In Peter Allison's sermon titled 'Entering Through Tribulation,' he explores Acts chapter 14, where Paul faces persecution in Lystra. The sermon highlights the challenges and tribulations faced by early Christians, emphasizing that entering the Kingdom of God requires enduring hardships. Allison draws parallels between peer pressure in modern social contexts and the biblical accounts of crowd behavior, illustrating how easily people can be swayed by the majority. He discusses the irrationality of crowds, using examples from both scripture and modern experiments, to show how anonymity and the desire to conform can lead to unjust actions. The sermon also delves into the commitment required to be a disciple of Christ, emphasizing love for Christ above all, taking up one's cross, and being willing to forsake everything for the sake of the Gospel. Paul is portrayed as a model disciple, returning to the cities where he faced persecution to strengthen and encourage new believers. Allison concludes by urging believers to remain steadfast in faith, relying on God's promises and presence in times of trial.

Please turn in your Bibles to Acts chapter 14. I'd like to begin reading at verse 19. Paul has been preaching at Lystra, And we pick up the account in verse 19. Then Jews from Antioch and Iconium came there, and having persuaded the multitudes, they stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing him to be dead. However, when the disciples gathered around him, he rose up and went into the city, and the next day he departed with Barnabas to Derbe.

And when they had preached the gospel in that city and made many disciples, they returned to Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch, strengthening the souls of the disciples and exhorting them to continue in the faith, and saying, We must through many tribulations enter the Kingdom of God. May His commandments ever be with us to make us wiser than our enemies. Heavenly Father, please open our hearts to receive Your Word with meekness. Please sanctify us by Your Word. Transform our thinking and enable us to be doers of Your Word.

May Your Word be mixed with faith this morning. And please sanctify my sinful lips to proclaim the Gospel of Your grace. In Jesus' name, Amen. Amen. Well, a professor from Indiana University recently, in the last couple of years, ran an experiment using a news literacy app that he had developed called Fakery.

In this game that he developed, or his team developed, his university lab. It simulates a news feed like you would see on Facebook or Twitter or one of the other social sites where they feed you news headlines. Players in this app called Fakery see a mix of articles from a wide variety of sources and they get points for sharing or liking news from reliable sources or for flagging fake articles as articles that are fake and need to be fact checked. So this professor and his team found that players are more likely to share and less likely to flag articles when the players can see that many others have engaged with those articles. In other words, exposure to the engagement metric, what the other people are doing, If they can see what everybody else is doing with respect to that particular article, then it changes what they do with it.

In other words, exposure to this engagement metric creates a vulnerability, which can make something go viral for no other reason than that a lot of other people are sharing it. And you see, this is exactly what can happen in a physical crowd. Because in a physical crowd, people see immediate feedback on how many people are doing something, And how many people are going along with something? And this happens in a physical crowd for a number of reasons. One, due to the anonymity of a crowd, and the veiling or the hiding, the concealing of individual identity in a crowd, people are more given to a loss of self-control, producing a measure of spontaneity and even irrationality.

There are examples of this, and we see in our life, but there's examples in Jerusalem of this, where in the Gospels the chief priests would stir up the crowd, so that Pilate would do the very irrational thing of releasing Barabbas to them, a murderer and a sedition, a murderer and somebody guilty of sedition. And this very same crowd, a pilot wanting to gratify the crowd, would release Barnabas to them and deliver Jesus after He had scourged Him to be crucified. Why would you want a seditious murderer released and an innocent man crucified? It seems irrational. And in a social context, There is also a similarly strong desire to go along with the crowd.

It's called peer pressure. And while children we might think of as most susceptible to this, It affects us adults, too. There's an experiment that was done on a TV program called Brain Games. I think it was sponsored by National Geographic. And a few years ago, they conducted one of their games I think it was Episode or season 5 one of their games was They they hired a bunch of actors to play patients in a waiting room of an eye clinic, and then they advertised for free eye exams.

And so all the people that were paid actors in the waiting room were told that when they hear a certain bell sound, they were to rise and then sit down. And so this unsuspecting person came in to the eye clinic, because they'd been told they could get a free eye exam, and they sit down in the waiting room of this clinic. So all they know is that they went to an eye clinic and they're going to get a free eye exam. And as they're sitting in the clinic they see everybody in the waiting room and there's maybe 10 or 15 other people stand up when this bell rings. And they look around and you watch them on the hidden camera.

