This sermon was preached at Cornerstone Baptist Church in Cherry Log, Georgia on March 3, 2013 by Pastor Paul Mims.

Acts 14:21-28
Early in January 1939, the precocious German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, age thirty-two, learned that all males in his age had been ordered to register with the military.

The solution was provided by America’s most illustrious theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr. Nine years earlier, Bonhoeffer had spent a year in the United States as a free-floating exchange student at Union Theological Seminary, arriving not long after Niebuhr had moved there from Detroit. He had made such a positive impression on Union’s faculty that Niebuhr jumped at the opportunity to bring him back. If we fail to offer him a job, he told Union’s president, Henry Sloane Coffin, Bonhoeffer will wind up in a concentration camp. This was not the stuff of run-of-the-mill letters of recommendation. Union extended the offer. Grateful to have a way out of his dilemma, Bonhoeffer booked passage, and in June 1939 found himself safe in America.

Safe, but unhappy. Bonhoeffer’s second visit to the United States lasted only twenty-six days.
In his beautifully constructed biography, Metaxas calls Bonhoeffer’s return to Germany in 1939 “the great decision.” Before he arrived in New York, Bonhoeffer was already his country’s most prominent theologian; in the German language, only Switzerland’s Karl Barth outranked him. After he went back to Berlin, Bonhoeffer added the roles referred to by Metaxas’s subtitle: martyr, prophet, spy. In 1945, the Nazis arrested Bonhoeffer, sent him to a series of prisons and camps including Buchenwald, and—two weeks before the Allied troops arrived at the Flossenbürg concentration camp—killed him. He was not yet forty. (Metaxas)

Bonhoeffer in five years rallied the churches of Germany to oppose the Hitler madness and has blessed every generation since with his example and writings.

He was certainly in the tradition of the Apostle Paul. The first Missionary journey had gone to its farthest point and they had to decide what they would do. Would they take the safe and easy route home or would they go back to encourage the churches the way they had come? The short way home would have been through the Taurus Mountains to Seleucia and on to Antioch. But they decided to go back where they had experienced hardships and threats of death. Let’s look at this undaunted courage. From Derbe where everything went well they returned to Lystra, Iconium, and Pisidian Antioch.

I. THE PLACE OF STONES. (14:19-20).

It was twenty miles back to Lystra. Things had gone so well in Derbe and they were encouraged, but with every step to Lystra Paul remembered the stoning. It all started when the Lord used him in the healing of a cripple man and when the townspeople saw it, they thought that Paul and Barnabas were the reincarnations of Zeus and Hermes.

“When the crowd saw what Paul had done, they shouted in the Lycaonian 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 Paul and Barnabas would have none of this and tried to present to them the true God.

“Then some Jews from Antioch and Iconium won the crowd over. They stoned Paul and 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.” Paul remembered how he had aroused the crowd to stone Stephen. Now for the very faith that Stephen proclaimed and which he had now embraced, Paul was stoned. You can see that it took courage to go back there. The wounds are still in his body. Perhaps a rib is broken and has not fully mended. Or perhaps he still has headaches from the stones that fractured his skull. Or perhaps an eye is still half closed from the bruise of a stone. But he goes back. Why? Paul’s purpose was to see the believers and to encourage them in their new found faith and to organize leadership in the churches. New believers have to be discipled.

Do you have a place of stones? All of us have places where we have been hurt or people who have hurt us. These issues are never solved until we get the courage to go back. Sometimes it is a family member or a friend or a business associate.

I had not seen my father since I was eight years old. When I was pastor at First Baptist Church in Norfolk, Virginia, we were visiting my mother in Quitman, Georgia. She said to me, “I heard recently that you father has died and is buried in Waycross, Georgia.” Because of his abuse and alcoholism they had been divorced since I was three years old. Because of what he did to us I had a latent anger toward him which bothered me at times. We had to go through Waycross to get back to Norfolk so we found the cemetery and located his grave. Janice and the children gave me a few minutes alone before they came over there and I stood by his grave and said, “Okay, Dad, I forgive you for wanting your drink more than you wanted us, for threatening to kill my mother and me when you were in a drunken stupor, for violating all that your preacher dad stood for, and for all of the birthday and Christmas remembrances that never came.” He did not hear me, but I heard me and God heard me and a big burden rolled off of me and I had a newfound freedom that I had not known in forty years.

The courage to forgive opens up a whole new life.

