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When things go badly, it’s easy to assume God’s favor has lifted—and that assumption runs deep enough that entire churches have been built on promising the opposite. Yet in Acts 13, the disciples who have just heard the gospel find themselves filled with joy and the Holy Spirit at precisely the moment Paul and Barnabas are driven out of the district, which raises a question worth sitting with: what if hardship isn’t the absence of God’s blessing at all?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The sermon contrasts “ease” with “God’s favor.” When you look back at a difficult season in your life, can you identify a moment when hardship actually revealed God’s presence more clearly than comfort would have?
The preacher describes looking at your home thermostat instead of checking the actual weather outside as a picture of measuring God’s blessing by personal comfort rather than eternal reality. What are some ways we “check the thermostat” in our own lives—and what would it look like to step outside and check the actual weather instead?
The synagogue leaders used their influence with prominent women to protect their own comfort and authority rather than embrace what was true. Where do you see people today—or yourself—choosing to preserve ease or power over truth? What makes that choice so tempting?
Acts 13:51 says the disciples were “filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit” even after Paul and Barnabas were driven out. How is that kind of joy different from happiness? What does it require to experience joy when circumstances are difficult?
Paul and Barnabas didn’t seek revenge or try to force belief—they shook the dust from their feet and moved on to the next city. What is the significance of that response, and what does it look like to trust that “God is doing the driving” in your own work, witness, or calling rather than trying to control outcomes?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve been exploring Paul and Barnabas’s journey in Acts 13, proclaiming the gospel in the synagogue. We’ve seen the Gentiles, the broader group that responded, and some of the Jews and the faithful God-fearers—Gentiles who were kind of afoot in both camps that responded last week. This week, we see a different group, the group that doesn’t respond at all. Well, actually, that’s not true. They do respond, but they respond negatively. We’re going to look at that group because I think it gives us a lot of insight as we think about what it means when we live the Christian life.
The temptation is to want to tell people, you know, if you become a Christian, your life would be so much easier. And we know that message, for lack of a better word, sells. There are churches that have built their whole existence on promising people if you just believe enough, your life will be good. The reason they do that, and the reason why churches often can become very large doing that, is that’s what we want to hear. You think about everything we see advertised—ads—it’s all about how, with this, we will be happy.
I was thinking this week about the ads you see start rolling out in October, November, and all through winter about cruise ships. Why do you have cruise ship advertisements in the winter? Because people are miserably cold. They say, “I am so cold, my hands are numb when I get into the car to go to work in the morning.” And if I know that at some point over the winter I am not going to be cold, and instead I’m going to be in perfectly delightful weather, going and seeing places I wanted to see, that would solve the problem for me. And what do you know in the commercials? Everyone’s having a great time. It doesn’t matter what part of the ship you’re on. The water slides always work at the pools. The ports of call are always delightful. The food is always picture perfect. If you just give enough money to a cruise line, you’ll be happy.
Scripture doesn’t portray anything like that about the Christian life. We don’t get to say, “Come on the cruise ship of the church, and if you get on it, everything that isn’t good right now that you’d like to get away from goes away. It’ll be good. It’ll be wonderful.” The temptation, in a point like what we see here as we’re in Acts 13, is to say, well, if there’s persecution, if it’s not going well, if it seems like we’re on the downside of everything, then maybe, just maybe, we don’t have God’s favor. It’d be easy enough to say. And it’d be easy enough for some people to look at Paul and Barnabas and say, “Look at them, they’re facing persecution, the people that are listening to them are facing persecution. Maybe we should follow someone else.”
But all that is tied to a terrible misunderstanding that ease is the same as salvation. Ease is the same as God’s favor, and that’s simply not how Scripture works. Not what God promises. We see very clearly here what we see throughout Scripture, which is that we don’t always get ease in this life, even when we’re following what God wants us to do, even when we’re fully embracing it. So, it’s not necessarily the most cheerful message as we’re in this new year series and we’re thinking about where the rest of this year is going to go, to say it might be a really lousy year.
