Ambassadors for Christ (Part 4)

At this time, our children can be dismissed to our children's church if they would like to.

Just meet our teacher out in the hallway there before you.

They'd happy to guide you downstairs to hear a Bible lesson today.

Well, we're back this morning to where we never left, the Acts of the Apostles.

If you'd like a sermon outline and didn't get one, just raise your hand, our ushers will come back through.

We're going to see a lot of them today, so get used to seeing them.

They'll hand you an outline if you'd like one.

The daughter said, Dad, this is a twenty-first century.

We don't waste our money on newspapers.

Here's my iPad.

He said, Thanks.

That fly never knew what was coming.

Welcome to the 21st century.

Now, we've been following the Apostle Paul on his second missionary journey through the cities of Macedonia.

We've been following him.

First of all, he went to Philippi, then he went to Thessalonica, then he went to Berea, and we left him, left off in Athens, right down there.

Before Paul's done talking with the philosophers in Athens, they're not even going to know what hit them.

And the theme we've been following in Paul's journey is how Christ made everything new in his life, and how he began to live that out with his new identity in Christ as Christ's ambassador to those who don't know him.

Paul explains that idea in a passage we've seen before.

Being Christ's ambassadors means we who have been reconciled to God through faith in Christ, we've been entrusted with that message to show other people how they can be reconciled through faith in Christ.

2 Corinthians 5, 17 to 20.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he's a new creature.

The old things have passed away.

Behold, the new things have come.

Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and then gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and he has committed to us the word of reconciliation.

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us.

So we beg you, on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

In the beautiful city of Athens, we saw how Paul began to reach out to people in the marketplace with the message of the gospel.

He even began to converse and dialogue with the heady Greek philosophers in Athens and preach Jesus and the resurrection.

The philosophers thought Paul was a second-rate academic, kind of making fun of him, but they were intrigued and attracted to the new ideas he was presenting about someone being risen from the dead.

So, out of the marketplace, in the marketplace, they the philosophers invited him to come to a special place on Mars Hill to further explain his philosophy.

And that's where we're going to pick up the story today.

Paul goes to the Areopagus on Mars Hill.

So I'm going to read from Acts 17, beginning in verse 19, and we'll cover this passage today.

And they took him, Paul, and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, May we know what this new teaching is, which you are proclaiming.

Fear brings some strange things to our ears, so we want to know what these things mean.

Now, all the Athenians and strangers visiting there used to spend their time in nothing other than telling or hearing something new.

So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, Men of Athens, I observed that you are very religious in all your respects.

For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, to an unknown God.

Therefore, what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you, the God who made the world and all things in it, since he is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all people life and breath and all things.

And he made from one man every nation to mankind to live on the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grow for him and find him, though he's not far from each one of us.

For in him we live and move and exist, and even some of your own poets have said, For we also are his children.

Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man.

Therefore, having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because he's fixed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness through a man whom he has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising him from the dead.

Now, when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some began to sneer, but others said, We shall hear you again concerning this.

So Paul went out from their midst, but some men joined him and believed, among whom also were Dionysius, the Aragopite, and a woman named Domeris and others with them.

Two points today to describe what Paul was saying at the Areopagus on Mars Hill, witnessing at the Areopagus and worshiping an unknown god.

First, let's look at Paul's witness there.

The Areopagus was not so much of a place as it was a gathering of a group of esteemed philosophers and academics at the time who gathered there to discuss new ideas.

The place the Areopagus met was on a hill called Mars Hill.

You can see it there in the picture.

Mars Hill.

And the Areopagus wasn't a place, it was a group that met to meet and discuss philosophy and ideas.

Socrates, who lived 400 years before this, lived in Athens, and he visited the Areopagus every single day.

When Paul began his so I want to say it was quite an honor for someone to be invited to speak to this elite group of academics and philosophers.

You couldn't get up there unless they you had an invitation.

Well, they were intrigued by what Paul was teaching, and they invited him to come up and talk to them.

He's going to give a monologue, and then they're going to judge what he's been saying.

So when Paul began his speech, he res you got to get this, I'll say more later.

He speaks to them very respectfully.

Um he noted that they were all very religious people.

He saw all their altars, and I like the way he calls them objects of worship.

He doesn't call them idols offensive, he calls them objects of worship.

In fact, when I think about that, it's a great place to begin any conversation with people as Christ's ambassadors because everyone is religious, whether they realize it or not.

A point Paul brings up in Romans chapter 1.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

What does being religious mean?

It means you're gonna go, you're gonna practice and pursue activities and things that we believe will give us ultimate meaning in life, significance, identity that we can live for.

Everybody is worshiping something.