A childhood accident caused poet Elizabeth Barrett to lead a life of semi-invalidism before she married Robert Browning in 1846. There’s more to the story. In her youth, Elizabeth had been watched over by her tyrannical father. When she and Robert were married, their wedding was held in secret because of her father’s disapproval. After the wedding the Brownings sailed for Italy, where they lived for the rest of their lives. But even though her parents had disowned her, Elizabeth never gave up on the relationship. Almost weekly she wrote them letters. Not once did they reply. After 10 years, she received a large box in the mail. Inside, Elizabeth found all of her letters; not one had been opened! Today those letters are among the most beautiful in classical English literature. Had her parents only read a few of them, their relationship with Elizabeth might have been restored. (Daily Walk)

II. THE PLACES OF UNWELCOME.

From Lystra, it was another forty miles back to Iconium. Look at 14:1-7. “At Iconium Paul and Barnabas went as usual into the Jewish synagogue. There they spoke so effectively that a great number of Jews and Gentiles believed. But the Jews who refused to believe stirred up the Gentiles and poisoned their minds against the brothers. So Paul and Barnabas spent considerable time there speaking boldly for the Lord, who confirmed the message of his grace by enabling them to do miraculous signs and wonders. The people of the city were divided; some sided with the Jews, others with the apostles. There was a plot afoot among the Gentiles and Jews, together with their leaders to mistreat them and stone them. But they found out about it and fled to the lycaonian cities of Lystra and Derbe and to the surrounding country where they continued to preach the good news.” But now they are back to this place where they are unwelcome by most of the people. But they have returned for the believers to encourage and instruct them, and organize leadership for the church at Iconium.

Sometimes, we have to have the courage to go back where we are unwelcome for the good of others. The same thing happened at both Iconium and Antioch. They were not welcome by the secular society.
Can you imagine that this missionary team had fears of going back to this place where their deaths were plotted? Fear is the elephant in the room for us when we think of going to a place where we are unwelcome. But the call to preach the Resurrection of their living Lord and the way he can justify sinners overpowered the elephant of fear, and they walked right into the stampede of the elephant herd. These cities had pagan temples, shrines, and places of lust and luxury. There was a hopelessness that we see in our cities today. It is called existentialism. Do you know what that is? “A philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one’s acts.” (Dictionary) In other words it is thoughts of man who says, “We don’t know where we came from. We don’t know why we are here. We don’t know where we are going. This existence is all there is. We can do what we want, but we are responsible for our actions.” That was Paul’s world. It is our world. And for the sake of those who have such an empty view of life we have to go where we are unwelcome to rescue those who will believe in our glorious Lord.

“Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them. – (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

III. THE PLACE OF VICTORY.

Visualize a sailing vessel in the Mediterranean Sea headed toward the coast of Syria. On deck is a man whose body is bruised, battered, and weary. But he is singing praises to the Lord God. He and his companion, Barnabas are headed back to the wonderful congregation of the church at Antioch in Syria to report the completion of their mission and the victories that God gave them. Listen to how Luke reports it in 14:26-28:

“From Attalia they sailed back to Antioch, where they had been committed to the grace of God for the work they had now completed. On arriving there, they gathered the church together and reported all that God had done through them and how he had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles. And they stayed there a long time with the disciples.”

There are two major discoveries that took place on this first missionary journey. First, that God wanted to open the vast world of the Gentiles to the gospel message and that Paul, this Jewish rabbi, was to be the Apostle to the Gentiles. Second, that all progress in the Kingdom, then and now, is made through the process of hardship and tribulation. Paul said to them, “We must go through many hardships to enter the Kingdom of God.” In other words, the church and the kingdom is built through the hardships, fears, and tribulations of God’s people. We should wonder then at the difficulties we have as individuals and as a congregation as we labor in the Kingdom.

God will always give us the victory, but it will always be a struggle. Mounted against us is the whole realm of Satan which works in the world and in the church. Someone, and I don’t know who, has written a beautiful few verses that encourage the church:

“Far down the ages now, Her Journey well night done,
The pilgrim Church pursues her way
In haste to reach the crown.
The story of the past comes up before her view;
How well it seems to suit her still,
Old, and yet ever new!

‘Tis the same story still, of sin and weariness;
Of grace and love still flowing down
To Pardon and to Bless:
No wider is the gate, no broader is the way,
No smoother is the ancient path,
That leads to light and day.

No sweeter is the cup, no less our lot of ill;
‘Twas tribulation ages since, ‘Tis tribulation still:
No slacker grows the fight, no feebler is the foe,
No less the need of armor tried
Of shield and spear and bow.

Thus onward still we press, through evil and through good,
Through pain and poverty and want, through peril and through blood;
Still faithful to our God, and to our Captain true;
We follow where He leads the way, the Kingdom in our view.

PRAISE BE TO HIS NAME!