Maybe Paul had a bit of that as he had no qualms recounting how he had been abused physically. But as this chapter opens he has just left Athens where he has been rudely dismissed by the intellectuals. He comes to Corinth – a culture far removed from that of Athens – and throws himself into his job – making tents – and reasoning with people in the synagogue at the end of every week. Paul always made sure he was not a burden to others so when he had no other means of support, he had a full-time job. However, when Timothy and Silas came from Macedonia, Paul was able to resume his first calling – full-time preaching. It doesn’t say he was personally fulfilled or merely satisfied by preaching. It says he was literally “constrained continuously” or even “held prisoner” by the word and the support from the other churches released him to preach full-time. Everyone together decided that was his best use. It was not Paul deciding to start a non-profit allowing him to do what he wanted. It was not a profession or a life-style. It was almost a sentence. It was, like Jeremiah, a burning in the bones. “I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. Besides everything else, I face the pressure of my concern for all the churches.” Does that sound like a rational life-style choice?

There are some in paid ministry who should go make tents and there are some making tents for whom we should take up a collection and put to their best use.

Something happens in Corinth after he is rejected by the Jews. He moves next door to a private home and, again, declares he is finished with the Jews and will now go to the Gentiles. This is a constant theme for Paul. In virtually every city he makes the same declaration but he is almost always drawn back to them. Today, we would call it mission drift or losing our focus or a mild obsession but for Paul it was an inability to completely write them off even as frustrating as they were. Just read Romans 9:1. “I speak the truth in Christ – I am not lying, my conscience confirms it in the Holy Spirit – I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race, the people of Israel.” It’s hard to walk away from that, isn’t it? It’s probably impossible but he tries. Over and over he tries to go only to the Gentiles but he cannot.

But something else happens and I think this is a moment in his life when he would like to be silent. Not to quit. Just to be quiet. Take a break. Go on sabbatical. Collect his thoughts and lay low for a spell. Why wouldn’t he? He’s met with very little success compared to the hardships and now he’s facing the same in this new city. Every time it is the same pattern. New place. New opportunity. New audience and same response. There comes a day when you begin to question why you are doing this. Of course, at the same time there are others, like Apollos, who are experiencing great success. Years ago, in Damascus, Paul had the same. Following his conversion it says “At once he began to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God. All those who heard him were astonished….and yet Saul grew more and more powerful and baffled the Jews living in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Christ.”

Maybe those days are gone? Maybe now is the time for Paul to be silent and make room for others like Apollos about whom Luke writes, “He vigorously refuted the Jews in public debate, proving from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ.” Now was his time and maybe Paul was thinking it was best for him to withdraw or retire or be silent. By now, he should have been more polished but he is “weak and trembling.” He still has waves of great strength and also great weakness. It’s never a predictable performance or practiced skill for him. It’s always a risk.

And then he hears the Lord speak. “Do not be afraid.” I’ve often wondered why God has to say that so many times to many of the great people in the Bible. They are fearful and anxious. Why does God often pick fearful people? Gideon, Moses, Joshua, Mary. I think being fearful may be one of the characteristics of obedient people. They don’t trust themselves but they are willing to trust God. In fact, it is only when they stop being afraid that they get in trouble. Samson stopped being afraid of the strength God gave him. Gideon stopped being afraid and trusted in his own courage and discernment. It was never fear that defeated them but depending on their own courage or accomplishments.

Paul is afraid and Jesus addresses a particular fear when he tells him to keep on speaking and not to be silent. “For I am with you, and no one is going to attack and harm you, because I have many people in this city. So Paul stayed for a year and a half, teaching them the word of God.”

There are several common fears I can find in this passage this morning and I want us to look at each of them briefly.

First, there is the fear of leaving what you love but cannot live with any longer. For Paul it was leaving his people, his race, his first choice of calling. It was leaving people with whom he had so much in common, in spite of their hardness. They were his first love. For some I have known, it is the same fear but with a twist. It is the fear of outgrowing a childhood faith or a family and becoming a stranger to them. Philip Yancey, the author, says he was always a stranger and an outsider. For many people, leaving the familiar is frightening.