You may not bow down to it, but you're living for something.

When something that is not the true God who created you, it then becomes an idol.

An idol can be anything in our life that we have made into an ultimate.

An ultimate means we can't live without it.

Gotta have it.

We'll do anything to get it.

Um, it could be appreciation, it could be anything.

Uh it can be anything, and if we lose it, it absolutely devastates us.

You can you can pick up and sense uh, and I'll talk about the the idols people are worshiping because when they lose it, they're absolutely devastated, they can't live anymore.

That's an idol.

Only the true God should have that kind of power in your life.

He's not going anywhere.

No matter what happens.

You're living for something, and an idol can be anything.

We've made into an ultimate.

The irony of idols, Paul, the apostles, even the Old Testament prophets kept repeating and repeating.

The irony is that idols are the work of man's hands.

You're creating an image of some you call your God from your own mind.

It's not the true God.

In other words, it's the God, the idol, something we create.

We're the creator.

Uh and I've I've talked to people like that.

Well, you know, the God of that Old Testament there who killed the genocide said, that's not the God I believe in.

Well, you know what's happening?

They've created an image of their God in their mind, who they want him to be.

Whatever that is.

They're gonna just bypass the true God, giving to us his revelation in the scripture, and exchange it for the God they want to really exist, but who doesn't?

This is the irony.

Uh, we create it like we see this is throughout the scripture, you see this point.

Psalm 135, 15.

Uh, the psalmist says, the idols of the nations are but silver and gold, the work of man's hands.

In other words, people are creating them.

They're not true, they're in our imagination, our dreams of who we want our God to be.

So who we can get what we want.

The gods we make are not real gods.

And everyone is religious in the sense the things we are doing, we do to give us our identity, our meaning, our purpose in life.

And if we don't get it, we're crushed.

Some people have made an idol of their career and accolades and achievements there.

And they jump through all the hoops.

They're being religious, jumping through every hoop they need to.

They're very religious, so they can get it.

Get what that God offers prestige or money or something.

Some people have made an idol of their treasures or their talents.

Or I sad to say, people make an idol of people in their lives, people they love.

They can't lose.

That's what happened to the patriarch Jacob when he faced the possibility of losing his youngest son Benjamin to slavery in Egypt.

Jacob's son Judah appeals to Joseph, who was now ruler in Egypt, one of his son, Jacob's son Joseph, who's now ruler in Egypt, he Judah appeals to Joseph not to take Benjamin away from his father.

Jacob, here's what he says.

Now, therefore, when I come to my father and the lad's not with us, since, listen to me, his life is bound up in the child's life, the lad's life.

When he sees that the lad is not with us, he will die.

Bound up with that person.

So much so, if it's he's devastated, he's he's not gonna live, he doesn't want to live.

Why?

Because that's who he's found his identity, his meaning, his purpose in life from.

What about you?

What are you driving your meaning and identity and significance in life from?

Be careful.

If it's not the true God, it's an idol.

We're warned throughout the scriptures about these.

Jacob's life was bound up in Benjamin's life.

Jacob couldn't live without him.

His whole identity, meaning, and purpose was tied to him inseparably.

And at that point, Benjamin had become an idol, an ultimate in Jacob's life.

Gotta have it.

Gotta have his love, gotta have his presence.

I'll do whatever I need to do to get that.

That's religious.

What activities do I have to do to protect that source of meaning and identity in my life?

Whatever we bound ourselves to, that has become the ultimate reason we live.

And that if it isn't the true God, it is an idol.

Yes, I'm talking to us as Christians.

We're warned throughout the New Testament about this.

Anything can become an idol.

We're gonna, when we exchange or replace the true God with either a concept of God we really want Him to be, and now I'll derive my meaning, uh, believing that, or with something else in our life to go on living.

Okay, if if you remember when Paul first arrived in Athens at the beginning of chapter 17, uh we're told he was absolutely deeply moved by the when he saw the city full of idols.

Acts 17, 16.

Now, while Paul was waiting for them in Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he was observing the city full of idols.

In Athens, uh you can't even imagine how many statues and idols surrounded the marketplace in that area.

It were hundreds, hundreds.

Um there was an idol for everything, every person's taste, every person's need to derive meaning or significance, they appealed to that god.

You know, uh let me let me share with you some of their gods that Paul was observing.

Apollos was the was the god of art.

Demeter was the god of agriculture.

You jump, see, you jump through hoops to make sure.

Well, I've got a big farm, I need blessing.

I that's where I that's my identity, that's where I have my meaning.

I need to appeal to this.

I'm gonna be religious and do what I need to do to get out what I want to have.

