Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Acts 14:8-18, NASB
- Series: Sent for the Sake of the Gospel (2026), no. 12
- Date: Sunday, August 23, 2026 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
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Let Jesus Be the Hero
This morning, we’re going to be in Acts chapter 14. This morning and next Sunday will be the last two installments of this series we’ve done through the summer on being sent for the sake of the gospel, and after that, Lord willing, we will return to our study of Luke. But as we prepare to finish up, I wanted to look at this passage this morning as a reminder that, as we go and put into practice the things we’ve studied and try to be more intentional and purposeful in sharing the gospel and making disciples, it matters how we do it. If we’re serving the Lord faithfully, there’s a likelihood that people will notice that. There’s a likelihood that people will comment on it and will credit us for it. And there’s nothing wrong with the encouragement, but very easily the encouragement can morph into us taking credit. It’s a dangerous thing to take credit for something that we didn’t do. It’s a dangerous thing to take credit for somebody else’s work.
Anytime I have merely carried breakfast to the little girls after Charla has slaved over a hot stove and they’ve said, “Thank you, Daddy, for making us breakfast,” I knew it would be a dangerous thing to take credit for having made the breakfast. I’m just the delivery vehicle. On top of that, frequently pans of things will make their way to my house after we have some kind of meal here. Some of you will say, “Here, take this home. I don’t want it.” And I get that. I’ve cooked things before that I don’t want to look at anymore after I’ve spent the time cooking them. But things will come to our house that we will serve to the kids. And I did not make that and don’t put that kind of pressure on me to make some of the things you all make. It’s a lot of pressure to take that credit. Anytime we take credit for something that’s not our work, there’s a danger involved. Whether it’s stealing credit from the one who really did it, thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought to, or even putting additional pressure on ourselves, there is danger involved.
This is true when it comes to the work of the gospel as well. We’re called to make disciples. We’re called—and what that means, if we go back to the Great Commission, is that as we go through life, we are being witnesses for Christ so that people who don’t know Christ have the opportunity to know Him, and those who do know Him have the opportunity to be strengthened in what they know and in following Him. That’s the Great Commission. That’s making disciples: leading people to Christ and helping them follow Him.
If we’re doing that, there’s a danger that we might start to think we deserve more credit than we really do. As I said, that can also put added pressure on us. I’ve told you before, it took me far too long to realize, “The Holy Spirit is involved in this,” because I thought if I could just come up with the right argument, the right combination of words, I’d be able to convince everybody. I’d be able to defeat any argument. If I could just work it out right, I thought I could do it. That was a lot of pressure.
Because I was trying to figure out a way for me to do something that wasn’t in my power to do. The Holy Spirit is the one who draws people to Christ. But He calls on us to speak what we know and to live what we know and to be available.
I want to look this morning at a passage about Paul and Barnabas from Acts chapter 14 that gives us some insight into how we can avoid taking the credit that we don’t deserve, both for our good and for the good of others around us, letting Jesus be the hero of the story. And I had to chuckle when we were having praise team practice before church this morning. That first song we sang of the three, the chorus called Him the “Hero of Heaven.” I didn’t plan that. The Lord must have planned that. See, I’m not taking credit. I didn’t plan it that way, but I thought that goes along perfectly with what we’re talking about this morning, that Jesus should always be the hero in every one of our stories. And so we’re going to look at Acts chapter 14 this morning, and this opportunity Paul and Barnabas had to take credit and how they declined it.
When the Crowd Gives the Wrong Credit
Starting in verse 8, here’s what Luke records of their journey.
In Lystra, a man was sitting whose feet were incapacitated. He had been disabled from his mother’s womb and had never walked. This man was listening to Paul as he spoke. Paul looked at him intently and saw that he had faith to be made well, and he said with a loud voice, stand upright on your feet. And the man leaped up and began to walk. When the crowd saw what Paul had done, they raised their voices, saying in the Lycanian language, the gods have become like men and have come down to us. And they began calling Barnabas Zeus and Paul Hermes, since he was the chief speaker.
How would you like that? This one must be Hermes because he talks a lot.
