Acts 14:8-18. In Lystra, Paul cures a man who had been crippled since birth simply by seeing that he had faith and saying to him "Stand upright on your feet." The people are so amazed, they are convinced Paul and Barnabas are gods - they call Barnabas Zeus and Paul Hermes. The priest of Zeus brings out garlands and oxen to offer sacrifice to them, but when Paul and Barnabas hear of this they tear their garments and rush out into the multitudes. They tell the crowd that they are not gods, but men just like them. They have come to give the good news of a living God who made all of creation and who now wants all nations to know of Him. Thus, they "scarcely refrained the people from offering sacrifice to them."

How difficult it is to convince religious people that they are worshiping the wrong gods! I find it much harder to evangelize to them than to those who don't practice any faith at all. The latter, it seems, know intuitively that they are missing something, and they are happy when someone approaches them sharing the good news with love. But religious people who are following other gods (and those can be things like "wokeness," politics, "science", or any of the other false gods being offered up to us) seem so convinced that they have found the "answer" (aka god), and that following that "answer" makes them good people, they often are the most resistant to the truth of Jesus. At least these Greeks recognize God's work in Paul and Barnabas, they just mistakenly attributed it to their gods. This is markedly different from the reaction to miracles that many of the Jews had. I expect that this is because the Jews knew they were following the true God, they just didn't want to accept that He had fulfilled His promise in the most unexpected of ways, because that would mean that their entire way of life would be changed.

In any case, it is frequently much more difficult to convince people with some sort of religion that they have to change the god that they are worshiping. And it is very easy for those who are following Christ to have their eyes and heart drawn to some other god in the name of a false goodness, or "niceness," or some other twisting of Jesus' true message. Convincing those people to get back on track can be the hardest of all.