Areopagus Series

Sermon Date 11-09-2014 Areopagus (Chuck Gohn)

How many of you detest waiting in line for anything? I hate waiting in line. I hate waiting in grocery lines. I hate waiting on the telephone. I hate waiting in the doctor’s office. I just don’t like it. I am always thinking about ways I can get around waiting. I usually try to look for the shortest line in the grocery store. My trick for doctor’s appointments is that I say I want to be the first appointment in no matter what day it is. Or when you are on hold and they say can we call you back, you say sure. Even with all the techniques we have to avoid waiting, we just can’t seem to get around it. Fortunately, we have these things called smartphones. We can be very productive in our waiting time. Check your email, text, catch up on TV shows. As good as those things are, it is probably not the best use of a Christian’s time. As we find out in today’s passage that comes out of the book of Acts, like Paul, we need to learn to be productive in our waiting time. We need to practice things like observing people and culture in a way that helps us connect them back to God. That is what we are going to talk about today.

As most of you know, we have been going through the series called The Story: God’s story as told through the people, places, and events of the Bible. We are in the New Testament portion of The Story. Specifically, we have been in the book of Acts. The acts of the apostles or some would say the acts of the Holy Spirit. Before we exit the book of Acts, we are going to talk about the apostle Paul one more time. You may recall that a few weeks ago I talked about Paul and his conversion on the road to Damascus. It was a very powerful experience. Following that particular conversion, Paul became one of the best known missionaries in the New Testament and really someone who was known for his travels. It is believed that Paul had three missionary travels. In this particular passage, we see Paul on his second missionary journey. I put a map up there so you can get an idea of how much he traveled. This is just on his second missionary journey. He started off way over here in Jerusalem. If we were to start talking about Acts 17 at the beginning, we would find Paul in Berea. Some of you know from your adult Sunday school classes that the Berea were a noble bunch. They were Jewish people. When Paul came to preach there, they didn’t just take his word on face value. They sat down and examined the scriptures to see if what he was saying was true. Consequently, a lot of people were converted in Berea. But the people in Thessalonica got wind of this and they weren’t too happy about it. So they sent a group of people down to Berea to stir up trouble. So much so that a group of Paul’s friends ended up putting Paul on a vessel on a boat and shipped him off to Athens where he was told to wait until his friends Timothy and Silas showed up. So that is where we are going to pick up the story today. Starting at Acts 17:16 and we are going to read through a big chunk of scripture. We are going all the way down to about verse 34. (Scripture read here.)

This is a great passage. I always liked this passage because it gives a very good example of how people can engage culture to the point of trying to locate things in culture that they can use to really connect back to God and possibly share the good news of Jesus Christ. But in order to do that we have to become observers of culture. We have to be willing to pay attention and open our eyes. We see Paul doing that in the very first verse where he says “While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols.” If you have read anything about Paul and the book of Acts, you see that Paul was definitely a man on a mission and a man of focus. Three missionary journeys. I don’t know how long he was technically considered a Christian but it was probably only about 20 years or so, and he got a lot accomplished because he was a very focus and driven person. If you do a personality test called the DISC Profile, one of the personality types is D and it stands for Driven. I really think that Paul was a driven person and would have the personality type of D. Those people tend to be so focused that they don’t see what is going on around them. It is surprising that God slowed Paul down enough simply to pay attention to the world and people around him. So much so that it opened up all sorts of new doors of opportunity for him. We are people that should learn to slow down a little bit. Just take our time and pay attention to culture. Speaking for myself, many of us are just not that good at it. We don’t slow down. We are so focused on our agenda or our mission so we miss out on opportunities to interact with the culture out there.