If I had said, “Come tonight to Little Hills and hear about how things might go really badly for you this year and that’s part of what it means to follow Jesus,” it wouldn’t exactly be the sort of message we’d put in our Facebook ad to see if someone was looking for a church. “Hey, come and hear about how things might be really rough for you.” So why even talk about it? Well, because it’s the truth. And I think in a way, as discomforting as it sounds, it’s actually comforting because it tells us when everything doesn’t come together right, it’s not necessarily the same as saying God’s favor isn’t upon us, that he isn’t with us.
So let’s pray tonight that we actually do feel God’s favor, that we know our God loves us, whatever we’re facing. And we pray as we do.
God, I thank you for this evening. Thank you for your word. Lord, we pray that you would help us to understand more clearly the difference between ease and favor, the difference between smooth sailing in this life and success, and what really matters. As we look at the missionary journey of Paul and Barnabas and we think about what they were facing, what the new disciples believing their message were facing, that we would understand more clearly what we should expect in this life and the comfort we can derive from knowing that you’re with us through all of it. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
So let’s go ahead and turn to verse 50 of Acts 13, if you would like in your Bible. Here’s what we read there: “But the Jews, in sight of the devout women of high standing and the leading men of the city, stirred up persecution against Paul and Barnabas and drove them out of their district.”
I think I would imagine probably all of us have had this experience at some point. You become a Christian, or if you grew up as a Christian, you really start to embrace it as your own, you get really excited, and you start to do some things for God, and it seems to go okay, right? It’s moving okay. And then you hit that first wall and you think, what’s this? I think about Paul and Barnabas here—they’ve already been through some things, so they’re not necessarily surprised, but maybe some of those who had just heard their message and are looking and seeing it are thinking, what in the world’s going on here?
You know, they just came and proclaimed the risen Lord, the Messiah, the King of the universe, and now they’re being chased out of the city. What is this? Up to that point, what we’ve been looking at, it looked like a pretty well ideal situation when you think about it. You have Jews and God-fearing Gentiles who are in synagogue all the time, who have been coming and listening to the prophecies and trying to understand how God is working, and as they’ve been doing this, they’ve been anticipating the Messiah. Now they’re told the Messiah’s here, and what do you know? They believe that the Messiah’s here, and they say, “This is wonderful, it’s great, we believe,” and some of them say, “Well, I think I like what you’re saying, Paul and Barnabas. How about coming back and teaching more?” I mean, if you ever really want to encourage a preacher, you say, “Would you preach more on that subject? Would you talk about it more? Can we even get together and do some more on this?” I’m telling you, well, it’s dangerous maybe to say that, you might say, “Well, I don’t want to encourage bad behavior by making him think he should keep talking,” right? Don’t encourage him, don’t feed the wild animals.
But seriously, I mean, how wonderful this would be for him. Yeah, you want us to come back and say more. Of course we’d love to come back and say more. And I think we kind of intuitively know that, right? If you have been praying about sharing the gospel with someone and you share it with them and they actually say, “I’d like to know more on this,” it’s pretty encouraging. So pretty well ideal situation.
Then it gets better with what we looked at a couple of weeks ago, that foreshadowing we saw with the wise men and then what comes after—that now the Gentiles are being included too, and what’s happening is the Gentiles are being included too, they’re believing. So you have Jews, you have the Gentiles that are moving towards Judaism, and the just outright Gentiles all believing. It seems like it’s this wonderful situation. And then, there’s the wall.
Why do they have a wall here? Well, leaders of the synagogue, the highly influential members of the synagogue, their friends in high places, they’ve seen what’s going on here and they say, “Well, if this succeeds, we’re not the authorities any longer. These apostles, for this man named Jesus, they’re going to be the ones who are the stars. They’re going to be the ones that people listen to.” We can’t have this, and so when we see this, success actually becomes a liability. Because now there’s jealousy. People want to hear Paul and Barnabas.
And so the leaders of the synagogue start to figure out, “Well, what can we do here?” There’s an interesting strategy they come up with. They want the city leaders to cast Paul and Barnabas out, but it says it starts with the devout women.
