Bible Stories for the Young
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After Paul and Silas left Lydia’s house in Philippi, they continued traveling until they came to a city called Thessalonica, where there was a Jewish religious building. Paul went in and reasoned with the people from the scriptures, explaining and proving that the Messiah had to suffer and rise from the dead. “This Jesus I am proclaiming to you is the Shining Rescuer,” he told them. And some people believed!
But others were jealous, so they gathered a mob and started a riot in the city. They rushed into the house of a man named Jason, looking for Paul and Silas. “Where are they? Where are they?” When they couldn’t find them, they dragged Jason and some other believers to the rulers of the city and said, “Those who have turned the whole world upside down have come here too!”
After this, the believers in Thessalonica sent Paul and Silas away in the night to a place called Berea. What do you think Paul and Silas did as soon as they arrived? Do you think they hid? No! The first thing they did was… go into another religious building to tell those people the Good, Good, Good News of Jesus.
Now the Bereans were more humble and honest than the jealous pretenders in Thessalonica. They listened eagerly and started searching through the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.
What do you think happened when the people read the scriptures to find out if Paul and Silas were right? THEY BELIEVED!
Now you might be thinking… didn’t any of the other religious people read the scriptures to see if what Paul said was True?
The answer is: No, they didn’t. They may have read the scriptures with their eyes and minds. But there is a HUGE, ginormous difference between reading the scriptures to prove your own point or to protect your own beliefs versus reading the scriptures to FIND OUT what is TRUE.
Did you know that there are many people all over the world who read the Bible and who call themselves Christians, and yet they believe very different things from each other? (Yeah, I know that’s super weird, isn’t it? That couldn’t have been what Jesus had in mind, huh?)
But that means HOW we read our Bible must be pretty important, huh? Yes… It is very important. (And very soon we’ll talk more about how to read your Bible and pray. But for now, I’ll tell ya a little story.)
When I was a teenager I met someone who was a Christian, just like me. But there were some things I believed that were different from him. That was concerning to me. One day I said, “We‘re both Christians. We both believe in Jesus. We both believe the Bible is True. So we should be able to resolve this.”
But he said back to me, “But some of things you believe are not in the Bible.” I was shocked and I thought, “Of course they are! I‘ve been doing the same religious activities my whole life. So it must be true.” And I even thought I knew where to prove it in the Bible. But when I opened my Bible, very determined to show him where in the Bible my beliefs were — it wasn’t there. I looked through all the pages. It wasn’t there. What I thought I knew turned out to just not be in the Bible. I was wrong. My religion was based on something that was not in the Bible at all. What would you do if that happened to you?
Do you want to hear what I did? That very hour… I simply changed what I believed, and I changed my actions to line up with God’s Word. I totally changed HOW I lived my life. Do you think that was hard to do? Not really. Do you know why? Because I was in love with a person, Jesus. I didn’t need to prove “my way.” I just needed to find His way by Listening for His heart. Remember? His sheep listen for and recognize His voice.
It’s very easy to believe something you’ve been told your whole life or to believe something that you just grew up doing. But oftentimes what God thinks and feels about something is not the same as what the world, or its religions, want to try to convince us is true.
As more and more people in Berea believed in Jesus, those religious pretenders who had stirred up the crowds in Thessalonica heard about what was happening and traveled over to Berea to stir up trouble there.
So the believers in Berea sent Paul away to Athens (but Silas and Timothy stayed in Berea).