Acts 17 Sermon

One of the great questions of our day, especially in Christian circles, is how do we live in a secular world? How do we live in a world that has, in many ways, moved away from the teachings of Jesus? You’ve probably head this phrase before - a secular world. I’m betting if I asked for a definition of secularism, a lot of Christians would say that its a worldview that is anti-Christian. It’s a mindset or a state of affairs that are hostile to the Christian teachings. Often when we call something secular, we really mean that it’s working against the kingdom of God. Now, I don’t think that’s the best definition, so let me put forward an alternate take. A secular world is one in which all of our beliefs, whether Christian or not, all of our beliefs are contested. It’s a world that says that we can not be certain that what we believe is true, and therefore the secular world is a world of angst and anxiety, because someone is always telling us that we are wrong.

Chances are you feel that angst regularly. We live in a world where our neighbors, coworkers, and friends all have completely different worldviews. They all have a wildly different set of beliefs, and because of this, our own beliefs, our own worldview are constantly being questioned - explicitly and implicitly. So the question is, how do we live as followers of Jesus in such a world?

Well the good news is that we’re not the first Christians to live in a secular world. In fact, let’s be encouraged this morning that Christianity was birthed in such a world. The Roman Empire was as secular as it got. They didn’t care what you believed or what you worshipped as long as you paid your taxes and loosely bought into the whole “the emperor is a god” thing. It was an incredibly divided society held together by the threads of an artificial unity, much like our own society. So in our text this morning, we see Paul land in Athens, the great intellectual and cultural center of the world, and he engages a world very similar to our own. And we see him do three things: First, he sees the city for what it is. With all of its beauty and grandeur and sophistication, Paul sees a city under the oppression of idolatry. Second, rather than running away or writing the city off, Paul responds with empathy and moves towards people with the gospel. And finally, he demonstrates that the deepest desires of the human heart are only fulfilled in Jesus. So let’s look again at Acts 17, beginning with verse 16:

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

Where are we in the story of Acts? Paul is making his way to Macedonia, but he’s had some trouble with crowds wanting to kill him, and so by way of a rescue mission his friends ship him off to Athens, where he is now waiting until they rejoin him, and they can continue on to Macedonia. Now, there has never been a city quite like Athens. As I said, this was the intellectual and cultural heart of the world. Some of the most influential people in history came from this city: think Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. But it wasn’t just philosophy: it was art, literature, and architecture. The buildings and monuments in Athens were unrivaled. You had the Acropolis, this great citadel on the hill dedicated to the glory the city and their gods, that could be seen for miles around. You had the Parthenon. Even the Agora, the famous market and city-center, Paul would have looked up and around and seen breathless works of artistry everywhere his gaze landed.

It would have been easy for Paul to have been swept up in the beauty and wonder of the city. One pastor I know used to call Paul a nerd among nerds. He is the greatest mind the Church has ever known. So Athens could easily have been his paradise. It would have been like me going to one of those big board gaming conventions. Paul could have been starstruck by all that Athens offered, but instead, what do we see? His spirit was provoked, because he recognized that the city was full of idols.

Now that’s a really bible-y phrase isn’t it - His spirit was provoked. Let’s flesh that out a little. This is the same word used of God in the Old Testament when he engages the idolatry of Israel. It describes a deep sorrow and godly anger that the city of Athens is being crushed by the weight of its idolatry.

How do we as Christians live in a secular world? First, we must recognize the presence of idolatry around us. Paul saw through the glitz and glamour of the city, through its philosophical might, and he saw it for what it was: a city proclaiming a worldview that did not find its fulfilment in Christ, a culture proclaiming a narrative that did not usher people towards Jesus, but actually away from him. The very things that his world praised, provoked his spirit, because he saw people pursuing after idols.

But he doesn’t do what we so often do. We evangelicals, we do this all the time. We see idolatry, we’re enraged by it, so we run the other way yelling Christian swear words as we flee. We label swathes of the public as hopeless, we write them off, and lose all motivation to bring the gospel of Jesus to them. Worse yet, we insult them and call them names. Is this what Paul does in Athens, the city of idols? Is that how we are to live in a secular world? No! Paul engages with these people. He speaks with them. He shows empathy and moves towards them.

We see in verse 17 that Paul follows his normal pattern and he goes to the Jewish synagogue, but then we get something different, because we’re told he went to the marketplace every day to talk with people who happened to be there. Look at the movement - Paul is moving towards the ones who are caught up in idolatry.

Now who are these people Paul interacts with? Luke describes two: the Epicureans and the Stoics. Let’s unpack that, because you’ll come to find that these people are still around today.

The Epicureans believed in some kind of divinity, but they believed that it was so far away that you couldn’t know anything about it. It wasn’t interested in humanity at all, which meant that life was left up to chance. It might go well for you, it might not. Who is to say? It’s all random. So your purpose in life is to sap as much enjoyment out of existence as you can, while you can. You can probably already think of where in our culture that worldview is still being played out.

