Are you where you want to be missionally? Are you content with your impact for the Kingdom that God has assigned to you? What’s keeping you from the missional living you are called to?

God’s grace to us in this is that there’s hope to live missionally in the face of our fears. God’s grace is not a grace that lets you get away with something, God’s grace is grace that lets you get to do what He’s called you to do.

Three scenes that teach us two lessons to solidify one point:

1. Live missionally when they wrongly persecute you (1-7)

- The truth we see time and time again in Scripture and certainly along Paul’s missionary journeys is this - opposition, division, and persecution in response to the Gospel is not a sign of failure - it’s actually a sign of obedience!

- The pattern of missional living:

- Obedience bred fruit (1)
- Fruit bred opposition (2)
- Opposition bred obedience (3)
- God released them for what’s next (4-7)

Have you been avoiding or given up on missional living because you might be wrongly persecuted? Has the possibility of opposition, division, or persecution been keeping you from obedience? When we’re tempted to think that “Having a tough time for the Gospel can’t be what God has for me” - are you sure? It seems as though it was all that He had for the early church - what would make you and I different?

2. Live missionally when they wrongly praise you (8-21a)

- The pattern of missional living appears once again: Obedience bred fruit (8-10), Fruit bred opposition (11-13), Opposition bred obedience (14-20a), and God released them for what’s next (20b-21a).

- Wrongly placed praise is opposition because attention to the gifts of the Gospel messenger cause distraction from and blindness to the Gospel message, opposing the purpose of the Gospel message and Gospel messenger!

- When the people wrongly persecuted them in Iconium, we have no record of them defending themselves, only the Gospel message. Yet when people wrongly praised them, they did everything they could to show they weren’t worthy of praise.

Is there some wrongly placed praise of others in your life that you need to do something with? When people praise you, do you walk a little taller, or do you do everything you can to reorient the praise of people to the one true God, and then keep living missionally?

3. Live missionally for the one who is worthy to be praised (21b-28)

- What does missional living for the one who is worthy to be praised look like?

- Praising God (21, 24-25, 26-28)
- Preparing people (22-23)

How can you and I live missionally like Paul and Barnabas? Paul and Barnabas evidently cared far more about what happened to the Gospel message than what happened to the Gospel messenger. What’s more important to you: what happens to the Gospel message or the Gospel messenger?

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