{"id":10017,"date":"2022-01-03T06:38:03","date_gmt":"2022-01-03T12:38:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/devotional-on-acts-7\/"},"modified":"2021-12-28T14:59:29","modified_gmt":"2021-12-28T20:59:29","slug":"devotional-on-acts-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/devotional-on-acts-7\/","title":{"rendered":"Devotional on Acts"},"content":{"rendered":"
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2014 – Mt Rainier National Park<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

How not to win friends and influence people<\/p>\n

Acts 7: And you continue, so bullheaded. <\/p>\n

The ragged transition in righteous Stephen\u2019s sermon feels so out of place. He\u2019s been debating with the religious leaders, and winning, so they come up with a scheme to lie about him and get him arrested. The charge is that Stephen claims Jesus of Nazareth is going to destroy the Temple and toss out the customs of Moses. Stephen\u2019s defense begins innocently enough. For some reason he decides to recount the history of their people, from Abraham on. Everything he says is plain vanilla, middle of the road facts that every Jew knows. After several minutes of this walk through history Stephen arrives at the story of the building of the Temple. Now those who have made the charge that Stephen says the Temple is going to be destroyed by Jesus sit up and take notice. When Stephen reminds them that their own Scriptures state that God doesn\u2019t live in any building made by man they, I think, decide he\u2019s about to say the Temple isn\u2019t important at all. Although it isn\u2019t recorded in this passage, I believe that people start shouting Stephen down. That\u2019s when he drops out of his sermon and responds by calling them \u201cbullheaded,\u201d \u201ctraitors,\u201d and \u201cmurderers.\u201d His enemies don\u2019t take kindly to being thus accused and the result is that the mob lives down to Stephen\u2019s description of them as murderers. I know I\u2019m not anything close to being worthy of making a judgment call on this good man who, even as he\u2019s being murdered prays for those doing the horrible deed. Still, I can\u2019t help but wonder if things might have turned out differently had Stephen responded differently. It seems to me that when he gets into a shouting match with his adversaries that his opportunity to make any case at all is lost. Again, I know I\u2019m not in a position to judge here but I think Christians are almost always more effective in spreading the Good News of Jesus when they live servant-lives, humble and kind. After all, Jesus said that when we\u2019re rejected we\u2019re to shake the dust off our feet and meekly move on. That feels a lot different to me than telling people they\u2019re bullheaded murderers.<\/p>\n

Take Away: Likely the best way to influence people for Christ is to take on the role of a servant while avoiding calling them names! <\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How not to win friends and influence people Acts 7: And you continue, so bullheaded. The ragged transition in righteous Stephen\u2019s sermon feels so out of place. He\u2019s been debating with the religious leaders, and winning, so they come up with a scheme to lie about him and get him arrested. The charge is that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1485,1428],"tags":[1268,1274,1276,1064],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10017"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10017"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10017\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15917,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10017\/revisions\/15917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/pastorscott\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}