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Sunnyside Baptist Church Michael Dirrim, Pastor
Let's go to the Lord together in prayer. Heavenly Father, we do thank you for the day. We thank you for our hope that we have in Christ, that you have shown to us so clearly, and abundantly, and beautifully in your word, that you make these things clear to us by your Holy Spirit, so that we may rejoice in you.
I pray that you would help us with that here this morning as we gather around Christ's table to share in this communion with you, because of your Son and by your Spirit, united with you by your grace alone, through faith alone in Christ alone.
I pray this morning as we read your word together, that we rejoice in its truth and give you the praise as you do your work in our lives, as you have your will in us. We pray these things and ask for these mercies, looking to your Son, Jesus Christ, the one with whom you are well-pleased.
Amen. I invite you to open your Bibles and turn with me to Acts 17. Acts 17, and we'll be reading verses 16 through 22. Acts 17, verses 16 through 22. Last time we talked about the good book, and now we're going to talk about the good fight.
There's a pattern of Christians fighting in the book of Acts. Not the bad kind of fighting, the good kind of fighting. There are a series of internal conflicts, conflicts within the church, a series of internal conflicts that clarify love and truth.
What that is, and we see that in chapters 5, 6, 11, and 15, where it's clarified who really are the church, not Ananias and Sapphira, but those who are truly born again of the Spirit. There is a conflict with the widows that is solved by the introduction of deacons.
There's a conflict about Gentile Christians that's resolved by Peter and the signals of the Holy Spirit. And there's a conflict about what constitutes the gospel that's clarified at the Jerusalem Council.
And then there's a series of external conflicts, conflicts that are from without the church, attacks upon the church that happen throughout the book of Acts. And these external conflicts glorify Christ, whether it's the apostles being imprisoned and even beaten by the Sanhedrin, or the martyrdom of Stephen and the persecution of Saul of Tarsus against the church that scattered the Christians throughout the known Roman Empire.
Or perhaps it's the conflict of Herod trying to kill the apostles or Paul and Barnabas in Cyprus and Galatia being hounded by Jewish opposition. Or even the conflicts in Philippi we saw in chapter 16 and the conflicts in Thessalonica and Berea we've already seen in chapter 17.
There is a pattern of Christians fighting in the book of Acts, the good kind, not the bad kind. We're looking at stories that tell us about the good fight. The good fight. A good fight that does not contradict the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love.
A good kind of fight that doesn't condone trolling for Jesus. A good kind of fight that is necessary and glorifying to God. Another instance, another example in our passage this morning, if you're able, I invite you to stand with me as we read God's holy word.
Acts 17, beginning in verse 16. Now, while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him when he saw that the city was given over to idols. Therefore, he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and with the Gentile worshipers and in the marketplace daily with those who happened to be there.
Then certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers encountered him, and some said, what does this babbler want to say? Others said, he seems to be a proclaimer of foreign gods because he preached to them Jesus and the resurrection.
And they took him and brought him to the Europagus saying, may we know what this new doctrine is of what you speak for? You are bringing some strange things to our ears. Therefore, we want to know what these things mean.
For all the Athenians and the foreigners who were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing.
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God. You may be seated. Paul, near the end of his life, the end of his ministry, said this to his dear son in the faith, Timothy. He said, I have fought the good fight. This is Paul's reflection on all the different things that happened to Paul.
He was let down in a basket over the walls of Damascus, snuck out of town out of Jerusalem before they killed him early, whisked out of Berea because of the Thessalonican Jews who were there to cause havoc there, and he had to sail by sea to get to Athens.
Paul on the run, Paul often imprisoned in shipwreck, beaten for the cause of Christ, Paul often accused falsely by even those who would also preach Christ, Paul who had been betrayed by friends, Paul who was often by himself.
He says near the end of his life, I have fought the good faith. Paul, the apostle of Jesus Christ, the prisoner of Jesus Christ, Paul, the one who called himself the bond slave of Jesus Christ. He says, I have fought the good fight.