Moreover, the priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought oxen and garlands to the gates and wanted to offer sacrifice with the crowds. But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard about it, they tore their robes and rushed out into the crowd, crying out and saying, Men, why are you doing these things? We are also men of the same nature as you, preaching the gospel to you, to turn from these useless things to a living God who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything that is in them. In past generations, he permitted all the nations to go their own ways, yet he did not leave himself without witness in that he did good and gave you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness. And even by saying these things only with difficulty did they restrain the crowds from offering sacrifices to them.
Why Lystra Thought They Were Gods
When we come to the beginning of this passage, Paul and Barnabas are doing the normal things Paul and Barnabas do. You might say, “Well, they healed the man. They told him to get up. That’s a normal thing Paul and Barnabas do.” In that day and age, God gave to the apostles the power of healing under certain circumstances to validate their message, especially when they went to pagan areas where they could go back to the Old Testament and talk about the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled as part of the basis of their gospel message.
They could do that, but the pagan Greeks didn’t know or care anything about the Old Testament scriptures. What they were looking for were signs, and this was a particularly powerful way of indicating there is truth in what we’re speaking. There is supernatural power in this message. It’s not just something we made up.
As they’re healing people, it’s like with Jesus: they’re not walking around healing people to put on a show and attract a following. They are healing people as a bridge toward people hearing the gospel message. They’re preaching the gospel and validating the message through miracles, and this led to them being mistaken for gods by the pagan inhabitants of Lystra. And you and I read this, and if you’re anything like me, it seems so random.
Why did their minds go immediately to the idea that Paul and Barnabas must be Zeus and Hermes? It boggles my mind anyway that they went immediately to the thought that they must be gods, but specifically those two. Luke mentions that they thought Paul must be Hermes because he was the chief speaker. Hermes was considered to be the messenger of the gods in Greek mythology.
And so that checks out. If you’re going to assign one of the gods to him, I guess that might be the one. But there’s a reason they did this, and ancient history shows us that Luke is not just making things up. There was a history in that part of the world involving legends of Zeus and Hermes walking around in human form.
Now, to be very clear, we know that didn’t happen. Luke is not saying that happened. But the Roman poet Ovid wrote about the legend. We know it didn’t happen, and the Bible does not present it as having happened.
But the Bible records that people there thought it happened. That there was this ancient legend that once upon a time, Zeus and Hermes were just walking around in human form, going from village to village, seeing who would receive them and doing God-like things. And that they had come to a particular village, and when that village refused them hospitality, refused to meet their wishes and demands, and refused to welcome them there, that they pulled off their human mask and became Zeus and Hermes and destroyed the village. And so if that’s the legend that these people had in mind, if that’s the cautionary tale that they remembered for generations, when these two men show up and they’re doing miracles, that’s where their minds go: They’re back.
Of course, they want to do everything they can to recognize them. Their thinking was, “We want to make sure they’re very happy with the welcome. We’re going to sacrifice to them. We’re going to do all the things so that they don’t destroy the village.” That is what Paul and Barnabas had walked into.
The Temptation to Take the Credit
The people of Lystra, in verses 11 and 12, they think the two false gods have reappeared, and they’re determined not to make the same mistake. And so they begin in verse 13 to worship Paul and Barnabas. I think we would all acknowledge that none of us deserve to be worshiped. But in our flesh and in our pride, if it were offered, there might be just a little bit of temptation to give in and let them give us a little bit of credit.
A little of this might be nice. It might be tempting to want to be celebrated like this. I mean, think about it. You walk into a town, they start throwing a parade, they start bringing you gifts.
That doesn’t sound like a bad deal. If they want to sacrifice offerings, that’s between them and the Lord. But this is nice. There might be a little bit of temptation.
We can easily sit here on a Sunday morning and say, “No, I wouldn’t be tempted by that.” Satan often tempts us through our pride. You go back to the garden; that’s the first thing he offered: “You can be like God.”
He always goes after our pride. So there’s something in this that could have been tempting to them just to be celebrated and to be lavished with gifts, maybe if they didn’t want to go as far as worship, but still to be celebrated like this. But the apostles knew it was wrong, and they reacted with horror and disgust.
It was absolutely the right reaction. They tore their robes, and they rushed into the crowd. That doesn’t mean they took their clothes off. They took their outer cloaks and tore them, which took substantial strength.