There's the God who controls that.

Ares was the god of war.

Uh armies went out appealing to him.

Dionysius was the god of theater, wine, ecstasy, fertility.

Uh Eros was the god of love.

Poseidon was the god of the sea.

You know, every city actually in in uh Greece had their own god, kind of their special god that the whole city identified with.

We'll see this later in in the book of Acts when we get to Ephesians, Ephesus, Artemis.

Oh, Artemis.

Yeah, we'll talk about that.

Uh Athena was the god of Athens, goddess of Athens.

Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of gods that represented the power that you believed could give you in life what you needed and wanted.

And you went through the rituals to make sure you get it.

When Paul saw these idols, observed, some translations had.

What's interesting is you don't pick this up in um in the English translations, but this this Greek word observed or saw or see is not the normal word in Greek for for just seeing things, just seeing, uh see that.

The word is theoretal, and we get the word theorize from the reo.

The word means to get under the surface.

You see some oh, you see why?

Oh, that's why that's half.

Oh, see that Paul is theoreting the idols, he's seeing underneath.

Um what's happening is he recognized what their idols represented.

He saw what they were using them for.

And then he realizes what they need to understand is the true God can give them everything, has given them everything they enjoy and want, could want.

I need to talk about that.

Underneath all the problems, I I'm convinced underneath all the problems in every single culture are idols.

Why do we fight?

Why do we make wars?

Uh we'll do whatever we need to do to get and receive uh what is required of us, if it means we get that money, we get that career, we get that success, and so on and so on and so on, so that we can find our happiness, find our meaning, find our fulfillment, apart from the true God.

At the Areopagus, Paul is showing us how to be an ambassador for Christ in a pluralistic um religious society, really.

Uh, how do you speak to them as an ambassador for Christ about their idols?

Well, he doesn't call them idolaters, for one thing.

He's not gonna offend them.

Uh he's respectful, as I said before.

He doesn't even call them idols as your worship, they call them objects of your worship.

He wants to be heard.

So he's gonna be sensitive to where they're at.

He wants them to understand and some things that they they need to know.

He's making an observation about them that leads him to talk about the one person who can give them what they are all really searching for.

The main thing Paul focuses on is the fact that he he picks this up.

It's really interesting.

He picks up the fact that they know, they know they they might have missed something, they might have missed a god, so they don't know everything.

Got a dedicated altar to an unknown god.

We'll talk about that now.

The inclination to worship is so deep, so strong in Athens, they want to make sure.

They cover all the bases.

In case we forgot something.

See, we there's an admission there.

We don't know everything in the universe.

There may have been a God we missed because we're not all knowing.

And Paul takes that admission that they know there's an unseen spiritual world they don't know anything about.

Paul is saying he's there to help them understand the God they've missed.

It's very interesting how he does that, turns it right around.

And Paul begins to describe their unknown God as the ultimate God above all other gods, the God they don't know yet.

And he he goes on in that passage to describe he's the creator.

He made everything, the world and everything in it.

He's Lord of heaven and earth.

He doesn't live in temples made by human hands.

He doesn't need anything from humans.

He gives life and breath to everything.

He made the whole human race from one blood.

He's sovereign, determining when and where we live.

He desires that humans should seek him.

And Paul says he's not far from any one of us.

We all live, move, and exist because of this one true God.

Then Paul says something absolutely masterful.

He quotes one of their own poets in the culture.

The fact that he knows this to me is amazing.

He was familiar with their literature and what they were basing their beliefs on.

He was well read.

He understood them.

And he pulls right out of their own culture some literature from their own poet who says, we are his offspring, the offspring of the one who created us.

In their own literature is the belief that God made us.

We've been created by this God, and therefore we are his children.

And this is also a principle we can take with us and our witness to others as Christ's ambassador.

Anytime, I believe, anytime we can connect some secular cultural observation that people have and are holding to the truth of the scripture or to Christ and the gospel, use it.

Yeah.

And you could that's just like this, the truth of the scripture.

Paul says, since that's the case, you guys believe in a creator and were his children, they should no longer think of God as being uh gold or silver or an image by your hands, or the from the imagination of some artist.

Don't think of God like that.

God is a person, and you know what?

He is overlooking the times uh you didn't know that he really existed and you didn't know better, but now he's declaring an important message to everyone.

God's declaring, Paul says to everyone, everyone, everywhere, they should repent.

What does Paul mean?

Paul means people should stop serving these lesser gods and turn in repentance to give our ultimate acknowledgement and worship to the one true Creator God in heaven.

And the reason we should turn from idols to turn to him is because the time is short.

Acts 17, 31.

He's fixed a day.

