The Famous Jesus (Acts #26)
Through the first seventeen chapters of Acts we have watched the gospel on the move — starting in Jerusalem, spreading into Judea, pushed into Samaria by persecution, and heading toward the ends of the earth. From chapter 13 Paul and Barnabas set out on a missionary journey; from chapter 15 Paul heads out on a second with Silas. Today that second journey comes to a close and a third begins.
What I want you to notice is that when these men entered a community, they did not come hoping to help out a little and make life marginally better. They came so that people would meet Jesus. It is all about Christ. It is about the famous Jesus.
Because of how much ground we need to cover, we are going to skip a rock across the back half of Acts 18, then let it sink into chapter 19.
Saying No to a Good Opportunity
To understand verse 18 you have to go back to verse 1. Paul arrives in Corinth, the largest city in Greece, and meets a married Jewish couple, Aquila and Priscilla. They were not only fellow Jews — they were tentmakers, and Paul had learned that same leatherworking trade as a boy. So he joins them.
He stays in Corinth a year and a half. He is in the synagogue on the Sabbath, people come to faith, a church forms, he pastors it — and all week he is working alongside Aquila and Priscilla, having spiritual conversations and discipling them. A deep friendship forms. So when Paul senses it is time to move on, verse 18 tells us they go with him.
They pass through Cenchreae, where Paul takes a vow and shaves his head, then sail for Ephesus — a critical city of the day, a Roman colony where many nations and many languages were represented.
And there Paul does something different. At first glance it looks routine: he goes into the synagogue, as he always does, and tells his fellow Jews about their Messiah. But when the people ask him to stay and say more, he declines.
Why? Verse 18 says he had set sail for Syria — the region containing Antioch. Antioch was the church where Paul had essentially grown up in the faith. He had been a zealous Jew from Tarsus, educated in Jerusalem, and after coming to Christ he had to flee for his life. Barnabas found him and brought him to Antioch, where he spent at least a year learning, growing, and doing ministry. That is what prepared him for these journeys, and after the first one he and Barnabas returned there.
Now, after two or possibly three years away, something in Paul is saying: I need to get back to my home base.
Here is what I want to pull out. Sometimes, when you know what God has called you to, you have to stay focused on it. Paul had a genuine opportunity to teach in Ephesus, and he said not right now. Luke never tells us why he felt he had to reach Antioch — only that he had set sail for it and had to keep going.
Sometimes you will have to stay focused despite a good opportunity in front of you — because a good opportunity can keep you from the better one.
And note: he comes back to Ephesus in chapter 19 and stays two years. It was an important city. He just could not let it sidetrack what he needed to do first.
Eight Crayons and a Box of Two Hundred
Paul leaves Ephesus but leaves Aquila and Priscilla behind. You might expect he would bring his good friends home to Antioch to meet everyone — but the ministry there mattered, people were coming to faith, and they stayed to lead. That decision matters for what happens next.
In verses 24–28 we meet Apollos, quite a character. He is from Alexandria, the largest city in Egypt — so, Egyptian, with a thoroughly Roman name, since he is named for the god Apollo. And Luke tells us he is a Jew. A genuinely multicultural man.
Not only a Jew, but one who believes Jesus is the Messiah — and God has gifted him as a communicator. So he travels, like Paul, telling people about Christ, and his travels bring him to Ephesus, where he preaches and reasons from the Hebrew Scriptures that Jesus is the Messiah.
Priscilla and Aquila hear about him, come to listen, and are impressed. But they notice something — probably in conversation afterward — and take him aside to explain things more fully.
What they realize is that he does not know everything God has been doing. He does not know that God sent His Holy Spirit at Pentecost in chapter 2, fulfilling what Jesus promised, so the disciples could speak in other languages and the gospel could go to the nations. And here he is in Ephesus — a polyglot city where all those languages are spoken — with no knowledge of the very gift God gave to move the gospel forward.
It is as though Apollos had been a remarkable artist working with eight crayons, and they handed him a box of two hundred colors.
Here is what to take from that. Even if you are enormously gifted, even if you have seen tremendous success, you have to stay open. Keep a learning posture, a growth mindset. Just because God has done amazing things through you does not mean He has nothing more to teach you. Stay open, because He may want to do more in you and through you than He has done before.
Twelve Men Who Only Knew Half the Story
Aquila and Priscilla evidently tell Apollos about the church back in Corinth, and he heads there to help — which explains something in 1 Corinthians. That church became fractured for a time, with people saying I follow Paul, or I follow Apollos, he is the better speaker, or I follow Peter, and others pulling the Jesus juke: well, I follow Jesus. Those last ones were actually right. As Paul put it, he planted, Apollos watered, but Christ brings the growth.
