<p>18:9- see on Acts 18:4,5.</p><p><i>And during the night in a vision, the Lord said to Paul: Do not be afraid</i>- Quoting the very words of the Lord Jesus to the disciples: &quot;Fear not... you shall catch men&quot; (Lk. 5:10). What the disciples feared was their inadequacy as preachers; and the same context is here with Paul. We see here a humility in Paul which his argumentative and emotional temperament may otherwise hide. His fear was also of physical harm, for the corresponding comfort was that nobody was going to hurt him (:10). Paul's fear of physical harm is again comforted by the Lord during the shipwreck (Acts 27:24). This fearful side of Paul makes the more impressive his continuation to Jerusalem, knowing that prison, beating and maybe death awaited him; it means his willing enduring beating at Philippi when he could have avoided it was the more gracious. He was not some macho fanatic who was genuinely fearless of death. In fact, it seems, quite the opposite. Paul spoke of his arrival in Corinth at this time as being &quot;In weakness and in fear and in much trembling&quot; (1 Cor. 2:3). The trembling may have been connected to the &quot;fear&quot;.</p><p>Paul says that he preached to Corinth in the first place in (spiritual) &quot;weakness&quot; (1 Cor. 2:3)-&nbsp; because it seems that when he first got to Corinth, he wasn't spiritually strong enough to grasp the nettle of witnessing to the city as he should have done (Acts 18:9,10). Having admitted to Corinth that he himself was weak, he can say that whenever one of them is weak, he feels weak too; in other words he's saying that he can totally empathize (not just sympathize) with a weak brother's feelings (2 Cor. 11:29).&nbsp;</p><p><em>But speak out and do not keep silent</em>- Gk. 'be dumb'. We have noted so many conscious connections between the gospel of Luke, and this 'Volume 2' in Acts. Here, the connection is clearly with Zacharias, father of John the Baptist, whom Luke records as being told not to be afraid; and is then told that he will be dumb s.w. &quot;keep silent&quot; and not be able to &quot;speak&quot; s.w. &quot;speak out&quot; (Lk. 1:20). Paul's mind was soaked with the Gospel records; he alludes to them at least once in every three verses of his letters. So he would have grasped the point the Lord was making: If he would not preach, then he would be effectively faithless in the Lord's promise, as Zacharias had been.</p>