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A vaccination can leave you feeling wretched for a week, tempting you to wish you could undo it and try again later. That’s the kind of pressure that hits when the gospel goes out in Acts 14—Paul and Barnabas meet rising opposition in Iconium, and the question becomes how we press ahead without quitting or compromising.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
How do we react to things? We had to decide how we were going to react to the snow this weekend, and depending on exactly how it snowed, it would have maybe changed the reaction. But clearly, if you get a lot of snow and they’re asking people to stay off the roads to keep the highway workers safe, a good reaction, when we have the blessing of our online stream and the ability to come together as a church online only for the day, a good reaction is to go for it, to go online.
And over the last three weeks and in this fourth sermon now, we’re going to be looking at one more bit of the reaction of the gospel going out into the world. We saw it going to Gentiles like the wise men as we started this series. Then we saw the reaction from the God-fearing Jews and the God-fearing Gentiles, those who were coming into somewhat of a compliance with the Old Testament law. And last week we saw, what do we do in reaction to persecution? We’re going to return to that subject tonight, think a little bit more about what do we do when things don’t go right? Because if we don’t know that, it’s not going to go right, we think it is going to go right, it’s often a little bit easier at least at first, right? It might take us by surprise and be painful when it actually doesn’t go right. But at first, there’s the comfort of thinking it’s going to go right, of not realizing what we’re getting ourselves into.
I was thinking about that last month. I got a notification that I was overdue, and actually, if I really think about it, way overdue for a tetanus shot. And so I thought, well, I get flu shots, COVID shots, that kind of thing. It’s not any big deal. I’ll go ahead. Why not? That way, the next time I’m working with something rusty or whatever, I’m not worried about it. So I got the shot. And what I didn’t realize was that it was going to make me feel relatively miserable for the better part of a week. It wasn’t completely horrible. But I can say this, especially in December, working up towards Christmas and everything that’s required, would I have intentionally gotten that shot then? Or if I’d known it was going to make me feel like that, might I have said, you know, maybe I could do it next month. And probably, if I’m honest with myself, if I’d done that, I would have got to this month and thought, well, maybe I can do it next month, and I’d keep putting it off.
If once I got the shot and I started to feel it, I’d been able to say, well, you know, maybe I don’t want to do this right now. Let’s just take it back out. I’ll worry about this some other time. It might have been tempting. But of course, once you get a vaccination, you have to let it run its course. You can’t undo the vaccination and say, I don’t like how it’s making me feel. I don’t want to do this. I’ll just stop.
But when we think about how we live our lives as Christians, the challenge is, we face a lot of symptoms, a lot of reactions. But we have the opportunity to say, well, I’m going to plow forward with this, or, God, this is really more than I will bargain for at the moment. Maybe I’ll do it some other time. I think that’s why we have passages like this one, because we look at how things often go wrongly, and we think, I don’t know if I want to sign up for this. And God’s calling us to stick with it.
And I have to say, with a lot of things in life, if I have the opportunity and can say, I don’t know if I want to do this, when it’s really miserable, it’s awfully tempting to say that. I’ll do it some other time. And that’s why it’s all the more important that we anticipate how it might be difficult, but to anticipate the joy that can be in that, and to anticipate that God is with us in that, so that we stick with it. Because, you know, I’m glad I got that tetanus shot. I’m glad I don’t have to think about that next spring, if I’m digging some dirt and planting some flowers or what have you, and I stick myself on a piece of something rusty in the ground, I’m going to be glad that I got that vaccination. It’ll make me feel a little bit better. Maybe not a lot better. I’ll cut myself. But it’ll make me feel a little better.
And we need that encouragement in life, too. If we’re going to stick with what God’s calling us to do and face it, even when it’s difficult, we need Him to say, look at what I’m doing ultimately, and look at how I’m with you in it. And that’s exactly what we find in Acts 14. If you want to turn there with me, I’ll pray for us, and then we’ll dig into this chapter.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for this evening. Lord, I thank you for the ability that we have to be together and to worship you together and to encourage each other, to have the chat and fellowship that’s going on, just that we can be your people, even when it’s cold and snowy and treacherous outside. That sometimes we have to recalculate because things are difficult, but we have the ability to and to keep pursuing the mission that you’ve given us. We thank you for that, and we pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
How do we press ahead? It’s awfully hard. Let’s take a look at verse 1 here, chapter 14. Now at Iconium, they entered together into the Jewish synagogue, and they spoke in such a way that a great number of both Jews and Greeks believed. But the unbelieving Jews stirred up the Gentiles and poisoned their minds against the brothers. So they remained for a long time, speaking boldly for the Lord, with more witness to the word of his grace, granting signs and wonders to be done by their hands.
