Teaching Summary: What Now? (Acts) A Script for Brokenness
Acts 14:1-18
As human beings, we want everything to be right in the world around us. We want the people we love to be whole. We want our children to be healthy and secure. We want our friends to find peace in their relationships. We want the sick to be healed and the grieving to be comforted. But that’s not the world we live in, is it? Somebody in your life is struggling right now, a friend whose marriage is falling apart, a neighbor who just got the diagnosis, a coworker who can’t seem to catch a break no matter how hard they try. And when you’re standing close enough to actually feel it, something in you wants to respond. What can I do? What should I do? Is this even mine to carry? We feel the weight of other people’s brokenness, and we don’t always know what to do with it.
Here’s the truth underneath the question. God has appeared in human history and written an alternate ending for a broken world. A story that begins in the garden, corrupted by sin, but does not end in death. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, sin and death have been defeated. All that was lost is found. All that was broken is restored. We are a resurrection people, called to bear God’s image once more, called to join God in the renewal of all things, including the renewal happening in the very people around us. But most days, we forget. And when we forget, we’re left to face other people’s brokenness in our own strength, overcommitting until we burn out, or shrinking back into silence.
Acts 14 gives us a picture of what it looks like to move toward brokenness the right way. Paul and Barnabas arrive in Iconium and do what they’ve been doing all along, speaking the truth about Jesus. Many believe, but opposition rises fast, and a plot to stone them forces them out to Lystra. That’s the pattern of this whole mission. Wherever the gospel goes, opposition follows. It isn’t a sign something has gone wrong, it’s a sign something real is happening. We’re fighting a battle Jesus has already won, and the enemy simply refuses to surrender.
In Lystra, there’s a man who has never walked a single step in his life, lame from birth. Maybe that’s not your story, but you know somebody living some version of it. A body that keeps failing. A marriage that never got off the ground. A grief that never really lifts, it just gets carried differently. Some brokenness is too big to fix no matter how hard we try, and most of us have been handed a script that tells us otherwise. Walter Brueggemann named it well, the therapeutic, technological, consumerist script. If something’s wrong inside someone, therapy and self-improvement will eventually sort it out. If something’s wrong around them, enough money or technology or effort will eventually fix it. None of that is bad advice exactly, but it isn’t enough, and it’s easy to run that same script on other people’s pain. Recommending a good therapist, sending a helpful article, paying for someone’s groceries, none of that is wrong. But if that’s all we ever do, if we help from a safe distance and never learn a name, never show up, never actually commit to pray for the person in front of us, we’ve dressed up the old script in gospel language and called it love. The story of Jesus is good news because it’s the story of how God came near. He didn’t send help from a distance. He took on flesh and lived among us. Jesus didn’t just help us. He became us.
When we run into brokenness like this, we tend to respond one of two ways. We size down, deciding it’s too much, too painful, not ours to touch. Or we size up, charging in and trying to fix it ourselves, carrying weight that was never ours to carry. Both feel like solutions. Neither one is.
Paul looks at the lame man and sees that he has faith to be healed. He tells him to stand, and the man jumps up and walks. The crowd sees it, and instead of asking questions, they shout that the gods have come down in human form. They call Barnabas Zeus and Paul Hermes, and the priest of the temple of Zeus shows up with bulls and wreaths ready to sacrifice. Before we shake our heads at them, we should recognize what’s actually happening underneath it. This isn’t really about paganism, it’s about pain. This crowd is just as exhausted by a broken world as we are, and here’s a man who couldn’t walk, walking. Of course they reach for that. It isn’t stupidity, it’s hope, aimed at the wrong place.
When Paul and Barnabas hear what’s happening, they tear their clothes and rush into the crowd. We too are only human, like you, they shout. Turn from these worthless things to the living God who made heaven and earth. Think about what just happened. Glory was on the table, free, no effort required. All they had to do was stay quiet and let the crowd believe what it wanted to believe. Go back to the garden for a moment. Adam and Eve were not offered equality with God, they reached for it, and it broke everything. Paul and Barnabas stand in almost the same spot and do the opposite. Philippians 2 tells us Jesus, though he existed in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped. He emptied himself. That’s the pattern Paul and Barnabas live out in Lystra. Where Adam and Eve reached for glory that was never theirs, Paul and Barnabas let go of glory that was actually being handed to them. That’s what resurrection people look like.
We’ve been handed a script, but Paul and Barnabas hand Lystra a truer one, three lines worth carrying with us. God is with us, present in Lystra long before any missionary arrived, in rain and crops and joy, and present with the people we love even in the waiting. God is working, not through Paul’s power but through an ordinary man willing to be used, the way he still works through a nurse who sits with someone in their last hours, or a friend who shows up with a meal and doesn’t leave when it gets quiet. And God is worthy, worthy long after the miracle fades from memory, which is exactly why we don’t have to keep finding new miracles to believe in.
Brokenness will keep finding the people we love. We’ll be tempted to manage it in our own strength, sizing down or sizing up. Paul and Barnabas show us a third way. Move toward the brokenness. Don’t shrink back from it. But when God chooses to work, even through you, don’t absorb the glory. Point past yourself. Stay human-sized.
