Paul vs. The Philosophers

In Acts 17, Paul finds himself in a city very different than what he’s used to. Grand temples, pagan altars, and false idols fill the great city of Athens. When he begins sharing the good news of Jesus with the people of the city, he’s mostly ridiculed. But eventually, he’s invited to share his beliefs in front of a small crowd in the Areopagus court. As Paul explains who the true God really is, he confronts and dismantles the pagan idolatry that fills that city. He proclaims the good news that God is bigger than any temple, can’t be contained in any statue, but is also nearer to us than our very breath. Today, our world is the same as Athens. We can be tempted, like the Athenians, to share devotion that solely belongs to God with other worldviews, religions, and ideologies that oppose the way of Jesus. But to truly seek first the Kingdom means we too must confront and dismantle the idols in our lives and give all of our worship and devotion to the King.

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 If you have a Bible, go ahead and open up to Acts chapter 17. Uh, we’re continuing, uh, trekking along, journeying through the book of Acts together. So, uh, we’re going to pick up right where we left off last week. Acts 17 verse 16. Uh, before we dive in, let me pray for us. You can still turn there if you’d like.

Uh, and then we will get going.

So Father, we thank you for, uh, this time. Amen.

God, we give you these next few moments.

God, we ask that you would, uh, quiet our minds, that you would still our hearts, and that you would ready our hands so that we might take what we learn, uh, from your word and put it into practice this week. Um, so Father, we love you, and we pray all this in your name. Amen. Uh, there’s a scene at the end of the first film in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, uh, that always captured my imagination as a kid, so here it is.

Uh, Aragorn, The Lone Ranger, resistant of his calling as Gondor’s true king, faces off against a small army of Uruk hai, Saruman’s evil elite soldiers. Uh, Aragorn is alone. This is the end of the movie. His company has been broken up. The famous Fellowship of the Ring has been broken, so Frodo has gone on to Mount Doom on his own to try and destroy the ring by himself.

Boromir has run off after trying to take the ring from Frodo. Legolas, Gimli, and the rest of the hobbits, uh, are off doing something else. I actually don’t remember where they are. Uh, but here’s what I remember is both Peter Jackson, the director’s brilliance, and Aragorn’s courage, both on display as Aragorn, in slow motion of course, faces off an entire small army of the most elite soldiers in Middle earth on his own.

Now the odds are stacked against him, there’s no chance of his survival, but he fights. To slow down Sauron’s army and give Frodo a fighting chance to get to Mount Doom. But there was always something about that scene that struck me as a kid. Aragorn, slow motion, with his sword walking out from behind those ruins so that he can You guys know what I’m talking about.

You’ve seen the movie. Don’t act like I’m weird up here. Okay? As an eight year old boy, this was, like, the height of what it meant to be like a man. Uh, That’s kind of, stay with me, that’s kind of like, uh, what’s happening in Acts, uh, that we’re about to read. There’s a pivotal moment in the story that Luke has been telling, this is Paul at his best.

Uh, standing off against, uh, not, you know, evil, wicked soldiers, but philosophical forces that hold the world under sway and influence. Uh, so like Aragorn, Paul’s own fellowship has been broken. Silas and Timothy, his two companions, are on their way to meet him, but they’re still a long ways away. We’ll But this is arguably Paul’s center point in his ministry to the non Jewish, or they’re called Gentiles, to their world.

This is Paul against the philosophers. And so we’re going to read a very weighty passage, and it’s really easy to get kind of bogged down in, uh, lost in the weeds here, uh, so in order to kind of help us orient ourselves around what Luke is trying to tell us, I’m going to work through this passage in three parts, the scene, the showdown, and the response.

Sound good? All right. So first, the scene. And we learned last week that Paul has made his way deeper into the Gentile world. As he and his friends Silas and Timothy have gone further in, they’ve planted some churches, they’ve started some riots, and they’ve landed some friends in jail. By the way, remember Jesus last words, last recorded words to his disciples before he left.

