Acts 20:1-16 Serious Ministry of Encouragement

Paul’s Travel Plans and the Setting in Acts 20

I heard an amen there, thank you. Might be the only one I get all day. There were many lamps in the upper room where we were gathered, and a young man named Eutychus sitting on the window sank into a deep sleep as Paul talked still longer.

And being overcome by sleep, he fell down from the third story and was taken up dead. But Paul went down and bent over him and taking him in his arms said, "'Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.'.

And when Paul had gone up and had broken bread and eaten, he conversed with them a long while until daybreak, and so departed, and they took the youth away alive and were not a little comforted. But going ahead to the ship, we set sail for Assos, intending to take Paul aboard there, for so he had arranged, intending himself to go by land.

And when he met us at Assos, we took him on board and went to Mytilene. And sailing from there, we came the following day opposite Chios, and the next day we touched at Samos. And the day after that, we went to Miletus.".

I'm just bouncing all over the place. For Paul had decided to sail past Ephesus so that he might not have to spend time in Asia, for he was hastening to be at Jerusalem, if possible, on the day of Pentecost.

The Meaning of Encouragement in the Body of Christ

Let's pray. Father, as we come to your word, as we get an opportunity to just read and to take it in, we hear details, we hear history, we hear circumstances of the life of Paul, and sometimes it can be hard to discern exactly what you're trying to communicate to us, but I ask that over the next hour, we would get an opportunity to worship you, to recognize that you are a God of encouragement, and then to see, as we break down this text and understand it and apply it, to understand your call on our lives to encourage one another, to build up the church, to strengthen one another.

And we are the church. The church is not this building or this place. It is the people. It is us. And so, Father, I ask that we would encourage one another, strengthen one another in this world where we live, where we walk as strangers and aliens and people who are, in essence, countercultural.

I ask that you would provide strength, kind of strength in numbers, strength with one another. And, Father, as we get an opportunity to worship and as the band leads us, I ask that you would even give them hearts of encouragement, encouragement that they would worship and that we would see their hearts as well and that that would rub off on us.

So, Father, I pray that we would worship you in truth as we sing these songs, that these words would become our words as we sing them to you. I ask this in Jesus' name, amen. I wanna encourage you to, encourage you, to get up and get some coffee, get some donuts at any time during the message.

We want you to just be able to keep your focus on God's word. Yeah, Dave, go right back there. There's some donuts for you, too.

Awesome.

Hopefully, you were encouraged in worship, too, that you were built up and strengthened. And the interesting thing is I looked up in, how many of you ever, when's the last time you looked something up in the dictionary?

People still use dictionaries? A handful of you? I'm gonna use an extremely important resource called dictionary .com. I'd encourage those of you who just raised your hand to check that out, too. The word encouragement in the English language, this is what dictionary .com says.

It says, to give support, confidence, or hope to someone. Think about those three words, support, confidence, or hope. Good things for us to be sharing with one another in the body of Christ. Good things for you to come together on Sunday morning and to offer to each other.

Would you agree that those are things that we need to go and step out of these doors and go out through our weak confidence, support, and hope? I think we all would agree that those are things that we need to be offering to one another, that we need to receive from one another as well.

But if you think about the root of the word encouragement, it's kind of like, if you break that word down, it's kind of like a compound word, n, meaning to put in, and courage, meaning courage. So to encourage somebody is, in essence, to infuse them with courage, to help them to walk with courage through their week.

Think about it that way. Have you ever thought about that word, encourage? It has the word courage right in it, to help somebody to be courageous throughout their week. There are many reasons that we need courage in life, and I think we're gonna walk through some of those later on in the message by the end.

So that's kind of the point. If we're honest, we've all faced circumstances in life where we needed someone to come alongside of us and to infuse us with hope to carry on with competence and support. Our setting is still in the book of Ephesians.

I mentioned as I was reading through it that there was a riot. That's the last thing that we encountered. A big riot was going on there. The culture was shifting away from idolatry in that town in Asia Minor.

Paul had come in and company, and they had shared the gospel and proclaimed it. Some drastic, dramatic things had happened where literally the production of idols, like if you picture there being like an idol factory there in the town, and the union gathered together and said, we're losing jobs, and things are going downhill fast because people aren't buying idols anymore, and literally what was going on.

