Never Abandon the Foundation

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Amen, you may be seated.
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I invite you to take out your Bibles and turn to the 17th chapter of the book of Acts.
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And find yourself at verse 16.
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When we come to our right reading, we'll be reading verses 16 to 34.
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Quite a large section of text, but it's all one narrative.
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It's important to get the view of what's happening there as we break it down.
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The title of today's message is, Never Abandon the Foundation.
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Never Abandon the Foundation.
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One of the most common recommendations that I hear from modern Christian leaders is that to engage the culture, we must meet the culture on its own terms.
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And in a sense, that is not wrong.
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I want to clarify from the beginning.
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The world is not going to come to us in general.
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We might have a few visitors every year, but the world's not going to just come here hoping that we'll save them.
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We must go into the world and we must reach those with whom we come in contact with.
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But the frightening thing that this statement that we must meet them on their own terms, the frightening thing that I'm hearing from many who are leaders in evangelical teaching is that when they say that we must meet the lost on their own terms, what they mean is that we must meet the unbelievers' worldview and agree with it.
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I've heard Bible teachers say that to reach the unbeliever, you can't use the Bible because they don't believe the Bible.
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I've heard others say that we can't focus on Christ, but rather we must get them to consider the general idea that maybe a God exists.
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And this myth is very pervasive in the realm called apologetics.
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And some of you know what apologetics is, but some of you don't.
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Apologetics, it doesn't mean to say I'm sorry.
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It comes from a Greek word, apologio, and it means to make a defense for something.
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And apologetics in regard to Christianity is when a person seeks to make a defense for the faith.
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And one of the most pervasive things I'm hearing in apologetics is that we have to go and meet the believer on neutral ground, start in a neutral ground.
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You can't use the Bible because we have to start on neutral ground and the unbeliever doesn't believe the Bible.
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The problem with that statement is that there is no neutral ground with an unbeliever.
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The unbeliever, according to the Bible, is in a condition of rebellion against God.
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He knows that God exists.
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God has revealed himself instinctively to all men.
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And his denial of God is not for lack of evidence, but rather for the purpose of autonomy.
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That's what the Bible tells us.
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It tells us that the reason why men don't want to believe that God exists is because in believing that God exists, they in turn have to believe that they are in some way responsible to him.
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And the only way that we can get out of that responsibility is to deny that he exists.
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Sinful men do not want a holy God to exist.
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Now they want a benevolent deity to exist, one who doesn't get involved, one who will be there when they die, one who will provide blessings when necessary and stop hurricanes when necessary and stop floods when necessary.
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They want the beneficent deity.
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As I've often said, everybody wants the blessings of God.
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No one wants the being of God.
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And so when I say no one wants God to exist, people say, no, everybody wants God to exist.
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No, they want the God that they've created in their mind.
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The idol that's sort of like the celestial Santa Claus, the celestial grandfather who wants you to come sit on his knee and tell him what you want for Christmas or whatever, that's the way people picture God.
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But when you come to somebody and you talk about the God of Scripture, who is a holy God, who detests sin, who says that he will judge the world in righteousness, people immediately recall, well, I don't believe in that God.
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I don't want to believe in a God who would judge.
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So as I said, it's not a condition of just neutrality.
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It's a condition of rebellion.
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Romans chapter 1 tells us that they suppress the truth in unrighteousness.
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That God has revealed himself from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness do what? Suppress the truth.
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Sort of like a spring, I think it happens early in life too.
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We sort of have this understanding that God exists and as we get older into our teenage years and later into our early adult years, we sort of start pushing it down because he doesn't agree with us and because we want to be the sovereign of our lives, we sort of push it down, push it down, push it down, push it down until it's fully suppressed.
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And sometimes that little voice is still there.
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So what do we do? We kill the little voice with alcohol, drugs, sex, anything we can to sort of just kind of mute the voice that we know is there.
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So it's suppression.
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We suppress it naturally because we're sinners by nature.
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Well this morning we find ourselves in the book of Acts and Paul is facing off against the philosophers of his day and the reason why I mention that as an introduction is because what Paul is doing is Paul is going to address people who don't even know anything about the Bible.
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Now you would think, okay, well here's people who don't know it, they don't believe it, so Paul's going to abandon the Bible because that's what the modern guys say, we'll abandon the Bible because they don't believe the Bible.
