In a world where there is so much diversity it is important to be able to change, to come up with innovative solutions to the problems and challenges that we face. In the second half of Acts chapter 17 that is where we find the Apostle Paul. You’ll remember that the first part of his ministry was spent either in Israel or in area’s that had heavy Jewish populations due to the diaspora. But then God sent him out of his comfort zone and into the Gentile area’s starting with Greece. Before God let him go there, he was given Timothy and Luke as teammates, people who had a gentile background, who looked like the people that they were being sent to and who understood those people. The past few weeks we’ve looked at the success and challenges that they faced in Philippi and Thessalonica. Then they go to Berea, where they again had great success but some of the Religious leaders from Thessalonica showed up to cause trouble specifically for Paul. So Paul leaves and goes to Athens while Silas and Timothy continue the work at Berea. The idea was for Paul to wait for them to show up but that doesn’t exactly fit the person that Paul is. So we pick the story up in Acts, 17:16-34, “While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with him. Some of them asked, ‘What is this babbler trying to say?’ Others remarked, ‘He seems to be advocating foreign gods.’ They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, ‘May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean.’ (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.) Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made very nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone-an image made by man’s design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.” When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, ‘We want to hear you again on this subject.’ At that, Paul left the Council. A few men became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.”
I love this passage because it shows us a whole lot about Paul’s personality and what drove him. Paul arrives and attempts to wait for Silas and Timothy, but seeing the spiritual condition of the city moves him to action. He tried to wait, he tried to be good, he tried to follow the plan, but his heart wouldn’t let him. Think about where he is, Paul is in Athens, at one time the center of the ancient world, still at this time arguably the center of the philosophical world. These people thought that they had it all together, they thought that they could answer all of the questions, and they looked down in judgment at any philosophy from the outside. They should have been proud, their ancestor’s basically created modern philosophy. Today we still know names like Socrates and Plato. They would tell you that they had it all together.
But here comes Paul, the outsider. Understand what is going on in his head, it’s not just that his thinking is what we would call Judeo/Christian today. It’s that everything in him truly believed that Jesus was the Son of God who died and rose again that everyone could be saved and everyone could have eternal life. Believing that means that he also believe that everyone who didn’t know God was doomed to eternity in Hell. When we say that people say we are Christians are judgmental, but we’re just saying what the Bible says, and it’s not that we’re supposed to look at people who don’t know Christ in judgment, it’s that we’re supposed to look at them with a broken heart. Paul looks around at all of these smart people, these people who studied so hard, but the studied the wrong thing. People who devoted their lives to worship, but the tragedy was that they weren’t worshipping God, but idols that they made with their own hands and it broke his heart and moved him to action.
Paul is supposed to be laying low, he’s supposed to wait for Timothy and Silas to show up, but he can’t do it. So we read that he went and “reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there.” And that his mistake, do you see it? He went into the synagogue, this was home territory, this is where he was speaking to people who’s thoughts he was familiar with. But then he went into the market place, without and interpreter.
It’s not that he needed someone to speak Greek for him, because he was obviously able to do that, it’s that their belief systems and backgrounds were different then his, and he didn’t have someone there to talk with him about those differences. So we read in verse 18, “A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with them. In order to completely understand what’s going on here you need to know who these two groups were.
Diogenes, summarized the Stoic view of life as “Nothing to fear in God, Nothing to feel in death; Good can be attained, Evil can be endured.” In other words they tried to be happy despite whatever circumstances came their way. So at first glance you would think that they really could have gotten along with Paul if they had gotten to know him, but there was one important difference. They sought to endure life with the view that the gods were distant and really didn’t play a role in human life, but Paul knew that God wants to be a part of our lives every day. He learned to be content because God was with Him and because he knew that one day he would be in Heaven with God. So their ability to endure was because they had no hope, and Paul’s ability to endure was because he had hope.
The Epicureans were another matter. They desired unity with humanity and kinship with the divine. They viewed life as a balance this included a balance in the emphasis you place in your relationship with that gods and with the people around you. Rather then thinking that life was something to be endured they felt that moderate pleasure was the greatest good.
As you look at those definitions and especially their treatment of the divine you realize that they didn’t really agree with each other. One viewed the gods as distant and one close, one believed in pleasure and one in endurance. In other words, the Stoics and the Epicureans were rivals. They didn’t agree with each other on just about anything. A lot of the debates that happened at the Areopagus were between these guys. They didn’t agree on much but when they heard Paul preaching Christianity they all agreed that they didn’t like. They didn’t know it, they didn’t understand it, and so they attacked it. Bitter rivals united together by a threat.