You will be my witnesses in Judea, Jerusalem, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. So now Paul is at the entrance to the ends of the earth, but he’s here alone. So if the pagan polytheistic Gentile world can be described as a beast, Paul is about to enter its belly. That is the city of Athens. Now we have to understand just how significant the moment Uh, that we’re about to read is, and, and in order to do that, we have to understand just how significant the city of Athens is.

In fact, I would say that there’s probably no modern equivalent that has as much cultural reach and power as Athens did in the first century. Maybe something like L. A. or New York or maybe Oxford or some place like that that has influence and sway all over the world, but even those cities kind of pale in comparison to what Athens was for the Greco Roman world.

It was a central hub, For the philosophical ideologies and worldviews that shaped the rest of both Greece and Rome, to put it bluntly, Athens was probably, according to scholars that are studying this time, the most important Greek city in the Greco Roman world at this time. It boasted of a rich tradition of intellectual thought from thinkers like Plato, Socrates, Epicurus, and was the famous adopted home of Aristotle.

This was a city that had massive reach and ideology, and it was known for its intellectual capital, its philosophical arguments, and its ideologies that spread throughout the rest of the known world. But, and this is key for us to understand, these philosophical debates and ideas were not just academic hobbies.

Like, when we hear about philosophies and things like that today, we don’t really see how those things shape us, but in the ancient world, this was not just, like, in, like, the universities and the study halls and the lectures. These were ideologies and philosophies. philosophies that shaped how every single person in that time saw the world.

So in other words, what your normal blue collar working Greek men and women thought about things like the meaning and the purpose of life, right and wrong, the will of whatever divine forces might be out there were all influenced by the philosophers and the religion, uh, the religions of Athens. Which means that Athens was not only a city with great intellectual power, but it was also a city literally overwhelmed by idols.

Temples, shrines, and statues lined every street. Another reason why I don’t think we have a modern equivalent to Athens in our world today. The Pantheon, for example, displayed a golden ivory statue to the founding goddess of Athens, Athena, that reportedly you could see, uh, reportedly you could see from Thessaloniki.

40 miles away. Other images and statues of the gods Apollo, Jupiter, Venus, Diana, Bacchus, and countless others were placed in homes, on street corners, and in every temple spread throughout the city. In one, uh, sort of semi famous Roman play, the main character notes that in Athens it is easier to find a god than a man.

And that’s exactly the first thing that Paul notices. So Acts 17 starting in verse 16. Says, while Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed when he saw that the city was full of idols that were distressed, deeply distressed as a mixture of emotions like anger, but also pain. It’s, it had like a visceral response.

He almost a physical kind of a way for him to respond, uh, just by seeing all these idols. So, He reasoned in the synagogues with the Jews and with those who worshipped God, as well as in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. The marketplace was like, it wasn’t like, you know, Wal Mart or Target or Fry’s or whatever.

It was like, more like a farmer’s market kind of a thing, where you would go and literally shop for your food. Shop for a new religion. People would just talk about these things all the time. They’d be like, what god do you worship? And they would share about the little altar or shrine they had set up in their home, and maybe some people would kind of pick up some things here and leave some things there.

So the marketplace was like a big social center. Paul goes up there maybe to sell tents, maybe just to argue with people, I don’t know. But he goes there to try and persuade them of the true, uh, way of Jesus. Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also debated with him. Some said, what is this ignorant show off trying to say?

Others replied, he seems to be a preacher of foreign deities, because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. So, uh, already, we need to define some terms. Uh, Epicureans and Stoics. Uh, let’s talk about these very briefly and to kind of, you know, oversimplify who these, uh, two groups of people are.

The Epicureans were materialists whose goal in life was pleasure. So they believed that the gods, if they existed at all, were really far away. Uh, with maybe little to no care for humans, or what they did, or what they thought, or whether they got worshipped or not. Uh, the point of life, because the gods were so far away and had no real interaction with, uh, humanity, the point of life was then to make the most of your time here.