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But what we're going to see, even though the Apostle Paul doesn't cite texts of Scripture, and this is where some people say, well he doesn't use the Bible because he doesn't cite texts of Scripture, even though the Apostle Paul doesn't cite, well in Isaiah this or in Ecclesiastes this because they wouldn't have known those names, he does stand firm on the bedrock of the truth of Scripture and that's the point that I want us to understand.
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He never abandons his foundation even when faced with who were the most elite philosophers of his day.
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It would be like if we, one of us went and had to stand before maybe the philosophy majors at UC Berkeley or Princeton or something like that, if we were to go stand before those men and have to give an account for our faith, would we start with philosophy or would we start with what God has said? Well, Paul in his masterful way under the power of the Spirit will proclaim to them what God has said.
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Let us stand and we'll read it together.
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Paul has left Berea, he is now in Athens, he is waiting for Timothy and Silas to join him and it says in verse 16, now while Paul was waiting for them in Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw the city was full of idols.
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So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there.
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Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him and some said, what does this babbler wish to say? Others said he seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities because he was preaching Jesus in the resurrection.
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And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus saying, may we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? For you bring some strange things to our ears, we wish to know therefore what these things mean.
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Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling and hearing something new.
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So Paul standing in the midst of the Areopagus said, men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious, for I passed along and observed the objects of your worship.
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I found also an altar with this inscription, to the unknown God, what therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.
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The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.
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And he 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, that they should seek God in the hope that they might 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, and even as some of your own poets have said, for we indeed are his offspring.
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Being then God's offspring we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man.
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The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed the day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.
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Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, but others said, we will hear you again about this.
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So Paul went out from their midst, but some men joined him and believed, among whom also were Dionysius the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.
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Father I thank you for your word, I pray even now that you would keep me from error as I seek to give an exposition of this word.
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I pray Lord for the hearts of the people to be stirred, for believers' hearts to be encouraged towards closer conformity to the person of Jesus Christ, and Lord for those who are not believers that they would be challenged to hear the words of the Apostle Paul, that all men everywhere, every person everywhere has been given the command to repent, and that falls on us all.
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May we hear it, may we heed it, in Jesus' name, amen.
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There was a time in American history when you could have called America a culturally Christian nation.
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I don't think that we've ever been Christian in the sense of all Americans were believers, or even the majority.
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But culturally, Christianity has had the highest amount of adherence in our land, and people for the most part would have given at least a passive acceptance to the truth of the Bible if you'd asked a normal person, can you give me some of the Ten Commandments, they probably wouldn't have been able to give you some if you'd asked them, can you tell me some of the books of the Bible, they probably would have.
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It is interesting though, we started the fishing hole this week, which is our evangelism booth, we go out to the fair and we hand out tracts and talk to people.
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I had three different conversations where I asked a group, each one of them was a group of young people, one was a group of girls, two was guys, and in each one of those conversations I asked, can anyone here name any of the Ten Commandments, none of them could, except for one Catholic girl who just happened to have it on her keychain.
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The rest of them, I don't know, can you give me any Ten Commandments, I don't know.
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Cultural Christianity is really on its way out in our land, and in a way that's good because many of those who were cultural Christians in the past died and went to hell, because they didn't have a faith that was any more than the culture in which they grew up in, it wasn't a genuine living faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
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But where this really has changed the landscape for us who are believers is that evangelism and apologetics has changed.
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Gone are the days when we simply would say, well the Bible says this, and there would be a passive acceptance of what was being said.
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Now, many people who are culturally secular, if you appeal to the Scripture, in their mind that's a meaningless appeal.
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It doesn't matter to them because they will say, I don't believe it.
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But that doesn't mean that we should abandon it.
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Just because a person doesn't believe something doesn't mean that you can't appeal to it.
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When a secular person tells me they believe in evolution, and they appeal to Darwin as their authority, or they appeal to modern scientific biological methodology as their authority, I don't believe in that, and yet they appeal to it.
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I mean, they're not afraid to appeal to their authority.
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Why then should I be afraid to appeal to mine? When we come to the Scripture this morning, we see Paul engaging with people of various sorts, and yet he remains firm in his commitment to the truth of the Scripture.
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Paul doesn't abandon that and say, okay, well, you guys don't believe this, so we'll pretend it's not true.
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Or you guys don't believe it, so I'm going to convince you that it's true.
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No, he simply proclaims the truth of it in their midst.