On the other hand, the Stoics also believed in some kind of divinity, but it wasn’t super distant from the world, it actually undergirded every part of life. It was interesting because while the Epicureans said God was so distant that you couldn’t know it, the Stoics said that God was so close that you also couldn’t know it. For them, the divine-soul as they called it, was a part of everything, guiding it towards its own destiny, which meant that all of life was fated. Life was determined by fate, so you can’t change your lot in life, and so your purpose is to learn how to endure it, the good and the bad. That’s where we get that phrase, “a stoic look.” It’s all about enduring life.

In many ways we haven’t moved past these worldviews, have we? The Epicureans are easy to spot and to identify with, aren’t they? We all long to have our desires met. We all want to maximize pleasure and minimize pain in our lives, don’t we? Epicureans believed that God was so far away that either he doesn’t exist or he simply doesn’t care, so we can do whatever we want. Live and let live. You only live once. You can see how this continues to play out in our world.

The Stoics are still around too, but it’s more subtle. You can see it in our propensity to distract ourselves endlessly. You can see it in our obsession with the internet and entertainment. The hours that we spend on social media or video games or sports. You can see it in how we can’t stop working, can’t stop packing our family schedules. So much of these antics are all about distracting ourselves from thinking about our lives, because we’re afraid that we’ll discover that they are meaningless. Maybe life is just fated, maybe it doesn’t have a purpose. We don’t want to think about that so we hit refresh on our email for the thousandth time or put on a TV show or mindlessly scroll through our newsfeed.

You can see that the Epicureans and Stoics are still around today, and Paul doesn’t run from them, he doesn’t write them off or call them names, and neither should we. We should move towards them and engage them with empathy, just like Paul.

Now, how does Paul engage them? Well he preaches a sermon, and in that sermon, he graciously demonstrates that their deepest desires are only fulfilled in Jesus.

Both camps believed that God could not be known, and because of that, human beings have to resign themselves to finding their own purpose and making their own meaning, which an exhausting and ultimately impossible task. The Epicureans seek purpose by pursuing what makes them happy, but is that a purpose that can truly sustain someone? How do Epicureans handle pandemics? Not well. Epicureanism never lives up to the hype. This is why Paul begins by saying, God is knowable! And it’s not like we have to figure him out, because by his own initiative he has revealed himself and his will for us in Jesus. We can know God because he wants to be known by us. He is not far from us. He cares about us, like a parent cares for their children.

To the Stoics he says that God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place” - Okay, they’d be tracking with that, right? God has set everything in its place, it’s all according to fate..but he goes on, “that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for “ ‘In him we live and move and have our being’.”

What Paul is saying is that if we truly live and move and have our being in God, as you say, don’t you think he might actually want us to know him? If he bothered to create all of this, don’t you think he actually might want a relationship with us? Do you really think that the beauty of the forests of maple trees up in the North Georgia mountains exist only for you to get a moment’s worth of awe, or could it be that someone is actually calling you towards him through the beauty of what he created. Do you really think that the wide-mouthed smile that your baby gives you when you walk into the room is really just a chance event that lifts your heart for a moment, or could it be that the Creator God is calling for you to be uplifted by gazing at his delight in you?

All of life is a pregnant pause, it’s the minor key that God intends to resolve in himself. This is the Christian message that we bear in a secular world. All of life’s worldviews find their fulfillment in Jesus. All of the desires of the human heart are fulfilled in Jesus and in Jesus alone, not in creation. So how do we live in a secular world? We acknowledge the idols around us. We move towards people in empathy. And we graciously demonstrate that the deepest desires of the human heart are fulfilled in Christ alone.

This hard to do. No question about it, this requires a lot of intentionality. So here’s what I want you do to do this week. I want you to get somewhere quiet in your home this week, and I want you to pray. And as your praying I want you to make three columns on a piece of paper. In the first column, I want you to write down the names of people you know that do not know Jesus. Friends, family, neighbors, whatever. In the second column, I want you to write down where they find meaning in life. Where are they pursuing purpose? Now, notice, this doesn’t have to be negative. They may be pursuing purpose in being a great parent or a great employer. Those are very common longings in our area. But in the third column, I want you to pray through how Jesus is the fulfillment on that longing and desire. At the heart of our longing to be a good parent is the desire to pass something on to our children, to secure a future for them. But if 2020 has reminded us of one things it’s that we can’t secure a future for ourselves, can we? But in Jesus, our future is secured, isn’t it? We know that he will come and make all things new, he will right every wrong, his kingdom will endure forever, and so that is where our hope must be. What if their searching for purpose in their career? Wanting a purpose isn’t wrong. Wanting to make something, to give back to the world, isn’t wrong, but inevitably, we’re going to fail at some point. We’ll mess something up. We’ll harm when we meant to help. How does Jesus liberate them from their failures? How does Jesus give them a life’s purpose that can handle our failures?

So create three columns and pray through the people who don’t know Christ, what is their hearts desire, and how does Jesus ultimately fulfill those desires. Because this is our task: to point others to Jesus. To recognize idols. To move towards the lost. And to point them to Jesus.