I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. Layer those in. He's not talking about three different things. He's talking about one thing in three different ways. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race.
I have kept the faith. Finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give to me on that day. And not to me only, but to all, also to all who have loved his appearing.
Be diligent to come to me quickly, he says to Timothy. Now, you hear Paul there at the end as he's talking about the good fight, having fought the good fight. What two desires remain? To be saying things like, I have finished the race.
I have fought the good fight. I have kept the faith. And yet he has desires that remain. And what does he desire? He desires communion. He's looking forward to communion with Christ, seeing his Lord receiving from him the crown, that final moment.
He wants to see his Lord, and he wants to see Timothy. He goes on to say how many people have left him and how lonely he is, and he wants to be with the fellow saints. Here at the very end of everything, when Paul is saying, I have finished, I have finished, I have finished, he's saying, I still want communion with Christ, and I want communion with my family in Christ, which tells us something about the connection between communion and the good fight.
It does pose a question to us. We ought to ask, what does communion have to do with fighting? Because those two don't sound like they go together. But neither do love and hate. Those don't sound like they go together.
And yet, we find that the latter proceeds from the former, and both of them are virtuous. Without the first, without the communion, without the love, the second, the fighting, the good fight, and the hate, the proper holy hate, the second just doesn't show up or shows up in a wrong way.
Without the first, the second is either woefully absent or wholly absorbing. In other words, we begin to think about the Christian life and the Christian witness and being a follower of Jesus Christ in this world, we begin to think of it in, well, one way we think of it is, it's like home, home on the range, where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day.
We're never going to say anything negative at all because anything negative or controversial, it's just not loving and not Christian. So we're going to be home, home on the range all the day long. Or in the imbalance, we will begin to think of the Christian witness and the Christian life not like home, home on the range, but like a range war, always patrolling for the next skirmish and the next fight.
And if we can't find one, then like Absalom, we'll set Joab's field on fire to spark a conflict, get it going. But we're talking about the good fight that is patterned for us in Acts. It is a pattern that shows not a contradiction to the virtues of faith, hope, and love, but a consistency with it.
And it does not condone trolling for Jesus. We're always trying to pick a fight with someone. When we put these things together, I think it's important to say that Paul desired communion. He desired communion with Christ and with those who belong to Christ as something that was essential for him to finish well.
It was the essential ingredient that helped him all along, and he desires it there at the end. The good fight must be fought from the ground of our feast. If we don't have communion with Christ, we're going to get the fight wrong,.
Or we won't get it at all.
It is very easy for us, I don't know if you've noticed this or not in your own life, but it's easy for us to become discouraged by the anti-Christian culture in which we live. It is easy for us to become distracted by the anti-Christian criticism in the world we live.
That we feel under assault, that we feel that we're on the outside, that we feel that we're an endangered species, and if certain people got everything that they wanted, then we would just simply be gone.
And it's easy to be discouraged about that. And yet, our focus should not be upon the problem, but upon the Savior. Our communion with Christ is what makes the good fight good. It's not a good fight unless I have Jesus.
It's not a good fight unless I have Him, and I'm with the people whom He redeems. So, we find Paul in this passage provoked by all the idolatry that he sees in Athens. And we see him engaging with pagan skeptics that are calling him names and trying to set him up for failure.
How does Paul respond? I think we are encouraged to think about our communion with Christ and respond in like.
Manner.
We should proclaim Christ when we are sorely provoked. Paul was sorely provoked in verses 16 and 17, and yet his response was to proclaim Christ. When was the last time that you were truly angered, truly bothered by the idolatry in.
The world?
It's a grievous thing, perhaps, to watch those documentaries about India and all of the hideous statues that cover the 330 million different gods of Hinduism and so on. It's just a hideous thing to look at.
It can be bothersome to watch people throwing pink dust upon themselves and wallowing in the dirt and going through all of their hideous practices. When's the last time you were grieved by all the idolatry around you today?
