Miracles and Mayhem | Ramin Razavi

You're listening to GARDEN CHURCH Podcast. We're in a series called Church on Fire, a journey to the book of Acts. This is the story of ordinary people filled with the spirit carrying the presence of Jesus into every corner of the world. The same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is alive and in us today. Join us as we step into the call to be people set on fire for his mission.

It's great to be with you guys. I I just love the way that this church is worshiping Jesus today. There's faith in the room today.

There's a sense that he's gonna move. There's a sense that he's present with us and that is the gift of all gifts. I mean, we've received all that we need right now. And today, we're gonna continue in our teaching series, Church on Fire. If you've been with us, we've been in the book of Acts and what we've seen in the book of Acts is simply this, is that what Jesus began to do and to teach in the gospels, he's just continuing to do and to pour out through faithful men and women who are filled with the Holy Spirit.

And I don't know if you're like me but I love titles and today's message has a title, it's Miracles and Mayhem. Miracles and Mayhem. Does anybody's life maybe right now kind of map over that title? Miracles and Mayhem. Anybody else been into the World Cup?

Any other big World Cup fans? Come on, it's been beautiful. There is no better picture of what Miracles and Mayhem look like than a VAR review in the middle of the World Cup. I mean, come on, that guy from Columbia, if he had a size nine and a half instead of size ten, they're beating Portugal last night. Iran would have won their game, that's where my family's originally from, if if the VAR wouldn't have caught the guy's arm slightly off sides.

And what happens in all those VAR moments is you see live action being played out on the screen and then the referee blows a whistle and I love the symbol. He's like, he goes over to the little screen and he gets the real picture of what's happening. He comes out, he blows his whistle and says something in an unintelligible dialect that no one in the stadium can hear and some people cheer like crazy and other people begin to weep. Following Jesus is not altogether different than that. Because here's what's true about following Jesus.

Jesus calls us as his people to obedience and faithfulness to him. And Jesus is the one who's responsible for the outcomes of our life of faith. So we can't tell all the time in a moment that feels like pressure, that feels like tension, that feels like the circumstances and the headwinds are against us. We cannot always tell in the moment, is this mayhem or is this going to be the setup for a miracle that God is gonna release among us. And that's what we're gonna look at today in Acts chapter 14 under the banner of miracles and mayhem.

Acts 14 · chapter mention

But let me even get deeper than that. It is about the presence of Jesus. It is about Jesus being the one who is doing ministry and who's releasing his fellowship among the disciples. And so let's look at Acts chapter 14 together. That's where we're gonna be.

Acts 14 · chapter mention

The disciples have just left Pisidian Antioch and now they've traveled about a 100 miles to Iconium. And we're gonna read the text and then we're gonna take a look at how Jesus is at work through the lives of the apostles. It says at Iconium, Paul and Barnabas went as usual into the Jewish synagogue. There they spoke so effectively that a great number of Jews and Greeks believed. But the Jews who refused to believe stirred up the other Gentiles and poisoned their minds against the brothers.

So there's breakthrough and there's opposition. So Paul and Barnabas spent considerable time there speaking boldly for the Lord who confirmed the message of his grace by enabling them to perform signs and wonders. The people of the city were divided. Some sided with the Jews, others with the apostles. There was a plot afoot, don't you hate it when there's a plot afoot?

There was a plot afoot among both Gentiles and Jews together with their leaders to mistreat them and stone them. But they found out about it and fled to the Lyconian cities of Lystra and Derbe and to the surrounding country where they continued to preach the gospel. In Lystra, there sat a man who was lame. He had been that way from birth and had never walked. He listened to Paul as he was speaking.

Paul looked directly at him and saw that he had faith to be healed and called out, stand up on your feet. At that the man jumped up and began to walk. When the crowd saw what Paul had done, they shouted in the Lyconian language, the gods have come down to us in human form. Barnabas, they called Zeus, and Paul, they called Hermes, because he was the chief speaker. The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought bulls and wreaths to the city gates because he and the crowd wanted to offer sacrifices to them.

