Apollos, the Complete Package – Acts 18:24-28

Last week Judy and I spent a few moments with a 30-year-old lady whom we first knew when she was barely able to walk.

We recognized her immediately, after not seeing each other for 14 years or more.

She is as beautiful and recognizable a young lady as she was when she was in diapers.

Have you ever looked at a child and thought:

“This little one is going to be really beautiful when she grows up”?

There is usually a resemblance between the toddler and the adult that he or she becomes.

Similarly, the man who is introduced to us here in this scripture was in some ways a spiritual child.

But you can tell just by looking at this toddler that unless something comes along to burn him, he’s going to be a beautiful servant of God.

Despite his immaturity and his infantile simplicity, he was the complete package.

The scouts could easily see that he was going to be a big-leaguer some day.

His name was “Apollos.”

You might be thinking that he was named after the Greek god,

But most scholars say that this man’s name was most likely a contraction of “Apollonius.”

He was a Jew and was not named after one of the gods of the Greeks.

We notice that he was originally from Alexandria.

This city in northern Egypt, on the delta of the Nile, had been one of the great capitals of the world for about 300 years.

It was founded by Alexander the Great, from whom it was given its name.

And as of the great cities of the world in that day, it was perhaps the oldest,

with Babylon and Nineveh destroyed, Athens on the wane and Rome a relative newcomer.

For 200 years it had been the home of the kings of Egypt,

and it acted as the cultural center of the South Mediterranean.

Hebrew, Greek, Egyptian, African and lately Roman influences all melded together in Alexandria.

The most famous library of the ancient world was located there with over 700,000 titles.

It was destroyed by the Saracens, the Muslims, in the 7^th century,

which perhaps says something about the general attitude of those people

At times there were as many as 10,000 Jews living in Alexandria.

It was the place at which the Old Testament was translated into Greek; that version which we know as the Septuagint.

There was so much free travel between Jerusalem and Alexandria that there was a synagogue in Jerusalem for the Alexandrians and some of the other foreign visitors.

Acts 6:8 – “And Stephen, full of faith & power, did great wonders & miracles among the people.

Then there arose certain of the synagogue, which is called the synagogue of the Libertines, and Cyrenians, and Alexandrians, and of them of Cilicia and of Asia, disputing with Stephen.

And they were not able to resist the wisdom and the spirit by which he spake.”

That synagogue was one of the ways in which Paul’s life touched Apollos’, although there is no proof that they ever met.

Alexandria was undoubtedly one of the first targets for Christian evangelization.

And the culture, education, evangelization and vibrant life of Alexandria helped to mold Apollos into Apollos.

This scripture uses the word “mighty” to describe 2 characteristics of Apollos, but I’d like to use it 4 times.

He was mighty in the SCRIPTURES, mighty in ELOQUENCE, mighty in HEART, and mighty in HUMILITY.

You might say that despite his immaturity, Apollos was the complete package.

First, he was mighty in the SCRIPTURES.

Apollos was “dunatos” in the scriptures – powerful in the holy writings.

Like Timothy, Saul of Tarsus and so many Jewish young people of that day, Apollos grew up under the sound of the word of God.

Apparently, his parents had “loved the LORD their God with all their hearts, and with all their souls, and with all their might.

And they taught the things of God diligently unto their son, and talked of them when they sattest in their house, and when they walked by the way, and when they lay down, and when they arose.

And they bound them for a sign upon their hands, & they were as frontlets between their eyes.

And they wrote them upon the posts of their house, and on their gates.”

In other words, Apollos had been imbued with the Old Testament scriptures.

His parents had exposed him to the Word of God from before the day that he had been born.

His mother and father sang the Psalms of David to that youngster while he was still in the womb.

Together with his brothers and sisters the family shared the truths of God in their home.

And this young man was given a thorough education in the Alexandrian synagogue.

Most likely, he could quote the Old Testament as well as Paul.

And what he couldn’t quote, he knew how to find.

Not only did he possess a knowledge of the letter of the law, but of the principles of the revelation of God.

The facts of the Bible; the histories; the laws, the details, are like vases which contain the blossoms of the revelation.

Sometimes the vase is glass and as clear as leaded crystal, but sometimes it is more opaque.

Whichever, it is always beautiful.

Apollos, like David, not only loved the vase, but the bouquet of the bouquet inside the vase.

He was mighty in the scriptures, which refers to his thorough knowledge of the Old Testament.

And in addition to that he had been instructed in THE WAY OF THE LORD.

I believe that this statement, here in verse 25, reiterates and corroborates what I have said many times:

When the New Testament speaks about “the Lord,” it is referring specifically to the Lord Jesus Christ;

not to God the Father or to the God-head generally.

Blessed be the man who brought the truths of the gospel to this one-time lost, Alexandrian Jew.

Apollos may have been headed toward the office of chief-ruler of the synagogue, or perhaps to priesthood.

But someone, with patience and knowledge, came and proved to him that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, and that he could have eternal life only through the Lord Jesus.

It may have taken three hours or it may have taken three years, but the Holy Spirit penetrated Apollos’ granite facade and poured in spiritual life where there had earlier been nothing but death

This man was born again.

