Today we’re reading Acts 14 in the Tattoo Church Reading Plan. Here are a few thoughts:
- The chapter starts off with Paul and Barnabas teaching people about Jesus. Then the religious leaders got mad (as usual) and stirred up the people against them until they have to leave the city.
- Paul and Barnabas go into another town, Lystra, and Paul (through the power of the Holy Spirit) heals a crippled man.
- The crowd believed that Paul and Barnabas were Greek gods who had come to earth. The priest of Zeus even have bulls brought in to offer sacrifices to Paul and Barnabas. The disciples quickly had to tell the crowd they were just human as well, which the crowd was hesitant to believe.
- After this some Jews “won the crowd over” and talked them into stoning Paul. Then they dragged him out of the city thinking he was dead. Talk about a rapid change of affection for their visitors.
- After leaving Lystra, Paul and Barnabas go into another city and then loop back through the cities they previously started churches in and assigned leaders for the churches.
If Paul and Barnabas were around today they would have some serious frequent flyer miles built up with all that traveling. It is a lot of cities talked about in this chapter but it gives us the ability to track the spread of Christianity and the ability to check the historical reliability of it. What’s more important, is it shows us they were serious about spreading the good news of Jesus. We read about Paul being stoned, so bad they thought he was dead. If you remember we explained what a stoning looked like back when we read Acts 7. It’s amazing that after this Paul was still willing to go on. Paul will go through a lot more, as we will read about in the coming days.
Does the courage and tenacity of Paul and Barnabas encourage you? In what ways? Does it make you want to share the love of God you’ve experienced with others?
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