You may perhaps don't identify as idolatry, but what about all the inordinate pagan, sexually abominable desires being expressed publicly today? When's the last time you were grieved by that, discouraged by that, bothered by that, made sick by it?
That's what's going on with Paul. Paul is waiting there in Athens for Silas and for Timothy. He had to be snuck out of town. He had to be sent on a boat down to Athens. You always have to get Paul out of the way for things to begin to calm down before lots of people start getting killed.
Paul was there preaching in Thessalonica. They had to move him on to Berea. He was there preaching in Berea, had to move him on to Athens. And there he is in Athens all by himself, and he's waiting for his fellow saints to.
Get there.
And as he looks around the city, he sees Athens entirely given over to idolatry. Ancient witnesses say that Athens had somewhere along the estimate of 30 ,000 public statues, statues that were public shrines to whatever god or goddess they thought should be adored and worshiped.
Not 30 ,000 gods necessarily, but several shrines to the same god or goddess. But still, 30 ,000 statues throughout the entire city, and this does not count the private shrines, the private statues that infested every home.
Paul was grieved.
He was provoked.
He was stirred to anger as he saw what was going on in Athens. And Athens was known to have twice as many religious feasts as any other city in the ancient Roman Empire. Every day was a celebration to some god or goddess.
Every month was a celebration to some god or goddess. Every week was some new awareness week, wasn't it? He was grieved, grieved by the city given over to idols. So what did he do? Gave up and went home.
He got mad and left. Notice that he reasoned, therefore... So he's provoked, verse 16, therefore... Verse 17, therefore he reasoned in the synagogue, notice also in the marketplace, he reasoned with the Jews, with the Gentiles, with anyone who happened to be in the marketplace.
In other words, Paul got provoked by all the idolatry that he saw, and so then he argued with everybody everywhere all day in a good way, in a good way. But it says he reasoned with them. It was pitting thought against thought.
They have a thought. I've got a thought. You've got another thought. I've got another thought. And so he was arguing with them. It doesn't matter if they were Jew or Gentile. It didn't matter if they were in the synagogue or they were in the marketplace.
He was arguing with everybody everywhere all day. Didn't that get him kicked out of Berea, Thessalonica, Philippi, you name it. He's fighting the good fight. And we know it's the good fight because what is his message?
How is his message summarized? It's summarized for us in verse 18. He was preaching to them Jesus and the resurrection. You see that? He was preaching to them Jesus and the resurrection. They had their thoughts, and Paul wasn't countering them with clever thoughts of his own, but he was bringing the message of Jesus Christ and the resurrection against every lofty thing countering God's truth.
He said no, and he would say Jesus and the resurrection. Preach the good news of Jesus Christ, His person, and His work. Now, well, if you're arguing with everybody everywhere all day, where's the love?
I mean, obviously, this could be consistent with faith as a Christian virtue because you're sticking with the faith, and even it's consistent with hope that you have a hope that this will change things if you stand for the truth, but where's the love?
Is it loving to argue with everybody everywhere all day? Most people would say immediately, no, give it a rest. I would say that you can argue with everybody everywhere all day in a very unloving way, and that's really easy to do, but you can also argue with everybody everywhere all day and do so in a loving fashion and be consistent by the grace of God in the truth of Jesus Christ.
Consider the love. Love suffers long and is kind, and if you're going to argue with everybody everywhere all day, you're going to have to suffer long. Love does not envy. Love does not parade itself. It's not puffed up.
If you're going to argue with everybody everywhere all day for the sake of the gospel, it better not be about you and you looking good and you being right. It does not behave rudely. It does not seek its own.
It's not provoked. Thinks no evil. This is how love is acting. It doesn't have to be rude. It doesn't have to try to be self-protective. It's not provoked, meaning I'm not going to come to my defense.
I'm going to proclaim Christ. It's not about you coming after me. I'm going to speak to you of Christ. Listen to verse 6. Does not rejoice in iniquity. This is 1 Corinthians 3 .6. Does not rejoice in iniquity.