And After about the third time they start standing up too For no other reason than that everybody else is standing up and sitting down when the when the when this tone sounds But it gets worse because one by one, all the paid people go back in and have their eye exam and leave. And now you're down to just the one person that walked in, who knows nothing about what's going on, other than that they're waiting in a waiting room to get a free eye exam. And the bell sounds and guess what happens? They stand. Well then other people start coming into this clinic.

They also are thinking they're going to get a free eye exam. And they sit down, and the first person walks in, and there's this person in the room standing up and sitting down every time the tone sounds. Guess what? The second person starts standing up and sitting down when the tone sounds. And you can kind of see the glances between each of them.

One of them says, well, why are we doing this? The first guy is, why are we doing this? He says, well, I don't know. This is just what we're doing. And you can watch as this waiting room fills back up again, all with people who have no idea, who have been told anything other than they're getting a free eye exam.

Pretty soon, the whole waiting room, another 10 to 15 people, are standing up and sitting down when the bell sounds. The Bible warns us about this aspect of crowds. It says in Exodus 23, 2, you shall not follow a crowd to do evil. Why? Because this is what we are prone in our sinful nature to do, to value and put weight on the example of others around us, more than that we put weight on the Word of God.

You shall not follow a crowd to do evil, nor shall you testify in a dispute, so as to turn aside after many to pervert justice." See, that can happen on a jury. Once 10 or 11 think that someone is guilty or innocent, or people just think that 10 or 11 are going a certain way, there's a lot of pressure to follow the crowd, even to a guilty sentence. I have a friend who was convicted right here in Conroe, just a few blocks away, of a crime. It was a case of lawfare before that term was coined. And afterwards, one of the jurors called him up in tears at having gone along with the crowd in a conviction.

See, the anonymity of the crowd and the desire to go along with the group, to conform to what everybody else is doing are two temptations that must be resisted. Proverbs contains a number of similar warnings like Exodus about the temptation to do with the crowd something that you would not do on your own. And something like this is what happened in Lystra. Jews came from Antioch and Iconium. They came a long way.

This was not a convenient thing. This was a major inconvenience. This was a major commitment to travel tens or fifty miles away to another city just to make trouble for Paul. This was organized, obviously. These Jews traveled from two different cities, and they traveled a significant distance to oppose Paul.

So they were organized. And this happened to Paul on several occasions. In Acts 17, when the Jews from Thessalonica heard that the Word of God was preached by Paul at Berea, they came there and stirred up the crowds. In Acts 21, when he was in Jerusalem, the Jews from Asia, seeing him in the temple, stirred up the whole crowd. Remember that was the occasion of his arrest and his imprisonment.

You see, Paul's own people here are the source of affliction. These people, these Jews, these were the church members. And here they are, opposing the missionary, the evangelist, the apostle of the very God that they claim to serve. You see, opposition, affliction, oppression doesn't just come from the people outside the church, sometimes it comes from within. Sometimes it can come from within a family.

Jesus was crucified by his own people, his own flesh and blood, his countrymen. Now we're going to ask, why are the Jews so upset with Paul that they would be willing to put down their lives and organize a crowd to travel to a distant city. Well, first, Satan opposes Christ and His people at every point. But he opposes the hardest, where The Gospel is having the greatest impact. And Paul was having an impact on these communities.

There were many people that were being converted. Even Jews were believing and leaving the Satanic Jewish Talmudic cult. Paul was also upsetting their apple cart. He was pulling people away from them. And loss of control Angers, angry people.

Loss of control. Angers, angry people. It's the control that they see going away. That's what makes them angry. When you see an angry man in a family, it's loss of control.

And they stir up the crowd. Why can they stir up the crowd? Well, Paul and Barnabas had just rejected their gift. They had come out to sacrifice to them as gods, and they are rebuffed. They are told, no, not just No, but what you're doing is horribly wrong.

No. And when a gift is spurned, it takes a lot of maturity not to be offended. If you've ever had a gift rejected by somebody, you know how easy it is to be offended at that. Paul had also been preaching that their gods were useless. In fact, they weren't even gods, he was telling them.

He said, turn away from these useless things. That they weren't gods, they were of the same nature as they were. And so these people were emotionally ripe. This crowd was emotionally ripe for persuasion. And so this then is where very significant persecution begins for Paul.

He's endured hardships, the trials and the trips and so on, the opposition, people opposing him has certainly been difficult, but now comes very intense persecution. Paul is stoned and dragged out of the city, presumed to be dead. And we know that this was driven by the Jews and not the Gentiles because of the method of the attempted execution. Greeks or Romans would have beheaded someone or beaten them to death. Stoning was something that's unique to the Jews.