Who are the devout women? Well, you see, if you’re the Gentile leadership that comes into the city, you’re serving the city, you have all kinds of servants, all kinds of people to help with household things. So your high society spouses would have a life that permitted ease of spending time learning things. And so these high society women tied to the authorities say, “You know, there’s these Jews over here and they have this interesting scripture and these interesting ideas. I’d like to learn more about it.” And so they had the time to learn, and so they had the ear of the synagogue leaders and vice versa. Because the synagogue leaders, they’re not dumb; they say, “Well, if these women are married to the powers that be in the city, I’m interested in talking to them, because if they like us, then the leaders of the city will like us, they won’t persecute us. It’d be a good thing.”
And so you have this symbiotic relationship between the Jewish leaders who are anxious to actually have a positive audience, the devout women who became devout because they had the time to go and say, “I’d like to learn more about this,” and the authority behind them as those married to the leaders of the city, that people would want to tell them.
So the synagogue leaders say, “Ah, here’s what we need to do: we need to get these devout women, one, not to listen to Paul and Barnabas, but do something a little more than that; they need to go to their husbands and say, ‘You know, these troublemakers are coming in and messing up my favorite pastime of going to synagogue. They’re going to mess up this thing that I love learning about.’” And so ironically, the synagogue leaders take this gift from God of these women who have the time and the interest and the enthusiasm to learn about God’s word, and they decide to pervert that and use that instead to cause people to flee the fulfillment of God’s word because they want to protect their turf.
They want their ease. And so the synagogue leaders who want to protect ease for themselves go to the women who have ease because of their position, and it turns into this thing, “Well, these disruptors might actually mess up the city, and so they need to protect their ease as well.” And so you see this cascading set of dominoes of, “How do we protect our comfort and our success, our ease,” that ultimately leads to saying to Paul and Barnabas, “Get out of town. It doesn’t matter if you actually hold the keys to eternal life, you know the truth that we desperately need and fix a broken world, it doesn’t matter because you’re going to break our world.”
And in that, I think we see how absurd, as I describe it that way, making such a decision is, but it’s the sort of thing that we do all the time, we just don’t realize. So often when we look at how’s my success going, how’s my comfort going, what we’re doing is, it’d be like if you’re trying to figure out, with the schizophrenic weather we have right now, what you should wear when you go outside and you decide, “I’m going to go look at my thermostat. I’m going to go look at my thermostat and see what it’s set to, and I will dress appropriately for that.”
Well, I’m not incidentally talking about a smart thermostat that also displays the outside weather, just like a traditional plain old thermostat. You go up to the thermostat and it’s all set to 72 degrees. Okay, 72. I think I’ll put some shorts on, I’ll put a nice Hawaiian shirt on, it sounds like an almost tropical, balmy day, it sounds really nice, and then you go outside and it’s 14 degrees outside and you say, “Oh, what happened?” Well, the absurdity is you’re looking at the thermostat. The thermostat doesn’t have anything to do with the outdoor weather, right? It might be helping us keep ourselves comfortable inside, but as soon as we need to go outside, what we really need to do is look at the thermometer outside or go outside for a moment and feel it or however you want to go about it, listen to the weather forecast, but you need to actually look at the weather, not how it’s set inside.
But so often when we’re measuring, “Am I aligned with where God wants me? Am I doing what God wants me to do?” what we’re not doing is looking at the overall eternal picture. We’re looking at our nice little four walls that we’re in and we say, “Well, the thermostat seems to be set to 72, it should be pretty comfortable.” And so we go with it, and we get frostbite.
And that’s exactly what these people were doing. They said, “Yeah, we’ve been waiting for the Messiah. Yeah, there’s a lot of problems, but you know what, it’s pretty comfortable. It’s 72 in this synagogue. Why would we want to risk it getting messed up? We’ll just keep looking at the thermostat. As long as the thermostat’s on, we’re fine.” Yeah, when we go outside, it’s absurdly cold, and we’re not dressed appropriately, but who cares, because it’s comfortable right now, we don’t need to worry about it.
Those ladies and gentlemen that we encounter in this passage, they had ease, but you know what they didn’t have? They didn’t have hope. Hope for the next hour. The thermostat’s set; central heating and air conditioning, they hadn’t been even yet—it was running just fine for them—but what about 50, 60, 70, 80, 100 years later? You’re not a single person in that synagogue that’s alive today, not on this earth physically alive. And so, while they were busy looking at the thermostat, they weren’t being prepared for the actual weather.