Meanwhile Paul reaches Antioch, stays some weeks or months, and then travels back overland through cities where he had planted churches, encouraging them. This takes a long time — probably a year — before he arrives back in Ephesus.
And there, verse 1 says, he found some disciples.
This passage used to confuse me, because nearly everywhere else in Acts “disciple” means a follower of Jesus. It was only recently I realized these men were not disciples of Jesus at all — and that is exactly what Paul is about to discover.
He asks, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” In Paul’s experience, when someone understands that Jesus died for their sins and rose again and puts their whole faith in Him, they receive the Spirit — and often, in that era, the evidence was speaking in other languages.
Their answer: “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”
Now Paul is catching on. I don’t think these men actually know who Jesus is. They are clearly worshipers of God, but I need to know more. So he asks, “Into what then were you baptized?”
Baptism is about identity. Many of our brothers and sisters in mainline denominations baptize infants, marking that child as part of the church family and covenant. Here at Riverwood we practice immersion — when someone puts their faith in Christ and understands what He did through the cross and the empty tomb, they go under the water, identifying with His death, burial, and resurrection: the old sinful self has died and been buried, and we are raised to walk in newness of life. It is all about identity.
So Paul is really asking: how do you identify? And they answer: “Into John’s baptism.”
John the Baptist was Jesus’ forerunner — and his cousin — an Elijah-type figure preparing people for Christ. Picture the scene: people trekking into the wilderness to see this wild man in camel hair, eating locusts and honey, standing in the Jordan hollering that this is wrong, and this is wrong, and this is wrong — until people are cut to the heart, realize they need to repent, and walk into the water to be washed as a sign of it.
So these men are saying: we went through a baptism of repentance. We are disciples of John.
And Paul answers, in verse 4, that John baptized with a baptism of repentance, telling people to believe in the one coming after him — that is, Jesus. In other words: you say you are disciples of John, but John’s entire ministry was to point to Jesus. It is all about Him.
And they accept it. They are baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus, Paul lays hands on them, the Holy Spirit comes, and they speak in tongues and prophesy. About twelve men in all — receiving a gift that would be genuinely needed in a city like Ephesus.
Gracers and Truthers
Watch how Paul handles them, because this will help you wherever you are in your faith.
These men are ignorant, much like Apollos — they do not know about the third member of the Trinity. Paul does not excuse the ignorance and wave it off as no big deal. And he does not bash them for it either.
John 1:14 describes Jesus as full of grace and truth. If you claim to follow Jesus, you are to live as He lived — full of grace and truth. But in nearly thirty years of ministry I have noticed that people tend to be full of grace or truth. We lean one way.
Gracers are kind and fiercely loyal. You can fail spectacularly and they will extend grace. They make some of the best friends in the world — wonderful listeners, and you can feel the love coming off them.
The trouble is that gracers struggle to stand on truth. Being grace-oriented means being people-oriented, and out of that we can end up fearing people. So when someone we want connection with takes a position, we drift toward it — well, that sounds reasonable — and then someone else takes the opposite position and we drift there too, because we want that friendship. We vacillate. And when someone is in unrepentant sin, we are quick to forgive but reluctant to confront. We do not want the uncomfortable conversation.
Truthers love the uncomfortable conversation. They are chomping at the bit, because they know Jesus said the truth will set you free — so they want to bring truth and set this person free. It feels holy. It feels righteous. It is black and white: there is right and wrong, you are wrong, I am right, so come over here.
The problem is the missing grace. Truth that was designed to free becomes a club that bludgeons. Instead of building someone up and restoring them, it beats them down and shames them.
Many truthers are very intelligent, love to read and learn, and have thought carefully through hot-button issues. But because it is so clear to them, if you do not agree precisely, you are out. So gracers gather people around them but will not stand for much; truthers push people away, and the only ones comfortable near a truther are other truthers. And to a truther, extending grace feels like watering down the truth.
So when a pastor quotes Ephesians 4:15 — speak the truth in love — the gracer hears in love, and the truther hears speak the truth. But Christ was full of grace and truth, and that is exactly how Paul operates here.
If Paul were a gracer, he would have met these men and said, you worship God, you have been baptized, wonderful, carry on — and walked into Ephesus. If he were a truther, he would have shamed them: you went through John’s baptism? Don’t you know John pointed to Jesus? You are heretics.
He does neither. He does not shame their ignorance, and he does not excuse it. He gives grace and he brings truth.
Which means if you are a gracer, you have to grow in courage and learn to stand on truth. You cannot vacillate on what God has said clearly. But won’t that hurt or offend someone? You are a gracer — they will sense God’s grace through you, they will know you love them and want to build a bridge. That part you already do beautifully. They also need truth, so learn what Scripture teaches and stand on it, because knowing the truth is what sets people free.
