You're Probably Looking for the Wrong Signs That God Is Working|07.05.26|Acts: Mission on the Road pt.2

One of the scariest parts of being a Christian is when we WANT to share Jesus with someone we care about, but we’re not sure how it’s going to go.

Because maybe you’ve been praying for someone in your life who is close to you, but who feels far from God. We call that person our “One.” And we know that God wants to reach them with his love, but we’re not sure if they’re open to us sharing Jesus with them.

And I’m not sure if the ways I’ve been praying for them have been ‘WORKING.’

I’ve been trying to listen to them, but I don’t know if I’m saying the right things. I don’t even know if I should say ANYTHING yet…

Have you felt that tension? It can feel scary, right? And I don't want to just tell you 'keep going'... I want to show you something in the text today that I think will actually change how you see it.

Because our Scripture today deals directly with the tension of wondering whether or not we’re doing the right thing to try and share Jesus with people.

[Scripture Ref]

So open your Bible with me to Acts 14 (p102). We’re going to pick up with the Apostle Paul as he enters a town called Lystra. Every time before this, Paul would enter a new town, and he would go to the synagogue and try and talk to the Jews about the fact that Jesus was the Messiah they were waiting for. And then he’d take that good news to the non-Jews in the town as well.

But this time, there’s no synagogue in the town, so Paul is starting without any common connection with the people, trying to tell them about a God that they don’t realize they need.

Paul is sharing the good news with complete strangers, with no idea who in the crowd might actually be ready to receive it.

Maybe that's exactly where some of you are this year. Because we’ve been spending this whole year talking about our shared mission of Each One Reach One. We’ve been on the road together asking God to help us name our One, the person who is close to us but who feels far from God.

And then last month, we talked about five BLESS rhythms to help us actually share God’s blessings with people in everyday ways that don’t feel too big.

And then last week, our guest speaker Lee got us reoriented to the book of Acts, so that we can see how God worked through his early followers to spread his good news across the area, because it was never meant for the church to keep it to themselves.

And so today we find Paul and Barnabas entering a new area, trying to share the good news of King Jesus. And all it takes for a big response is One person leaning in, because God had been at work already before Paul and Barnabas even got there.

But to better understand how the crowd responds, you have to know something about this town of Lystra. There was a legend from centuries earlier that Zeus and his messenger, Hermes, had visited the town once in disguise.

Most of the townspeople didn’t recognize them and missed the opportunity to receive a gift from them. And so the whole town has been living with that anxiety since then that they don’t want to miss the chance to receive a blessing from the gods.

That backstory is going to matter a lot in about 30 seconds as we read this together. Because Paul and Barnabas are preaching out in public to whoever will listen, and that includes a man who had never been able to walk.

Let’s rise to read God’s Word…

[Acts 14:8-20]

[Acts 14:8-10]

Paul and Barnabas are speaking to anyone who will listen, because, in their minds, everyone needs to hear the good news of King Jesus.

But it’s not like they are just standing on the corner and shouting at the crowd. Notice “the look.” How Paul is looking intently and catching the eye of a man who had been lame from birth.

He’s been this way his whole life and had never walked before. Maybe this reminds you of the time that Jesus encounters a man born blind, and the disciples have questions. Because having a disability like that causes challenges at any time in history, but back in the first century, it meant a LIFE of relying on the kindness of others to survive.

And any interaction with other people was a mixture of pity and avoidance, because everyone assumed you must be cursed by the gods or had brought this tragedy upon yourself somehow.

And this lame man is listening to Paul teach. We don’t have the exact words Paul was saying, but we can be sure it was similar to the previous speeches Paul had given about the hope that can be found in Jesus when we put our faith in him.

The lame man is listening, and he’s leaning in. And Paul looked directly at him. He didn’t scan the crowd and kind of sheepishly look at the guy and then flit away.

Paul looks DIRECTLY. Intently. He fixes his gaze upon this man. He’s speaking to the whole crowd, but he’s noticing One.

And what he sees is faith. The text says that Paul noticed the man had “faith to be healed.” But here’s the cool part. The word that the author, Luke, uses for “healed” is the same word that he uses elsewhere for “saved.”

The same word can mean physical healing and it can mean spiritual rescue. The lame man has faith to be healed, and freedom from his physical condition is connected to spiritual freedom as well.

I’ve seen this type of faith before. Have you? I’ve seen it in people who hear about the good news of Jesus and you can tell in their eyes, in their face, that they have a little piece inside them that really does want to believe.

They want to believe that the hope can be for them, too. The freedom can be for them, too. The fully-alive LIFE of Jesus can be theirs, too.