What we’re challenged here is, are we preparing for the weather or the thermostat? Which one are we preparing for? Because so many of the things we chase after, thinking they’re going to provide ease, don’t actually pan out.
I mentioned cruise ships at the beginning, and it was just this week I was reading the headlines of the news, and the headline was something like this: “Dozens hit with rib-cracking virus.” Anyone else hear about the rib-cracking virus? It’s a particular variant of the norovirus, a digestive tract virus that often makes its way around cruise ships. But on a particular cruise, people decided to get away from the winter weather right after Christmas. They disembarked on 12-28, so just after Christmas, on the cruise until January 9th. They get on the ship, they’re thinking about all those smiling faces they’ve seen in the commercials, and how great it’s going to be and how nice the weather’s going to be. They get on the ship, and they’re in close quarters, and within just a day or two of being on the ship, what do you know? Both crew and customers are infected with this terrible version of the norovirus that causes such violent reactions that many, if not most, of the people who contract it end up cracking ribs.
And so after the initial discomfort of the symptoms, then you have the pain of the ribs. I think about that, and I think about the person who leafed through the brochure and gone on the website and thought, “I don’t want to go outside and have my hands cold; I’m going to be just warm for a few days.” But they come back on January 9th with broken ribs, feeling kind of weak and emaciated from the days of not being able to hold down food. And the promise of ease ended up being actually the opposite. Now, thousands of dollars poorer, less healthy, and with months of healing ahead.
When we chase after ease, one of the things we need to ask is, will it be lasting? Because it’s nice when things go really well. And for the many people on the ship, to be fair, that didn’t get it, they may have had a few days of genuine ease. Although if I’d been one of the people that didn’t get it, I would have been watching all my neighbors being taken off to quarantine and thinking, “I don’t think I feel ease at the moment,” even if I don’t have it. But they all got back off the ship. It didn’t last. It didn’t make life easy; it made a few days easy.
And for the synagogue leaders, as they were doing this, for the bargain they made with the city officials, essentially what they were doing is they were saying, “We’ll take the next few days of ease. Most of us will actually get a few days of ease. Some of us might get rib-cracking virus and it really not be easy. We’ll take that rather than actually fix it.” We’re chasing after what’s lasting.
Because here’s the thing that we see clearly as the Spirit works in this: we don’t necessarily get ease in this life as we follow Jesus, but we do get joy in the Spirit. Verse 51 says, “But they shook off the dust from their feet against them and went to Iconium. And the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.”
Watch the kingdom being established here. Because as Paul and Barnabas have to race out of the city, I’ve already taken for granted something that happened, which is, I said, you know those new converts? They’re wondering what’s going on. Those new converts, yes, things are a problem, but things are a problem because they were successful. People were actually believing. People did believe. So the fact that it gets rough doesn’t eliminate that. In fact, it only is rough because it’s true.
And so as Paul and Barnabas move on, they leave behind disciples—people studying God’s word, people seeking to understand more about Him and what He’s doing and what He’s calling them to do. Paul and Barnabas themselves, I’m not saying they like being chased out of cities. You’d have to be a really strange person to say, “I love it when people chase me out of the city.” But you know what happens? They get chased out of the city and they go to another city and start preaching. We’re going to need to talk about that experience next week. But they go on, and they keep doing God’s work, and the kingdom keeps expanding.
While it seems like they’re the ones receiving judgment because they’re the ones suffering, in fact it’s the people of chosen ease who’ve fallen to the mistake of thinking worldly comfort is the key—that ultimately they’re missing out. Paul and Barnabas say as much by the actions they take as they leave. It says they shook the dust off their feet.
We know that phrase, but it’s worth thinking about what that actually meant to a Jew in the first century. Because here’s what you do if you were a Jew in the first century. You travel to wherever you need to to function in the ancient world over the Roman roads. You arrive in Jerusalem to go to the temple. And what you do is you arrive in Jerusalem and you have all that pagan Gentile dirt on your feet. You go and you shake off your feet before you go into that holy ground of the temple so that you’re saying, “And now I’m actually back where God’s people are. Now I’m actually where it’s good.”