Paul did not rejoice in the iniquity of idolatry. He couldn't stand all that idolatry. He did not rejoice in that. He didn't say, wow, what a wonderful culture. Look how rich it is. Oh, I want to experience more of this cultural distinctions and differences.
He said, no, that's awful. Notice, does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth. Rejoice in the truth. He was rejoicing in the truth. And with joy, with love, you can argue with everybody everywhere all day the gospel of Jesus Christ, and it's perfectly consistent with Christian virtue.
You can do it in a wrong way, but just because people do it in a wrong way doesn't mean that there's no right way. Now, listen to this command from Psalm 97 verse 10. Are you ready for this command? You who love the Lord hate evil.
How about that? You who love the Lord hate evil. They say, wow, I don't really mind evil. It's okay. I try not to be too strong on evil. It says, you who love the Lord hate evil.
Why?
Because it's Christlike. Because it's Christlike. Aren't we supposed to follow Christ? Is He not say, you know, He's the master, we're the disciple, we're to be following Him? Hebrews 1, 9, quoting Psalm 45, 7 says, of Jesus Christ, concerning Jesus Christ, you have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness.
You remember what Jesus did when He went to the temple and found it so full of thieves and robbers and false religionists?
He cleaned house.
Hey, it was His house to clean.
He went there.
It's His threshing floor to winnow. And He went there and He cleaned house. And the disciples, in reflecting on that in John 2, 17, remembered what Psalm 69, 9 says. Zeal for your house has eaten me up.
Oh, it was Christ's love for the Father that led Him to act in such a combative way. Hate and love together. Does our communion with Christ stir us to proclamation? Perhaps a stronger communion with Christ, more abiding in Christ, more love to Christ, more love to Thee will result in us being provoked more easily, us being provoked more often, us being provoked more deeply about the idolatry that is in the world around us, and that we will be led more often to say more about Jesus Christ and Him risen from the dead in response to the evil around us.
Isn't He the Savior for the world? Don't these idolaters need a Savior? Don't they need their sins forgiven? Don't they need their lives turned around? Idolatry makes man a wreck. Idols make man a wreck and bring mankind to ruin.
We should hate idols. We should despise idols. And then we should respond to idolatry in a way that is Christ -like, that is consistent with faith, hope, and love. Some of you will understand what I'm about to say.
Some of you won't, and it's fine. But Paul in Athens did not flip off the idols or the idolaters. He did tell them that they were wrong. And he did, steady on, very stubbornly, in a righteous way, refuse to let them have their truth.
It brings us to the second point. We are to proclaim Christ not only when sorely provoked, but we are to proclaim Christ with a sanctified pugnacity. Pugnacity means that you're really stubborn and you won't shut up.
You're not going to be quiet for a second. Now, normally when people are pugnacious, this is a bad character trait. People say it's a bad character trait because they will often be identified as those who get sucked into personality spats, and they're just going to argue, argue, argue, and they won't ever stop arguing.
Very often, they'll do this online, like the little dog behind the glass window of the car, who is the most fierce animal you've ever encountered. Now, that's not what we're talking about. Paul's face-to-face.
He's in the synagogue. He's in the marketplace. He's talking to Jews. He's talking to Gentiles, whoever happened to be there. And he is speaking with them, and he is being pugnacious, and he is being stubborn with those who are countering him.
Particularly, we are told about Epicureans and Stoics. Now, these were the two leading schools of thought in Greek philosophy of Paul's day, kind of like when Jesus was talking to his opponents and critics in Jerusalem and in Judea and Galilee.
It was who? It was the Pharisees and the Sadducees, two leading thoughts about Jewish philosophy and Jewish thought. Here, the Epicureans and the Stoics are the two leaders in Greek philosophy and Greek thought.
The main idea in Greek philosophy is that everything spiritual is good, everything ethereal and immaterial is good, everything material and physical is bad, and you want to escape the physical and get to the immaterial as much as you possibly can.