Paul sees it in this man, and he responds to the faith that he sees. “Stand up on your feet!” And the man doesn’t slowly rise, he JUMPED UP. Leaps up and starts walking.

[Acts 14:11-13]

Paul had the LOOK, but the crowd had the MISS. They see this miracle and they immediately interpret it as connected to the legend that they had heard for generations: Zeus and Hermes.

“We missed them once… we’re not missing them again!” And they immediately call for Paul and Barnabas to be worshiped as Hermes and Zeus, even though Paul and Barnabas are trying to get them to stop.

The local priest brings bulls and wreaths to the city gates, and the whole town is preparing to throw a party for the wrong people.

We’re about to see that the way Paul and Barnabas respond is really commendable, but first, we’ve got to see how the way the crowd is responding is the way that humans always respond: we see something good happen, and we immediately attach it to the nearest visible source.

We put our faith in what we can see, or what we’re familiar with, or what we were raised to believe, don’t we?

The crowd wasn’t wrong that a miracle had happened. They were just wrong in who they were giving the credit to. They were aiming their worship and faith in the wrong direction.

[Acts 14:14-15]

Paul and Barnabas realize what’s happening and they tear their robes, which wasn’t just a soap-opera dramatic move. It’s the formal Jewish gesture of horror and dismay at blasphemy. They refuse to just stand by and receive what belongs to God alone.

And then Paul speaks to the crowd, not with a full gospel presentation, but with just enough contextual information to redirect the crowd.

“We’re not gods. We’re human, just like you. But we’ve come to tell you about the one, true God, who made everything you see, and who has been preparing the way for you to know who he is since before time began. He’s the LIVING GOD.”

The living God, as opposed to… dead gods. Gods who don’t move, don’t act, don’t notice.

No, there is a LIVING God who has been doing good, giving rain, giving crops, filling hearts with joy… all before anyone in Lystra knew his name.

He was already there… already at work.

[blank]

But the crowd was missing it, because they weren’t looking for a miraculous saving God they hadn’t met yet. Instead, they were sticking with the understanding they knew. They were sticking with the interpretations they had before.

And we do the same thing, don’t we? We have these expectations with how things are supposed to go, how things are supposed to look.

Even with the act of trying to share our faith, we have expectations about what that’s supposed to look like. We’ve seen a movie, or heard some story, or watched some pastor… so we think that when we share our faith with someone, we should see a change in them right away. We should see them start to cry and become emotionally transformed.

When someone we care about begins the journey of sobriety, we expect them to make a complete turn-around with every part of their life and start to live up to our expectations for them.

When we pray for our One, we want to see some visible proof that God is working.

So we get discouraged when nothing seems to be happening. When they don’t necessarily seem more open this week than last week.

And we start to attach our sense of whether God is “working” to what we can see, what we’ve come to expect, what we hoped would happen in their response, their openness to us, whether they came to church or not…

And when we don’t see it, we start to wonder: “is God actually moving? Is this even doing anything?! Maybe my One is too far gone. Maybe I’m not good enough at this…”

Please hear me, you’re not wrong for wanting to see God work! What I’ve described is just a MISS, because we’re attaching our trust to what we can see and what we’ve come to expect with our preconceptions, just like the crowd in Lystra.

But Paul and Barnabas won’t settle for the crowds’ misunderstanding. They make sure everyone knows, “Just because you don’t understand how God has been working… he HAS been working. And he never left himself without a witness. He’s already here, reaching out to you.

So the question isn't whether God is at work in your One's life. The question is whether you can trust that he was at work before you showed up.

[Jesus reaches people]

Because, just look back at this story: the lame man didn’t do anything to EARN Paul’s attention. He didn’t perform his way into his own healing. He was just… leaning in.

And Paul looked at him… REALLY looked… and saw faith that God had already placed there.

Do you realize that? God provided both ends of that moment. He provided the faith in the man to lean in, and he provided the faith in Paul to act, AND he provided the healing and salvation that was witnessed there!

Paul may have shown up to try and share the good news with the entire town, but he realized something that we need to understand about Jesus.

Jesus doesn’t reach “crowds.” Jesus reaches PEOPLE. Jesus connects with individuals. Because he loves them and wants to draw near to them personally.

And so we can trust that Jesus has already been pursuing our One before we even knew to pray for them.

We see this even in our story, because Paul didn’t bring God to Lystra. He says as much in his quick speech to redirect the crowd: God was already there in Lystra, giving rain, filling hearts, doing good… among people who didn’t even know his name.

Paul didn’t bring God to Lystra. He introduced people to a God who was already there and had already been at work.

