Acts 28:6 “Howbeit they looked when he should have swollen, or fallen down dead suddenly: but after they had looked a great while, and saw no harm come to him, they changed their minds, and said that he was a god.”
Your Response-ability
Sometimes people love you; sometimes people hate you. Sometimes they can love you and hate you all in the same day! We can worry too much about what other people think about us, and that can cause us to lose focus on what we think about God.
If you are focused on following God, He can be focused on who follows you. God can take care of someone’s response to me if I rightly respond to Him. It is human nature to spend more time thinking about how others respond to me than how I respond to God.
Imagine being the Apostle Paul for one day in the book of Acts. You probably wouldn’t have picked the day described in Acts 28! Shipwrecked and on an island with barbarians, Paul was bitten by a venomous snake. The barbarians were convinced he was a murderer, but then changed their minds after he didn’t die and called him a god. Talk about a roller coaster of emotion!
At the end of the day, your response to God is on your head-not anyone else’s head. You can’t blame your response on your parents, your environment, or your circumstances in the day. Your response is your responsibility. Don’t get so distracted by who is following you that you miss out on following God like you should.