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You remember from our last study, Paul was in Thessalonica, and the people were stirred up as a mob to get him out.
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The Jewish people did not like hearing what Paul had to say in Thessalonica because he was preaching to them Jesus from their own Scriptures.
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He was taking the Old Testament, and he was showing them, here is Jesus in your Bible.
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They didn't want to see that.
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They didn't want to hear that, so they pushed him out, and a mob rose up, and they pushed him out of Thessalonica, so he went to Berea.
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Well, in Berea, the Jews had a different response.
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In Berea, the Bible says they were more noble-minded than those of Thessalonica, and the Jews of Berea listened to what Paul had to say and compared it with the Scripture, and the Bible says that they studied the Scriptures daily to see if what Paul was saying was correct.
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That's why we call them the noble Bereans.
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Well, the people in Thessalonica found out that he was in Berea doing this, so they sent the mob over there, and they went there to challenge him, so now he's been pushed over to Athens, and he's by himself.
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And you've got to think, I've never been run out of a town, at least not yet, but I can't imagine it's a good feeling to be literally just pushed out, pushed away, to be hated like that.
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And the Apostle Paul was a man.
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He wasn't a superman.
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I mean, he was an amazing man in the sense that how God used him, but he was a man with emotions and a heart and a will, same as us.
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I'm sure that he felt a little, you know, just kind of beaten down in ministry at this point, and here he is by himself, and I think this is why the point he says, come to me quickly, he says to Silas and Timothy, tell them to come.
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I'm all by myself, and I'm here in the bastion of philosophy of the ancient world, Athens.
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But it's interesting that even though alone, and even though at probably one of the lower points of his ministry, having been kicked out of now two towns, he didn't just sit there and wallow in his own pity, and he didn't allow it to keep him from ministering.
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But it says in verse 16, we're going to begin our exposition, I begin in verse 16, it says, now while Paul was waiting for them in Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw the city was full of idols.
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That word provoked, it really is, that's a light term, and if you say, well, I'm provoked, you know, it kind of might just mean you're kind of have a little peck or something.
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He was upset by this.
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I got to thinking about this passage as I was out at the fishing hole this week, and I've been thinking about this as I knew I was going to be preaching this this week, and I'm going to be making a lot of allusions to the work, because it's on my mind, and things have happened.
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But you know, and Mikey, you can attest to this, and those others who've been out there with us, you look out and you see nothing but idolatry walking by.
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People who idolize self, people who idolize all kinds of different things, whether it be sex and all kinds of stuff, the way they dress, the way they present themselves, they make themselves into something to be desired, I mean, it's all over, and you just see it.
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And I can sort of, in my mind, kind of place my mind, I don't know how Paul felt, obviously I'm not Paul, but I just imagine walking into Athens where there's temples everywhere, there's statues to false gods everywhere, and you as the apostle Paul know that there is only one God, and yet there are people who are bowing down, who are giving sacrifices to these temples that are vain buildings built to false deities.
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And so when you see the word provoked, think about the provocation in his heart, he's provoked because the true God is not being worshipped.
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You understand that's why evangelism exists? John Piper made this point years ago, and I think that we miss this so much, he said evangelism exists because worship doesn't.
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He said the reason why we go out and evangelize is not necessarily to see people go to heaven, it's to see people who aren't worshipping God, worship God because He deserves to be worshipped.
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It's not about you going to heaven, it's about God getting the worship that He deserves.
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Your going to heaven is the byproduct, not the purpose of your salvation.
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The purpose of your salvation is so that you would glorify God who deserves to be glorified.
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You understand that? It's not about you, it's about Him.
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And that's what Paul, Paul sees all these people worshipping all these gods who are not the true God, number one they're wasting their life, they're wasting their energy, they're wasting their soul and their eternity, but they're also not giving God the glory.
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So he's provoked by that, he's stirred by that.
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So what did he do? Verse 17, he went to the synagogue because that was Paul's first stop.
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Why is it Paul's first stop? The gospels for the Jew first and then to the Greek, make that argument.
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There's common ground there, he can go in and say there's the scripture, you have Jesus in your scripture.
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Go to Isaiah, go to the Psalms, go to Genesis, go to any text of the Old Testament, go to any book and you're going to find Christ and he's pointing to Christ from the scriptures.
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So he has a common ground, he has a way to connect with them, but he's not limiting himself to them.
