Br. Jamie Nelson

Acts 18:1-8

In today’s reading from the Book of Acts, we hear a story about a time when the Apostle Paul faced disappointment and seeming failure in his work spreading the gospel, yet that failure wasn’t the last word for God.

We hear the story of Paul’s arrival in Corinth, a Greek city where people of many cultures, languages, and religions passed through or made the city their home.

Some of those people were Jewish refugees who had recently been expelled from their homes in Rome due to a decree of the emperor Claudius. Paul, a fellow Jew, became close with two of those refugees, a married couple named Aquila and Priscilla, and worked in their canvas and leatherworking business.

Paul worked in their shop during the week, and he spent the Sabbath in the city synagogue preaching and teaching about Jesus – an evangelism strategy he’d used with success in previous cities. But other than his friends and benefactors Priscilla and Aquila, he didn’t find much initial success sharing the good news about Jesus the Messiah to the Jewish community.

We hear that time and again, Paul’s testimony was met with opposition and resistance. Finally pushed beyond his limit, Paul responded by shaking the dust from his clothes and announcing that he was done butting heads with people in the synagogue community. Henceforth, he would preach to the Gentiles of Corinth.

Have you ever found yourself in a similar place to Paul?

A situation where you have taken time to prepare and sought wise counsel until you arrived at a sense of clarity about how to proceed, yet your best efforts just weren’t bearing fruit. Maybe it’s a situation in your work where a project isn’t going as planned due to factors outside your control. Or maybe it’s a relationship where you’ve shown up, tried your very best, and still things just aren’t working out. It’s easy to get disillusioned and ready to give up when that happens, to feel like you’ve failed.

I wonder if Paul felt like he’d failed at his God-given mission, since the very people he came to reach had turned away. But he kept on sharing the good news of Jesus, this time with Gentiles.

And then something unexpected happened: Crispus, the leader of the synagogue, the very place Paul had left in frustration, came to faith in Jesus. Not just him, but his household, and many others in Corinth. And as we know from Paul’s letters to the Corinthians sent after his departure, the church he planted became a robust Christian community.

So what can we learn about God through the conclusion to that story?

Failure and resistance don’t mean God’s not at work.

Paul may have been finished with the people he met through the synagogue, but God wasn’t. The seeds that had been planted took root beneath the soil. God continued to be at work in the community, opening hearts to Jesus.

So if you’re facing resistance and failure or something in your life isn’t unfolding the way you’d hoped, trust that God is still at work. That what feels like rejection can create a space for a new direction, that what looks like a closed door can actually be the threshold to something new.

Trust that failure and disappointment isn’t the end of God’s story for you.