Here’s the thing that we need to be realistic about. And it might make us hesitant to be involved in the church. It might make us question why we’re there at times. But we’ll get to the why in a moment. The first part is we need to admit that worldly powers are going to oppose God’s people. It’s going to turn people against the gospel. It’s going to turn people against those who preach the gospel. And we see this multiple times in this little section of Acts. We see it throughout Scripture, and we see it throughout history.
It should be no surprise if we’re faithful, teaching God’s word, that we’re seeking to love our neighbors and love God, that people are going to oppose us. It sounds like a good thing, right? That sounds nice. But we’re told that people are going to oppose us.
Luke enters this new chapter. Now, of course, the chapters themselves aren’t inspired, the chapter numbers. So this is technically a new chapter in Luke’s telling of the events of the early church. But nonetheless, there’s a turning point here. He’s moving on to another story. And as he does, he says, in the same way, he’s referring anyone who’s reading, including us, that things that we’ve just read about, they’re going to happen again. Paul and Barnabas are coming to Iconium. Why? Because they were chased out of the previous city. Now they’re coming here, and they are going to face opposition again. But before they do, they’re going to have an opportunity to preach at the synagogue.
They come into that gathering of the Jews that have been scattered around the Roman Empire and the Gentiles who’ve become followers of the Lord over time. Maybe they were curious what was going on in the synagogue, or they had a Jewish friend or neighbor, and they make that connection. However it happened, they’re there too. And Paul and Barnabas, they preach the gospel, and people are intrigued, and people start to believe, and things start to happen exactly how you would hope. Their mission, and they’re understanding this at this point, is that they’re supposed to preach to both Jews and Gentiles. Both of them are responding, and both of them are supposed to respond. Everybody is supposed to hear the gospel and believe, and so they’re going for it, and they’re preaching it. And the fact that they had just been chased out of a city, it doesn’t change anything for them. They’re right in it right again. They’re going to go and do this just as God has called them to do.
What happens when they do? They get opposition again. You think about why we feel miserable if we get a vaccination? It’s an immune response, right? You inject that vaccination into your body, the body thinks that it’s being infected by something, and it responds to it. That’s part of actually what makes it work in the long term, but it’s not much fun necessarily in the moment that we’re experiencing.
When we go into a group of people, and those people are infected by sin, all of us are, and you inject the gospel into it, there’s going to be an immune response. Only, just like when our immune systems are out of whack, this is an out-of-whack response, because the gospel is a healing thing, not a damaging thing. But again, it’s sort of like a vaccination. Our immune systems don’t understand vaccination, so they attack. And when we’re not yet believers, we don’t understand the vaccination against them that comes in the gospel, that the death that we bring upon ourselves, the ways that we break ourselves, that God is offering a healing response to it, and so what’s our natural response? To attack. We take it personally. Wait, you’re saying I’m a sinner? You’re saying I need to believe this? You’re saying whatever I currently believe isn’t good enough? We attack.
The fact that Paul and Barnabas are preaching the gospel, it’s not surprising that they get attacked, that there’s opposition that occurs. Now, this immune response in this city is a little different than the previous city, because Iconium has its own unique history. While they’d been preaching in a city that was very much Roman-administered, here in Iconium they prided themselves still on being Greeks. You see some of that in the language here. The city itself, its name, Iconium, was pre-Grecian in its origin, but they’d invented a whole myth around the Greek gods that explained the name of the city because they wanted to be Greek. And so, like a good Greek city, they didn’t have a Roman administrator that would make the decision of whether Paul and Barnabas should be there or not. It was run by a body of the people, a democratic body.
And so what we see here with this poisoning of the minds that starts to happen, this opposition, is the goal is to turn the people who are representing the city against the city, to turn the body politic, as it were, against the city, against the gospel, rather, so that Paul and Barnabas say, oh, well, I guess if people don’t like us, we’ll leave. Now, if the people knew Paul and Barnabas very well, that’s not how they operate, but plenty of people would. There were plenty of teachers that traveled around the ancient world, and if they didn’t receive a favorable audience, they’d just go on to another city and see what happens. And it seems like that’s what they’re hoping will happen with Paul and Barnabas.
