June 3, 2015 (Wednesday)
The Bible Study this evening at Bethel Baptist Church, Ingleside, will take us to Acts 14, following the early missionaries to Iconium, Lystra and Derbe. Everywhere he went, Paul was mistreated in some way and ultimately ordered to leave town. Yet he kept on preaching, moving to the next town and doing it again.
The early days of television saw the advent of video ads. Some of the most interesting and greatly successful ads were those for Timex watches. Each ad showed a watch being abused is some way, then held before the camera as the second hand moved across the dial. We then heard John Cameron Swazey say, “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”
The Apostle Paul reminds me of those ads.
In our previous study of Acts, we left Paul and Barnabas in Antioch of Pisidia. His talk of Jesus had been gratefully received by many, but also rejected by the town’s leaders. He was therefore commanded by those leaders to leave Antioch. The missionaries then traveled to the next town, Iconium, where the same sequence of events that had been seen in Antioch were repeated. When Paul and Barnabas learned of a plot to kill them, they fled the city.
Next stop: Lystra. There was no synagogue there, and therefore the audience was almost completely pagan. Paul healed a man who had been lame all his life. The reponse of the 
people there was immediate and enthusiastic attempts to worship the preachers as gods. Paul was shocked and shouted that neither he nor Barnabas was a god, that they were only human. Still the crowd wanted to sacrifice to them. Then Jews came from Antioch and Iconium and stirred the people to turn against Paul and Barnabas. They stoned Paul and dragged him outside the city, thinking he was dead. After the disciples had gathered around him, he got up and went back into the city. The next day he and Barnabas left for Derbe.
“After proclaiming the Message in Derbe and establishing a strong core of disciples, they retraced their steps to Lystra, then Iconium, and then Antioch, putting muscle and sinew in the lives of the disciples, urging them to stick with what they had begun to believe and not quit, making it clear to them that it wouldn’t be easy: ‘Anyone signing up for the kingdom of God has to go through plenty of hard times.’
“Paul and Barnabas handpicked leaders in each church. After praying–their prayers intensified by fasting–they presented these new leaders to the Master to whom they had entrusted their lives. Working their way back through Pisidia, they came to Pamphylia and preached in Perga. Finally, they made it to Attalia and caught a ship back to Antioch, where it had all started–launched by God’s grace and now safely home by God’s grace. A good piece of work.
“On arrival, they got the church together and reported on their trip, telling in detail how God had used them to throw the door of faith wide open so people of all nations could come streaming in (Thus ended the First Missionary Journey). Then they settled down for a long, leisurely visit with the disciples” (Acts 14:21-28 MSG).