Where We Never Expected to Be

In Acts 15 the church is in a crisis. Jewish Christian have been telling Gentile Christian that they must also keep the Old Law and old ways to be saved. This isn’t so but the leadership in the church knows that this issue is going away soon. That have to balance their response to keep Gentiles in right behavior without adding the burden of the Old Law to them.

Eventually, they write a letter outlining the principles they want the Gentiles to follow. To ensure the validity of the letter they send it with people on both sides of the issue, Paul and Barnabas, who were familiar to the Gentile Christian, and Judas and Silas well know men in the brotherhood.

This seems to settle down the problems and after they spend some time with Antioch they make plans to travel back home. Yet, an interesting note is found in Acts 15:34.

“But it seemed good to Silas to remain there.”

I wonder what caused that? It wouldn’t be the place you expect a Jewish boy like Silas to want to stay at. Maybe the excitement of the things happing there interested him. Maybe he likes the congregation. Whatever the reason, it takes his life in an unexpected direction. Soon he is off with Paul on a missionary journey. Months traveling, nights in prison, doing all kinds of work in the Lord’s service he never had expected. What was going to be a few weeks to Antioch and back became a new life traversing the world.

We too might find ourselves in place we never expected to be. Life situations that have changed in ways we never expected. We can resent them or we can embrace them. Like Silas we look and see the good that can be there. Opportunities to serve. Changes that can do a greater good. Chances to expand our horizons.

We might not know where things are going but we can know if we follow the will of God, he will use us for the greater good in whatever place we might find ourselves, even if it is a place we never expected to be.

Comments

I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...

Master Your Self

In a contest for the toughest president of the United States, it would be hard to go against Theodore Roosevelt. He was known for his “manly” pursuits hunting big game, climbing the Matterhorn, participating in boxing match while president. (These weren’t play fights, he lost the vision on one eye because of them!) Once before he was about to give a speech an assassin shot him in the chest. Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital and insisted on giving his speech, still wearing his blood-soaked shirt! Teddy might have become tough but he wasn’t born that way. He was a sickly child that suffered from severe asthma that almost proved fatal. As was a young boy, doctors discovered that he had a weak heart, and advised him to get a desk job and not strain himself. He was homeschooled because of his many illnesses and spent most of his time indoors. But then as a teen his father, whom Teddy Roosevelt revered, told his son, “ ...

Why Does A Lion Tamer Use a Chair?

Ok, I know you have seen the image. A lion tamer enters in the cage of the beast and forces it to obey his commands using a whip, a gun and a chair. Now you can see how the whip and gun could come in handy but you might be wondering why a chair would intimidate an animal as powerful as a lion? Clyde Beatty taming a lion with a chair It's not that the lion is afraid of the chair -- it's that the lion is confused by the chair. Cats are single-minded, and the points of the chair's four legs bobbing around confuse the lion enough that it loses its train of thought. Casually put, the chair distracts the lion from wanting to claw the lion tamer's face off. The powerful creature could destroy the chair in moment’s notice but instead it is distracted into submission. It’s not too much different than how Satan controls us today. By the power of God we could overcome anything that he would use to subdue us. We can overcome the evil one (1 st John 2:13-14). ...

Ecclesiastes 12:10

Search This Blog