Acts 20:35

I have shewed you all things Better (as Rev. Ver.) "In all things I gave you an example." The verb is cognate with that noun which Jesus uses (John 13:15), "I have given you an example that ye should do as I have done unto you."

how that so labouring i.e. in like manner as the Apostle laboured. And the verb implies "wearying toil." He had spared for no fatigue. He speaks of this toil (2 Corinthians 11:27), "in labourand travail."

ye ought to support[Rev. Ver." help"] the weak By "weak" does St Paul here mean those standing in need of material or moral help? Grimm (s. v.) takes it for the poor, those who are in want from any cause, as those must have been who could not support themselves, and whose wants the Apostle supplied by his own labour. Yet this is a very rare sense, as he admits, for the verb to have, and "feebleness" of faith and trust is much the more common meaning. And that sense suits well here. If among new converts large demands should be made for the support of those who minister, they who are weak in the faith as yet, may be offended thereby, and becoming suspicious, regard the preacher's office as a source of temporal gain. An example like St Paul's would remove the scruples of such men, and when they became more grounded in the faith, these matters would trouble them no more. For the use of "weak" in the sense of moral, rather than physical, weakness, cp. Job 4:3-4; Isaiah 35:3.

and to remember … Jesus He appeals to them as though the saying was well-known, and as we notice this, we cannot but wonder at the scanty number of the words which have been handed down as "words of Jesus" beyond what we find in the Gospel. This is the only one in the New Testament, and from all the rest of the Christian literature we cannot gather more than a score of sentences beside. See Westcott, Introd. to Study of the Gospels, pp. 428 seqq.

how he said The Greek has an emphatic pronoun, which is represented in the Rev. Ver." he himself said."

It is.… receive In support of what has just been said about strengthening the feeble in faith, these words seem as readily applicable to that view of the Apostle's meaning, as to the sense of "poverty." What would be given in this special case, would be spiritual strength and trust; what is referred to in "receive" is the temporal support of the preacher, which St Paul refrained from claiming. We cannot doubt that he felt how much more blessed it was to win one waverer to Christ than it would have been to be spared his toils at tent-making by the contributions of his converts.