But it’s something we see all throughout the scriptures in the Jewish culture, when somebody was horrified, particularly when somebody was blaspheming against God, they would take their robe and they would tear it as a sign of their horror, their disgust, maybe a sign of mourning that somebody was blaspheming God, and that’s exactly what took place here. Paul and Barnabas don’t entertain it for a moment. They recognize it for what it is. Somebody is taking glory that God alone deserves and trying to give it to us. Perish the thought—we’re not going to allow this to happen.
And they rush out into the middle of the crowd trying to stop this.
Refuse the Glory That Belongs to God
From their humility and their desire to bring Jesus back into focus, this morning we can learn three commitments that keep Jesus at the center of our gospel service. Now, for you and me, as we try to make disciples, nobody, I feel pretty confident in saying nobody is going to rush out and throw us a parade or try to sacrifice animals to us. This is a different world, a different culture that we live in from Paul and Barnabas. But it can be tempting to go after credit that’s not ours.
Even though it’s a different set of circumstances and a different reaction from the people around us, we want to learn from their experiences. We want to learn from the principles that they show us of how to keep Jesus at the center of our gospel message. They could easily have taken Jesus out of the center of what they were doing. And you and I can easily take Jesus out of the center of what we’re doing and make it about me and my goodness and my efforts and my service, and we want to avoid that at all costs.
So we look at verses 14 and 15, and the first thing that they teach us here is refuse the glory that belongs to God. Refuse the glory that belongs to God. So Barnabas and Paul, they hear what’s going on. When they understand what’s happening, they tear their robes, they rush out into the crowd, and they begin crying out, saying, “Men, why are you doing these things?”
To Paul and Barnabas, it makes no sense that the crowd is reacting this way. And they explain, “We are also men of the same nature as you, preaching the gospel to you.” What we see here is that they had the humility to recognize, “We’re not as great as they seem to think we are.” Just because we’ve been healing people, that was the power of God working through us. That’s not the same as having the power to heal in ourselves.
There was humility in the situation, and there’s an old saying about humility that it’s not thinking less of yourself, it’s just thinking of yourself less, and I think that’s true. Humility is not saying, “Oh, I’m just dirt. I’m worthless.” They didn’t say, “We’re just wretched creatures.” They said, “We’re just men like you.”
There’s no qualitative difference between you and us. They simply placed themselves in the proper station. “We’re simply men of the same nature as you.” And we have to be reminded of that.
We have to be reminded of that as well. God uses us, and I’m so grateful for the ways that He uses us. I’m grateful when He uses me. I’m grateful when I get to see Him use you.
But we have to remind ourselves that just because God uses us doesn’t mean we’re more than humans. What they do, instead of putting themselves down or instead of taking the credit, there’s not a prideful response but a humble one. Instead, they emphasize the gospel in verse 15. “We are just men like you, of the same nature as you are, preaching the gospel to you.”
So when they do this, they’re expressing that their message was not about them. What they’ve come to do was not about them. They’re not Zeus and Hermes in real life, looking for glory from the city. They’ve come with a message about somebody else.
There’s frequently a temptation to make our service about us, whether it’s about our fulfillment or our credit. And I know that’s the case because that temptation may be biggest for pastors, to make ourselves the hero of the story, to make our service about us and what we can accomplish. We have to resist that.
But I’m sure there’s some element for all of us where it’s tempting to give ourselves a little bit of credit.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with feeling a sense of satisfaction in how God has used us. There’s nothing wrong with being thankful for how God has used us. There’s nothing wrong with being recognized for being obedient or being faithful. We just don’t want to take the credit that belongs to God.
We have to resist that.
So what they’ve done in these first few verses, when they react, they’ve let Jesus be the hero of the story. It’s a phrase I heard years ago, and I can’t remember where I heard it. I’d like to give credit so that I don’t take it for myself.
But there is a hero to the story, and it’s Jesus. You and I are not the hero of the story. When somebody comes to Christ, when we’re faithful to share the gospel and someone comes to Christ as a result, we can rejoice in that. We should rejoice in that.
We can rejoice in the part He allowed us to play, but it was never us who saved that person. That credit belongs to one Person, and that’s the One who actually did the saving. When lives are changed and people are transformed, when we see people grow as followers of Christ, we can and should rejoice over that. We should rejoice over the role that God allowed us to play.