Life was something that was meant to be experienced. Maximize pleasure, minimize pain, or, what you might have heard, eat, drink, and be merry. Now they believed in moderation, of course, they weren’t like total hedonists, but their aim in life was to enjoy as much of the physical pleasures that life had to offer them as they possibly could.

The Stoics, on the other hand, were the complete opposite. So the Stoics, again, broadly speaking, were pantheists whose goal in life was discipline. So they didn’t believe that the gods were far off. They actually believed that God was actually really close. In fact, they would define God not as a personal being or a heavenly father, but more as a transcendent sort of vague spirituality, this energy that lives inside all created matter.

Divinity was this inner sense of rationality, or the Greek word, logos, reason, things that made sense. And our job in life, as human beings, Stoics or as people wasn’t to try and maximize pleasure or minimize pain. It was to, uh, wield the divine force that kind of holds us all together through, uh, self discipline, virtue, and enduring hardship.

This is what we would call a modern day pantheist. They believe that God is in you. God is in me. God is in the trees. God is in the stars, the sky, the birds, all of that. Uh, they emphasized, again, discipline, self-control and virtue in order to overcome evil and suffering. And these philosophies, as you can see, were kind of complete opposites from each other, but they were prevalent and highly influential in the city of Athens, and they were both radically opposed to Paul and his kingdom.

Look how they describe it in verse 18, they call him an ignorant show off. So the scene here is Paul’s going to the marketplace talking with all these people, and some of these Stoics and Epicurean philosophers hear about this Jewish man talking about, uh, you know, a foreign d God named Jesus and all this, and so they, Come and they say, what is this ignorant show off trying to say?

Literally, that in Greek, you might have a note in your Bible that calls this a seed picker. Uh, ignorant show off, that phrase means seed picker. Uh, common way, it was like an idiom. If you said that in the first century, they would know what you meant. Uh, we don’t know what that means, so here’s what it means.

Uh, a seed picker was literally like, like a bird who would go and pick different seeds off the ground. So, uh, if you were described as a seed picker, it meant that you didn’t really have any thoughts of your own. You would go and kind of pick up things here and there. You’d regurgitate things and kind of create this weird new way of life.

You weren’t a very good teacher. You weren’t very compelling. Uh, your communication lacked sophistication. Uh, and just had a lot of pointless information. Uh, some of you are like, yeah, I know that’s exactly what’s happening right now. Okay. Stay with me. Alright. All this to say, are they taking Paul very seriously?

No, they’re not taking Paul very seriously. They believe he’s just preaching about foreign deities. Now, hang on to that. That’s going to be really important in a minute. Uh, maybe this God named Jesus and what they probably thought was his goddess wife, Anastasis, uh, which is the Greek word for resurrection.

And so let’s keep reading. Verse 19. So they took him. And they brought him to the Europagus, and said, May we learn about this new teaching that you are presenting? Because what you say sounds strange to us, and we want to know what these things mean. Now all the Athenians and the foreigners residing there spent their time on nothing else but telling or hearing something new.

That’s Luke being a little bit, uh, sarcastic. So, the Europagus. This is where the showdown is going to take place. The Europagus was actually the highest court in Athens. It was situated where you could see all of Athens in its splendor, all of its temples, the Acropolis, the Pantheon. It’s where legal decisions about religions, ethics, and civil life were decided, and famously, it was where Socrates, the great philosopher, was executed nearly five centuries earlier than this, after being tried and found guilty of preaching foreign deities.

So when we read this, it’s really tempting to think that these people are being really genuine. They hear something compelling about how Paul is communicating the gospel, and they just want to hear more. I would argue that’s not actually what’s happening. They’re accusing him of preaching foreign deities.