But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of this, they tore their clothes and rushed out into the crowd shouting, friends, why are you doing this? We too are only human like you. We are bringing you good news, telling you to turn from these worthless things to the living God who made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything in them. In the past, he let all nations go their own way. Yet he has not left himself without testimony.

He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons. He provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy. Even with these words, they had difficulty keeping the crowd from sacrificing to them. Then some of the Jews came from Antioch and Iconium, the guys that had chased them out of town and won the crowd over. They stoned Paul, dragged him outside the city thinking he was dead.

But after the disciples had gathered around him, he got up and went back into the city. The next day, he and Barnabas left for Derby. So holy spirit, we pray you would come now and you would open the living word of God to us. God, we surrender our preconceptions of who you are and what you will do and we say yes, Jesus. We want the fullness of your kingdom to come here as it already is in heaven, Lord.

We willingly follow you, king Jesus. Thank you for your grace and your mercy. We pray in your holy, holy name. Amen and amen. I told you this was full of a lot of mayhem.

I mean, come on. You start with effective ministry and then you get into an unscrupulous rumor campaign which only causes them to double down with their confidence, which levels up the sense of god's grace and mercy among them to do miracles, which causes even more opposition. A plot gets afoot. Now they flee the city, probably under cover of night. They show up in some backwater village called Lystra.

They start preaching. Some guy in the crowd has faith. He gets healed. The crowd gets a bunch of oxen with wreaths around their necks and a sharp knife and starts thinking that Zeus and Hermes have shown up on the scene. Paul gives a culturally contextualized message to help reorient them to God being the reference point of all reality.

It doesn't work all that well. The lynch mob for Iconium catches up to them. Paul is nearly stoned to death. He's strengthened by his brothers, goes back into the city where he was just persecuted and they eventually leave. Crazy.

I'm sitting with this text this week and I'm like Jesus, what's the through line here? And you know what he said to me? I'm present in it all. I'm present in it all. Every year I have the staff do an exercise we call peaks and valleys and it's simply a way of mapping your year.

Where did you see God? Where did he feel absent? Where was there joy unending? Where was there brokenness and pain? Where was there breakthrough and where is their seemingly endless waiting?

It's a great exercise. You should do that exercise sometime. And what's wild is as we do that exercise, we carry with it the assumption that we understand what God is doing. And what this text is going to do is help us to see that our call with Jesus is not to a map or to a designated plan, it is to faithful fellowship with him. And if we continue to give Jesus our yes, here is what I can promise you.

I can promise you, you will go deeper in the fellowship of knowing him, in participation with him and you will go deeper in the fellowship of sharing in his ministry. What I cannot promise you is that it won't be without pain. What I cannot promise you is that it will not be without brokenness and hardship. What I cannot promise you is that you might be like Paul who would reflect on a time like this later in second Corinthians when he says this. He says, I don't want you to be uninformed my brothers and sisters about the pain I felt when I was in Asia.

It was so bad that it felt like we received this sentence of death. Right? They were coming against us. But all of this happened, he says, I can see in hindsight so that we would not put our confidence in ourselves, but we would put our confidence in God who has the power to raise the dead. And so as we trust Jesus through what feels like wild peaks and valleys in our life, he's trying to reveal to us that what we need more than the outcome is the object of our faith.

We need his presence with us wherever we go. And so let's pick up with Paul and Barnabas in Iconium and then we're gonna get to the wild scene down in Lystra. These two cities could not be more different. Iconium was the capital of the region. It was a sophisticated city.

It was a cultural city. It was mostly a Greek city. And Paul and Barnabas go into the synagogue as was their normal practice. They preach the gospel. It's a breakthrough moment.

And what I love about it is the gospel is uniting cultures. Isn't that powerful? It's uniting gentile and Jewish culture right there in the midst of the synagogue. But guess what the gospel's also doing? It's uniting opposition.

Have you ever noticed that? That how unlikely the bedfellows can become when they want to oppose the message of Jesus. And that's what's happening in this moment. And you would think in this moment as the opposition comes and the persecution comes, last time that happened, they fled Pisidian Antioch. But this time they doubled down.

And what we see in this is the grace of Jesus, the grace that Jesus pours out that determines where the apostles give their attention and they give their devotion. Because when the opposition comes, what do they do? They double down. They press in. It's almost like the text is saying if you get underneath the language, the greater the opposition, the greater the boldness of the apostles.

