Take heart, brothers and sisters. When the fears and doubts come rushing in. When the future looks bleak. The Lord knows where you are. The Lord sees your work for him. And the Lord isn’t finished with you yet.

It would be easy to think that the Apostle Paul never had the sort of worries that the rest of us do. But occasionally, we get little reminders that he wasn’t superhuman.

For example, in Act 18, the Lord appeared to Paul one night in a vision and said: ‘Do not be afraid any longer, but go on speaking and do not be silent; for I am with you, and no man will attack you in order to harm you, for I have many people in this city’ (NASB). Calvin comments that Paul was ready to faint until the Lord appeared to him and set up on his feet again.

We see a similar example in Acts 23:11: ‘The following night the Lord stood by him and said, “Take courage”’. The Lord wouldn’t have stood by him and said that if Paul hadn’t been starting to waver. If he hadn’t been starting to doubt.

And no wonder!

In the space of about 24 hours Paul has been dragged out of the temple (21:36), with his life only spared because Roman soldiers rushed in to stop the crowd lynching him. Just before he’s taken into the barracks, he persuades the tribune to let him speak to the people, which goes well until the point where he tells them about God sending him to the Gentiles. At that point, the tribune orders Paul to be flogged, to try and find out what the uproar was about.

So Paul has gone from being about to be killed, to being about to be tortured. Yet even in the midst of it, he seems fairly assured and unflappable. He calmly asks the tribune if it’s lawful for him to flog a Roman citizen (knowing, of course, that it isn’t). He responds to Ananias the high priest in the style of an Old Testament prophet – before he realises who he is. Then in he cleverly plays the Pharisees and the Sadducees off each other by mentioning the resurrection.

Things then turn violent again, and it looks like Paul is going to be torn to pieces. The soldiers are sent in again to take him by force and bring him into the barracks. And at this point, it’s as if everything catches up with Paul.

The lights are off.
He’s on his own.
It’s not hard to imagine the doubts and fears flooding in. 

He’d longed to get to Rome. He’d written to the Christians in Rome and asked them to strive together with him in their prayers, that he might be delivered from the unbelievers in Judea, and that by God’s will he might come to them with joy and be refreshed in their company (Rom. 15:32). But now, the prospect of him getting to Rome and fellowshipping with Christians there seems bleak.

He’s alone. Things in Jerusalem haven’t gone the way he’d hoped. 

But at that moment the Lord stands by him to comfort him.

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