The Jews stoned people for blasphemy. And just like with Stephen and Christ in their rage, they didn't even follow their own laws. They should have taken him outside of the city. There should have been a trial. There should have been witnesses and so forth, but we don't read anything of that.

They simply stir up a mob and they stone him right in the city. Romans and Greeks would have probably just left someone there. But the Jews, It's interesting how wicked people always want to give some semblance of lawfulness to what they're doing. It always amazed me that communists would bother to have a trial when you knew what the outcome was before the trial started, or the Nazis. For example, the trial of Sophie Scholl and Hans Scholl and their third partner.

Complete sham trial. They want to kill these people. Why do they bother having a trial? Because they want to give it a veneer of respectability, of lawfulness. And so, here are these Jews, after they've broken the law in every possible way, and stoned an innocent man so they think he's dead, now they're concerned about, well, We can't let His body lie in the city.

We need to drag it out of the city. So they drag Him out of the city and they leave Him for dead. But we see Secondly, the disciples identify with Him. The disciples, when Jesus was arrested, all scattered from Him. Peter disowned even knowing who Christ was.

But here these disciples identify with Paul. They gather around his body, and that's a courageous thing to do. Because here's somebody that's just been stoned, and when they identify with that person and show sympathy or show connection, they risk themselves being stoned or mistreated. And so that took courage on their part. To gather around his body, to come out and gather around his body, and openly show their support and affection for this man who's just been stoned.

Now, it would not appear that Paul was actually dead, but was instead severely hurt. Luke says that they supposed that he was dead. And that often means that they believed something that wasn't quite accurate. He uses the same thing when he says in Luke 1, or not Luke 1, but when he says, I think it's Luke 3, that Joseph as supposed was the son of so and so. Or Jesus, sorry, it was supposed that he was the son of Joseph.

He wasn't physically descended from Joseph. He was physically descended from Mary, and was pregnant by the Holy Spirit. So people suppose that Jesus was a physical descendant of Joseph. I think he is saying here that their belief was mistaken, that he was actually dead. They supposed he was dead and That may have been that it certainly would be that he was severely wounded he may have been unconscious And it's surprising that they would not recognize that he wasn't dead, but remember they're in a rage and mobs do irrational things.

And so in their rage and irrationality they miss what's obvious that he wasn't dead. Maybe his pulse was very weak, but probably they never bothered to check any of those things. He just was Unconscious not moving they took him out But I think there is a miracle here nonetheless. As these disciples gather around Him, Luke doesn't say that they were praying, but I imagine that's what they were doing. But there's certainly a miracle here in that he's able to get up and walk into the city, and then the next day he's able to depart on a trip with Barnabas to Derbe.

I mean, a man who's just been stoned is probably not walking too well, especially if they've been knocked unconscious. They're bloody, they're bruised, maybe some bones are broken. Stones of this kind were designed to kill people. The first stone would often knock somebody out, so they'd be unconscious for the rest. But it was a gruesome thing.

It was done humanely in that the first stone would have knocked people unconscious. But for him to be able to just get up after being stoned and walk back into the city and then leave on a trip the next day, there's a miracle there. He was healed. And it was done, it was a miracle that was done through these disciples as they gathered around Him. He arose and went up and went into the city.

The next thing that we see about Paul's enduring of affliction is that he returns to the very city where he was stoned. There were disciples in this city of Lystra. Timothy was from Lystra and we'll be introduced to him in a couple of chapters. And on his second journey, when Paul came back through this city, he took Timothy with him. Paul went back into this very city that had just stoned him because of his concern for these disciples, he wanted them to know that he was okay.

He wanted to be sure to encourage them in the faith before he departed to the next place that he had to go preach. And so the next day he travels to Derby, being probably pretty bruised and sore, but he presses on. I don't think he was just trying to get out of the city. And I say that because he'd been stoned there. And I say that because he returns to it, as we'll see a short time later.

I think he was driven by a zeal, an overriding zeal to complete his ministry that he'd been given to preach to the Gentiles. And Derbe was the next city that he needed to go to. Paul had an overriding zeal to preach the Gospel, to serve Christ. He told the Ephesian elders in Acts 20 that he was going to go bound to Jerusalem not knowing the things that would happen to him there except that the Holy Spirit had testified in every city that chains and tribulations awaited him when he got there. But here's what he says about those chains and tribulations.