The greater the the opposition and the adversity they face, the greater the boldness the apostles came into the moment with. This speaks to us about our sense of mission in this world. I love the way that missiologist, Leslie Newbigin, who was a British theologian and missiologist, he said it this way, our deepest desire for mission must to be with must be to be with Jesus where Jesus actually is. And then he goes on, this blows my mind, Where is Jesus? He is on the frontier between the already usurped dominion of the devil and the in breaking kingdom of God.

This is what our desire for mission is, is to be with Jesus where Jesus already is. And where is Jesus today? He is not sitting back in comfort. He is not relaxing into convenience. He is not practicing self fulfillment or self actualization.

Let me help you with where Jesus is. He is on the borderline. He is on the front lines. He is where the already usurped, which means defeated and destroyed, kingdom of darkness is being overtaken by the kingdom of the son that we love. And that's what they had in their bloodstream.

They had in their bloodstream that their messiah wasn't in the tomb anymore. And when your messiah is not in the tomb anymore, it speaks of what he's defeated and the final enemy was death. And if the final enemy is death, let me just put this out there for you today, you don't have anything to fear anymore because you church have not received a spirit that makes you slaves to fear but you've received the spirit of adoption and by that spirit, we cry out, Abba, Father and his spirit is preaching, testifying to your spirit today that you are a child of God and that if you ever fear or face any suffering, you will also share in the glory of Christ. This is our motive for mission, to be with Jesus where he is on the frontier between the already usurped dominion of the devil and the in breaking victorious kingdom of the Son of God. That's why opposition made them more bold.

And what I love scripture says happens in that moment is the Holy Spirit backs the message of Jesus. If you've ever wondered like, man, I'm I'm not seeing the miracles I've been praying praying for. I'm not seeing the healing I've been praying for. I would ask you, what is the tip of the spear that you're leading with? Is the tip of the spear the answer to the prayer?

Is the tip of the spear the outcome or is the tip of the spear the gospel of Jesus Christ? Because the pattern we see throughout the New Testament is that healing is a sign and wonder. Here's the easy way to think about this. Healing comes, miracles come as a sign to make you wonder about the God in heaven who's pouring his spirit out. And so the word here that they use in Greek to understand this, it says that the spirit empowered or he gave agency to the apostles to do miracles and signs.

Why? To confirm the message of God's grace. If you wanna see an increase in miracle activity in your life and ministry, ask the previous question, is my life fully devoted to Jesus? And are the prayers I'm praying for the glory of Jesus, for the expansion of the kingdom of Jesus because Jesus backs prayers that are done in his name. And so, this powerful moment's going on.

Spirit's giving agency. They're walking in cooperation with the spirit. And now, opposition ratchets up yet another level. So a plot is afoot between the gentiles and Jews with the city leaders to mistreat the apostles, persecute them, but also probably to murder them. Stoning's a pretty effective way of ending someone's life.

And at this point, they leave the city. Now, in all the mayhem we've looked at already, this is a really interesting thing because you might you might think like the next play is more miracles, more power, defeat these guys, win these guys to Christ, I guess if we're gonna be empathetic and compassionate and loving. Win our enemies to Jesus and stay in the city. But here's something that is so so central to us as we follow the leadership of Jesus. We cannot control the outcomes.

We cannot control the outcomes. We can only commit to courageous obedience and to faithfulness to Jesus. We cannot control outcomes. We cannot predict futures. We don't get a map but what we can commit to is faithful obedience to following the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And God uses this kind of opposition in our life of faith to break our sense of mastery over the life of faith. He is deconstructing Paul's ability to live with formulas here. Because Paul's still early in his apostleship and so far, he's preached one great sermon in Pisidian Antioch and he's about to preach his second sermon which is gonna be very different in Lystra. And Paul is still, a term we learned from our friend Preston Morrison, Paul is still getting his educations from the Holy Spirit. Have you gotten any educations from the Holy Spirit lately?

Where he's teaching you things? He's maturing you in the image of Christ? What do we see in Jesus' life? Does Jesus heal every single person around him that is sick or demon possessed? No, he doesn't.