And so as Paul and Barnabas leave the synagogue, leave the people who are thinking, “We’re God’s people, but we want worldly ease,” they shake the dust off their feet to say, “You know what? What you’re demonstrating isn’t that you’re trying to hold faithfully to the teachings. What you’re demonstrating is that you’re essentially the Gentiles. You are the pagans. Because what you want is the worldly comfort, not the otherworldly solution. So we’ll shake off our feet. Just pagans.”
Now they weren’t doing that for the Jews that believed. They weren’t doing it for the God-fearers who believed. They weren’t doing it for the Gentiles who believed. In that, they were saying, “You know what? It matters more than whether you’re in the synagogue. What matters more than if you go to the temple is do you actually know the Lord? Do you believe in Him? Do you see what He’s doing and do you care about that? And that’s what matters to you. And if you do, then you’re on holy ground. You are actually entering into God’s presence. If you have the leading position in the synagogue of the city, and all of these people who are descendants of Abraham are sitting there, but you reject what God’s doing, that’s not holy ground. That’s the very thing that you shake the dust off your feet for.”
If you’re coming with a new message, you’re going to get opposition. I mean, that’s clear enough, and it makes some human sense why. But I think it’s striking here for both these disciples and for Paul and Barnabas how differently their reaction, as they’re spreading this new message and believing in it, is than what we see elsewhere in the world.
For example, if you’ve ever studied the history of Islam, Muhammad claims to have a vision, and what does he do then? He writes down these teachings, starts teaching people, but then he goes into nearby towns, towns that are related to his kinsmen, and they reject him, and they say, “You’re talking crazy. We don’t want anything to do with you.” Well, that sounds sort of familiar, right? But notice what he does next. He goes away, he builds up a large enough group of people that he can mount an army, and he goes and he slaughters those who oppose him. And that army grows stronger and stronger and stronger, and he conquers.
What did the followers of the Way, what did the followers of Jesus do? They went on to the next town, rejoicing that God was spreading his kingdom. Paul and Barnabas didn’t keep a list: “Here are the people. When we have enough followers, we’re going to get on horseback, and we’re going to go and make them pay for rejecting us.” They didn’t do it.
And I think if we’re really honest with ourselves, because a lot of times we aren’t, if we’re really honest with ourselves, the human impulse is actually the former—to go and get that revenge, to find some way to be successful enough that we can get people put back in their place when they reject us. But that’s not what we see as God expands his kingdom.
Think back to verse 48 that we looked at: “And when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord, and as many as were appointed to eternal life believed.” We’re going to be talking more about appointing and election tonight during Sunday School Express in just a few minutes. But just kind of hold on to it here for a moment, because it’s really crucial that that phrase comes right before Paul and Barnabas are rejected. It’s really crucial they understood this. Because what they understood was God is working. God is the one who’s working this salvation to bring it about. And so we don’t need to come back with the sword. We don’t need to come back even with sword-like words. We just need to go and be faithful to Him because He’s the one appointing, He’s the one that’s doing, and we’re just the people that get to watch Him doing it. And it’s pretty amazing.
It was left in Pisidian Antioch, the city that they’d been preaching in. Likewise, what did they have here? What were we told at the end of this little segment of the story? They had joy, and they had the Holy Spirit. Those two were related. They might have said, “Well, it would have been really nice if Paul and Barnabas could have stayed, and they could have taught us more, and eventually we would have been the leaders in the synagogue, because everyone would have believed, because they’re so convincing.” It would have been great.