He’s not being invited to share more about his beliefs. He’s being threatened for them. Now this wasn’t actually like a, he’s not an actual, actually going through like a trial, like a legal trial. This is more of like a, hey, we need to make sure that you aren’t threatening our very way of life. So not an official court proceeding.

This is more like an informal inquiry, like a strong arming him into saying what he really believes. Introducing foreign deities to him. threatened the economic system of the city and the entire region of this part of the world. Later in Acts, we’re going to read that if there are no gods, if there are no other false gods and ideologies and pagan idols and things like that, then there’s no need for physical, literal idols.

And if there’s no need for physical, literal idols, then those people who make their living off of making those idols are suddenly out of a job. So if you threaten idolatry, you threaten the idols that built the foundation, the bedrock of the city, you’re not just threatening the threatening an ideology or religion, you are threatening the economic way that Athens has made its, uh, made its living.

So Paul isn’t just subverting false religions, he is threatening the societal bedrock of Athens itself, and that’s gotten him some enemies. So that’s the scene. Next is the showdown. My best friend in high school. Uh, was one of the most brilliant and charismatic and also one of the most arrogant people I’ve ever met.

Uh, he used him, uh, his, his, uh, his brilliance and his charisma to kind of weasel his way up to the top of the, like, social ladder. So he was one of the most popular kids. Uh, not only was he on the varsity football team and the homecoming king both junior and senior year, Uh, he also used his brilliance and his charisma to, to again, weasel his way up to becoming the president of the chess club.

As you do. Uh, I remember the last pep rally of our senior year. He was invited to give a pitch, not to attract freshmen to join the football team, but to join freshmen to join, uh, to get them to join the chess club. Uh, so he only had a few minutes to try and kind of pitch what the chess club was and how fun it would be to come and play chess after school or whatever.

Uh, because, uh, he was brilliant and charismatic or whatever, a little arrogant, instead of just kind of giving a pitch and explaining what the club was, uh, he pulled a little stunt. Uh, he played. In front of everybody, three games of chess against three different opponents at the same time. And he won. And it made me so mad because everyone thought it was the coolest thing ever.

Probably staged, I get that, that’s not the point. The point is, uh, But the sure sign of brilliance in any chess game or chess player, if you watch any chess movie like the Queen’s Gambit or that one with Tobe McGuire where he plays Bobby Fischer, there’s always a scene where they want to show you how brilliant a chess player really is.

You show them playing three different games of chess at the same time. There’s always that scene, they’re walking around, taking on different opponents, somehow able to keep track of these games and the different strategies in their minds at the same time. That’s what my friend did senior year of high school.

That’s what Paul’s about to do, here in Athens, in the middle of the Europagus, as he’s about to be questioned for his philosophies and his religious ideas, all these things that he’s bringing to the city of Athens, these foreign deities. He’s about to hold this argument and kind of trace different things and basically dismantle what they believe line by line.

It’s a brilliant speech, honestly, but it’s really interesting. If you read it, it kind of doesn’t make a lot of sense. At a surface level reading, we just say that Paul is basically just kind of given the opportunity of a lifetime. So he’s invited to the court, highest court in Athens, most influential city in the Greco Roman world.

So he sees an opportunity to share the gospel, and he takes it. So most interpretations would look at Paul’s speech just as really an exemplary model of how to communicate the gospel message in a context different than your own. And the speech certainly is that, but if that’s all that it is, it’s a little weird.

I mean, he quotes and he seems to affirm false gods and pagan poets. He mentions the resurrection, but not the cross. And when he tells everyone to repent without really mentioning or explaining what sin is, people kind of run him off. So what exactly is Paul doing here? I’m glad you asked. Let’s read it line by line.

Verse 22. Thank you. So Paul stood in the middle of the Europagus and said, People of Athens, I see that you are extremely religious in every respect. For as I was passing through and observing the objects of your worship, I even found an altar on which was described to an unknown god. Therefore, what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.

