Knowing Enough To Get Started

Suggested Reading: Acts 18:24-28

Through college and, serving as a youth minister for a while afterward, I had always wanted to learn to play the guitar. But I never had the money to buy one so it would have been a little hard for me to take lessons. Well, one summer, my father-in-law, who was pastor at the church where I was doing music and youth went on a mission trip to Myanmar. He came back with a hand-crafted guitar that he had bought in a street market for $35. My father-in-law handed me the guitar, gave me a book about how to play it and said the rest was up to me. Two weeks later, he told me that he wanted to have worship in the Fellowship Hall and that he wanted me to lead worship with my guitar. Two weeks later.

I didn't play guitar anywhere near as well as I would have liked and only knew a fraction of the chords and strum patterns that I know now. So, I picked songs that I could play with what I knew and did what I could. I've been leading worship with a guitar ever since, learning more and more about how to actually play as I go.

In Acts 18, Apollos' story resembles my experience with the guitar. Apollos was in Ephesus teaching and preaching about Jesus when two of Paul's friends, Priscilla and Aquila encountered him. Scripture records that Apollos "spoke and taught about Jesus accurately, although he knew only John's baptism." (Acts 18:25, HCSB) Priscilla and Aquila filled in the gaps for Apollos and then he kept right on preaching about Jesus, doing exactly what he was doing before but being more informed than he had been.

When it comes to sharing the Gospel with people, sometimes we think that we have to have all the answers to all the questions, that we have to understand everything perfectly or, at least, a lot better than we do right now before we can tell people about Jesus. Apollos shows us that is not the case.  Notice what Acts 18:25 said about Apollos, "he taught about Jesus accurately" even though there was a lot he didn't know.  To share the Gospel, you don't have to know everything, you just have to be willing to share what you do know. Tell people why you believe, tell them what Jesus has done in your life, and if they ask a question that you can't answer, it is okay to say, "I don't know."

You may not be a Bible scholar, but you know enough that you made a decision to follow Christ. When it comes to sharing the Gospel, don't ever let what you don't know overshadow what you do know.

Assisting Apollos With Open-Heart Surgery

Suggested Reading: 1 Corinthians 3:1-9, 16:12

The movie Something the Lord Made dramatized the story of two men, Dr. Alfred Blalock and his assistant Thomas, who developed and performed the first open heart surgery. While Dr. Blalock was recognized as a renowned surgeon, Thomas was his black assistant in a day when blacks were still required to enter Johns Hopkins University through the back door. On the day of the first open heart surgery, performed on an infant with Blue Baby Syndrome, Blalock stopped the surgery. In front of a gallery of other surgeons, Blalock realized that he was going to have difficulty performing the surgery on his own and, even though it could damage his own reputation, brought in Thomas, his black assistant, to talk him through the procedure. No one expected the surgery to work in the first place and Blalock would simply have been thought ambitious for being willing to try it if he had failed and the baby had died. But bringing in a black assistant to talk him through the surgery? That was sure to diminish his standing among his colleagues. In the end, though, Blalock decided that the life of the infant was worth more than his own reputation.

The Apostle Paul planted the church in the city of Corinth. At some point after his departure, Apollos came on the scene and began working in the church of Corinth as well. Apollos' presence diminished Paul's standing among the Corinthians and Paul wrote to them, urging them to stop arguing about whether they followed Paul or Apollos but to focus on following Jesus together (1 Corinthians 1). Paul insisted that he and Apollos were on the same team, working for the same goal, even though Paul had lost some influence due to Apollos' work among the Corinthians. But toward the end of 1 Corinthians, Paul wrote of a conversation he had had with the other famous teacher, saying, Now about our brother Apollos- I urged him to visit you with the other believers (1 Corinthians 16:2, NLT). Even though Apollos' presence had diminished his own influence, Paul urged Apollos to visit the Corinthians again because he thought that the Corinthians would benefit from his teaching.

I've discovered that we often do a great of job of talking about being on the same team but our walk doesn't always match our high ideals. Instead of getting the best replacement at work to fill in for us during vacation, we find someone who is competent but won't become competition. Community churches talk about working together to reach youth, but then won't let their youth participate in a joint worship service at another church because they might get "confused" (often code for: "they might like that church better than us"). Instead of coming up with joint solutions that will help the country, our politicians grand-stand to make the other party look bad to increase their own standing. Instead of picking the best person for a particular task, we reserve it for ourselves because it is a more visible or prestigious task and we want to be seen doing it.

Like Paul, we must learn to put aside questions of personal influence and renown in favor of doing what is best - best for our church-members, best for our co-workers, best for our customers, and best for the people we minister to. Do we really believe that we are all on the same team? Are we really interested in doing what is best for the people we care for? Or are we more interested in maintaining our own influence? We must make our decisions based on what is best for the people God has given us, not what is best for us.