Never Hungry: A Church Anchored in Grace | July 12, 2026

Sermon number thirty-seven picked up in Iconium, where the same pattern from Pisidian Antioch repeats immediately, Paul and Barnabas preach in the synagogue and a great number of both Jews and Greeks believe, before opposition rises up all over again. Pastor Justin drew the whole message out of a single phrase tucked into verse three, that the Lord bore witness to the word of his grace, and he wanted the congregation to hear his big idea plainly stated up front, that a church chasing signs and wonders will always be hungry, but a church anchored in the word of his grace already has everything it needs.

The Setup: A Church Anchored in Grace, Not Signs

He was careful to say clearly that The Crossings is not a cessationist church, and that if God wants to heal or speak in power in the room, everyone would stand back and give him the glory. But he pushed hard against a culture trained to need bigger and bigger stimulation just to feel something, warning that a church which needs an escalating spiritual experience every week to stay engaged is not actually anchored in anything, and that measuring health by how electric a room feels rather than by the word itself is a trap a young, growing church can fall into without noticing.

That set up the first point, that the word of grace is what saves us, not the show around it. Pastor Justin noted that a great number of Jews and Greeks believed before any miracle is even mentioned in the text, then turned to Romans 10:17, that faith comes from hearing and hearing through the word of Christ, not from seeing. He shared his own testimony of trusting Christ on October 27, 2010 with no vision and no miracle, only hearing the truth about who Jesus is, and argued that anyone waiting for an undeniable sign before trusting Jesus is waiting on something he never promised, because his word alone is enough to reach into a life with no business being changed.

The second point followed directly from verse three itself, that signs bear witness to the word and were never meant to replace it. Pastor Justin pointed to Jesus's exchange with the royal official in John 4:46-48, where Jesus names the human tendency to always want one more sign before settling our faith, and he used the story of Elijah at Horeb from 1 Kings 19:11-12 to show that God was not in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire, but in the low whisper that came after. He warned that a church built on chasing the next big moment has to keep producing bigger moments just to stay standing, while a church built on the word of grace is standing on something already finished at the cross two thousand years ago and needing nothing added to it.

Pastor Justin noted a detail in verse four that Luke seems to include on purpose, that the city was divided over Paul and Barnabas as messengers of the word rather than as miracle workers themselves, a distinction he said decides whether a congregation ends up admiring its leaders or trusting its Lord. That distinction mattered enough to build the sermon's third point around it, that when God moves, he alone gets the glory, never the one he uses, grounded in 1 Peter 4:10-11's call to serve by the strength God supplies so that God is glorified in everything.

He illustrated that principle with Gideon's army in Judges 7:2, where God deliberately trimmed thousands of soldiers down to three hundred so that Israel could never claim their own hand had saved them, and with Paul's own words in 1 Corinthians 15:10, that it was not Paul but the grace of God working through him despite his tireless labor. Pastor Justin offered the congregation a simple test for their own hearts, whether the first sentence out of their mouth after God uses them is look what I did or look what God did, warning that collecting glory that belongs to God is exactly the hunger this whole passage warns against.

The passage ends with an attempted stoning in Iconium that sends Paul and Barnabas fleeing to Lystra and Derbe, and Pastor Justin pointed out that they did not go silent when the applause turned into a threat, they simply kept preaching the same word of grace in the next town. That word, he said, never needed Iconium's approval to keep working, and it does not need a bigger sign to work in anyone this morning either.

This Week's Application

So this week, are you waiting for an undeniable sign before you will trust Jesus more fully, when the word he has already given you has always been enough? We would love for you to join us this Sunday as we continue walking through Acts together.