The silversmiths guild was up in arms and started a riot because people were no longer buying idols. That's the dramatic impact that Christ was having in the culture in Ephesus, and we talked last time we were together two weeks ago about how when Christ comes into a culture, he transforms it one life at a time, that it wasn't through lobbying, it wasn't through political activism, it wasn't through those kinds of things that the culture changed.

It was as Christ, through the gospel, grabbed one life at a time, the culture began to shift away from idolatry, and that was what was going on. But we see right off the bat in our text, right from verse one, after the uproar had ceased, so that's done away with.

That riot has gone. Paul met with the believers in the text, it says. After the uproar ceased, Paul sent for the disciples, and he encouraged them. He brought encouragement. Now, the fact of the matter is, he'd been planning on going to Greece, leaving Ephesus long before.

If you were to look back in Acts chapter 19 and verse 22, he had sent two guys, Timothy and Erastus, ahead of him into Macedonia, into Greece, to basically pave the way. He was planning on going back to churches that he had already started, and with the intention of encouraging them, the text says.

So he was planning on going back there anyways. It wasn't like the riot shook him up, and he's like, I gotta get out of Ephesus because they're rioting against me. No, he had already made plans before that ever occurred.

But there's a word about encouragement in Paul here, because how many of you feel like you start, as we're going through the book of Acts, maybe some of you have read some, some of you went to Sunday school when you were a kid, how many of you feel like you have a handle on who Paul was, a little bit?

Like you just have some notions or some preconceived biases about who the apostle Paul was. What was his character, what was his personality? I think we can get that wrong a little bit. We can get in our mind that Paul was a driven man without much concern for people.

Have you ever heard that before? Or have you ever thought that in your mind as you see the way that he moves in and out of the churches and the way that he deals with people? You can actually kind of start to see him as a little bit harsh, many of you admit to that.

And I think Paul was not a people person or something like that. As if he was someone who preached the gospel, he was a hard-nosed man, ran roughshod over everyone that he encountered. But I believe it is true that he was a driven man.

I think that that's accurate. I think that that's the nature of who he was. He was a man who preached the forgiveness of Christ found in the cross of Christ, and that drove him to proclaim the gospel of Christ.

He was driven, he was focused, the gospel was the center. And everywhere that he goes, what's he doing? Preaching the good news, telling people about Jesus. But I do not believe that Paul was unconcerned for people.

Listen to what he wrote to the church in Thessalonica. Now, he's gonna go there here in a minute. We're gonna see him go to Macedonia. That's a church that he started. He founded the church in Thessalonica several years before.

He's traveled around, he's gone back to Jerusalem, he's gone full circle, and he's gonna go back to them and encourage them. But while he was in Ephesus, here, this time, around the time of this very riot, he writes a couple letters back to the church, and they're called First and Second Thessalonians.

We can read those. We can see what he wrote from Ephesus to Thessalonica in preparation for his return visit to them.

To encourage them.

But in his absence, and in one of those letters, this is what he says. But we were, speaking of his first visit with them, but we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children.

Wow, does that sound hard-nosed? Does that sound like he was running roughshod over the Thessalonians? Sounds like he was a man of compassion and deep, deep sense of care for people and concern for them.

He says, when we first came among you, we were gentle about the way that we presented the gospel. He's about to go back and visit these people a second time, and he declares that he was very concerned for them in his presentation.

So I would say Paul was passionate about the gospel and compassionate towards people. He was loving and concerned about them. I think that we know, intellectually, that those two should go together, right?

Compassion for people and passion for the gospel. Don't those seem like a good pair? But I think if we are honest, sometimes we can tend to think in our minds or buy into the lie that those who are most passionate about the gospel are those less concerned about people.

You hear, you understand what I'm saying? Does that make sense? Let me illustrate that. Like we can tend to think that the guy with the megaphone down at, and I use that as an illustration a lot, forgive me, but it's just such an extreme example of somebody who is almost, like extreme counter-culturalism.

Would you agree with that? Megaphone up by the flags at Western Michigan University. Have you ever seen this guy? He travels around to different universities in Western Michigan. He goes up to Grand Valley State.

I think somebody told me, somebody knew his name. Tom, Tom the Preacher, Preacher Tom or something like that. Tom the Evangelist. And he goes and he has a megaphone and it's hellfire and brimstone. You're all going to hell unless you change your ways, on and on and on.