Now, quickly, Statue of the Unknown God. If you’ve ever read that and wondered what that is, uh, here’s what that is. There was a legend that Paul likely knew about that was really popular in Athens at this time. Uh, briefly, the legend went like this. In 500 A. D., there was a plague that ravaged the city and left a third of its citizens dead.

After sacrificing, uh, to every god that they knew of, the people of Athens desperately sent for help from a philosopher named Epimenides. Epimenides went, arrived, saw all the dead people, and assumed that there must be a god that they forgot to worship. So he tells the local priests in the city to set up, uh, let go a bunch of sheep, let them graze in the field, and the ones that stop grazing and lie down to sleep, slaughter them there.

Make that a sacrifice to this unknown god that you don’t have a name or an altar for yet, and then maybe that god that’s causing this plague on the city of Athens will, uh, relinquish the plague and you’ll survive. And so that’s exactly what they do. The plague stops, and in those spots where they slaughtered the lambs, they built altars to these unknown gods.

So Epimenides comes to Athens as a prophet, telling them to make sacrifices to an unknown god so that they might be saved. This is good. Paul comes to Athens, standing in the same spot as Epimenides, telling the Athenians how that unknown god sacrificed himself so that they might be saved. That’s cool.

Okay. Alright. Moving on. Verse 24. Are we okay? Are we doing alright? Okay. Alright. The god who made the world and everything in it, he is the lord of heaven and earth. Does not live in shrines made by hands. Neither is he served by human hands. As though he needed anything, since he himself gives everyone life and breath.

And all things. Now, in my imagination, as Paul says this, he’s gesturing towards the pantheon here or the Parthenon, or to the Acropolis or to any of the other temples, altars or shrines that you could see from the opus. Paul’s saying these things might be well intended. I see how religious you are, but these things are worthless.

He’s confronting both the Epicureans and the Stoics here. He’s showing the Epicureans that God didn’t just set the world in motion and then walk away. He’s near enough to give us breath. At which point the Stoics might have said yes and amen, but Paul shows the Stoics that God isn’t in the created world.

He’s actually separate from it. Verse 26. From one man, We don’t have time to get into it, but that is a line critiquing the way the Athenians would have thought of time as this sort of cyclical thing that repeated itself over and over again. Verse 27, He did this that they might seek God, and perhaps they might reach out and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us.

For in him we live and move and have our being. That’s a quote, by the way, of Epimenides, the prophet, 500 years ago. As even some of your own poets have said, for we also are his offspring. That’s another quote from another poet named Eratos. Since we are God’s offspring then, we shouldn’t think that the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image fashioned by human art and imagination.

So like a genius chess player, Paul is brilliantly weaving in and out of multiple philosophical arguments to show what they get right and what they get wrong. So the Epicureans would have liked what Paul had said about God not needing a shrine or a temple made by human hands. They believed the gods were far away.

They don’t need or want anything from us. But they would have been startled to hear that Paul believed that this god is near. He’s not far away. He’s so near we can reach out and find him. He’s not far from us at all. In fact, it’s not us who need to give that god anything. It’s God who gives everything to us.

The Stoics, on the other hand, would have liked what Paul had said about there being something divine and transcendent through which we live and move and breathe, and they would have liked that Paul quoted their favorite Athenian poet, Eretus, we are all his offspring. Eretus, speaking of Zeus, Paul, speaking of God.

But the Stoics would have been startled to hear Paul describe this divinity not as an impersonal force that we learn to wield through discipline and virtue, but rather As a personal singular God whose divine nature is wholly separate from gold, silver, and stone. And us being offspring doesn’t mean that we’re connected by something divine, but that we are made in the image of someone divine.

All of this points us to Paul’s main point. Not only can God be known, but he also wants to be known. But Paul’s not done. He actually goes one step further. Verse 30. Therefore, having overlooked the times of ignorance, God now commands all people, everywhere, to repent. Because he has set a day when he is going to judge the world in righteousness by the man he has appointed.