Second, there is the fear that follows success. I don’t know who said this but it is true. “It is often in the moment of success that the heart becomes cowardly. It is often in the hour of success that the fear of opposition and hostility is born.” We want to protect our success or we are afraid of losing what we have gained. I know there are moments for writers and speakers when they know the best they have produced did not come from them. They merely passed it on. It was as if God said, as he did to Jeremiah, “say these words to my people” or as he said to John on the island of Patmos, “Write this down, for what I tell you is trustworthy and true.” You know that moment may never come again and you want to claim and own it.

Or, remember Elijah after the defeat of the prophets of Baal. In spite of the victory he runs and hides in a cave.

There is always the fear of being found out and people discovering you are not who they think. This power is not yours. You are not a god. It comes and goes on its own discretion. Sometimes it drives out demons. Sometimes it sways crowds. Sometimes it shakes prisons. Then sometimes it doesn’t show up at all. That is the fear that follows spiritual success.

Third, there is the fear that follows failure. In a recent trip to Nashville, Carol and I had the opportunity to meet the former Olympic skater Scott Hamilton and his wife, Traci. We talked about the tendency of skaters to pull in after a fall and be satisfied with doubles instead of triple axels. It’s true about getting back up on the horse, isn’t it? Otherwise, your mistake turns into a pattern. A friend of mine used to encourage me to make “great mistakes” and don’t hold back from the chance of failing. But, sometimes we are tempted to pull back or be reluctant to try again instead of jumping up and remounting.

In “Soul Survivor”, Philip Yancey tells the story of Martin Luther King after his first significant defeat and time in jail.

“King, shaken by his first jail experience, sat up in his kitchen wondering if he could take it anymore. Should he resign? It was around midnight. He felt agitated, and full of fear. A few minutes before, the phone had rung. “Nigger, we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out, and blow up your house.”

King sat staring at an untouched cup of coffee and tried to think of a way out, a way to quietly surrender leadership and resume the serene life of scholarship he had planned. In the next room lay his wife Coretta, already asleep, along with their newborn daughter Yolanda. Here is how King remembers it in a sermon he preached.

“And I sat at that table thinking about that little girl and thinking about the fact that she could be taken away from me any minute. And I started thinking about a dedicated, devoted and loyal wife, who was over there asleep…And I got to the point that I couldn’t take it anymore. I was weak…And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me, and I had to know God for myself. And I bowed down over that cup of coffee. I never will forget it…I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right. I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage.”

…And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you, even until the end of the world.”…I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone. No never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.”

Three nights later, as promised, a bomb exploded on the front porch of King’s home.

Fourth, there is the fear we naturally feel in the face of an overwhelming task or challenge. Imagine the expectations Paul’s followers had for him as their leader. Everyone wanted to share in the glory and his success – but only a few were willing to share in the pain that came with it. Paul felt the responsibility of those dependent on him. He felt the pressure of his concern for the churches he had planted. And now, he was going to take on a totally new ministry that would put him outside a community he understood even when they disagreed. He was going to the Gentiles. Not just ordinary Gentiles but Corinthian Gentiles. They were new believers with enormous ignorance and immorality wired into their whole culture. They were spiteful, disobedient, impure, greedy, stubborn and lustful with no background of ethics or appreciation for the law. Where do you start?

The fifth and final fear is in the word God uses to reassure him. I have many “laos” here. Laos means common and uneducated. This was not who Paul was used to working with – he was far more comfortable with theological debates among those who understood the terms. His strength had been – as we learned about his time in Damascus – astonishing Jews in the synagogue and proving to them that Jesus is the Christ. It was with his own people and highly moral Greeks – the god-fearers – that Paul was most comfortable.

Now, God was saying He wanted Paul to stay here, to settle down with those the classical world despised and looked down on, the ignorant and foolish, the rough and ill-mannered. It wasn’t idealistic like our mission trips to the “least of these” but to those who know nothing about the finer distinctions. Leonard Sweet has a great line. “What if Michelangelo had said, “I don’t do ceilings. What if Jesus had said, “I don’t do crosses.”

