Acts 14

Paul and Barnabas are getting into more trouble here, and not just from the plan to have them killed by stoning (which very nearly ended Paul's ministry in this chapter). They were close to getting in trouble when the people started to try and worship them instead of God. Paul and Barnabas, surely, were tempted by the feeling of empowerment and pride that would come with that type of response. Everyone wants to be liked, not very many of us are liked enough that people want to worship us, but I'm sure that it would be hard to turn away from that kind of attention.

It's a dangerous thing because it's easy to get confused about who's really doing the work. We see preachers on TV all the time that are talking to hear themselves talk. They like that attention, and their audiences all but fall on their faces to worship them. Some of them may have started out with that end goal. They might have planned from the very beginning to get the attention of a crowd and encourage that crowd to worship them as a god. Mostly, we call those people cult leaders, and they are fairly recognizable. The comedian Tim Wilson says it's pretty much like any other job. You can't find good help and the pay's never good enough, but you do get to play with automatic weapons, so there are some perks. I think there are plenty of guys on TV, though, that started out like Paul and Barnabas, and they are little harder to spot. They just wanted to preach the gospel, and when they preached people came to listen. Then there were more people and there was more attention, and they liked the attention. Before they knew it, they were preaching to get the attention rather than to share the Gospel.

So, it's really two sides of the same dangerous coin. On the one side, we have to be careful that preaching the Gospel and giving God the attention and the glory is always at the forefront of our actions. On the other side, we have to be careful that we are not falling into the trap of worshipping the messenger rather than the sender (God Almighty).