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And here's the thing that I see a lot, boy I don't think I'm going to get through today, I have a lot to say about every verse, but something I see a lot in our Christian life and our Christian walk is so many people only talk to people that at least somewhat agree with them because they want to be affirmed, not challenged.
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People spend years studying apologetics, never talk to an unbeliever.
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Why would you spend all that time defending yourself against something you're never going to talk about? You become a great apologist but you're not an evangelist.
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Evangelism should precede apologetics because apologetics is just there for when they asked you for a reason for the hope that is within you and the only reason they're going to ask you for a reason for the hope that is within you is because you've told them about the hope that is within you.
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Make sense? They ain't going to ask if they don't know and they ain't going to know unless you tell them.
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Well they'll see it in how I live because I live so much like Jesus.
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Never was a more prideful statement made.
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They're going to see it.
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I live like Jesus so they'll see it and then they'll ask.
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Bull butter.
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Not true.
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That ain't how it works.
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You tell people about Jesus.
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Now there will be times in your life, there will be times in your life where your response to a tragedy may be in such a way that someone sees your response and says, I wonder why they responded differently and they may ask you of the hope that is within you.
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So I'm not discounting that completely as impossible.
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But that's not how evangelism works.
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Lifestyle evangelism and friendship evangelism is not in the scripture.
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Paul didn't go around making friends.
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Paul went and shared the gospel.
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Does that mean you can't make friends? No.
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Does that mean you're not supposed to live like Christ? No.
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You're supposed to do both those things.
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But the gospel is to be on our mouth, to be on our hearts.
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And we're supposed to speak it.
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As I said, no way I'm getting through all this.
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But let's move to verse 18.
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I'll at least try to move a little quicker.
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Because we see in verse 18 he addresses different people, not just the Jews.
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Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him and some said, what does this babbler wish to say? Others said he seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection.
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Well, the Epicureans, if you're unfamiliar with this particular time in history and who the Epicureans were, they were those who believed that the chief end of man was the pursuit of pleasure.
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They didn't necessarily believe in an afterlife.
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And so because this life was all that there was, they believed that what you need to do in this life is to avoid as much pain as you can and pursue as much pleasure as you can.
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Because if this life is all there is, you've heard of YOLO, right? You only live once, right? So that's the way we ought to live.
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Just go for all the pleasure we can and avoid all the pain that we can.
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It's very modernistic in the way a lot of people view life.
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It's going to make my life as easy as I can and I'm going to avoid all the pain that I can because this is all I got.
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And once I'm dead, I'm dead.
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The Stoics had a little different idea.
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The Stoics believed that you should be above feeling.
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You should be above the desire for those things.
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They sought to suppress their wants, suppress the desire for pleasure.
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They had no emotional response to pain or to pleasure.
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They sort of just wanted to be emotionless.
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I kind of think about, and it's not an exact parallel, but I kind of think about the Taoist idea and how the idea is just to sort of meet this, what they call nirvana or this state of nothingness where you don't desire anything so that when you become nothing, that's the perfect.
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You know why there's reincarnation in that belief system is because you're still desiring, you're still wanting.
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You only reach nirvana or nothingness when you've finally given up all connection or ties to the world.
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It even comes into, and I know this is a pop culture reference, so forgive me for those who are so reformed you never watch a movie, but in Star Wars, that's the same idea.
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The idea is if you love something, you can't love anything.
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You have to give everything up.
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That's the whole Jedi idea is you give everything away, give everything up, and you don't love anything and then you don't ever have to hurt when it's gone.
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Sort of an emotionless stoicism.
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So you got two different kind of competing philosophies.
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You got those who eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die, and then you got the other side who are the, you're not going to have any emotions at all that way we don't lose anything because we're not attached to anything.
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So Paul's dealing with both.
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And they are conversing with him and they're calling him the babbler, which is interesting.
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They're calling him the ignorant one.
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Here's this guy, he doesn't have the education we have.
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He hasn't been brought up in the best of the stoic schools.
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He hasn't been brought up in the best of the Epicurean philosophy.
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He's the babbler.
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He's the ignorant one.
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He's a preacher of foreign divinities.
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Why are they calling him that? Well because they believed in all kinds of gods.
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The idea though was that some were pantheistic, they believed gods were in everything.
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Others were, they believed in the gods, there were many gods, but they were separated almost like deism.