There's grace in moments for healing. There's grace in moments for deliverance. There's grace in moments for breakthrough. And what Paul is learning in this moment is Jesus gave me agency to perform miracles and signs and wonders for this period of time in this city to strengthen the church, to proclaim the gospel, and now that same Jesus is leading me to leave this city and move on to the next assignment that he has for me. What is Paul learning in all of this?

The opposition that I'm facing is part of the formational journey that Jesus has me on. If you think about the teaching Jesus gave in John 15 about the vine and the branches, I love how he gets us started. He says I am the vine and you are the branches and then the one that we always kinda pass over and my father is the gardener. And he talks about this part of our spiritual life called pruning. And what pruning is is it's cutting back the areas of who we are that are taking life from what is most necessary to us.

I have some friends that are big into the viticulture business back in Boulder, Colorado. Colorado. And one of the things they taught me is that if you want to train a vine, which is the same language Paul will later use in the gospels when he talks about the way we go through suffering, it's for our perseverance and our training. And if you wanna train a vine, you have to prune the vine. And if you prune a vine, what you end up seeing at the midst of the season, in the midst of the season, is what looks like a completely barren stump.

Have you ever seen this at a vineyard? And you're wondering like, how can this thing in any way produce life? But what the agriculturist will tell us is that by training that vine, by pruning the unnecessary growths, guess where the life force of that vine is going? Roots deep into the clay soil, deep into the earth where the nutrients are so that next season when it comes time for harvest, that vine that looked like a burned out stump is producing the finest vintages. And that's the same process Paul is going through here.

He is being allowed to face opposition because in the pruning work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, God is producing a kind of life in us that we could not get any other way. He'll reflect on this later in second Corinthians chapter four. I'm gonna start down in verse six for the slides. He's reflecting on the way God has led him through his life to the church in Corinth and he said, for God who said let light shine out of the darkness, so he's speaking of the creative energy of God, made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God's glory displayed in the face of Christ. And he he knew the light of the knowledge of the glory of God.

It blinded him on the road to Damascus. Chase preached that message for us powerfully here. We get to see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. What a gift. But he goes on.

But we have this treasure, presence of Jesus, the full person of Jesus in our lives in jars of clay, in fragile clay pots. Any other clay pots in the room? Why? To show, to demonstrate that this all surpassing power is from God and not from us. You think Paul may have felt that that day?

There were miracles, there were signs, there were wonders confirming the message. Now there's a plot afoot and I gotta get out of town. It it shows us that this power is from God. It's not from us because we're hard pressed on every side but not crushed. We're perplexed but not in despair.

We're persecuted but not abandoned. We're struck down but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive in Christ are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then death is at work in us but life is at work in you.

He's saying as I continue to fill up in my flesh what is lacking in regards to Christ's afflictions on behalf of the church. I'm like a little clay pot that just keeps getting holes knocked in it. But good news for you, that the light of the knowledge of the glory of God is what resides inside of the clay pot. So the more that I go through, the more that I persevere through, the more that I trust God with, the more you see his glory through my life. And so the question for us is how do you interpret the opposition and adversity you are facing in your life of faith?

And as a means of application, I wanna offer these things to you. Would you ask god to give you a new interpretive lens for the circumstances of your life? Would you ask the spirit to reframe the opposition you may be facing with the life of Jesus not your desired outcomes for life? Death may be working in you but where is God wanting to birth new life? How might God want to release his power into the contested spaces of your life?

Not escape from your pain but greater agency in the Holy Spirit to glorify the name of Jesus through any circumstance. Would you bring this question to God? Is the opposition that I'm currently facing something that I need to overcome or something that I need to submit to as part of God's pruning work in my life? How holy spirit do you want to lead me and teach me in these contested moments? And this one's just for me.

How god might you be loosening my grip on control and deepening my trust in you through these circumstances. Because I think that's what Jesus was doing in Paul as he left Iconium. And he was doing it because Jesus knew better than Paul knew what he needed for the next part of his assignment. So let's go there. So Paul goes over to Lystra.