And he'll just shout down the crowd, you know, hecklers and all that business. And wow, was that fun. But some people might have the error in their mind that that defines passion for the gospel. That man, that guy is passionate for the gospel and that's the definition of it.

Did you see what I'm saying? So could you see how maybe we might get a little askew in our thoughts that not keeping in balance compassion towards people and passion for the gospel, and those two can get a little out of whack.

Now I'm not judging that man, by the way. I don't know. Maybe the guy's got a strong passion for people and compassion for people and he's driven out of that. I don't really know what motivates him to do what he does, so please don't hear me judging that.

But if we love the gospel and we love people both, then we will diligently seek ways to communicate the gospel in ways that our culture understands. You agree with that? Do you understand what I'm saying?

So we will be looking for ways and methods to show them the love of Christ, even in the methods that we use to present the gospel. On the other hand, I don't think that I'm necessarily preaching to anybody here who's ready to pick up a megaphone so what I've done is I've just made you feel less guilty for not doing that, but the fact of the matter is maybe what I need to be encouraging you to is out of your compassion for people and passion for the gospel to actually go say something.

Maybe that's probably, is that probably more likely where we all fall and the error is on the other side? Does anybody have a megaphone ready to go? Okay, so but as we see, there's gotta be this balance in understanding our own passion and our compassion for people.

So Paul encourages the believers in Ephesus. They had been through a lot together so just think back through. I mean, we're talking about history here, real events, real stuff going down. They saw what the text, what Luke wrote earlier was extraordinary miracles.

Now I mentioned in that message that to put the word extraordinary in front of miracles is like redundant a little bit. Like you have extraordinary miracles, not just your run-of-the-mill miracles happen in Ephesus, but extraordinary ones.

Many of these people had burned their books of incantations. We saw that Ephesus was a place that was steeped in dark religious practices. This was like Hogwarts on steroids. It was like, okay, a lot of black dark arts and things going on there.

Literally, literally, okay, and I wanna make sure that you understand that the scripture is clear. Now we might have all kinds of westernization in our mind about whether there's really witches, whether there's really black magic, whether that's the, scripture takes for granted that it is, that there are real demons.

There is a real possibility that people will go out and worship the demonic, and so there are dark powers that exist in reality in this world. Do you guys believe that? Sometimes it can be hard for us in our western mind to actually think that way, right?

But there is an actual spiritual battle that's going on behind the scenes, and Ephesus was a center place for that, and they had burned 50 ,000 drachmas worth. We talked about that being about $9 million worth of books and scrolls and spells and incantations, and they brought them all together, and somebody was sitting there tallying it up.

Lots of money worth of books that they burned. So a lot going on. They had endured a citywide riot in their honor. Okay, the Christians there had endured a lot, and so what we have is Paul getting ready to leave them, and he's like a coach at halftime, and he leaves them with words of support, confidence, and hope.

I'm taking off. I hope to get back to you sometime, but in my absence, be encouraged. You have my support. There is hope, and move forward in confidence. He departs from Macedonia in northern Greece. So if we can, awesome, that worked.

So he's there in Ephesus, and he's gonna head up to Macedonia. So hopefully, I'm gonna leave that up there for a while, and maybe it'll snap too, and you'll be able to see that we got Turkey down there on the right, the Black Sea up there, and then modern day Greece over there, and he heads up to Macedonia.

Now, many scholars have sought to reconstruct the life of Paul, try to put all the pieces back together and figure out exactly where he was, and you can get a pretty good handle on that from the book of Acts, but one thing that scholars have to take into account is that they see him in Macedonia for about one to two years, so we have how much written in scripture.

About this trip to Macedonia?

One verse.

We have a verse, but the reason that scholars see that is around this time, Paul speaks in the book of Romans in 1518, he says that he went to an area called Illyricum, that's north of Macedonia, up into what would even be like modern day Yugoslavia.

Of course, Yugoslavia's not there anymore, but those broken up countries up there. So he heads up to Illyricum, he was there, he says so in Romans, this is the time that most scholars put in the life of Paul that he went up there.

So we have, when you think about this, he's in Ephesus, he's gonna do all these travels, and our text is gonna cover a short amount of time in the text, but it's quite a long duration, and that's the only reason I'm bringing that up to your attention, is to help you be able to visualize what's going on here.

