Acts 14:1Plain English VersionThe same thing happened in the town called Iconium. Paul and Barnabas went to the Jewish meeting house, and they talked strongly about Jesus to the people there. They told them that God is very good to people. And a big mob of people believed in Jesus. Some of them were Jews, and some of them were not Jews. But there were other Jewish people that didn’t believe in Jesus, and they talked to the other people that were not Jews, and they got them to hate the Christians. So the people of Iconium split up into 2 mobs. One mob reckoned that Paul and Barnabas were right, but the other mob reckoned those Jewish people were right. Paul and Barnabas stayed in Iconium a long time, and they kept on telling people about Jesus, and they were not frightened of anyone. And God helped Paul and Barnabas do powerful things, to show that they were telling the true story about Jesus. See the chapter |
After that, some Jewish people came to that place from the towns called Antioch and Iconium, and they talked to the Listra people, and they made them get angry with Paul. Then those Jewish people threw big stones at Paul. They hit him with those stones until they thought he was dead. Then they dragged him outside the town and left him there.
So he went to the Jewish meeting house a lot, and he talked with the people there about Jesus. Some of those people were Jews, and some of them were Greeks that believed in God. And every day Paul went to the place in the middle of the city, where there were a lot of people, and he talked about Jesus to the people that he met there.
You see, Titus was there with me, and he is a Greek man, not a Jew. But there were some Jewish men that came secretly into the church in Jerusalem. They reckoned they believed in Jesus, but they didn’t really trust him properly. They only came into the church to see what we were doing. And they reckoned that Titus had to follow the Jewish law and have a young man operation. But, you see, if we belong to Jesus Christ, we are free from that law. But those men wanted to force us to keep that law.
You are all joined to Jesus Christ, so you are all joined to each other. You are not different from each other any more. It doesn’t matter if you are a Jew or not. It doesn’t matter if you are a man or a woman. It doesn’t matter if somebody keeps you like a prisoner, or if you are free. None of that matters. You are all joined to Jesus Christ, so you are all the same as each other.
You are a new person now. It doesn’t matter if you are a Jew or not, or if they did a young man operation on you or not. It doesn’t matter if you are from another country, or even if you are from a wild tribe. It doesn’t matter if you are a prisoner, or a free person. This is what matters, Jesus Christ lives inside all of his people. He is really great.