And as I said, Lystra could not be more of a different town than Iconium. And scriptures are just very plain about it. It says in Lystra there sat a man who was lame. He had been that way from birth and he had never walked. He listened to Paul as he was speaking and Paul looked directly at him and saw that he had faith to be healed and called out, stand up on your feet.

At that, the man jumped up and began to walk. So Paul is being discipled in the way of Jesus that this all surpassing power does not come from me. This is God's power being released into the world for God's glory to bring God's kingdom. And he shows up in a pagan town that commentators, they they call it rustic which is a nice way of saying backwater. It's mostly illiterate.

They did not have a synagogue in that town. And he shows up and he's preaching and we don't really know what the environment was, probably some open air environment. And he just looks out and he locks eyes with someone. And because he's been trained not to pursue outcomes, he's been trained to follow the presence of God. He's been trained to follow where grace is moving.

He looks out and he says, I see faith in you. If there's faith in you and there's Christ in me, the hope of glory and Christ with us now, why not stand up and walk? And to be really honest with you, was sitting with this this week, I'm like, okay, how do we preach this and how do we talk about this and and the lord just humbled me. He's like, would you shut up? Would you let me minister?

And so I wanna just extend that invitation to you today, like right now. Are there are there some of are there some of us today that have faith in the room to be healed, to be set free from something, to be delivered from something? If if that's you, would you be as bold to stand and we're gonna pray for you. We believe Jesus is here. We believe his grace is here.

Thank you, Lord. Would you just put a hand on someone next to you and just begin to ask for their healing? Don't you don't have to pray complicated prayers. Just ask the Holy Spirit to heal them.

Come Holy Spirit. Thank you Lord.

Thank you, God. Thank

you, Lord. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, God. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord.

Thank you for those precious sounds, Lord. Thank you.

Holy Spirit, come. We pray Jesus that every person standing now in the name of Jesus would be healed. We agree. All glory and honor and praise be to the king of kings. Amen and amen.

Let's thank the lord. If My precious son stood, he was diagnosed with diabetes when he turned 18. This is what the church is meant to be my friends. Meant to be people filled with the holy spirit doing the things Jesus did. If you are able to test your healing, we'd love to hear from you by the end of service.

We'll celebrate that together. That'd be a great way to do the benediction. Praise God. But as we said earlier, we pray bull's eye prayers, right? Pastor Darren taught us that.

We just did it. And and we we leave the outcomes in the hands of the father. Thank you, thank you. I wanna honor all of you who stood. Can we just honor all who had faith to stand today?

Alright. Well, the crowd noticed that this man was healed and, you know, if you knew anything of the old testament, you you would have known that like in Isaiah 35, it talked about how when the kingdom of God comes, deaf ears will be opened and blind eyes will be opened and mute tongues will be able to speak. And I love this one. It says, and the the lame will leap like a deer. And you saw that in Jesus' life, right?

Like the guy's friends like cut a hole in the tiles and there he is. And then you saw it in Acts when Peter and John went because remember whose power this is? Same Jesus, different people yielded to him. And what's wild is the crowd in Lystra, they don't have a framework for God. I dream about this happening.

Like where God's power breaks out in communities and cultures in Southern California that don't have a framework for God. And they just try to assign it to whatever they know. That's what happens. So the Lyconians, they just start shouting in their native language and I don't think we have any Lyconian speakers in the room today, otherwise I'd ask for a demonstration. But they're like, the gods have come down in human form.

Barnabas they call Hermes and or Zeus and Paul Hermes. And and what happens in this moment is kinda like out of an Indiana Jones movie, like Temple of Doom. You know, like that priest you got you're scared of him when he was a kid. Remember him? Scary guy.

He used to say like, I don't even say it. It might be a curse. But So they just come running out of this temple that they had to Zeus in the area and they've got like a bunch of oxen and they've got those floral wreaths around the neck of the oxen and there's this priest rocking up with a couple of sharp knives and Paul and Barnabas must have been thinking like, okay, they're excited. I I think this is good. I don't understand what they're saying.

God doesn't give us interpretation for Lyconian yet. Anybody got interpretation? No interpretation. They're just running out of the temple with a couple of big old oxen, some wreaths, and then they see the knives and they're like, oh, this is not good. This is not good at all.