This theme keeps coming up, when we live for Christ and then proclaim Him, people around us will see it as a threat. That is how they saw Paul. Why is it a threat, because it is a change from the status quo. When we are content with our lives we don’t want to change. Think about these philosophers, they were not only content with their lives, they thought they had the answers for everyone else. It is the tragedy of human life. So many people will settle so something less then what God wants for them if they think that it is all there is. Two schools of thought, one saying just endure life, one saying be moderately happy, and they run head into Paul who says God loves us and wants the best for us. That when we find Him we don’t get moderate happiness we get joy.
The sad thing is that we see the same thing in our culture. Listen to what Gene Edward Veith wrote in his book “Loving God with All Your Mind.” This book is a discussion of what goes on in our modern university system, the Athens of our day. It mentions a few people just so you know who they are G.K. Chesterton was a great Christian theologian and apologist at the turn of the last century. Karl Marx is the father of communism. And Ayn Rand is a philosopher from the last century who promoted individual freedom as the greatest good. So here is the passage. “G.K. Chesterton has observed how Christianity is attacked “on all sides and for all contradictory reasons.” He points out hew some condemn Christianity for being too pessimistic, others for being too optimistic. Christianity is said to stress sin, judgment, and austerity, to be inhuman in its gloom and bleakness. Others, though, reject it for its pie-in-the-sky comforts. The belief in providence and in a caring God, they say, hides the true bleakness and meaninglessness of life. The church is ridiculed both for being antifemale and because in Europe only women still go to church. It is criticized for its austerity and for its extravagance, for being too peaceful and for being too violent. It is attacked because it lacks unity (“None of the churches agree with each other”) and for being unified (“They don’t allow differences of opinion”).
Such arguments are heard every day in classrooms, publications and conversations. Followers of Karl Marx charge Christianity with suppressing the poor. Followers of Ayn Rand condemn Christianity for helping the poor. A person may accuse Christianity of being the opiate of the people and then, in the same conversation, complain about the Church’s stand on drugs. Liberals hate Christianity for being conservative, and conservatives hate it for being liberal. One of my students ripped apart Christianity for being selfish and intolerant. Another student, a political conservative who had been reading Ayn Rand, attacked it for its altruism. According to him, selfish individualism is the highest good and Christianity’s teachings of love, compassion, and responsibility for others have spoiled the free society.
In a history class, as Chesterton observes, Christianity might be blamed both for the ineffectual mildness of Edward the Confessor and for the ferocity of Richard the Lionhearted, for being too pacifist and for being too warlike. A science lecturer may snipe at Christianity for suppressing modern knowledge in the name of outdated superstitions. An anthropology teacher will then attack missionaries for introducing primitive cultures to modern technology and health care. Some deride Christianity for being too rationalistic, reducing the mystery of life and the supernatural to a set of intellectual dogmas. Others dismiss it for being too emotional and mystical, an escape from reason into cloudy superstitions.
The point is not simply that the charges, taken together, contradict each other, but that Christianity is more complex, comprehensive, and whole than many of its critics realize. Chesterton provides the analogy: Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of my many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation…would be that he might be an odd shape, but there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall…Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the center.”
Paul has ran into a culture that we see today, one where even people who don’t agree with each other are willing to agree that they don’t like Christianity. But we also need understand what is going on with Paul. This is a change for him as well. Paul’s habit was to go into the synagogue and debate, he did that here too. There he found people who had a similar background to his, their life assumptions were the same, they spoke the same language both literally and figuratively. But then he goes outside the synagogue, outside away people who think the same as he does.
Paul’s habit was to go and proclaim Christ, in verses 2-3 we read, “He reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that the Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead.” Now the Jews and the people around them got this, what’s the problem? Simply this, Paul had stepped into a world that didn’t understand the concept of a resurrection. To them when we died we simply became a shade bound to the underworld. It wasn’t really us it was a shade of us, something less then us. There was no hope of a resurrection, no thought of eternal life as something good, there was life, and something less then life, that was it.
So here is Paul with his well devised arguments, the ones that have been successful everywhere he’s gone, and he pulls them out and the Greeks call him a “babbler.” The Greek term is “spermologo” and the meaning that seems to fit best here is of a person who takes pieces of seemingly unrelated information and then tries to make them seem like they all fit together. It makes sense that that is what they would think of Paul because his central message was the resurrection which doesn’t seem to make any sense. If Paul is going to be effective here, he is going to have to change the way that he presents the gospel. Paul is going to have to be an innovator.