But it’s not me changing you. It’s not your Sunday school teacher growing you. It’s not the people around you in the pews growing you. It’s God working through them.
We want to make sure that He gets the credit. His point is, “We are mere men like you.” But by saying, “We’ve come to preach the gospel,” they tell us, “We have Someone else to tell you about—Someone who’s far greater than we are.” One thing that will help us keep the right mindset in our service is to always let Jesus be the hero of our story. If we serve and do ministry and people think, “Well, he’s a good guy,” and that’s all they get out of it, we haven’t quite done our job. If we serve and work together and people think, “Wow, Central Baptist—that’s a great church,” I hope they do think that, but if that’s all they think, we haven’t done our job. Jesus is the hero of the story.
Point People to God’s Greatness
Then we see them move from this in verse 15 to where they begin to point people to God’s greatness. This is something we want to do as well. In verses 15 through 17, he says they are preaching the gospel so that the people will turn from these useless things to the living God who made the heavens, the earth, the sea, and everything in them. In past generations, He permitted the nations to go their own ways, yet He did not leave Himself without witness.
So as Paul and Barnabas are turning the conversation back to God and to the gospel, Paul points these people back to what makes God worthy of praise. As we’re serving, we need to be reminded that God gets the credit. God deserves the credit. Jesus deserves to be the hero.
We refuse that glory, and we point people back to God. It’s not merely saying, “I don’t deserve that credit.” It’s actively giving the credit back to God for His greatness. Paul points these people back to some of what makes God worthy of praise. We’ve talked about this at some point during this series.
We talked on a Sunday morning about sharing the gospel. We talked on Sunday night about reasons to praise God and went into how they are interconnected. The things that make up the gospel, who God is and what He’s done for us, are reasons to praise Him. And the things that we could think of that make Him worthy of praise, things that we should praise Him for, those are also things we should be telling other people as we share the gospel.
These things are interconnected.
So he points them back to God’s greatness. He makes the case that He’s real, for starters. That’s a pretty big one when he’s talking to these pagan Greeks.
His point is that they should be turning from these false gods, these lifeless gods, to Someone who is real and alive. When Paul spoke to pagans, that was a frequent theme of his. Their gods had to be carried around and had to be bathed. They would bathe the statues and they would dress the statues and they would do everything for the statues.
Paul’s point was that their statues depended on them, while we serve a God who is not served with human hands and does not dwell in a temple made by hands. We serve not the God that we made and sustain, but the God who made and sustains us. That’s the difference.
So he pointed people to the fact that God is real and He is alive.
He’s the creator of all things. He also mentions the fact that God controls the fates of nations and empires. He says God has allowed the nations of the world to do what they would for a while. He talks about this in Acts chapter 17 as well, about God moving the nations.
I’m paraphrasing what he said here. He does not use the word “chessboard,” but I always think about a chessboard with it. God is moving the nations and empires of the world around on a chessboard in order to accomplish His purposes. God moved nations in order for the conditions to be right, to send the Messiah, and for the gospel to be proclaimed to the known world.
You can go back through the book of Daniel, and you can see His plan to do that, that He brought a succession of empires. God controlled the nations of the world. They thought they were stronger than Him. They thought they were stronger than His people, but God has been in control of all of it.
And so what he’s presenting here is a God who’s not merely an option or an add-on. They had that. They had that in their world. They could worship Zeus, and maybe worship Hermes a little bit, and maybe worship Aphrodite if the need comes along.
I could list some more Greek or Roman gods for you, but I’d probably get them wrong. You can ask my son about it later. He studied all of that. But you could worship whoever suited your needs at that moment.
These gods were like add-on options. God is not.
Paul presents the God of Israel as the only God worthy of our worship because He’s the only One who created us. He’s the only One who sustains us.
He’s the only One with power over the nations. As we serve and do ministry, we don’t want people to know more about us. Now, if they get to know us and if we build relationships with people, that’s fine. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do that.
I’m saying our goal is not for them to know Jared. Our goal is not for them to know Central. Our goal is for them to know the God who made and sustains them. Our goal is for them to know this God.