No, they just say, “Wow, God’s working. His Spirit’s with us. We have joy.” And I think it’s exactly tied to that verse 48, because they saw and they knew that those whom God was working salvation in were believing. They didn’t need to be angry that these other people didn’t believe, because they knew that God was going to do what He was going to do, and it was going to happen. He was the one that was going to build His kingdom. Paul didn’t need to try to find some friend that owed him a favor, that had some influence somewhere in Rome, to get an edict laid down to throw out the people out of the synagogue who had rejected him. He didn’t need to do that. He just needed to go and keep preaching the gospel because God is the one who does the appointing. God is the one who brings about the salvation. And He and Barnabas and the new disciples and everyone ever since then has a really simple commission. It’s not to force people to believe, because we can’t. Not to get vengeance on our enemies, because it ultimately is about as satisfying as getting a rib-cracking disease. It’s about preaching what God has told us to preach. Sharing the gospel. Encouraging people to grow in Christ. And trusting and knowing that God is the one who gets the victory. He’s the one driving. He knows where He’s driving us to.
Years ago, we liked to joke with my grandpa. He had, in his later years, really bad vision, so he couldn’t drive. But he was still very, very much full of life, and also insights to how he thought driving should occur from the days when he could drive. And so we’d go on a trip or something, and he’d be saying—
And so at some point, we stopped at some kind of touristy place, and they had the perfect gift for him. They had the backseat driver’s license. And so we got him that backseat driver’s license. And when he would start offering driving advice, we’d always ask him, “Do you have your backseat driver’s license with you?” And it was just fun, right? I mean, it was fun.
But I do have to say, and this is probably true of every backseat driver I’ve ever been around, and when I’ve been a backseat driver, for that matter, you know, backseat drivers, the reason we joke and sometimes get serious about them is that they, nine times out of ten, really aren’t offering anything that improves the success of the driving mission. In fact, it may make it worse, right, because the driver starts getting distracted. And if you can make it a joke and you kind of laugh about it, it’s a good thing. But sometimes we don’t feel much like it’s a joke.
And what we really want to just say is, “I know where I’m taking us, and I know how to get us there, and you’re safe in this car. It’s going to be okay. Let’s just enjoy the ride.” I know you think I should go a little faster. I know you think I should go a little slower. I know you think I should turn here, but you know, I’m more comfortable this other way.
God tells us, “You know, you really like those backseat driver’s licenses because you think that you’re the one driving.” And a lot of times we go ahead and mount the whole steering wheel and the whole thing at our seat because we think that we’re driving it. But, you know, if you put one of those simulation steering wheels in front of your seat, it doesn’t drive the car. You can put a lot of effort into it, but it’s not going to do anything to improve it. It might actually distract you from actually enjoying where you’re going, though.
And the newly formed church had a choice here. Were they going to try to drive it? And they could have done like Muhammad did and go and fight their enemies and smite them and say, “We’re going to do this.” But they said, “No, we know our God is actually in control of this. All we need to do is actually do what He told us to do. What He told us to do was to go and share the hope of Jesus. And so that’s what we’re going to do.”
And it might not be easy at this moment in this life, but we know that He’s the one driving. And yes, we just passed the exit we thought we should turn off at. But this passage is a call to look down and pull out our wallet and pull out and see the backseat driver’s license saying, “All right, God, you’re the one who’s driving. You’re the one who’s going to get us there. I just need to actually do what you told me to do, which is share the gospel along the way and have joy because you’re with me in the whole process. God is the one driving.”
And really that’s why they were able to handle the situation so well and so clearly. They understood that God was driving. And the reason we often don’t handle it so well is we forget that. So often we act like those throughout history who haven’t had Jesus working His kingdom out through us, who haven’t had the blessing of the Holy Spirit, because we grab onto that fake steering wheel and we clench it so hard, and we’re digging into it, and we miss out on what God’s doing because we’re searching for ease. And ease is elusive ultimately.
But here’s the good news on why they could have joy in this time and in the time after. Instill those people who believed in Jesus to have joy because while ease is elusive, God isn’t. Let’s pray that we could know that today.
Father, would you help us to be those who fully and truly trust that you are the one working salvation? Yes, we’d like things to go in a way that’s easy. Certainly here at the church we’d love for everything to go smoothly, that we can do the work you’ve called us to do. In our lives, we’d like ease. In the lives of our loved ones, we’d like ease. But as we look at your word, you don’t promise that, but you do promise us that we have the hope and the security that we find in you. So would you help us to experience the joy in that? That when things are uncertain, we still have joy because you are with us. Let’s pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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