He has provided proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead. Now, Paul likely would have known about the famous play Eumenides by the great tragic playwright Aeschylus, which is a play that describes the very founding of the Europagus. It’s a legend, a myth, that tells about why the gods, specifically Apollo, created and built the Acropolis that Paul is now standing in.

In that play, the end of it ends with, uh, Uh, the founding of the Europagus, and the Greek god Apollo says this, Once a man’s blood has been sucked into the earth, he dies. And there can be no resurrection. The Europagus that Paul is standing in was literally built on the belief that there will be no resurrection.

There will be no judge, there will be no judgment after we die. We have to do that stuff here on earth while we still can. That’s what the Europagus is for. But Paul brilliantly redirects their intrinsic sense of morality and justice that made them build the Acropolis outside of themselves and towards the God that he has just shown to them.

Lastly, the response. Verse 32. When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some began to ridicule him, but others said, we’d like to hear more from you again about this. So Paul left their presence. However, some people joined him and believed, including Dionysius the Europagite, a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

So the resurrection wasn’t just silly and ridiculous, it was anti intellectual. Maybe the Athenians could accept that there was an ultimate god who was going to one day judge the world. Maybe they could accept that they had somehow missed this god. Maybe they could accept that this god was bigger than the local temples or statues could hold.

And maybe they could accept that this god was close and personal enough to actually feel. But resurrection? If that was true, then everything else falls apart. The foundation of Athens and the pagan Greco Roman world crumbles. Paul will actually later write to the church in Corinth, which he’s about to start in the next chapter.

If the resurrection isn’t true, then our faith in Jesus crumbles. Central to the kingdom is the risen, resurrected King. So that’s the speech. Arguably the height of Paul’s ministry to the Gentiles, the question for us Is what does this have to do with us today? Or put another way, how should you and I respond to Paul’s speech?

It’s really easy to read things like this and to get really lost in the weeds and to kind of look at all the culture and the history of stuff, which I think is really fun. I don’t know if you can tell. Uh, I love this stuff. To note Paul’s brilliance and how, uh, gifted he is at being able to hold different arguments in his head, how educated he is and privileged to have this knowledge about different Athenian poets that he’s probably read in different plays that he had maybe some awareness of, and to be able to use these things to contextualize and communicate the gospel in a way that he knows will both, uh, attract people and confront them.

But at the end of the day, the way that we read Scripture has more to do with how the posture of our heart is as we read it than, uh, the filling of our minds. So I believe that we have to understand what Paul and what Luke really want to communicate to us, um, by highlighting this speech. And I think the best way to understand why this is in the Bible is to go back to the beginning.

What sets Paul off? What is Paul’s entire speech targeted at? It’s idolatry. And I know how that sounds. We’ve heard and we’ve talked a lot at our church, and probably in many churches, about the sin of idolatry and how all of us tend to make idols in our lives out of different things that God has created and given us.

And because most of us don’t blatantly worship Greek gods or Roman spirits, most of us, I hope, uh, don’t have altars set up in our homes to gods like Jupiter or Athena, it can be far too easy for us. To shrug off this passage, to sneer at the pagan Athenians, to look down on them as ignorant enemies of God.

But I would argue that you and I really are no better. Or in the words of the late, great Tim Keller, we’re all pagans again. See, that same impulse, That drove the Athenians to direct their worship and their devotion to a pantheon of gods and vague spiritualities also drives us to worship, to give our energy and our attention, to give our allegiances to a pantheon of other ideologies, practices, worldviews, and habits.

Theologians call this syncretism. It means dividing our devotion to God with other worldviews and ideologies. And again, I know it’s hard for us to see ourselves in this text because Athens is such a foreign city to us, and we likely don’t see pagan idols lie in our city streets, and we may not even recognize the pagan idols that exist within our own hearts, but I would argue that some of us live like the Epicureans.