So, those in the synagogue in particular, who are used to being those of status, we talked about this a little bit last week, you have those who are teaching God’s word, those who are calling the Gentiles to follow God’s word, they see this new message of a gospel as a threat, because if people follow this new gospel, they might not become God-fearing Gentiles that respect the synagogue leaders as the moral authority. And so they seek to turn people against Paul and Barnabas.
But really, in some sense, genuinely, I slipped the tongue earlier, but it’s actually true, turn the city against itself, because just like if the immune system goes wild on that vaccination and actually hurts the body, it’s preventing us from receiving something that would protect us, so too when we are willing to get into that mob mentality and turn against the gospel and against the church, we’re actually turning against what’s good for us, we just don’t realize it happens.
Paul and Barnabas see that God’s working. We’re told that God’s doing signs and wonders here, and others are believing, and so what do they do? Yes, there are people that don’t like them, yes, there are people who are speaking against them, but they stay and they keep preaching, because they realize that there’s something good here, something needed here, and God’s allowing them to do it, and they are going to do it, even if some of the people don’t realize what’s actually good for them.
It reminds me of a controversy we had here in St. Charles not long ago. A company wanted to build a data center in town. If you don’t know what a data center is, it’s a very large building that has a ton of computers in it. Well, for you to be watching this tonight, we’re going through multiple data centers to transmit this out. Data centers run all the websites we go to, at least the vast majority of them. Our email, our social media, YouTube, Facebook, all that stuff is dependent on data centers.
And so someone wanted to build a data center here in St. Charles. There aren’t very many in the St. Louis area. It puts us behind other cities in our ability to compete in the tech world. But they’re big things, and if you’re not a tech geek like myself, they sound kind of mysterious and maybe bad, and they require a lot of resources, infrastructure that would have to be built, and it sounds like, well, why would we want to waste our time with that? We can do more important things.
And so there was a hearing, as you have whenever there’s a controversial building, and the data center company is going to present its case. But ultimately, they withdrew. They decided, you know, fine. We can do a big PR campaign, but we’ll just go somewhere else. And so we’re not going to have that data center. And while that might sound good in the short term, you know it’s actually not good, because when you build data centers, then other high-tech companies come in, other new developments happen within a city. You can’t do some of that without good data centers, and so much of what we’re doing now and so much that we’ll do in the future depends on it.
But there was opposition, and the data center company surely said, you know, we could fight this, and we could spend all our time doing PR and trying to get the people who dislike us to understand who we are and what we’re doing, and we could maybe even bribe them, give them gifts, try to encourage them to support us. The data center company, in fact, could turn itself into a full-fledged lobbying firm and try to get its way, and maybe along the way even forget that it was supposed to be a data center. Oh, we’ll just lose people and get it to the point where people like us.
Well, Paul and Barnabas, they could have done that as well. They could have said, let’s quit preaching the gospel that we are preaching and instead preach something that won’t make people oppose us, because people keep opposing us. It doesn’t go over well, so maybe we try something else.
I believe the reason that we have passages like this is that we understand the world is going to be in opposition to us, and we are going to feel the pressure to change, to preach what people want to hear, to say the sort of things that would cause people to like us. But the risk is, and in fact, it’s not just a risk, it’s a reality at points in time in the church, is that churches will decide we need to stop this by getting people to like us, and we do what I described in that hypothetical scenario where the data center company had stayed, but it focused all of its energy on getting people to like them. They forgot to actually build the data centers, lobbying people, just gave gifts out, just became all about politics.
You see that in the church, where at times the church will be so focused on getting this group or that group to like us that we begin to become like them rather than helping people become like Jesus. It doesn’t matter which side of the political aisle you’re on. Here’s the thing that we need to understand in our very polarized world. Both sides do this, and we’ve seen it happen on both sides in the church. I’m not trying to do so-called both sides-ism. It’s simply the reality if you look at the history of the church.
The temptation is always going to be there are these people who aren’t yet Christians or who are only marginally Christian but are on the side of the aisle I like best, and I’m going to try to be more like them so that they’re willing to like me even though I’m a Christian, and that means I shouldn’t necessarily do everything they do. So we start to absorb them and their points. And you know what the thing is? We end up being like them rather than them ever coming to be like Jesus. It doesn’t work. It never has, and it never will. It’s a very big risk.
