The argument at Caesarea went on for days, and nobody won it.
Agabus had tied himself up with Paul’s belt and said what the Spirit said. Everyone in the house drew the obvious conclusion and began pleading with Paul not to go up. Paul told them they were breaking his heart, and that he was ready to be bound and to die at Jerusalem.
And then this:
And since he would not be persuaded, we ceased and said, “Let the will of the Lord be done.”
Read what that sentence does not say.
It does not say they came round. It does not say they saw it his way in the end, or that someone produced a clinching argument, or that the Spirit settled it overnight. Nobody is persuaded of anything. Luke uses a word that means they fell quiet. They ran out of argument, and they stopped.
It also does not say they were wrong. They never withdraw the plea. They simply stop making it.
Luke knows what agreement looks like when it happens. At the council in Jerusalem the church works a question through — testimony, argument, a passage from Amos — and arrives at it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us. At Troas a vision comes in the night and the company concludes together that God has called them to Macedonia. Both times the discernment lands. Both times Luke records the agreement as the point.
Here there is no agreement, and Luke records it anyway, in the same even voice.
So the chapter leaves us with two things a company can do. It can reach a shared judgement, and that is the better outcome. Or it can fail to, and hand the question over, and go on together — which is what happens next. Verse 15: they got their things ready and went up to Jerusalem with him. They lost the argument and they carried the luggage.
Let the will of the Lord be done is usually read as a pious full stop. It is the last honest sentence available when two people who love each other cannot agree about what God is doing. It hands the matter back to the one person who knows, and it does not pretend the disagreement has gone.
I had a cardiac arrest, and since then the question of how much longer I keep working has been live and has not gone away.
Most of the counsel I have had says scale back. It is good counsel, given by people who want me alive, and it is almost certainly the sensible reading of the situation.
My sense, over six months, through circumstances and events I could not make line up any other way, has been the opposite: that God would have me step up rather than step down.
Earlier this week I sat over coffee with a colleague and said so out loud, which makes it a decision rather than a leaning.
I am not sure it is God. I think it is. And I have decided as though it is.
That is not much like the testimonies I grew up on, where the leading is clear and the confirmation arrives and the person goes forward knowing. I have not been given that. What I have is six months, a conviction I cannot fully account for, and the people who love me saying something else — none of whom I have persuaded, and none of whom have persuaded me.
Nothing has changed. I have simply stopped arguing about it.
Companion: Through the Spirit, on the word that came to Paul at Tyre.