God is real, but he’s not really involved in our world or in my personal life. I’ve never seen a miracle, therefore he must not care. We split our allegiance to God with devotion to political parties or people who promise to course correct the world instead of Jesus. Maybe, in other words, for some of us, Jesus is our king on Sundays, but the rest of the week, he’s just another part of our schedules, along with our work life, our hobbies.

To reorient our lives, which is the language that we use here at our church, to literally orient our lives around something other than our jobs, our income, our hobbies, our families, whatever it is, and instead orient them around Jesus feels as foreign to us and disturbing as the resurrection was to the Athenians.

We follow God until he doesn’t make us feel good. Maximize pleasure, minimize pain. Or maybe others of us are like the Stoics, we follow God until it doesn’t make sense to us. Until the way of Jesus and what it means to live life in the kingdom contradicts what we think makes up the good life, or the good life and, uh, discipline or virtue.

We are the ultimate authority in our lives. not God. But if the undercurrent of Athens was superstition, self discipline, and hedonism, I would argue that the undercurrent of our culture isn’t that different. See, Paul’s speech at its core is more than just a culturally relevant explanation of the gospel.

It’s a dismantling of every other pagan god and false idol that the people of Athens give their allegiance to. And just like it did sometime in the first century, the gospel also comes to us today to disrupt our own idolatry and misplaced devotion. But what the gospel disrupts, it also replaces.

At the height of Paul’s speech, he says something really radical that sounds kind of weird and mystical to us, that in him we live and move and have our being. Hmm. God is the one who’s literally closer to us than the molecules in our bodies, than the breath that we breathe itself. God gave us the breath.

God is near to us. In other words, the deepest longings of our hearts that existed in the hearts of the Athenians, that pushed them to worship pagan gods, that push us to make idols out of ideologies, families, other things that want to disrupt God, the only thing that can satisfy that longing, as cheesy as it sounds, is Jesus.

It’s a relationship with Jesus. And Paul was somebody who had it all. Paul was educated. And Paul had the authority. He had the history. He was top of the line Pharisee. He had his career set before him. He encounters Jesus out of fear, yes. In the road to Damascus, he’s blinded. Jesus confronts him for the way that he’s been living his life and persecuting Jesus’s disciples, but I really do believe that this isn’t Paul speaking on Jesus’s behalf out of fear.

I believe this is Paul who’s met the risen Lord in his own life and has found a God who’s not far off and, and, uh, inactive in the world around us, but who has actually found a God who’s nearer than Paul himself could have even imagined. The deepest longings of our hearts can only be found in a relationship with Jesus.

So I want to give us time to respond a little bit. So why don’t we stand?

And I just want us to respond this way.

Would you come Holy Spirit?

And God, would you show us, even now in this moment as we’re, you know, Directing our attention to you, directing our minds and kind of opening up our hearts and examining our habits and our routines of our lives. We ask that in this moment you would maybe show us, bring something to mind that is taking your place in our hearts.

God, would you show us ways that we might be living like the pagans in Athens?

I mean, we haven’t thought about it that way before, that the way that we’re splitting our lives and dividing our devotion is, um, it’s not just our lifestyle, it’s actually idolatry. Something that you’re, you take seriously and that you’re going to judge.

God, I ask for those of us who identify with Epicurean philosophy, we just want to live life, we want to experience it. We want to maximize pleasure, minimize pain. Amen.

God, I pray that even now you would show us that life to the full or life and life in abundance is a life centered around you.

For those of us who identify with the Stoics, we want to follow you, but logic and reason are getting in the way. And I pray that you would show us, not that we have to put aside our logic and our reason, but that your way is the best way. And that the kingdom doesn’t often make sense to the world, but it is true.

And it is real.

God, I pray for all of us that in this Space that we gather in week in and week out that you would constantly show us that you would meet us here and remind us What we can look like As a church that is centered wholly around you Making your name known to the pagan world around us, but also in our own hearts in our own lives So god, we thank you for your word.

We thank you for this time We pray all this in your name. Amen.