There’s actually two risks when we encounter opposition like this, and that is a huge one. The other one, though, is we simply give up. Paul and Barnabas could have just said, yeah, you know, we don’t need to teach anyone else. Just like the data center company. They said, fine. There are other cities who see the future of technology and realize the cities that have good facilities have good tech infrastructure are going to be the cities that lead. We’ll go to one of those cities that actually understands that. You don’t want us? Fine. So they left. Will someone else try our city? I don’t know. But I can say that definitively, we are poor for the fact that we haven’t had data centers built. It’s put us behind the curve.
And Paul and Barnabas, they look out at the people and they have this opposition. Here’s the thing that they do that we’re called to do, just like we’re, on the one hand, called not to conform. We stand firm where we are. We also realize that our mission isn’t to enrich ourselves, to make things easy for ourselves, but to help the very people that often oppose us. And so when they oppose us, we don’t say, fine, I’ll just go somewhere else. You don’t want your data center? Fine. We’ll give it to the city that understands it. They say, no, we know that some of you that are opposing us right now are actually going to come and believe. We know some of you who are sitting on the sidelines, you’re going to come and believe. And there’s some of those people who already get it, just like some of us already got that we need data centers.
There’s that whole mix here in Iconium, and we know that you need this. This is the future for you. And it’s not just the future for the next 50 years or 100 years. This is the future for eternity. And we’re not going to walk away just because it’s difficult. We’re going to stay here. We’re going to preach. We’re going to teach. We’re going to declare the risen Lord. And so that’s what they do. They stay for a long time.
We take one of the temptations. It reduces our suffering. If we become more like a group that’s opposing us, or maybe the smaller group that’s allied with us but not really with us, it makes life a lot easier. And so there’s that temptation, and it makes life easier. And if we instead just give up and move on, it makes life easier.
Staying in the middle and saying, I’m going to stand firm, but I’m going to stay because I want you people who I’m not willing to compromise my integrity with, but I care about, to hear the gospel and to know who Jesus is, that’s the hard spot.
Here’s what we need to ask ourselves. This is, I believe, why Paul and Barnabas stayed. Is God working in the midst of this? That’s the big question. We’re told here that God was. He was doing signs and wonders.
I think about some of the challenges we face in ministry, and I’m not saying that we’re constantly doing signs and wonders. We’re not having healing services. We’re going to promise miraculous things. God can do that. I don’t believe he ordinarily does in our current moment. But even if they’re not spectacular supernatural appearances of miraculous healings and such, we see spectacular things as God has enabled us to be a church and how he’s made it work. Just because they don’t require special effects if it was a Hollywood film, doesn’t make it any less clear that God is working.
I see those things. And I think a lot of us do. And those are the things we need to hold on to. If God’s working, even if it’s hard, we keep going.
Because if God’s working, that means he wants us here. He wants us doing this. And we hold on to that, and we run with that even when there’s opposition.
Because here’s the thing. There might be worldly power that opposes the gospel, but even more so, there’s godly power that opposes the world with the gospel.
Take a look at verse 4. But the people of the city were divided. Some sided with the Jews and some with the apostles. When an attempt was made by both Gentiles and Jews with their rulers to mistreat them and to stone them, they learned of it and fled to Lystra and to Urbe, cities of Laconia and to the surrounding country. And there they continued to preach the gospel.
Well, it gets worse, right? If you’re not presently regularly attending Little Hills and you came on tonight because it’s a cold night and you’re listening, you think, boy, I don’t know who this guy on the screen is, but he sure knows how to make a good sales pitch. Come and be part of a movement that causes people to be stoned. I admit, it doesn’t sound great, does it? No.
So why do we do it? Maybe you’re wondering that. Why do these people do this? Why do they keep doing this? Because we realize we have something precious that God has given us. That’s why Paul and Barnabas, as the opposition in this building, they keep trying. It’s not because they expected ease. And clearly the people they were preaching to didn’t expect ease because they could see what was happening to Paul and Barnabas.
Here are these two stellar representatives, two of the greatest missionaries the Church has ever known in all of history. The people of the city are opposing. It’s not a good sales pitch. It isn’t. The Church isn’t about giving good sales pitches. We’re not that way. That’s not ultimately what we can do. But they knew that the people there needed Jesus.
