Acts 13:13-43
What makes the difference between a boring sermon and one that strikes like lightning? On a more personal level, how do you have a significant encounter with people who are well versed in religion and already have their minds made up? In this week’s text, Paul and Barnabas travel north through the Taurus Mountains and enter the city of Pisidian Antioch. On the first Sabbath day after their arrival they are invited to give a word of exhortation to the congregation. For three hundred years Jews in the Diaspora have been reading the Scriptures and listening to countless sermons exhorting them to remain faithful to the law. But never have they heard a sermon like this with such good news, declaring God has fulfilled all of Israel’s longings and is on the move, doing revolutionary things where new life is breaking out for whole world and nothing is going to remain the same. And unless you jump in with both feet, you are going to be left out! So don’t you be left out.