And they wanna they wanna worship us. And before we start to make fun and critique the Lyconians, What we have to realize is that our flesh wants to co opt the message of Jesus to fit in our already existing cultural reference point instead of allowing him to reorient our entire worldview to him. And so I just made a quick list of some of the cultural narratives that we face. One is postmodernism which is a deep suspicion of any metanarrative. The second is moral therapeutic deism that god exists to make you happy and comfortable.

The third is the age of disenchantment, that the spiritual realm isn't real or meaningful. The fourth is the age of authenticity, that the highest value in life is self expression and self actualization. The fifth is the idolatry of self, prioritizing personal and material gain over sacrificially living for Christ. The sixth is the privatization of our faith, that faith only belongs in our private lives. Don't bring that into the public square.

The seventh is nationalism, a political ideology that merges political and Christian identities and promotes exceptionalism like god somehow loves one nation more than another right now. The eighth is pluralism. That how could there be one thing that's true if there are so many different belief systems? This list was something I learned from my friend Tyler Prieb in the missional life course and it is so relevant to this text because that is exactly what was happening in Lystra. They just had a cultural narrative of what life should be like.

And in the midst of that culture narrative, God's miracles break out and they just try to co opt the gospel of Jesus into the framework of life that they were comfortable with. And that's not what Jesus is about. Because what Jesus is about is radically reorienting the whole of our life to his way and to his kingdom. And so what Paul does next is he begins to preach a contextualized message to help them see how God has been trying to reach them for all time. What he says is he runs into the crowd and I I love this picture of him running into the crowd because it's not him critiquing them for getting it wrong.

It's not him shaming them for not seeing that, oh, you did not understand that Jesus is the fulfillment of the of the messianic prophecies that you had no idea existed and the fulfillment of the Jewish scriptures which you've never seen. You didn't know that? Oh, shame on you. No. It's Literally, it's like he's he's running into the crowd.

He's tearing his clothes which is a picture of grief over what they're experiencing. He's feeling compassion for this crowd. And he runs into the crowd and he preaches this beautifully contextualized message. It's a very different message than his first message in Pisidian Antioch which is all about connecting the dots of the Old Testament and showing that Jesus was the fulfillment of the Old Testament, here in Lystra, he starts pointing at the mountains and he's like, do you see the mountains? Have you seen the sea?

Have you felt an ache in your longing, an ache and longing in your heart that god would turn towards you? It's almost as though what Paul is saying, maybe you guys have always known god but you didn't actually know it. And he preaches this message out of general revelation we would call theologically. It's like what psalmist writes in Psalm 19. The heavens are declaring the glory of god and the expanse of the skies tell the goodness of his hands.

Day after day, they're pouring forth speech from God. And what I love about this is an expression of the kindness of God. He says God has shown you his kindness. Don't you feel the joy in your heart on certain days and the fullness of your belly after you've eaten a good meal? Where do you think that all comes from?

He's orienting them to a god based world. So many applications here about how we carry the gospel into the world but I think god wants to say something a little more tender to some of us today. When I was a little boy, I was a first generation American. My dad came from Iran, my mom came from Germany and let me just say figuring life out in the middle of Ohio was difficult. Just put it there.

Just new experiences all around. Hadn't known what a tractor pull was before but they're pretty cool. There's a lot of horsepower. Those kind of things. Fishing, I learned to fish.

I got pretty good at it. But there was also a lot of conflict and a lot of uncertainty in our home a lot of times. And when I was a little boy, about eight, nine years old, I I realized I liked to get out on my own. And so I would take my little bike that I called the Red Hero and I would ride the Red Hero down Pine Brook Lane and there was a little creek there. And I'd parked my bike against the tree by mister Wagner's house and I would walk along this creek.

And I would find great peace in doing this. And I was not raised in a home of of worshiping Jesus in this way. I I was just trying to figure out life and I was trying to ask questions and I and I look back at my life and I I remember when I was in college, I heard a song by a band called Ten Shekel Shirt. Anybody remember Ten Shekel Shirt? What a name.