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They were so separated that they didn't really care about what was going on here or if they did get involved.
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It wasn't for things like eternal life or blessings or things like that.
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So you have the Apostle Paul, he's preaching about Jesus.
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And what do they see Jesus as? Just another god.
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And he's a foreign god.
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We haven't heard of this one.
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We've got our gods and we've got our pantheon of gods, but here's this kind of weird foreign stranger.
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And he's talking about a resurrection.
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Which by the way, I want you to understand this.
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When you go out and you talk to unbelievers today and you mention the resurrection, they're going to have an issue with that because they'll say science doesn't allow for a dead person to rise.
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By the way, we've become a society that's so infatuated with science that science itself has become a religion.
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Science itself has become a religion.
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You say, well, how is it a religion? Because when you ask somebody, what do you believe in? I believe in science.
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What is science? Science is a procedure by which we determine whether or not something is true through the method called the scientific method.
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You start with a hypothesis, you do experiments, you determine whether or not those experiments are repeatable, and that's how science is done.
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What do you mean when you say I believe in science? Well, I believe in what's being able to be repeated.
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How is the world created? Well, I believe it's created through evolutionary process.
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Well, what was the starting point? We don't know.
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You can't repeat that.
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So it's not science you believe in.
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You have a faith, and it's still very much a religion.
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Historical science and repeatable science is a different thing, and they try to equate the two, and they're not.
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I know I'm getting a little off the subject, but my point is this.
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The philosophers of Paul's day were not much different than the philosophers of our day because they didn't believe in resurrection either.
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They saw people die, and they stayed dead.
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So it wasn't like everybody back then was just, oh, resurrection, no big deal.
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People back then also believed in somewhat of a scientific method because everybody who was dead up until that point stayed dead.
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So when Paul mentions a resurrection, that is just as affront, just as much an affront to their intellect as it is to the intellect of the people of our day.
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And this is the point I'm trying to get around to.
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Paul didn't soften and say, well, I'm going to tell you about a general God who generally created the world, who might be, you know, present.
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No, he said this God sent His Son, Jesus Christ.
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He died on a cross for our sins.
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He was in the ground for three days, and after the third day, He resurrected.
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That's the message.
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Proof positive in verse 18, the message that Paul is teaching them is not a generic general gospel or general statement about God.
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He's telling them about Jesus.
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He's standing on the foundation of who Jesus is.
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He's not afraid to begin with Christ.
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Oftentimes, modern apologetics, you know what it does? It gets people to say this, and this is actually from one of the leading philosophical apologists of our day.
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He said, the best that we can do is to show that the preponderance of the evidence points to the conclusion that there might be a God.
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That ain't evangelism, and that ain't apologetics, but that's all that philosophy does.
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It brings you to the conclusion that the preponderance of the evidence points to the reality that there might be a God.
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That's not Christian apologizing.
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That's not what Paul's doing.
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Paul's not going around saying, hey, guys, I think there might be a God.
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I want to try to convince you that maybe it's true.
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It's just pointing out that, because in verse 19, and they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, which if you have a King James version, that says Mars Hill.
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The reason why is because that's the Latin name of the same place, saying, may we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? This was the place where the Areopagus court would meet.
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They would discuss civil, criminal, and religious matters.
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This was the place where those type of decisions were made, because this is where the philosophers would gather.
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And verse 20 says, for you bring some strange things to our ears.
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We wish to know, therefore, what these things mean.
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Now, all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.
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Novelty.
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Novelty was the soup du jour.
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It was the desire of the day.
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It was what the people wanted.
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And it still is.
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People want to hear the newest idea.
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You know what often atheists are trying to convince people of now? Atheistic philosophers are trying to convince people in the belief of some type of alien race that preceded the human race as the seed for the human race.
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Because they have to come up with some way the evolutionary process got started.
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In fact, if you've ever watched the movie Expelled with Ben Stein, in the film Expelled, I've never referenced so many movies in a sermon.
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This is not normal.
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But in the movie Expelled with Ben Stein, Ben Stein went about talking to teachers who had been put out of the classroom for talking about God and denying evolution.
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At the very end of the film, Ben Stein, who is not a Christian, but he was interviewing these people, he had the opportunity to interview Richard Dawkins.
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That's not Richard Dawson, the old game show host.
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Richard Dawkins is the, one of the leading proponents of evolutionary biology in the world.
