January 12, 2011

This Week’s Reading
Acts 14:1-28
Paul’s 1st Missionary Journey

“While . . . at Lystra, Paul and Barnabas healed a man with crippled feet. . . . When the crowd saw what Paul had done, they shouted in their local dialect, “These men are gods in human form!” Acts 14:8, 11

God Won’t fit your Preconceptions

Pastor’s Reflections

Each of us has a worldview, a specific mental lens through which we see and interpret everything. The western worldview sees things logically, “reasonably”, linearly, and materially. The eastern world sees the world cyclically, kind of the like the Lion King’s circle of life. Many third world nations see an enchanted world full of gods and devils (perhaps they are wiser than we).

How you view the world is the framework into which you will fit new information. Each worldview therefore fits its understanding of Jesus into itself, thereby altering in some way the Gospel itself. We westerners have westernized Jesus for example. For one thing Jesus was probably a short semite, not a tall rough looking northern European.

In Today’s passage those from Lystra had no conception of ordinary men exercising the delegated power of the one God of the universe. They simply thought Paul and Silas were gods and they conducted an elaborate ceremony of sacrifice to them.

There is a great lesson here for us. When we talk about Jesus to others we cannot expect them to understand exactly what we are talking about. They will fit Jesus into their worldview. It will take time and experience and care to correct that. Your Bible is essential. Read the Gospels in particular so that you don’t fall into the “Lystra trap” yourself, attributing to the Gospel what your presuppositions may have wrongly assumed. Make sure you know the Jesus of scripture, not of your own creating, the Jesus as communicated through the Gospels so that the Jesus to whom we introduce others is indeed the Jesus of the Gospels and not a caricature of Him.

Many people reject the caricature, but would be astounded if they knew the real thing.