Acts 13:43 “Now when the congregation was broken up, many of the Jews and religious proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas: who, speaking to them, persuaded them to continue in the grace of God.”
After the unbelievers had left the meeting (Acts 13:42), the believers so rejoiced in the Doctrine of Grace that they “besought that these words” of “grace” “might be preached to them the next sabbath” (Acts 13:42). “Paul and Barnabas … persuaded” the believers “to continue in the grace of God”; that is, do not be deterred or discouraged or confused or led astray by the unbelievers. “Paul and Barnabas” weren’t telling them to keep their Eternal Salvation; they were telling them to not allow themselves to be dissuaded from the Truth of Grace. It seems that there are always people, things, and events that tend to deter, discourage, confuse, and lead the believing Children of God away from the blessed truth of the Doctrine of Grace. When teaching my little children to catch a ball, I kept reminding them to keep their eye on the ball, because the hand follows the eye and if the eye is on something else, the hand will not catch the ball. To “continue in the grace of God” is to keep our mind focused on “the grace of God”. Our great adversary will employ people, things, and events to deter us, discourage us, confuse us, and lead us astray. Over the last two years, our little Church family has been bombarded with awful things; a Category Five hurricane that absolutely devastated our area, we’ve had many more than usual severe injuries, surgeries with long recoveries, deaths of our loved ones, and now this virus! I honestly do not know if our response to this virus is correct, but I do know that when you cannot accurately define a threat, God has given us the wisdom to pray and treat it as if it is the worst possible threat. God has given us a brain and He has put a good mind in us, and we are to use it. But, our great adversary sees our troubled times as an opportunity to fling heretical ideas upon us and to discourage us. Knowing that troubled times would come, the Lord told Peter, “I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not” (Luke 22:32)! My Dad often said, “I just juuged my feet in the ground”; that is, I would not move, change, or give up. Paul said it this way, “be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord” (I Corinthians 15:58). Like all the other storms we’ve endured and survived, by the grace and mercy of our Lord the storm of this virus will also pass from us and the generations after us will encourage their children by telling them how we endured and how the Lord delivered us. So, like our Biblical ancestors, lets “continue in the grace of God” by praying often, reading the Word of God, speaking to one another of the things of God, singing the precious old Biblical Hymns, and listening to the preached word! This is our opportunity to “continue in the grace of God”, to “live by faith” (Romans 1:17), and to show our “love” (John 14:15) to our Lord by remaining faithful to Him and to His Word and to His Doctrine of Grace even while the storm is raging!