This final fear and perhaps his worst was, I think, getting stuck among people with whom he could not communicate in a place he would have to stay and not preach then move on. He would have to become more than a debater and preacher. He would have to be more than an apostle. He would, over time, become a pastor. He would learn to submerse himself in the tedium and the frustration of working with lives of people that are broken, flawed, selfish and out of control. At the same time, it was only by staying in one place that he would make some of the greatest relationships of his life – like Priscilla and Aquila. Being a pastor is not being a CEO. As you know, I love Eugene Peterson and in his book, “The Pastor” he says, “There’s a lot of talk about leadership in the Christian church today: how to be a strong leader. I think a lot of that talk is misguided, taking its cues from the worlds of sports and big business. In those areas, a leader is someone who comes in and gets things done. That’s appropriate in almost every other area of life—but not for pastors in the church. As pastors, we’re not trying to get something done. We’re not looking at people and thinking about what we can convince them to do. That’s not the goal. As pastors, we’re trying to pay attention to what’s going on now, right here—right now. We’re trying to pay attention to what God is doing. And we’re trying to share that in the community. If we get that idea turned around and focus on getting things accomplished, then we turn ourselves into congregations that have bought into this sports-business model. That’s why so many pastors are depressed so much of the time. They try and try—and keep trying—to become these business-style leaders and they can’t make it work in the church.”

The time in Corinth would change Paul into something he never imagined himself doing. He became a pastor to people.

What happened? This time became the source of some of his greatest work. Read 1 Corinthians 13. You don’t learn that as a theologian or debater. He was able to write that because he came to understand what it meant to love real people with enormous flaws and sin. Yet, the time at Corinth with the laos is the source of some of his greatest thinking and writing. The constraints on his life, the pressures and sense of being “sentenced” created extraordinary results that might never have happened. It was the same with Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller, General Booth and the founding of the Salvation Army, Mother Teresa, Ghandi or C.S. Lewis being ridiculed as “that writer of children’s books” by his peers. Our best often comes in the midst of our worst times.

Philip Yancey writes about Dr. Paul Brand who worked for many years in obscurity with lepers here in the States and in India.

“He knew presidents, kings, and many famous people, but he rarely mentioned them, preferring instead to reminisce about individual leprosy patients. He talked openly about his failures, and always tried to deflect credit for his successes to his associates. Every day he rose early to study the Bible and to pray. Humility and gratitude flowed from him naturally, and in our time together I sensed a desperate lack of these qualities in myself.

Most speakers and writers I knew were hitting the circuit, packaging and repackaging the same thoughts in different books and giving the same speeches to different crowds. Meanwhile, Paul Brand, who had more intellectual and spiritual depth than anyone I had ever met, gave many of his speeches to a handful of leprosy patients in the hospital’s Protestant chapel. Obviously, he had spent hours meditating and praying over that one sermon. It mattered not that we were a tiny cluster of half-deaf nobodies in a sleepy bayou chapel. He spoke as an act of worship, as one who truly believed that God shows up when two or three are gathered in God’s name.”

“Because of where I practiced medicine, I never made much money at it. But I tell you that as I look back over a lifetime of surgery, the host of friends who once were patients bring me more joy than wealth could ever bring. I first met them when they were suffering and afraid. As their doctor, I shared their pain. Now that I am old, it is their love and gratitude that illuminates the continuing pathway of my life. It’s strange – those of us who involve ourselves in places where there is the most suffering, look back in surprise to find that it was there that we discovered the reality of joy. He then quoted another saying of Jesus. “Happy are they who bear their share of the world’s pain: In the long run they will know more happiness than those who avoid it.”

The comfort of God this morning is “I am with you” in the:

Fear of leaving the familiar.
Fear after success.
Fear after failure.
Fear in the face of an overwhelming situation.
Fear of getting stuck.
Fear of speaking out.

What is your best that is waiting for you not among the best and the brightest or the accolades of people and friends? What will you look back on and say those times and people have brought me more joy than wealth could ever bring?