And the song said this, it says, maybe I have always known you but I didn't know it. And I just wanna offer that to some of us in the room today. Maybe you have been asking God to speak and he's saying the heavens are declaring the glory of God, Expands of the skies are telling the greatness of his hand. Maybe you're asking for God's presence and he's saying, you were fed this morning. Your heart kept rhythm today.

Oxygen filled your lungs today. My grace is all around you today. Jesus wants to speak to you today. He wants to reveal his goodness and his love to you and it might come through a miraculous healing and you jump up and begin to run hot laps around this building and we will praise the lord. Or it might be that you look up at the heavens and say, my father has always been present in my life.

All glory to Jesus, both stories in the miracles and in the mayhem. Speaking of mayhem, what happens next is crazy. So this crowd in Iconium that wanted to take Paul out figures out somehow that he got to Lystra and they go 25 miles down the road and they find him in this moment that is just pregnant with anticipation as he's in the midst of this pagan crowd preaching about the kindness of God and his presence in the sky and trying to figure it all out. And this crowd shows up and what scripture says is the crowd is won over by these Iconiums, Which is just a great statement for us that we should not allow the flattery of any crowd, whether it's on the Instagram profile or it's in real life, to somehow make us feel like we're in the right place because the crowd changed in a heartbeat. They went from like, let's worship these guys to let's kill these guys.

This happens every day in our culture. The fickleness of the crowd. And if you're paying attention in this moment, the long shadow of Jesus' cross begins to fall in this moment. Because the same crowds that were chanting Hosanna, Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the lord. By the end of the week, we're chanting, crucify him, crucify him.

And the rocks are picked up and Paul is pelted with these boulders and these stones and he's taken within an inch of his life and then dragged outside of the city and left for dead. And you might think like this is the guy that saw the person healed. This is the one who had agency for miracles and power. But what if it's true that what what Paul would write later, I want to know Christ. Yes, in the power of his resurrection but also in the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings.

And what if the moment where Paul was most conformed to the image of Jesus was not in the moment where the miracles were raining down from heaven, but in the moment that he remained faithful under the pile of rocks that threatened to take his life. This is the gospel of Jesus Christ, that we live faithful to Jesus and there may be times he releases the miracles and the kingdom comes here as in heaven and there may be times that the rocks of any kind fall on our body and we get the honor. No, we get the privilege of stewarding in our body the sacrifice of Christ as a witness to the world that the grave was emptied and that we are looking to a better hope, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. So we like Paul, don't lose heart. Even though outwardly we may be wasting away, inwardly we are renewed day by day because these light and these momentary afflictions are achieving for us an eternal weight of glory that far surpasses them all.

So we don't set our eyes on the things that are seen, we set our eyes on the things that are unseen. For what is seen is temporary and what is unseen is eternal to the glory of Jesus Christ himself. This is what Jesus invites us into. A faith that anticipates, expects the miracles and a faith that perseveres through the mayhem and the pain of life. Let's stand and respond to God.

We can have our garden prayer team come up, our worship team. I'm gonna give a just a simple prayer and a few invitations but if you wanna come for prayer for anything right now, you're welcome to just make your way to the front already. Let's just still ourselves, quiet ourselves and open our hands as a posture of receiving from God. Jesus, would you come now and just continue to minister to us Lord. We want your ministry.

We want your presence Lord. Just sense that the holy spirit wants to speak to some of us today that the pain, the suffering that we've endured has not been separation from god but actually an invitation to fellowship with him. If that's you, would you come forward and receive prayer just for the strengthening work of the holy spirit whatever you're facing? That god would reframe what you're facing not with a lens of your desired outcomes for life but through the cruciform lens of Christ crucified and resurrected. And also just wanna continue to ask holy spirit for healing if you wanna come forward and receive prayer for healing of any kind.

Jesus, we believe your grace is present to heal today. And Lord Jesus, we wanna receive more of your holy spirit. You are the one holy spirit that enables us to live a life of faith. You are the one who enables us to receive the great grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so if you're feeling brokenness and pain, if you need to confess sin today, if you need to lay your life at the altar afresh before the Lord today, Come and receive from the lord.

Jesus said, do not fear little flock for your father is pleased to give you the kingdom. Our asking is met with an unimaginable generosity from our father.

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