That the Holy Spirit testified he would face. He said, but none of these things move me, nor do I count my life Dear to myself, that I may finish my race with joy in the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus to testify to the Gospel of the grace of God. None of these things move me, Paul said. And that wasn't just words. He demonstrates that.

He's stoned and he gets up and walks right back into the city that stoned him. None of these things move me. And I don't count my life dear to myself so that I may finish my race with joy." That's his own race. And also the ministry which he's received from the Lord Jesus to testify to the Gospel of the grace of God. That's what moved him.

We also see that Paul in his ministry doesn't just hold a revival for a couple days and leave town. Paul made disciples. And that's work. Paul made the learners. Disciples are those who are studying the Word of God in the school of Christ.

Disciples are those who are people who are following Christ. And Paul wanted to make disciples. He didn't just want bare converts who fell away a few months, weeks, or even a year after he left. Now what does that mean practically? What does it mean to make a disciple?

What does it mean to be a disciple? I think there are three very practical implications that are given in the Scripture of being a disciple of Christ. The first is that We love Christ more than anything else. Luke 14, 26 says, If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, Yes, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. Cannot be my disciple.

To hate father or mother, wife and children, and so forth, means to love father and mother, wife and children less than our love of Christ. Now to our Western ears, that sounds confusing. Because we think of love as primarily a feeling instead of primarily a duty. We think of it as a mushy emotion, sentimentalism, but it's really primarily a duty. That's why in the Bible, the law is summed up in terms of love.

Love is the fulfilling of the law. It says nothing there about how we feel or our sentiments. It says, are we keeping the law? That's love. And so in this passage, to hate is really to love less.

That means when we are forced to choose between pleasing a person, even if it's a spouse, or obeying the Lord, we obey the Lord. Now there's a way to do that that is pleasing to the Lord, and there's a way to do that that is not pleasing to the Lord, especially when we're dealing with somebody in authority. But this is why Matthew puts the same thing in Matthew 10.37. He just says, He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. And he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

That's what it means to hate spouses or fathers or mothers or children, or brothers or sisters. See, Joseph could tell Potiphar, the wife of Potiphar, his master, the one who had total control over his life. Remember, he's a slave in a pagan land where the life of a slave was worthless. But he could tell his master's wife when she tried to entice him to commit adultery, he could say, there is no one greater in this house than I, nor has he kept back anything from me because you are His wife. How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?" Joseph knew what that meant, to refuse his master like that?

Or Job could tell his wife when she urged him to curse God and die, he said, you speak as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we indeed accept good from God? And shall we not accept adversity? And in all this, Job did not sin with his lips. He loved God more than his wife.

We love our spouses, of course. We love our parents. We love our children. We love our family and our brothers and sisters. But if we don't love Christ more, then we cannot be His disciples.

If we're not willing to risk offending our own family because of what our duty to Christ requires, then we cannot be disciples of Christ. The second requirement of a disciple is that we take up our cross and follow Him. In Luke 14, the next verse, Jesus says, and whoever does not bear his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple." Now taking up our cross, or bearing our cross, is different than simply suffering. To take up our cross is something that is initiated on our end. Something that we voluntarily and willingly choose to do.

We leave our comforts in order to follow Christ, knowing that our service may very well involve loss, maybe even loss of life. And Jesus goes on to talk about counting the cost. Because this is a decision, a voluntary choice that we are making to leave the comfort, just to risk the things that we have in order to follow Christ. You see, that's very different than just having an affliction come upon us, not through our choice. Taking up our cross is where we are choosing to follow Christ, recognizing that there will be a cost involved in that decision.

Taking up a cross as a fireman rushing into a burning building to save people. You didn't have to do that. It's a bodyguard throwing themselves between the bullets and the body they are guarding. That's taking up your cross. This is what Christ calls us to do.

If we're not willing to bear our cross and come after Him, then we cannot be His disciple. That's what He says. You cannot. It's a requirement. And thirdly, The third requirement and characteristic that Jesus gives of what it is to be His disciple is that we're willing to leave everything.

It's closely related to taking up our cross. Luke 14.33, So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has, cannot be my disciple." Taking up our cross to follow Christ simply means commitment to the point of giving up. Our hopes, our dreams, our possessions, even our very life, if that's what God calls us to do. This is the attitude. This is the only acceptable attitude of a true disciple of Jesus Christ.