Point People to God’s Goodness
Then he ends up at verse 17, pointing people to God’s goodness. We want to point people to God’s greatness. We also want to point them to God’s goodness. They’re not the same thing.
They’re related, but they’re not the same thing. As he’s talking about God letting the nations of the world do their thing, even under His control, he says, “Yet He did not leave Himself without witness.” There was a time when the nations of the world rejected the truth as God revealed it. Paul talks in Romans about the knowledge of God that comes from looking at creation, and the knowledge of God that comes from within, through the conscience—this innate sense of right and wrong that didn’t come from us, it didn’t come from evolution, it comes from the law of God written on our hearts.
Mankind rejected that. The nations of the world rejected it. God let them run amok and chase after the things that they wanted for a while. But even then, He did not leave Himself without witness.
God continued to show Himself and to show Himself good to all the peoples of the world. He says, “He did good and gave you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness.” Paul is teaching here that not only is God great, but God is good. God has continued to show love and compassion on the nations of the world even as they rejected Him.
A skeptic might look at that and say, well, look at the condition of the world.
Can we really claim that God is good with all the things that people suffer now, with all the things that people suffered throughout past history? The reality is that most of what we’ve suffered throughout history has been what happens when people forsake the law of God. War and genocide and human-engineered famine and murder and you name it, the evils of our society, these are not things that God told people to do. These are things He told us to avoid.
Much of the evil that’s been suffered has been the direct result of somebody’s choices to disobey God. We could also look at natural catastrophes. We could look at earthquakes. Nobody caused the earthquakes.
We could look at hurricanes. Nobody caused that. But once again, that’s the result of living in a fallen world. I’ve lost count of how many tornadoes I’ve lived through.
How many tornadoes have we lived through? At least four or five, right? I quit counting after a while. And then we moved to Lawton, and it’s been great.
We got out of central Oklahoma. Nobody looked at that and said, okay, somebody did something every time one of those tornadoes came through. But we recognize that we live in a world where there is sin, and it affects everything. It doesn’t mean, oh, so-and-so knocked over a bank, so God sent a tornado.
It just means there’s sin in the world, and it leads to suffering.
Even in the midst of that, God has been far kinder and far more gracious to us than we could ever deserve. He says God sent the rains from heaven. Doesn’t that sound good?
I was so excited when we got our little mist yesterday because we needed it and we’ll take more. But the fact is that, for thousands and thousands of years, God has continued to bless people with sunlight and rain and seasons and all the things that we need to sustain life. Paul told them that the gods they’d been praying to were not the ones who did this. It’s been this God that you’ve rejected. We see in this the goodness of God, the kindness of God, that He continues to bless us and continues to show grace even after He’s been rejected. He draws their attention to what God has done and the fact that He has still made Himself known.
The Hero of the Gospel
All of this is a natural lead-in to the gospel. We come to people and we have a story that may be the story of our life. We may walk people through the Bible and tell them the story that’s there. We may take people through our testimony, which is a story of our lives.
But it’s really a story about Him and what He’s done in our lives. We come to people with a story where the credit doesn’t go to us, it goes to God. We want them to understand the greatness of God, that He’s the only One worthy of our worship. We want them to understand the goodness of God.
We don’t worship Him because He’s great and awesome and fearsome, but because He’s good in the midst of that. God could have at any time in history destroyed us because of our sin. And yet He is loving and kind; He loved us anyway. And instead of destroying us over our sin, instead of consigning us to the hell we deserved, He sent His Son.
Jesus came willingly to take responsibility for my sin and for yours, to be nailed to the cross and shed His blood and die as the payment for my sin and yours. He didn’t deserve to be there. You and I deserve the punishment of God, the judgment of God. But Jesus took it in our place.
Why did He do that? Because God is good. Because God is loving. And because God is great and wise enough to devise a way where His love could be expressed and His justice still could be satisfied.
He is the hero of the story. Because He’s the One who took our sins on Himself. He’s the One, as we talk to people, who can take their sin on Himself. He’s the One who can make them right with God.
He’s the One who can give them a future and a hope. I can’t do it. You can’t do it. This church can’t do it.
We can point them in the right direction, and we must point them in the right direction, but part of that is making sure they understand: Jesus paid for their sins. Jesus bought them peace with God. Jesus rose again to prove it.
