From The Unknown To The Known God

How do we, as Christ’s ambassadors, engage a modern culture with wisdom, courage, and gentleness—so that the gospel is not just another opinion in the noise, but a message carried on “beautiful feet” bringing good news?

Everywhere we look, the signs of moral fracture are undeniable. We read headlines that grieve our hearts: marriages collapsing, cohabitation rising, families breaking apart. We see a steady erosion of respect for authority—parents, teachers, police, government. Practices once unthinkable—abortion, euthanasia, gender confusion, rampant pornography, and the normalization of gambling—are now embraced as simple matters of personal preference. Even our political leaders model a public discourse filled with hostility, contempt, and demonization, shaping a culture where hatred seems more natural than holiness.

And how do we reach a society so deeply distracted—spending six or seven hours each day absorbing a constant stream of images, ideas, and ideologies? The issue is not that people are no longer spiritual. According to the Pew Research Center, seven in ten adults still identify as “spiritual.” The problem is that today’s spiritual marketplace is loud, complex, contradictory, and proudly self-invented. For many, the claim that there is one true God is merely one voice competing among a thousand others. Materialism, power, fame, and the worship of self have become the functional deities of our age. Some embrace atheism and pursue pleasure as life’s highest meaning. Others believe the divine is in everything and therefore cannot imagine pledging loyalty to only One.

In times like these, we might wonder: How do you reach people who are drowning in competing philosophies?

How do you speak truth in a world that has redefined and dare I say outright rejected any form of absolute truth?

How do you proclaim Christ where every worldview claims equal authority?

This is not a new challenge.

Today we turn to Paul in Acts 17—the apostle standing in the heart of Athens, a city overflowing with idols. Ancient writers said there were more gods in Athens than people. Yet Paul did not begin with condemnation. He began by understanding their beliefs, engaging their questions, and building a bridge from their searching hearts to the God they did not yet know. In this passage, we will see that if we hope to reach our culture, we must do what Paul did:

we must understand before we speak, challenge without shaming, and share the gospel not with arrogance but with the genuine desire to reach the lost with the love and grace of God.

Sensitized to Surroundings

To truly understand how Paul engaged the culture of his day, we must first walk with him through the magnificent city of Athens—a place bursting with art, intellect, and idolatry. On his second missionary journey, Paul arrived there after persecution had driven him out of Macedonia. From about 480 to 404 BC, Athens had flourished—militarily, economically, and culturally—rising to become the crown jewel of the ancient world. Though the Peloponnesian War eventually ended its era of dominance, the city’s influence endured for centuries. It was the home of great philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Zeno, whose ideas still shape human thought today. Towering statues of Zeus and Athena, along with countless temples, filled its streets. The most breathtaking of all was the Parthenon, a marble temple rising high on the Acropolis, dedicated to the goddess Athena, the city’s protector. By the time Paul arrived, Athens had lost some of its political power but remained the intellectual and cultural heart of the Roman world. Imagine walking those crowded streets—surrounded by idols and philosophers—yet daring to proclaim the Good News of the one true God!

While Paul may have admired the breathtaking architecture and the rich heritage of Athens, what gripped him most was not its beauty but its idolatry. Like Jeremiah, for whom God’s word was “a fire shut up in his bones” (Jeremiah 20:9), Paul could not remain silent while surrounded by so many lost souls. Those who have been born of water and the Spirit (John 3:5) have undergone a radical transformation — “the old has gone, the new is here” (2 Corinthians 5:17). God has replaced our hearts of stone with hearts of flesh and written His law upon them (Ezekiel 36:26; Jeremiah 31:33), enabling us to see the world through His eyes.

As Christ’s ambassadors, we walk the same streets as everyone else, but we do so with different eyes and a different purpose. Though we live in a world that is not our home, we are not called to imitate its ways, but to view art, music, sports, business, wealth, poverty, and culture itself through the lens of the cross. Like Paul, what compels us to engage our culture is not anger or fear, but a deep, Spirit-born love for people—a love that moves us to weep for them, to comfort them, and to point them to Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6).