If we're not willing to forsake all that we have, if we're not willing to walk away from it, voluntarily forsake it for the sake of Christ. Then Jesus says, He cannot be my disciple. This is what Paul wanted to make. This is what he was making. He was making disciples.

That's what he says. He preached in the Gospel in that city, and he made disciples. This requires a lot of training. It requires teaching. It requires hard work on Paul's part.

It requires sacrifice on his part. And notice that he wasn't content with a few, he made many disciples. They worked hard. He wasn't content with a small harvest. And God blessed their labors with many converts, but also many disciples.

This wasn't Paul preaching to a stadium filled with tens of thousands of people and then walking away and having all those converts fall away. This was Paul making many disciples. People who loved Christ more than their family, who were willing to take up their cross and follow Him, and who were willing to forsake everything. That's what He made. And then after he's done in Derbe, it says that he returned to the very city where he'd been so horribly mistreated and abused.

He went back to Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch. Why? He went back because he had a love for the people of God and a desire to bring the Gospel to them that overrode all the tribulations that came. You see, by returning to the cities where they'd been so severely abused, where Paul had been stoned, Paul and Barnabas are taking up their cross and following Christ. And Paul returned to these very cities to strengthen the converts that were there.

That's why he went back. In verse 22, they returned to Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch, strengthening the souls of the disciples and exhorting them to continue in the faith. Paul returned to strengthen these converts because these were new Christians who like Timothy probably had unbelieving families. And they needed to be strengthened lest the trials and the tribulations that come with being a disciple of Christ would scorch them to death. They would be like that seed that falls on the rocks that sprouts up immediately but has no roots and doesn't survive the hot sun.

Paul came back to strengthen those converts so that they weren't scorched by the sun. Now how did Paul do this? Well, it says he exhorted them. I'm sure that He exhorted them to do this. He exhorted them that through many tribulations we enter the Kingdom of God.

If they stoned Paul, they would not have treated Paul's disciples or the converts under His ministry very kindly either. And so they needed to know that what was happening to them, what they would be experiencing as converts undergoing tribulation, that this was to be expected. Paul may have used passages like Isaiah 43, 1 and 2, because you remember the New Testament hasn't been written yet. He's comforting them. He's exhorting them out of the Old testament.

Isaiah 43 says, But now thus says the Lord who created you, O Jacob, and He who formed you, O Israel, fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by your name. You are Mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. And through the rivers, they shall not overflow you.

When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned, nor shall the flames scorch you." This is how Paul exhorted them, that we must through many tribulations enter the Kingdom of God. But notice that along with these words of exhortation, that when we walk through the fire, We won't be burned. The Lord is walking with us. But He didn't just strengthen them with words, He strengthened them with His example. The very fact that He would be willing to come back to the city where He had just been stoned and return so quickly from Derbe to minister to them was probably one of the most encouraging things that he could have done.

See, he identified with them. He was willing to risk His own life to be with them. And that surely was a great encouragement to them. So He was encouraging them not just with His words, but with His life. He was in His own example embodying what a true disciple of Christ was.

Somebody who loved Christ and His people more than his own family. Somebody who was willing to take up his cross and follow Christ. Somebody who was willing to forsake everything, including his life, to follow Christ, to minister to his people, to fulfill this ministry that he'd been given by the Lord Jesus Christ, to proclaim the gospel of grace. May God give us His grace that we can be His disciples, taking up our cross, following Him, willing to risk everything for Him. Heavenly Father, we thank You for Your Word, without which we would wander in ignorance and darkness.

And we thank You for Your Spirit that teaches us and that grows us. And we thank You most of all, Lord, that You are present with us. That Your promise to us is that You will never leave us and never forsake us. And that is not an empty promise for to You all authority in heaven and earth has been given. And You are able to protect, to defend, to preserve, to strengthen.

For Lord, all of this world, You govern and you control for your own glory. Lord, we ask that you might make us your disciples and give to us a zeal for your kingdom, even as Paul had in Barnabas, and those who traveled with them. Or may you give us a boldness, for you have said that the righteous are as bold as a lion. May we have that kind of boldness. That we fear no man because we fear You.

And we pray, Lord, that Your Word might dwell richly in us. And Your promise that when we walk through the fire, You are walking with us. You haven't promised that we won't walk through the fire, but Your promise is that You are with us in the fire. And that the waters will not overflow us and the flame will not scorch us. Lord, may we believe your word and trust in it.

In Jesus' name, Amen. Thank you.