My prayer is that this weeks message will challenge all of us to be on mission for Christ, to proclaim Jesus from where we now sit to the ends of the earth. Before you go any further, check out this video on the website of the International Mission Board of the SBC:
http://www.imb.org/main/give/videosearchpage.asp?StoryID=5595&LanguageID=1709
Intro
We often speak about
the worsening condition of the world around us, but feel like we’re helpless to change it.
But
we’re not helpless. Far from it.
We
have the most powerful message of change that has ever existed, the gospel of
Jesus Christ.
Just
because we look around and think our culture, society, and world looks bad,
there is no reason to despair.
The
challenges we face are no different or worse than what those first century apostles
faced as they went forth to engage the world with the good news of the
resurrected Lord and Savior Jesus.
Background:
When we come to Acts 17:16 we discover
the apostle Paul has been left alone in the great city of Athens.
Athens was a great cultural center,
the prize jewel of ancient Greece, and even though conquered by the Romans in Paul's day,
the Romans still treasured all things Greek.
With a history now spanning
7,000 years, Athens was the home of a democratic society laying the foundations
for Western society.
Athens was a city of learning and intellectual
greats, boasting Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – the world’s greatest philosophers.
Athens was also a city of
magnificent architecture, hosting the Acropolis, the Agora, and the Parthenon.
Left alone in this cultural capital
of the world, Paul could have toured the city as a sightseer and been awestruck
by its many wonders.
But he didn’t. Rather he saw the
city not in any of these ways, but as full of idols and in desperate need of
Jesus.
Later addressing the Athenians Paul
would say, I see you are ‘very religious.’ And so they were.
"Xenophon referred to Athens as ‘one
great altar, one great sacrifice’. In consequence, ‘there were more gods in
Athens than in all the rest of the country, and the Roman satirist hardly
exaggerates when he says that it was easier to find a god there than a man’.” “In
the Parthenon stood a huge gold and ivory statue of Athena, [for whom the city
was named]‘whose gleaming spear-point was visible forty miles away’. [1]
No doubt Paul was impressed by the beauty of it all, but this was not
what inspired him. What inspired him was the fact that all this was given not
to worship of the one true God through Jesus Christ, but to dead idols.
As I reflected on this passage of
Scripture it hit me that our world is not so different today.
Idols are everywhere. Idols not
literally made of stone, bronze, or gold, but of made of every imaginable desire.
What kind of idols do we have? We
worship…
Athletics Houses
Musicians Cars, motorcycles
Actors Hobbies of every kind
Politics Media: (American Idol)
Business The church
These are all good things, but when we begin to idolize them that becomes a bad thing.
But what is an idol? What
constitutes worship of these things?
Beloved whenever ever we ascribe
glory and honor to anything that is not God, we run the risk of idolatry.
You see all glory belongs to God,
and things we possess or tasks we do are not to be glorified in the same way we glorify God,
yet we do it so easily.
A pastor once said, “Whenever a
good thing, becomes a God thing, that’s a bad thing.”
That stuck with me. I may possess a
great many things, but I never want to glorify them in my life. They are simply
things.
Paul encountered a world where the
idolatry was more plain perhaps, but it did not discourage him, rather it inspired him to do something, to do the greatest thing he could do, and that was to engage the people with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
How did he do that? Tune in later this week and I'll tell you. Read ahead in Acts 17:16-34 to get started.
[1] Stott, J. R. W. (1994). The message of Acts : The Spirit, the church & the world. The
Bible speaks today (277). Leicester, England; Downers Grove, Ill.:
Inter-Varsity Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment