How is Your Faith?

 

  I hope everyone has had a great holiday weekend. Pastor Fred preached from Acts 14:8-22 and this is Paul’s first public ministry and what kind of day would of been on our first day on the new job we heal someone who is crippled and by the end of the day, we were left for dead outside the city limits. How many of us would go back to this place some time later to encourage people in their faith. This happened to Paul and here are some of my thoughts from this passage. 

  My first thought is that I wonder who is this man who could walk from birth? The only thing we know about him is of his ailment of not being able to walk. I find it interesting that there are miracles throughout the New Testament that we don’t know much of the persons story or even their name. Pastor Fred asked me a question this week on this passage that got me thinking. The question essentially was, what made Paul go over and heal this man? There was no recorded conversation between the guy and Paul, so why did Paul heal him without knowing his story or faith. My thought was that maybe it was done so that the glory of God could be revealed. How often are we healed or delivered from something and we forget to praise God for it? Instead we promote the hard work and sacrifice that we did to make something happen and we forget about God being all powerful and deserving of glory and praise. One explanation is that Paul did it to show Gods authority over all. 

  My second thought is that we are often really vain and we really like to promote our goodness or place other people on pedestals and then we crucify them as them for any wrong doing. As Christians we are guilty of this. Bill Hybels and Mark Driscoll both were pastors of fairly influential churches in the early 2000’s and often were keynote speakers at church conferences and people listened to what they had to say. Then they both had their fall from grace and were crucified for their words and actions. Now, they needed to be held accountable for those things, but I wonder if that fall from grace would of been minimized if we didn’t place them with that God like status and they didn’t allow their ego to be fed and allowed it.  When the people called Paul and Barnabas gods and were about to make sacrifices in their honor, they told them no and tore their clothing. They realized the real power was from God and not them. 

  My third observation is that after Paul and Barnabas preached the good news of the Gospel and telling the people that God made Himself known through the sending of rain, the people became fickle and let the nay sayers talk them into stoning Paul and Barnabas, even after the miracle. What gets me is that they were left for dead and after they were healed up, they went back to minister to the other believers. I would have said peace out and not gone back, but Paul and Barnabas realized that there were brothers and sisters in Christ who were struggling and they went back to minister to them. This not only took courage, but faith also. They saw the bigger picture and glorified God by going back. 

  Here is the application for us today. Throughout this whole passage, faith is at the core of it. Paul healed the man who couldn’t walk not to make himself look better, but he realized through the Holy Spirit that he had faith to be healed. There was also faith for Paul and Barnabas to go back after they were left for dead and minister to a church that was struggling. So here is my question, how is your faith doing? Are you trusting God to provide or have you become bitter enough to walk away or not trust as much? At some point we all hit rock bottom and we have three basic choices. The first one is to grab some dynamite and keep digging. The second one is that we sit there and whine above our problems. Or the third option is that we act out in faith and we stick out our and callout for Jesus. Remember, for those of us who are not at rock bottom, we use our faith to come alongside those are struggling and encourage them. 

Grace and Peace

Tom Boustead