Acts Series · Acts 18

You need a
trellis.

A vine with no trellis doesn't just fail to grow tall. It spreads sideways and kills everything underneath it.

August 16, 2026  ·  Garrette Milliken

Kudzu grows almost anywhere in the South, and almost nothing stops it. Burn it, mow it, dump chemicals on it, and it's back before the crew finishes lunch. Garrette once watched utility linemen fight a patch of it with something close to a flamethrower, and still lose.

Kudzu is a vine with nowhere to climb. Left alone, it doesn't grow up. It spreads sideways, covers whatever's underneath it, and eventually kills it for lack of light. A vine with no trellis becomes ground cover.

Gifted, and
growing sideways

By Acts 18, a man named Apollos shows up in Ephesus. He's eloquent, he knows the Scriptures well, and he preaches with real fire. He also has the story only partly right, and nobody in the synagogue wants to say so. Who corrects a man that gifted?

Two people do. Aquila and Priscilla, a couple who make tents for a living and don't preach at all, take Apollos aside privately and explain the way of God to him more accurately.

He began to speak boldly in the synagogue. But when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside, and explained to him the way of God more accurately.

Acts 18:26

Apollos could have pointed to his own resume and walked off. He doesn't. He listens, and goes on to become one of the most effective preachers in the early church. His gift didn't need a bigger platform. It needed a trellis, something to grow him upward instead of sideways.

Nobody's
competing

What makes Aquila and Priscilla worth noticing is what they don't do. They aren't threatened by a gift bigger than their own. Garrette put it plainly: kingdom people are contributors to your life, not competitors with it.

There are really only two kinds of people around you. Some develop you. Some just use you, and you can usually tell which is which with one question: do they ask how you're doing, or only what you can do for them? The people worth keeping close get excited when you outgrow them. The ones to drop need you to stay small enough to still need them.

Three
people

Garrette closed on a short list, short on purpose. Someone ahead of you, a mentor, who tells you the truth even when it costs the easy relationship. Someone behind you, a mentee, because nothing God does in you was ever meant to stop with you. And someone beside you, a friend, who doesn't need anything from you and isn't sizing you up for anything either.

Ahead, behind, beside. Lose any one of the three and you're either always following, always leading, or always alone, and none of those is where a person is meant to grow.

You can be gifted, anointed, and eloquent, and none of it replaces a trellis. Trellising was never glamorous. Nobody frames a picture of the trellis. But the vine never reaches what it was planted to become without one.

Something to Sit With

Who's your
trellis?

Not who cheers for you loudest. Who's willing to take you aside and tell you the truth.