give the first and the best to you. I pray that we would be people who would not rely on our strength, but on the power of God. And I pray that we would be people who will be looking for our salvation to Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And we pray that you would do all of this through Christ's Holy Spirit, whom He sends to us. In Jesus name we pray.

Amen.

other sermons in this series

Oct 4

2026

"Preparation and Fulfillment" (Acts 19:1-7)

Preacher: Rev. Jacob Gerber Scripture: Acts 19:1–7 Series: Acts: God's Vision For His Church

Sep 20

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"Many Gifts among Many Members" (Acts 18:18-28)

Preacher: Rev. Jacob Gerber Scripture: Acts 18:18–28 Series: Acts: God's Vision For His Church

Sep 13

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"My Grace Is Sufficient for You" (2 Corinthians 12: 1-10)

Preacher: Rev. Jacob Gerber Scripture: 2 Corinthians 12:1–10 Series: Acts: God's Vision For His Church