And he was able to take what he had learned about the Messiah generally,

and add what he then knew about the Lord Jesus,

becoming a man mighty in both the Old and the New Testament scriptures.

I read the other day, that one of my favorite Southern Baptists, John Broadus,

on the occasion of his last visit to the chapel services at Southwestern Theological Seminary,

exhorted his audience with this scripture: “Be ye mighty in the Scriptures.”

Unfortunately, it didn’t sink in very well,

or at the very least it didn’t reach much beyond that generation of preacher boys.

Apollos was mighty in the scriptures.

He was also mighty in ELOQUENCE.

Verse 24 says that he was “an eloquent man.”

Verse 25 says that he “spake and taught diligently the things of the Lord.”

Verse 26 says that he “began to speak boldly in the synagogue.”

And verse 28 says that he “mightily convinced the Jews, and that publickly, shewing by the scriptures that Jesus was Christ.”

For those of you who like such things, the “mighty” of verse 28 is a different Greek word than the “mighty” of verse 24.

The first was “dunatos” and is related to “dunamis” and “dynamite.”

But verse 28 is a word which speaks about verbal “vehemence.”

In other words the man had been given the gift of preaching.

Not every pastor has the same God-given ability to preach.

That doesn’t mean that the Lord has not necessarily called that man to the pastoral ministry, because preaching is only one part of his job description.

Conversely, there are other men who can preach like Apollos, whom the Lord has not called into the pastorate or even into the ministry.

The Bible doesn’t tell us whether or not Apollos ever settled down to pastor a church.

We know that he moved on to Corinth, but that he didn’t pastor there.

At least for a while he was acting as a traveling evangelist or as a missionary.

God had given him the ability to move a crowd, and to share with those people the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And he was trying to use his gift for the glory of the Lord.

He was mighty in the Word and he was mighty in words.

Apollos was also mighty in HEART.

In addition to speaking boldly, verse 25 says that he was “fervent in the spirit.”

You’ll notice that the word “spirit” – “pneuma” is not capitalized.

Even though it uses a definite article, it is not talking about the Holy Spirit, but Apollos’ human spirit.

The word “fervent” is the Greek word “zeo” ( dzeh’-o ) from which the English word “zeal” is derived.

This man possessed a zealous spirit or soul.

You could legitimately say that he was “a man on fire.”

I have met Christian ministers who could turn their apparent zeal on and off like a light switch.

When you heard them preach you’d think that they lived next door to Heaven.

But then when you met them out of the pulpit they were as secular and potentially sinful as any man you ever knew.

You could say that they were smoke, but not fire.

Apollos’ fervency was apparently genuine.

He was on fire for the Lord.

He lived close to his Saviour.

And the scent of the Lord’s cologne could be smelled on Apollos’s clothes.

The fourth thing that made Apollos a well-rounded Christian was that he was mighty in HUMILITY.

Verse 28 – “And he began to speak boldly in the synagogue: whom when Aquila and Priscilla had heard, they took him unto them, and expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly.”

As I read these words, they seem to say to me that Apollos accepted Aquila and Priscilla’s teaching.

Even though he was the preacher and they were the hearers, he learned doctrine from them.

Not only does this say something good about Apollos, but it says wonderful things about Aquila and Priscilla.

Let’s imagine that you were in a church service and in came some flaming evangelist.

During the course of his message, or in talking to people after your pastor spoke, he said some things which you knew to be unbiblical.

Most of us, unlike Aquila and his wife, would sooner walk away from that heretic, than confront him.

And we’d certainly be more likely to confront him than befriend him.

Wouldn’t you more likely rebuke him than teach him?

The implication of this scripture is that Paul’s friends from Corinth befriended this younger evangelist,

and in a kind and patient sort of way, they shared what they had learned about the Lord.

They didn’t berate him; they didn’t attack him; they didn’t ignore him.

They helped him to investigate and accept what he hadn’t heard or seen before.

And to the credit of Apollos, he was corrected, and he did learn.

I was talking to a man the other night who told me that the church of which he is a member is in trouble.

The treasurer has resigned his office and appears to have left the church, because he was not happy with the mismanagement of the Lord’s money.

Then the new treasurer is in the unenviable position of having to try to figure out how to pay the bills without money enough to do it.

This friend said that the matter could be easily corrected if the pastor would publically apologize and tell the church that he would drop some of the expensive programs that he was trying to implement.

Unfortunately, he is one of those pastors who is always right and must not be corrected.

He’s doctrinally perfect, a businessman and manager without peers, and next to omniscient.

As a result he’s close to running a church into the ground.

God help the pastor, the evangelist, and the missionary who has gotten to the point of omniscience and personal perfection.

Apollos may have been the complete package, but that doesn’t mean perfection or impeccability.

It didn’t even mean maturity or even enough knowledge to adequately pastor one of the Lord’s churches.

But Apollos did recognize his imperfections and embraced the opportunity to learn more of the truth.

He left room in his life for growth.

So here was a man with great God-given skills, and a good rudimentary education in the things of the Lord.

He was on fire for the Saviour, and at the same time he was pliable and teachable.

He may have to stay in the minor leagues for a little while longer,

But he was the complete package and one day would become a great servant of the Lord.