It's already set, folks, in which he'll judge the world in righteousness through a man whom he's appointed by having furnished proof to all men by raising it from the dead.

Do you realize in his speech, Paul has just answered all the basic questions of life that every person should ask?

Who am I?

Where did I come from?

Where am I going?

He answers all of them.

And the thing of it is, in any culture, the answers to those questions, everybody will have to believe something about them.

Who am I?

Where did I come from?

And where am I going?

Everybody believes something about those three questions.

They're basic life existent questions.

And our answers to those questions, whatever they are, form our belief system in life.

That's our belief system.

That's how we live on those beliefs.

And you know what?

We live by faith in those beliefs.

If we believe we're a product of chance evolutionary processes, we're gonna also believe in the survival of the fittest, uh, the strong over the weak, as the natural process of life.

And we may be we may be prone to trample over people who get in our way.

Or if we believe, life has no meaning.

We just live and then we die.

I've talked to people with that who hold that belief with no proof that they're holding it.

I don't believe in any kind of afterlife.

We just live and die, and that's it.

Well, then life becomes kind of a free-for-all.

Live it up.

This is it, this is all we got.

But they're believing it by faith.

They don't have proof that's the way it is.

How do they know?

They don't.

Everybody, you see, is religious in the sense that we live by a system of beliefs in our mind and heart by faith.

No proofs.

Everybody believes something about life, its meaning, and its purpose.

And none of those things can be proven.

They're all a matter of faith.

At the Areophagus, Paul answers the questions of who we are, where we came from, and where we're going.

We are the creation of God, the Almighty, the Creator.

We exist because God made us and determined all aspects of our life.

He's sovereign.

And we are headed to meet him one day in judgment to give an account for the life he gave us.

Notice that he's mainly talking to the philosophers here.

I just can't get over this.

Um, the educated elite in Athens.

And they're hanging, they're hanging on to their philosophies with no proof, just by faith.

So Paul's going to give them something they can believe in that has proof.

First of all, he establishes by their own admission they don't know everything about the life of the universe.

There are unknowns beyond their understanding, things that can't be proven, things we hope and believe are true, but we don't really know for sure.

Then he goes right for the jugular.

He said, I can give you proof that the true God I've just described actually exists.

Your own religion has a lot of unknowns, which you have no proof.

I have proof of the true God I serve.

I know the God that is unknown to you, and I'm making him known to you, and here's the proof: he raised your future judge from the dead.

Repent.

There's time to prepare.

Repent and turn to the true God.

And before this interesting, uh before Paul could finish more of the gospel explanation, he's ushered away.

Surrounded by religious, intellectually elite people, Paul's able to introduce them to the true creator God, Jesus the Messiah, using their own words, ideas, and practices.

Everyone innately knows whether they will admit it or not, there is a God who exists who will one day hold them accountable.

Anybody has any sense of morality inside knows this.

There's accountability.

Some people don't know why they feel guilty.

Paul appeals to their innate sense of the true God they seek and leads them to try to find the one whom God has sent to be their savior from that judgment.

So, all that to say, in witnessing for Christ as his ambassador, I just pull from this some things that help me that can help us.

Look, listen in our interactions with people, try to see the idols underneath what they're saying, what it is people are living for, what they're hoping for.

What's a description of the God they want?

Use what you hear and see in their life in their in the culture that corresponds to the truths God's given us and lead them to know Jesus, the ultimate source of life eternal.

While Paul wasn't finished talking to them, I'm gonna finish with the message he intended.

From Paul's message at the Areopagus, we're called to repent.

And you need to you need to take stock of this because I've talked to Christians who really have jettisoned the God of the Bible and got a God in their own mind whom they want.

He they want this one.

Don't do that.

We're called to repent from all false notions and beliefs about God that we may behold him and believe in the one person whom God has sent to save and redeem for himself for eternity, Jesus.

Believe in Jesus, the Son of God, risen from the dead, to give eternal life to all who believe in him.

And of course, you know, admittedly, that belief is by faith based on the evidence we've been given in the Holy Scriptures.

So I trust you've done that or will do that, believe in Him for eternal life.

Uh let's close in prayer.

Father, thank you that when we were lost and dead in our sins, you didn't leave us to perish.

You sent your Son, Jesus, sinless, perfect, to stand in our place, receive what we deserved in your judgment, so he could save us and reconcile us to yourself.

Help us to never, never minimize what Jesus has done for us.

We gratefully praise him, praise you for all that he means to us, all that he's done for us.

And I pray now that you would give us your heart for the lost, that we may have the confidence and urgency to reach them with the gospel, just like the Apostle Paul.

I pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.