Because here’s the thing, it might seem like it’s difficult in the moment if you’re facing opposition, if maybe people get mad at you because you start to follow Jesus or you say, well, I can’t do this or that because Jesus calls me to hold myself to a higher standard than that. It can be hard. We all know that our lives are broken. We all know that we’re staring down that ugly thing called death and the question is, what do we want ultimate? What really matters?
Paul and Barnabas realize if this is difficult, but we’re giving people the hope of eternal life, we’re staying put. We’re going to. And so they stayed for a long time. See that in verse 3. Then it’s only later on when it’s unbearable that they move on. And sometimes we might be called to be in a place standing for Jesus, staying faithful to what he says. And we need to be satisfied with he’s not saying stay there permanently, but stay there until the tide turns. You still have something to do here. Maybe not forever, but for the moment. And I think that’s what Paul and Barnabas sensed in Iconium.
Iconium wasn’t going to become their longtime home. They weren’t going to buy houses there and retire there someday. Either of them, by any indication, ever quote-unquote retired. They kept doing missions work until they died, but they probably knew this was not going to be their final destination. And they were okay with that. They were going to be there until they couldn’t be.
But the other side of that, this is the other part where we have to be open to understanding what God is doing, is that we need to be discerning when enough is enough. A lot of times our tolerance is too low, and that’s why we’ve been focused on what we have so far. There’s a little opposition. We say, well, this isn’t any good because I was expecting things to go well if I followed Jesus. Our tolerance is often too low. What we call persecution here in the United States at least, most of the world and their experience of opposition to the gospel, they might not laugh at us because they’d be more charitable than that, but honestly, what in the world are these people talking about? They don’t know what persecution is. They’ve never had their house burned down, and the people burning down that house hoping they were still inside until they die because of the gospel. They’ve never watched their family beheaded because of the gospel. Praise God for that. We should be thankful. But it does show that our tolerance is low oftentimes.
On the other side, though, we can become so focused on, well, if there’s opposition, it must be that I’m doing what I should do, that we don’t actually use discernment and say, okay, I’ve done what I can do here. Now it’s time to move on. Clearly, Paul and Barnabas, they’re balancing this well. When people are poisoning the minds of those around them and trying to mess things up, they keep going because there’s work to do. But when the people are ready to stone them to death, they say, okay, we have more to do. God isn’t calling us here to be stoned to death. He’s calling us to go on and keep doing ministry.
And that’s the key thing. Their discernment isn’t how long do we keep doing ministry and then we give up because it’s too hard. It’s how long do we keep doing ministry in this particular way, in this particular place, before we try something else? And all of us need to use that sort of discernment, right? Because all of us have an opportunity. If you believe in Jesus, then your calling in life is to help other people believe in Jesus. To look at them and say, you need this for the future. I know this is something of benefit to you.
And not to be satisfied if we have it for ourselves and everyone else lacks. But if we realize that we can’t be effective doing it in a certain place, well, maybe we try someplace else. If in your work, you have a work environment that allows you to share something about your faith, then go for it. If you, on the other hand, realize that the first time you share about your faith, you’re going to be fired, and then you can’t share about the gospel or provide for your family in that workplace, maybe see if God’s giving you a different door to share the gospel. Not because we fear opposition, but if the opposition completely shuts down the ability to do it anyway, then we use discernment and figure out where is God working? Where is he going to open? And it’s okay to look for that, as long as we keep in mind that what really matters is God working in the place that we’re focused on at this moment, this is where God wants me, or not.
I think probably you can go anywhere in the world, certainly anywhere in this country, and you’ll find that serial political candidate, that person that runs for office every election, never wins, and for the most part, people just ignore him or her, because that candidate never ever wins, never even gets substantial numbers, maybe occasionally functions as a spoiler for some other candidate, but never is actually going to accumulate anything. Sometimes the candidates seem relatively sane, and it’s just that they don’t have the backing. Sometimes they seem maybe like they’re missing a few sandwiches in their picnic basket. There’s something not quite firing right there.
But either way, we know those people, those ones that are never going to win elections.
Every once in a while, one of those serial candidates, something happens. Their opposition candidate gets mired in scandal, and suddenly people say, well, I never pay attention to this guy, but I’m going to look anyway because I can’t vote for him. Or some new issue crops up, and it’s the one that the serially running but never winning candidate has been talking about all along, and suddenly people want to listen.
