Unstoppable - Tomb Of The Unknown God Series

Unstoppable – Tomb of the Unknown God

11/26/17

Acts 17:16-34

Sunday AM

This week I received a link to an interview on the Voice of the Martyr radio w/ a missionary to Iran who shared an amazing story of the power/presence of God. B/c this missionary has a target on his back; they obscured his voice and changed his name to protect him. (play audio file)

We’re in a series in Acts about the Unstoppable power of the H.S. in the life of the church and in every believer. In this study, we’ve again witnessed that the Christian life has never been nor will ever be a work of the human ability and ingenuity, but solely the work of the H.S. This truth was never more obvious than in the missionary journeys of Paul. As Paul made himself available to God, God worked thru him and his mates to see the church explode throughout the world. In every city they visited, just like in Iran today, the truth of Jesus was shared, the H.S. moved, and the church exploded. And as we’ve just heard, the same God who was moving in Acts then is still on the move today.

But are we experiencing Him or settling for some manmade religious experience that’s comfortable, and tame? I fear, we’ve settled for the latter.

While we can stop in any of the cities where Paul stopped, I want to take a few min. to revisit Athens.

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 w/ both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, and in the marketplace day by day w/ those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate w/ him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this b/c 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 you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we would like 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: “People 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 w/ this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship – and this is what 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 human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any 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 off-spring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone – an image made by human 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 w/ justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone 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. Some of the people 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.

Paul has traveled to the seat of human identity and ingenuity – the very center of the philosophical and religious world to present the truth of the Gospel. He started in the religious centers and marketplace, until finally, he’s granted an audience at Mars Hill before the Areopagus – where he again, under the influence of the H.S. presents the love of God embodied in Jesus. He got them to contemplate the Divine.