And we can trust the same with the people in our lives that we care about, that God has put on our hearts. It’s not like we are the ones who are carrying God to them. We aren’t carrying the weight of that.

They aren’t closed doors that we need to pry open: “If I can just say the right thing, then they’ll believe! If I can just pray hard enough, then their life will change! If I can just teach them the right thing from the Bible, then I can fix them!”

It’s not on our shoulders. It’s not our weight to carry alone. God loves them even more than you do, and he wants to work through you to reach them, yes, but he’s already been at work in their life…

…in ways you haven’t seen, in conversations you weren’t a part of, in moments of emptiness or longing or pain that you didn’t cause and couldn’t fix.

Your job isn’t to manufacture their faith. Your job is to NOTICE where they’re already leaning in.

Paul spoke to the crowd, but he NOTICED the one man who was leaning in, who had faith, because Jesus reaches people. And he was already reaching your One before you knew to pray for them. [...]

[Acts 14:19-20]

But the story took a turn before it’s over, didn’t it? Because the same crowd who was about to sacrifice to Paul as if he was a deity… they get stirred up by opponents from Iconium.

So, clearly, some time has passed, and the same Jewish leaders who were trying to stop Paul in the previous towns catch up to him.

And the crowd is whipped up again, but by the opponents this time, and they try to execute Paul by stoning him. They drag him outside the city and leave him for dead because that’s what they think.

It’s the same crowd! The same townspeople who thought he was Hermes! What changed?! …someone else showed up with a more compelling narrative, probably played on their fears or stoked doubt in what they had seen in Paul, and the crowd followed it to a disastrous and violent end.

But here’s why I think this detail is included for us: it shows that Paul wasn’t building his faith in God’s work on what he could see.

Because if I was Paul, I would have whiplash from this story. If I got to be a part of a lame man’s healing, and then the whole town thought I was a god… that’s a successful day of ministry! God MUST be on the move, because I’m attaching my sense of God’s work to whether I can SEE him working.

But then soon after that the crowd turns against me and tries to kill me? God must have left me! He must be angry or distant or cruel! …that’s what I would believe if I’m attaching my sense of God’s work to whether or not I can SEE him working…right?

But Paul didn’t do that. Because he knew that you can’t build your identity on the platform that humans put you on. The applause and the stones came from the same place in the human heart.

And so when verse 20 comes, and we see ANOTHER miracle with Paul surviving the murder attempt… he gets up and the next day he leaves for the next city to KEEP TELLING PEOPLE ABOUT THE GOOD NEWS OF JESUS.

He doesn’t quit. He doesn’t re-evaluate whether or not God was actually working. He just gets up and goes.

Because his confidence wasn’t found in the crowd’s response. His confidence was in the God who was already at work… in Lystra, in the next city, in every place the Spirit would lead him to go next in mission on the road.

[Look at your One]

And if we are to learn from this, and try to apply it to our lives, here’s what I’d like to suggest: Pick one moment this week to stop, look at your One, and pray. And really listen… ask God: where are you already at work in their life?

Look for how they might be leaning in. Maybe they asked a question about the Bible or faith. Maybe they said something about their marriage or their kid or their fear that sounded like LONGING.

That’s a LEAN. Ask God to help you see it, because those might be areas that God has been preparing them to receive faith.

Because God has already been at work in their life. Ask him to make that clear for you so that you can lean in with them. You don’t have to manufacture their faith or God’s work in them. You just get to respond to what God is already doing in them and obey how he’s leading you to connect with them.

And if you’re feeling like nothing is happening… if you’re not seeing signs of openness… if the conversations aren’t going anywhere… don't let your confidence in God's work rise and fall with what you can see.

Simply ask God: where are you already at work in them? And let that question be enough. Trust that God is working, and follow his nudge when he leads you. Because we don’t have to manufacture anything in our One.

[END]

Paul didn’t convince the lame man to have faith. He just NOTICED faith that God had already placed there, and responded to it.

And the man didn’t earn the healing. He heard the word from Paul and responded to it. He JUMPED up, and the leap itself was a gift that he received from God.

And God is not waiting for you to get something right before he moves in your One. He’s already moving. He was already at work before you even had their name put on your heart, before you started praying, before you worked up the courage to have a conversation with them or connect with them.

Your job is to stay available. To keep looking. To trust that the God who made everything — including your One — has never left himself without a testimony in their life.

And because of that, we GET to share the good news of Jesus. We GET to follow in the footsteps of the early church who didn’t keep the gospel to themselves.

And neither will we. So let’s share Jesus with someone this week. Amen?