You know what happens when that happens? The other candidates, the ones that actually were going to get the votes, that just pretend like that serially running candidate is a nuisance that’s not even really worth dignifying by responding to. Suddenly they’re going to start running attack ads. Suddenly they’re going to start naming that person and talking about what’s wrong with that person because there’s traction happening. And it’s for the right reason, right? Because now this person’s offering something worthwhile.
That’s what we should expect to happen when we’re preaching the gospel faithfully. There’s going to be opposition because the world doesn’t want that. And when we’re not really preaching it, we’re not really demonstrating it in our lives. We don’t live like Jesus has called us to. No one’s being called to the gospel through what we’re doing. There’s not going to be opposition because we’re not a threat. There’s other things to do. Just that candidate that always shows up on the ballot and no one pays attention to.
So it’s good when people start to pay attention and start to oppose in the sense that it tells us, yes, something’s happening here. God’s working and the forces of evil, the forces of the world don’t like it.
But occasionally one of those serial candidates, the way he or she gets attention is just doing something utterly absurd and ridiculous and scandalous. Just causing offense to cause offense if someone talks about that candidacy.
Sometimes Christians do the same thing too. They say, well, if opposition is good, I will stir up opposition. I’ll just be disagreeable. I’ll be mean. I’ll cause scandal. I’ll say things in the nastiest way, even true things, that way people have to talk about me.
Just like that’s not helpful for that candidate, it’s not helpful for the gospel.
What we want to know is that, yes, we’re going to be opposed if we preach Jesus. Make sure we’re being opposed for preaching Jesus. That’s what happens with Paul and Barnabas. They don’t needlessly cause scandal. People are scandalized because they don’t want to hear the gospel preached.
That’s what we’re called to do. We’re opposed because we’re being faithful. They keep doing it. We’re opposed because we’re causing opposition. We need to re-evaluate ourselves.
Where are we at? Are we in that comfortable spot where no one’s opposing us, we’re just sitting in the synagogue, saying we kind of want to know about what God has for us, but we’re not willing to do the uncomfortable thing of actually following Jesus?
Well, now’s the time to follow Jesus. Now’s the time to actually get uncomfortable. But then once we do, we need to keep evaluating.
The reason it’s actually going pretty smoothly is I’m not actually showing the fact that I follow Jesus in any way. I’m not renouncing my sins. I’m not living faithfully. I’m not looking for opportunities to share the gospel. It’s time to re-evaluate again.
And on the other hand, if we do face opposition, boy, do we want to make sure it’s exactly for the reasons that Paul and Barnabas were opposed. That we’re being faithful. That we’re being loving. And people are getting offended at the fact that we’re being loving, not the fact that we’re responding in a worldly fashion, that we’re always taking offense, that we’re always looking for offense, that we’re always causing a stir.
That is not of the Lord.
Where are we?
Here’s the thing we need to remember. There’s a couple of actions going on that were going on back 2,000 years ago and still today. That God has saved us. That’s what sent the missionaries out to preach. The world’s going to oppose us. Those are two actions.
And the question is, which one then empowers us and fuels what we’re doing? Is our reaction to the opposition that we face from the world?
Well, I can tell you, no matter if it seems like we’re taking a stand for Jesus or not, if that’s where our reaction is being fueled, it’s going to look worldly. It’s ultimately not going to be God-glorified.
On the other hand, if our reaction is to the fact that God saved us and we don’t care if we’re opposed or not, we just want to do what Jesus has called us to do, well, we serve a Lord who’s faithful. And when we turn to Him and we react to Him, guess what happens? He holds us strong so we don’t compromise. He holds us strong so we don’t cower.
And in that, He calls the very people that might be opposing us right now to know Him and be transformed so they can face and embrace and rejoice in that beauty, that wonderful action that God’s done for us as well. Let’s pray that’s the kind of lives we live.
You pray with me, please.
Father, we do pray that you would help us this day and every day, that even when the reaction to our faith is as unpleasant as the below-freezing temperatures are right now, Lord, would you help us to offer the warmth and the healing comfort of your gospel to those around us. Would you help us to do that today and every day? Help us stand firm where we’re weak. Would you help us to be faithful where we’ve been compromised? Would you help us in everything to testify to you, to endure through suffering, and to have good discernment that we go and proclaim and continue to for all of our lives? We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
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