Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
I did not shrink from declaring anything profitable
Acts 20:17-27
17 From Miletus he sent to Ephesus and called to himself the elders of the assembly. · WEB
Paul's only recorded address to a church rather than a crowd defends his record, and the defense is that he kept nothing back and took nothing.
This is the only speech in the book delivered to believers, and it reads unlike the others. There is no argument from Scripture, no narrative of Israel, no call to repent. It is a man handing over a church.
He begins with what they can verify: You yourselves know, from the first day that I set foot in Asia, how I was with you all the time. Three years of daily contact is his evidence, and he appeals to it four separate times in the speech.
The manner is described before the content. Serving the Lord with all humility, with many tears, and with trials which happened to me by the plots of the Jews. The tears recur twice more in the address and are not a rhetorical flourish; this is the same man who told the Corinthians he wrote to them out of much affliction and anguish of heart.
Then the claim on which his conscience rests, stated twice in eight verses with the same verb: I didn't shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and afterward, I didn't shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God. The verb means to withdraw or draw back out of fear, and the temptation it names is universal — to keep back the part of the message that will cost something to say.
His method is given in one clause and it is worth more than most manuals: teaching you publicly and from house to house. Both, not either. And the content is summarized in the shortest form the book gives it, addressed to both audiences without distinction: testifying both to Jews and to Greeks repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus.
The turn to the future is somber. I go bound by the Spirit to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to me there; except that the Holy Spirit testifies in every city, saying that bonds and afflictions wait for me. Note exactly what he says the Spirit has told him. Not to go, and not to stay away — only what awaits him. He is compelled toward it and informed about it, and the outcome is left dark.
That distinction governs the harder passage a chapter later, where disciples at Tyre urge him through the Spirit not to go up. What the Spirit is consistently reported as saying is that chains are coming. The conclusion that he should therefore turn back is one his friends drew, and it is a conclusion Paul does not accept.
His own valuation follows and it is the most quoted sentence of his life: these things don't count; nor do I hold my life dear to myself, so that I may finish my race with joy, and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus. Life is not despised; it is ranked. Something is worth more, and it is a commission and its completion.
He then says he knows they will not see his face again, and draws the conclusion a watchman draws: I am clean from the blood of all men. It is the same figure he used at Corinth, and it is the only kind of innocence a preacher can claim. He does not say they all believed. He says he told them everything.
settled What this mark means