He hangs around and encourages the churches in Macedonia, heads up into Illyricum, all with the purpose of what does the text say? What's he gonna do? Encourage them. That is the primary ministry that he is setting about, encouraging people.

The last time Paul was in Macedonia, he was chased by mobs of Jews from town to town. Does that sound like fun? Anybody ready to sign up for that ministry? People threatening your life, well, we're gonna see him get threatened again.

How many texts have we encountered where Paul wasn't threatened, that he was going to die? Very few in the book of Acts, so we just kind of grow to expect that. Sermon after sermon, week after week, Paul's going to get a threat on his life.

He does again in this text here in a moment, but he was chased from town to town. But even in that hostile environment, the church had taken root. Kind of amazing, isn't it? I mean, people are being hostile towards him, they're threatening him.

He's running from town to town, even has to go down to Athens all by himself, leave Silas and Timothy up there the first time through, and they're helping to encourage and strengthen and build people up, and the church is planted.

What do you think it would have been like to be a believer in Macedonia during this time? What would that have been like? Any thoughts? A little bit what?

Difficult, yeah.

Difficult in what ways? Difficult like, how many of you enjoy just, like you would just stand up, stand up in your office place. I don't know, some of you work in cubicles, some of you have your own office.

Just step outside your office door, stand up in your cubicle and shout, Jesus Christ is Lord. How many of you think that would go well in your business? You excited about that? Now let's, okay. Carissa would because her office is right there,.

And I'm the same.

I'm fine with that. I will just step right outside of my office door and proclaim that any time.

That's good.

I really appreciate that, Carissa. Now let's take that to Macedonia in this time, where a whisper on the street that you're a follower of Jesus Christ could get you lynched. You could be killed for that.

How many of you, that's just push down your desire to evangelize a little bit. Do you know what I'm saying? I mean literally a knife in the back in the middle of the night because you're a follower of Jesus Christ.

That's the kind of context that this is. That's what Macedonia is like during this time. Jews roving the place looking for Christians to kill. Not pleasant, not a happy place, and the church is thriving there.

It's growing. We often see that throughout the world where persecution is the highest, the church grows the fastest. Because there's a, I think it's because there's a deeper dependency upon God. And that's one thing that is convicting to me here in America.

I have a hard time relating to persecution, and yet the majority of Christians throughout history and even present day right now, the majority of Christians in the world are under persecution. Did you know that?

The majority of Christians. Like if you take the sum total number of Christians and then say who is under duress, the majority of Christians in the world are under some sort of social duress. Where does that put us?

We are at the pinnacle of, I don't like to put it at the pinnacle, but we are the small portion. Like just the tip of the iceberg. And if you broaden that out to history, we are such a privileged people with the gospel.

With the freedom to own Christian literature. You can have it. You can carry it. You can disseminate it.

You can give it out.

Has anybody ever been afraid that somebody's gonna take your Bible? You've had to hide your Bible because somebody might steal it? No, we've got 20 of them. Most of us, right? We don't even know where, I mean, I bet there's people, I couldn't, I'd be hard-pressed to put my hand on every Bible that I own.

If you gave me 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and said put your hand on every Bible that you own, could you do it? Probably most of us couldn't. We probably have Bibles we don't even know we own. Boy, I'm being kind of stern here.

And this is coming towards me too. But I'm just looking at the broad scope of the world.

And where do we stand?

And where is our boldness and our zeal and our desire to see the kingdom of God expand and grow? Man, it's convicting to me to think that through. I don't know what persecution means.

I don't even know that.

Maybe that's why encouragement is not a primary ministry in the church in America. Maybe that's why we don't have ministries of encouragement. Have you ever thought about that? We have ministries of all different kinds of things going on but encouragement, I've never been to a church that had a formal ministry of encouragement.

Maybe that's not necessarily the way that it happens anyways, and we'll get there here in a second. Because I think the ministry of encouragement is something that's more focused one-on-one, right? Encouragement doesn't happen necessarily best in a group but one-on-one.

But at the same time, taking it seriously and being intentional about it is I think the point that I'm trying to get across here. It's easier to think that we can go it alone without as much need for others when there's not persecution, when there's not difficulty.

But by the end of this message, I would like to bring this around to show our intense need for giving and receiving encouragement even where we live right now. There's some significant reasons why we need encouragement and we need to be giving it out.