This is where truth is. This is where salvation is, and so on. Well, given that, the Epicureans tended to think about the reality of the world that they understood it as, everything is ethereal and spiritual, and then make applications to their body and say, since everything is really about the spiritual, it doesn't really matter much what you do with your body.
And so they would advocate everything from hedonism to asceticism, but it was just all over the place because it doesn't matter. Your body doesn't matter, and that was their basic philosophy. And there's a lot of people who are alive today who operate with an Epicurean philosophy and don't know how to spell Epicureanism because they think it doesn't matter.
Given the reality of the world in which we live, it doesn't matter what I do with me. I'm going to do whatever gives me pleasure. I'm going to do whatever I think, and how I think and how I feel, whatever is the spiritual and ethereal is primary, and so however I feel and think, that's what I'm going to end up doing to my body no matter what happens to my body.
Why do people operate that way? Because we live in a pagan society today that is anti-Christian, a pagan society that does not recognize the creator-creator distinction. We also live in a world where there's a lot of Stoics, and good news, there's a new teaching material that has come out, Stoicism for Kids.
And you can watch these very nicely put together animated films about being a child and being a Stoic and learning life lessons about being a Stoic. Stoics were like Epicureans in that they agreed with Greek philosophy, however, they turned it differently.
Given how they were to see their body, then they would look to the world. Body first, then world. And so they were saying, well, you just need to keep a nice level playing, recognize that, you know, these things happen, but these things don't matter, and you need to be at peace and calm, and you need to be in balance and not be moved by all of this chaos, because really it doesn't matter.
These are live options for people today because of the denial of the creator. The philosophy hasn't gone away. There's nothing new under the sun, Solomon tells us. And still, the people that would be anti-Christian today were anti-Christian back then, denying God, denying Christ, affirming a world filled with nothing but matter, so nothing matters.
And even though we don't have a lot of statues everywhere, there's still an affirmation of every little thing and veneration for every little thing. Now, notice that they encountered Paul. The Epicureans and the Stoic philosophers encountered him.
And it's not a gentle word. It's not that they say, oh, hi, how are you doing? This is a word that means to be thrown together. And so there was a combative encounter between these Greek philosophers and Paul, and they don't like Paul very much.
They have the corner on truth. They're in Athens. They have the Oropagus. They have Mars Hill. They've got 30 ,000 statues. They know which gods are which. They have all the gods cornered so much so that they even have one called the unknown god that Paul will talk to them about later on.
But here it sounds like he's just like them preaching some new idol, preaching new false gods. And they call him a babbler. Notice in the text, verse 18, what does this babbler want to say? Other translations might have seed picker.
They were calling him a bird brain.
Remember Jesus' parable about throwing seed out to the field, and some of the seed would fall upon the hardened path, and there it lies right on top of the ground. The birds come down and begin to eat, but they don't eat in an orderly, logical fashion, do they?
They land, and they hop around, and they grab this seed, and they hop over there and flap and grab that seed, and they leave two or three seeds in between, and they're not very logical with what they do.
And they said, that's you. They said that to Paul. They said, that's you. You're a seed picker. You're a babbler. You're a bird brain. You're saying about this over here and this over here. What are you doing?
Are these some new gods that you're proclaiming? You see, even in their engagement with Paul, they're not interested in hearing about Jesus of Nazareth, who is the Christ, the Son of the living God, the living God who is the creator of all things, and that Jesus was raised from the dead the third day.
They're not interested in Paul's worldview at all. They take whatever he's saying, and they forcibly bring it into their worldview, and they say, you must be worshiping some strange gods we haven't heard of yet.
But Paul stays on message. These philosophers don't know very much, if anything at all, about the Old Testament. Don't have a concept about the sacrificial system that was laid down in the covenant at Sinai.
Don't have an idea of the promises of David's heir being the king, the promised seed from Genesis 3 .15. They don't have any concept or context of the Old Testament scriptures, and Paul preaches to them the testimony of the Old Testament scriptures.