And if you lean toward truth, you have to grow in grace — which is not watering anything down. But it is the truth that sets people free. Yes. And Romans 2:4 says it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance. Do not dilute the truth; people need it. But our world is broken and hurting, and many already know the truth. Jesus did not come to condemn the world but to free it. So do not bludgeon people with truth — be a surgeon, and let truth be the knife that removes the tumor so the healing of the gospel can come in.
The Sons of Sceva
After verse 7, Paul goes back to the synagogue and this time stays — reasoning with people every Sabbath for three months. Some believe and some don’t, as always. Those who do become a church, he pastors it, and he remains in Ephesus two years.
Which brings us to an absolutely bonkers story.
And God was doing extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that even handkerchiefs or aprons that had touched his skin were carried away to the sick, and their diseases left them… But the evil spirit answered them, “Jesus I know, and Paul I recognize, but who are you?” And the man in whom was the evil spirit leaped on them, mastered all of them and overpowered them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded. — Acts 19:11–12, 15–16 (ESV)
If anyone tells you the Bible is boring, read them this passage.
Seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva were working as itinerant exorcists. Whether they genuinely wanted to help people or wanted to look spiritually powerful, we don’t know. But then they see what God is doing through Paul — cloths that touched him being carried to the sick, people healed, demons driven out — and they think they have found a new tool.
So they walk in and use it: “I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims.”
That phrase gives them away. They know about the famous Jesus. They do not know Jesus.
Knowing About Jesus Versus Knowing Jesus
This past week Leanne drove back from visiting family and listened to a podcast interview with the author Nancy Pearcey about her book The Toxic War on Masculinity. She came home Friday and we went for a walk to catch up, and she told me about it.
For years the statistics have said Christian marriages are no better than secular ones — divorce rates as high or higher, more abuse, lower satisfaction. The numbers make it look as though getting married as a Christian will ruin your life.
What Pearcey argues, as I understand it secondhand, is that parsing the data tells a different story. Couples who identify as Christians and attend church regularly, take part in a Bible study, read Scripture, pray together, give financially, and serve in some capacity — those couples have a dramatically lower divorce rate and markedly higher satisfaction than everyone else.
So how do the big research groups get it so wrong? Because in their sampling, plenty of people say “yes, I’m a Christian” who attend a couple of times a year, are in no Bible study, do not pray with their spouse, do not read Scripture, give very little, and do not serve. Jesus is a side thing. And in that group the divorce rate is worse than secular marriages, abuse is higher, and reported joy and satisfaction are far lower.
The word for that is nominal. They know about the famous Jesus, but they do not appear to know Jesus.
That is who the sons of Sceva are. They know about Him. They have sat in the synagogue hearing Paul reason that He rose from the dead. They have watched the miracles. But they have never put their faith or their identity in Him. To them He is a tool to be used, not a Savior to worship and follow. It is news for the head that has never reached the heart.
And sadly that describes a great many people in our culture. Ask most people whether they are a Christian and they will say yes — but look closely and you find nominal faith. They have never taken ownership of the relationship. They know about Jesus, but they are not known by Him. They are here at Christmas to hear that God took on human flesh, and at Easter to hear He died and rose — they know the story, and it has not touched their Monday or their Tuesday or any other day.
I don’t want that to be you.
The Best Gift You Can Give
It is Father’s Day, and many of you will be given something — a gift, a card, a phone call.
Dads, let me encourage you to give a gift. The greatest gift you can give your kids, your family, your coworkers and your friends is an honest pursuit of Christ.
Don’t let Jesus be a side thing. Don’t give Him lip service. Give Him everything. Pursue Him in prayer, through the Scriptures, alongside other believers, through serving, through giving — with everything you have. The data itself shows those are the strongest, healthiest families. That is the greatest gift you could hand your children.
And this is not only a dad thing. It is a mom thing, a kid thing, a young and old thing, a rich and poor thing. Wherever you are and whatever your station — give Him everything.
Our culture says fake it till you make it. I am telling you that if you try to fake this, you will be exposed. That is precisely what happened to the sons of Sceva. They walked in holding a new tool, and they did not know Jesus, and it came apart.
Years ago I did some on-and-off counseling with a man in his late twenties. On the surface he had everything — a good job, good money, a beautiful wife, a couple of precious kids, in church almost every Sunday. Underneath, it was a completely different story. His marriage was in shambles. He was losing enormous amounts of money to an addiction. And he hated himself, because he knew the veneer he was maintaining was rotten underneath — he was trying to use Jesus to succeed at work, trying to use Jesus to look like he had it together.
Jesus was a tool. He was not the Savior he worshiped and followed. And that is the whole difference between knowing about the famous Jesus and knowing Him.