He’s also going to have to make what ever changes are necessary quickly. Because they not only call him a babbler, but it says that “they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus,” Understand this was the council that control what was allow to be spoken and taught. This council had the power to shut him down. The invitation to speak at the Areopagus was more of a trial. Now the language doesn’t seem to indicate that Paul was arrested but they really didn’t give him a choice it was speak now or forever hold your peace.
So now Paul only has one choice left. He can stick to what he’s always done, present the gospel and the resurrection and try to make them understand it, or he can change tactics. That is what he chose to do, they were afraid to change but Paul wasn’t. Rather then continue to argue with the philosophers Paul tried to relate to them. Look at how he starts out, verse 22, “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.” He looked around he saw their culture and then he used what he observed in a way that could make the gospel understandable. It’s not that he compromised the message, that can never change because it’s not ours it’s God’s, but he was willing to change how he presented the message.
Reaching a changing and diverse world has always required the church to be innovative. Jesus quoted from the prophets and spoke in parables, the apostles in their letters, used reasoned arguments and creeds for people to understand and remember. The church through the ages adopted popular melodies and instruments to proclaim it’s message we have to be willing to change if we want to reach our culture, it was true for Paul and it’s true for us. I am so excited about what is going on in 252, to see the excitement in our kids and to see them bringing their friends and families. God is at work in our church through them. When the call report was given here about 3 years ago, one of the things that it said was that we have to change, that the definition of insanity is trying the same things over and over again and expecting different results. I am proud of all of all of the people who have helped us make that change and the way that you have accepted it. Last week at 252 Live we had 37 kids and over 40 adults who were either playing a role, there with their kids or just wanted to see what it was about thank-you for your support of that program.
We’re seeing our kids reaching their friends and inviting them to church. But what about us, the adults, let me ask you this question, when you look around the world, when you see all of the idols that we have made with our own hands, cars, houses, movie stars, athletes, politicians, whoever and whatever it is people turn to get them through the day and maybe give their lives a purpose, when we see that how motivated are we to reach them with the only true salvation, knowing God and coming to know what life really is. Are we like Paul, does it make it so that we can’t sit still, that we have to move. And are we really like Paul are we willing to do whatever is necessary, to change, or do we want to reach people only if they are willing to listen to the messages that we listened to in the past the one’s that make us comfortable. Here’s the key question for the day, are you willing to be innovative?
What changes do we need to make so that we can reach our friends for Christ. One change a lot of us need to make is we need to be praying for God to send people in our path that we can share Him with and that He will open doors to share Him, and then we need to do it. Last week I got the opportunity to share about who Christ really is and what it really is to be a Christian with a bunch of people on a thread on a friends page on Facebook. You know how good God is? This was a friend that I used to pray for when we were kids, then we lost contact and only recently got reconnected on Facebook, now I have an open door to talk to him about God, because of modern technology and our Ancient God who remembered the prayers of a Junior Higher. Never give up on those you pray for and remember that our God can use anything if we look for those doors and are willing to walk through them.
So what does it take to effectively share the gospel when you’re in unfamiliar territory? Well look at what Paul did. Paul was able to see some success in the face of great opposition because he had genuine concern. Think about the results for a moment, this was an apostle who was accused to “turning the world upside down.” Here we read that, “A few men became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.” Compared to past results this doesn’t seem impressive. But think about the circumstances, he was on trial, in the midst of a group of skeptics who were used to hearing new ideas all the time. And Paul is calling for a total commitment, which means not only do you have to reject what you’ve believed in the past, which will also cost you position with your peers, but you have to reject whatever new thing might come tomorrow. This was a hostile crowd where the price was high for a convert. The best Paul should have hoped for was to be allowed to continue to speak. But because he was willing to change his approach and relate to them on their level God was able to speak to people’s hearts and some of them accepted Him.
It takes a personal investment. The challenge to us as a church is are we willing to invest in people like Paul did? That means that we need to change the goals of some of our friendships. There are people we see all the time that our goal, if we were to think about it is to have a nice time. We go out to eat, we talk sports, politics, the weather, hobbies, kids, whatever, and then we part ways. Our goal is to have a nice time with them. But if they don’t know Christ and we really care about them we have to change our goals, instead of just having a nice time, we need to have a goal of seeing them accept God. That may mean that we start turning conversations towards who God is, it may mean that as the holidays approach we invite them to activities at the church. Whatever it means we need to pray for them and then try to do something about their spiritual condition because we have a genuine concern for them.
