Acts 19:1-7

SANCTIFICATION OF THE EPHESIAN CHURCH

1-7. Apollos remains preaching in the great church at Corinth, the largest and most gifted of the age, the result of an eighteen months' protracted meeting held by Paul, Timothy, Silas and Luke. Happily, in the good providence of God, the great Apollos, now bright and fresh in his Beulah- land experience, arriving soon after Paul went away on that great tour visiting all of his Asiatic churches, “confirming them,” i. e., getting them sanctified and establishing them in the experience and life of holiness. After this long tour, “Paul having come through the upper parts [i. e., those countries east of the river Hollys], arrives at Ephesus and finds some disciples.” This little band of twelve disciples had been converted under the preaching of Apollos before he was sanctified, and while he was still fervently proclaiming the gospel of Jesus the Christ in the Johanic dispensation, as he lived away in Africa where he had not come in contact with the stirring history of the crucifixion, resurrection, ascension and Pentecost at Jerusalem, as you must remember they had no mails nor newspapers.