Church Voices

While they were at Lystra, Paul and Barnabas came upon a man with crippled feet. He had been that way from birth, so he had never walked. He was sitting and listening as Paul preached. Looking straight at him, Paul realized he had faith to be healed. So Paul called to him in a loud voice, “Stand up!” And the man jumped to his feet and started walking.

When the crowd saw what Paul had done, they shouted in their local dialect, “These men are gods in human form!” They decided that Barnabas was the Greek god Zeus and that Paul was Hermes, since he was the chief speaker. Now the temple of Zeus was located just outside the town. So the priest of the temple and the crowd brought bulls and wreaths of flowers to the town gates, and they prepared to offer sacrifices to the apostles.
Acts 14.8-13

In Lystra Paul continued to preach the gospel, while there a man was healed because he had faith, the response of the Lystrans is interesting. Instead of turning to praise the Living God and leaving behind their previous beliefs they instead integrate what they have just seen into what they already believed. In fact, as they go to worship Paul and Barnabus, Paul continues to explicitly tell them what they believe about the two of them is wrong. The scriptures record, that despite this brute force approach it was still difficult to stop the people from worshiping them.

Quite a bit of noise has been made from certain segments of Christianity about the certainty of belief, they have attacked any theology that allows for any re-assessment of belief in any portion of any of our theological positions. These segments of Christianity have much in common with the Lystrans who despite Paul’s clear preaching and the demonstration of the power of the Living God still integrated Paul and Barnabas into their wrongly held beliefs.

As followers of Christ we are called to the truth, but we are also keenly aware of our own shortcomings in terms of both sin and ability (if the two can even be separated). As such we need to find ourselves in the delicate high wire act of clinging to orthodoxy, yet open to rebuke and correction by the Spirit through the scriptures. If our first reaction to anything we disagree with is to condemn the advocate of such a position as a damnable heretic of the most idiotic kind and then to complain to those who agree with us that this is nothing more than “itching ear” false preaching, it may be that we find ourselves in Lystra, instead of reality, and bending our knees to our particular culture, or intellect instead of Christ.