By the end of verse two, regardless of how much time has passed, by the way, that's all in verse one, so we're on verse two now. We'll move through this. By the end of verse two, regardless of how much time has passed, Paul has moved on to Achaia, so we get him down in where currently is Corinth.

The word that you see in the English Standard Version there is Greece. He came to Greece. Well, wasn't he in Greece when he was in Macedonia? Technically, yes, according to our current political, geopolitical climate.

Greece is the whole ball of wax that you see there from Macedonia all the way down to Corinth, but not in those days. Greece was a designation of strictly the district of Achaia. That's what they called Greece.

So if you were to say to someone in that era, I'm going to Greece, you would have to go down by Corinth in Athens, down in the south. So that's what's going on there in the text. When I first read it, I was like, well, isn't he already in Greece?

Why is he? But some of you weren't necessarily seeing that. He spends three months there, and what was common for traveling during that time is to winter someplace. So we see a couple of times Paul talking about wintering in a location, wintering in Rome, wintering, and that's what he's going to do here.

We have pretty clearly where he is at, what the time frame is, AD 57. That's the winter that he's here, and we have that just so well-defined according to the history and who was in rule at certain times and throughout the book of Acts that we can really designate that for the winter of 57 AD, we know where Paul was.

He was down there in Corinth hanging out. Now this all occurs from here forward. We're going to get a snapshot of a couple of weeks. The rest of the text takes place in about two weeks' time in the springtime of 57, when the Feast of Unleavened Bread is.

We see that in verse six. Well, how do we know that springtime, the Feast of Unleavened Bread takes place in the springtime? It's the run-up celebration for the Jews up till Passover. So kind of around Lent time for us.

So when many of the churches in our community will be practicing Lent leading up to Easter, the Jews are practicing the Feast of Unleavened Bread running up to Passover. What day was Jesus crucified on?

Passover. So if you think Easter in your mind, that's the timeframe of when this is occurring, right around Easter time. It's springtime. So you can get the, and the interesting thing is, the shipping lanes all open around that time according to history.

So travel becomes more easy. That's why they wintered, as traveling was more dangerous during that time and difficult. I wonder if you'd like to sleep in a tent in the middle of winter. That's the only options they had for traveling often.

So if they're going through some of these places, they're going to be in tents. So obviously you kind of want to hunker down for the winter. That's what they did. Paul makes his plans to go back to his home church in Antioch after stopping at Jerusalem.

He says, I want to be there for Pentecost. We'll see that at the end. But there's a plot that comes out to kill him. Surprise, surprise, a plot to kill Paul. Can you imagine? And something about this plot is interesting because the way that he averts the plot is to not jump on the ship that he's planning on going to Troas.

So he's made plans. He's getting ready to get on a ship. He catches wind of a plot and he doesn't get on the ship. Why do you suppose that was? I think it just seems to be logical in the flow of the text that somebody was going to kill him on the ship, right?

The Jews had planted somebody on there, an assassin, and they're going to take him out on this trip to Troas, just a couple day journey. And so he doesn't jump on the ship and his life is spared. But the remainder of his posse, his troupe,.

Can you get that?

Go ahead and advance that one. Go ahead and advance it one more. There you go. So the posse is going to go from Corinth to Troas, and they go ahead and get on the ship. The assassin wants Paul, not his people.

So him not getting on the ship somehow is going to divert that. And he instead goes back to Macedonia. And it says in the text, he went up to Philippi. And what's going to be interesting is that once he gets to Philippi there, we see the verbs, I mean, the pronouns begin to change in the text to us and we.

Why would that be?

Why would the author begin to use us and we in the text? Because he joins the team. So now we actually have the author of the book, Luke, who Paul left in Philippi, we were told back in earlier in the book of Acts, he went through and left Luke in Philippi.

Now he joins back up with Luke in Philippi, and we begin to see us and we. Not only that, but we see some significant character traits of Luke. Because as we, from what's written, the remainder of our text that we're going to be looking at is very specific in its detail.

Luke loved detail. He was right down to how many days they spent someplace. On the first day we did this, we stopped at this port, then this port, then this port. Travel in those days meant that you stopped at a lot of ports, like a Greyhound bus.

Anybody ever rode the Greyhound bus? Oh, that is a brutal way to travel.

That is brutal.