They don't have any Bible in their worldview and thinking, but he preaches to them Bible. I'm going to talk to you about Jesus, and I'm going to talk to you about the resurrection. He's preaching to them Bible, even if they don't have any, even when they don't recognize the Bible as a source of authority.
He's going to do it some more when he goes up the hill. He's being pugnacious. He's staying on message. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. Paul does not try to relate to them and talk to them about decency.
He doesn't try to relate to them and talk to them about being a good citizen of the Roman Empire. He's keeping the main thing the main thing. So if they're going to come at him with Greek philosophy, he will preach to them Jesus and the resurrection.
If the Jews want to come at him with saying this is how we interpret Moses, he's going to preach to them Jesus and the resurrection. We're not as Christians to be preaching patriotism and decency. We're to preach Jesus Christ, who makes the best kinds of citizens and makes us in God's image and changes us so that we live lives that are righteous.
We preach Christ. We don't preach the way things used to be should be the way things are now. No, we preach Christ, Him crucified, Him risen from the dead. And we will be steadied in our message and steady on and focused on our message by our communion with Christ.
When we commune with Christ and we value Christ and we love Christ, He stays our message. Thirdly, proclaiming Christ to skeptical pagans. We've already begun to talk about, but in verses 19 through 21, they say, we're going to bring you to the Orophagus.
We're going to bring you up to our discussion hill. We're going to bring you up here.
Because we're going to hear.
What kind of strange thing you're going to be talking to us about. We get our word zany from the word they use to describe his teaching. They weren't being kind. They didn't say to this guy, this seed picker who had new gods and strange teachings, they weren't inviting him up to the Orophagus because they thought he was compelling.
They weren't bringing him up there because they thought, wow, we really ought to hear this. This is so interesting. We're so open to new ideas and truth. No, they called him a bird brain teaching zany things.
This invitation to go up to the Orophagus, this invitation to go up there.
And speak to them,.
Had all of the hospitality of the hazing. It had the same promise of crowd support of the Colosseum. They're there to make fun of him and to mock him and deride him and tell him he doesn't know. And he needs to be quiet and go away.
It was entrapment. How often did Christ's enemies try to test him? Give us another sign. Oh, solve this unanswerable question full of conundrums. They're always seeking to test him. And he always answered them.
Stayed on message, right? He always answered. And he preached the gospel even to skeptical pagans, to skeptical Jews who didn't believe,.
Who were his critics.
Paul's doing the same thing. But you notice something about Christ? He did not chase skeptical critics down. He didn't hunt them down, did he? He didn't go hunt up the high priest. He didn't go look for Nicodemus.
He didn't go to the Sanhedrin, did he? They came to him and confronted him. But Jesus, what did he pursue? What did he make a priority? What did he say no to this request and no to that request in order to go do and prioritize?
Time and time and time and time again. Go get alone with his Father and pray. Did we see that communion was his priority time and time again? Yes, he was in the fight. Yes, he never watched the pitch go by.
Yes, he was ready to argue with everybody everywhere all day the truth of God. However, what he pursued was not the conflict. He didn't pursue the fight. Even though he engaged in the good fight. He pursued communion.
And this is something that we need to remember. There is a good fight, but we are to proclaim Christ. Proclaim Christ when sorely provoked. Proclaim Christ with a sanctified pugnacity. To proclaim Christ even to rude, heckling, skeptical pagans.
But the good fight that we're given and entrusted with is stirred and steadied and strengthened by this communion that we have in Christ. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the time you've given us in your Word.
I pray it's been a good reminder of what we need. We thank you, Father, that we have these promises that our future is one of worship,.
Not of war.
That our eternity future is full of worship and thankfully not of war.
Father, we thank you.
You call us to a good fight now. And we look forward to the good rest to come. Help us to be faithful. Please strengthen us as we turn to Christ. Commune with him and to love him. We pray these things in Jesus' name.
Amen.