I used to go back and forth to South Carolina on the Greyhound bus when I was in college. Oh, man, I'm glad I don't have to do that anymore. Just stop every little podunk town between here and there, 24 hours sometimes to get between there and here, just nuts.

That's the way that travel was in Roman times. Stop at every little port along the way, try to stay close to the shoreline. You don't know what's out there in the middle of that Mediterranean Sea, so you want to stay close to the shore.

All kinds of rumors about what exists out there. So you stop at port to port to port, and Luke is the only one. When Luke is with them, you find out every port that they stopped at. So we see a little bit about his character there.

So he joins up with a trip, and they arrive in Troas. We see, by the way, in verse four, that Paul travels with a huge entourage. There's a big group of people in his posse here. And funny names, they're fun to say.

I'd encourage you to try those sometime. Sopater, I don't even know if I'm even close on that one. These are Greek men from all over, that are identified in verse four. They are a great representative group of new believers, and we find this out in 1 Corinthians 16, three through four.

If you're taking notes, you can jot that down just to verify this. In 1 Corinthians 16, three through four, it indicates that Paul is carrying a large sum of money with him during this entire trip. So whether the assassin was going to take the money, whether the assassin was there, just for religious reasons, probably maybe a little bit of both.

But all the churches throughout the Greek world had taken up an offering to help the poor Christians back in Jerusalem. Historically, we know that there were a couple of serious and significant famines that struck in Judea during this time.

And so a lot of the believers are going without food in Jerusalem, and they take up a huge offering. And some people see this as a delegation, because the men are from all over where Paul has planted churches.

All the way from over in Asia, to Galatia, to Macedonia, all over the place, and there's representatives from all of these districts and areas. So it's quite possible that this is a delegation heading back to Jerusalem.

But regardless of their official position, this is a testimony of God's work through the Apostle Paul. That he has the opportunity to travel with those believers that he's had a direct impact in their lives.

These are people who had not known the good news of Jesus Christ before Paul and company came to town. And so they're all, they all jump on the ship and head to Troas, and then we see that after Paul hooks up with Luke, they head down to Troas and join him there.

So they all arrive at Troas, get together with the church there on the first day of the week, and it says that they got together to break bread. What do you suppose breaking bread meant? They have a meal together, but also something maybe I think a little bit more, when we talk of breaking bread in the church, what do we tend to think of?

Communion.

They got together and they remembered the body of Christ that was crushed for them. They remembered the, they took wine to remember the blood that had been shed for them. And this is a significant time of gathering of God's people.

How many of you would think it would be kind of cool to get the chance to take communion with Paul? Like that's kind of awesome. Not that he had any special blessing or anything like that, but just, man, this guy was significantly used of God.

And just to think that when we take communion, we are part of something that's so much bigger than what we are just even in our gathering here, right? We're part of the church all the way down through the ages, and we're remembering that it is the blood of Christ and the broken body of Christ that seals us into the church of God that is far beyond what God is doing here at Recast, and that's a cool thing.

So they get together, they break bread, and then they have dinner, and then they break bread afterwards and have communion, and it says, from dinnertime to midnight, Paul and the church talked about stuff, okay?

So they're just kind of hashing through things, talking it through, he's encouraging them. It's likely that this dialogue goes deeper than just how the Lions are doing. You know, how your favorite football team is doing, what, you know, who's gonna win the World Series.

I'm guessing, I think I'm on firm, I think this is a pretty likely guess, but that they talk about more than that. Now, that's not to say that we can't have spiritual conversations that involve our real, genuine daily lives, right?

Like, I mean, I like to connect with people on that level, you know, and talk about the football game and things like that, but if we never go deeper than that, is that really fellowship, is that really communion, is that really what it means to live in community as the body of Christ together?

No, if we never, if we just scratch the surface of each other's lives and the only association I ever have with you is because you're a Michigan fan and I'm a Michigan fan, that's pretty chintzy and shallow, wouldn't you say?

But we go much deeper, every one of us in this room are in Christ, go much deeper than that together, don't we? We've got some significant things to talk about, some opportunities to encourage one another in our walk, because we know what it means to be Christians in a culture that is not Christian, and that puts us on ground to be able to assist and help each other in various ways, and it's a two-way street.

So there's this encouragement that's going on, and although the word is dialogue, it's implied that Paul is really directing the discussion, he's guiding it because it says he prolonged his speech until midnight, and you thought my sermons were long.