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And he asked him if he believed in God.
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Of course, he doesn't believe in God.
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And he says, well, where do you think we come from? We don't know.
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Okay.
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He says, but, but, he says, what are some of the possibilities? He says, well, it's possible that we were seeded by an alien race.
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That the world itself was seeded by aliens from another planet.
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This is, I'm not making this up.
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You can go watch the film for yourself, but here's the point.
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This is Stein's response.
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He said, so you're willing to concede that aliens exist, but not God.
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I heard one atheist once say, well, I will believe in the incredible before I believe in the impossible.
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That's the atheistic philosophy.
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I'll believe in the incredible before I believe in the impossible because to them, aliens are incredible, but God is impossible.
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Why? Because I've never seen him, but wait a minute.
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You've never seen a, nevermind.
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God is impossible because they do not want him to exist.
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You must understand that there is a desire to be autonomous and autonomy and a world that is governed by a God who is in control of all things is impossible.
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And because of the desire for autonomy, we must find something else to be the reason.
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So Paul here, I went a little off track, but I'll bring it back.
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I promise.
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We're talking about hearing something new.
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Paul here is with people who love to hear philosophical ideas.
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They love to hear people bring in new ideas.
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They love to hear somebody just come up with something, something different.
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Novelty is the best.
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So just bring us something new.
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So Paul standing in the midst of the Areopagus said, men of Athens, I perceive in every way you are very religious.
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Some people think that the apostle Paul, the apostle Paul was here trying to establish some common ground and trying to establish in this statement some type of a, almost like he's, um, uh, flattering them.
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I see you guys are all very religious and that like, that's a good thing.
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But actually the word, the underlying word is a little bit more, um, specific.
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Um, days a day, uh, it's days a day.
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Moan days a day.
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Moan is not so much that they're religious.
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It's superstitious.
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I see that you have a theological fear.
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That's, that's really the, the, the, the meaning of the term.
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You have a, you have a deity fear.
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It's a fear of deity is what it is.
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I can see you have a fear of deity cause you got all these things around trying to, trying to, um, placate someone.
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That's what this is all about.
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Sort of like the guy, uh, Mike Warnke, he was old Christian comedian.
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He talked about, he went to Vietnam and he met an atheist in Vietnam.
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He said by the third week in Vietnam, the atheist walked up and he had a chain on his neck.
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He had a cross, a Buddha, a star of David, a star in Crescent and an Indian arrowhead.
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He said, what does that mean? He goes, I don't know.
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But in my position, I don't want to make anybody mad.
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That was just, and that's sort of the idea of the Athenians.
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They just, they were superstitious.
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They had all of these different temples and all of these different statues cause they didn't want to make anybody mad.
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If there's all these gods, we got to placate everyone.
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Satisfy everyone.
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In verse 23, and this is probably where I'm going to start to draw to a close and we'll get to the rest next week.
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But in verse 23 says, for as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription to the unknown God.
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Agnosto Theou.
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Agnosto is where we would later get the word agnostic.
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And these unknown God statues were actually not, it wasn't just one.
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They were actually in several places there in Athens because centuries before, there was a plague that had ravaged the area and they were trying to appease every God that they could.
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And nothing was causing the plague to end.
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So they reached out to a philosopher called Epimenides and they said, what do we do? How do we deal with this plague? And Epimenides said, and the stories are sort of, they differ depending on what source you use, but essentially he had a herd of goats and one story says that he sent the goats out and the ones that went to the different temples, you worshiped at that temple and that was letting you know.
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But some of the goats would just wander and stop and sit down in one spot.
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And so what they would do is they would go to where that goat was and they would erect the statue and say, this is an unknown God.
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We don't know who this goat's pointing at, but we don't want to take our chances.
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So they were all around.
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There's another story, sort of the same thing.
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It says he basically gathered them up and the ones that sat down, they put a stone there and the ones that stayed standing, they didn't put a stone there.
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So there's a little difference in the historical sources.
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But ultimately these statues wasn't just one.
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There were statues around and as you walk through Athens, you would see obviously all of these temples that are set up to the various gods, but then you would see these little stone placards and they would say to the unknown God.
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And Paul looked at that and he says, what therefore you worship as unknown, what therefore you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.
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Now I'm going to end here.
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I'm going to start right here next week, but I want to finish by saying this.
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Paul is not saying, and this is going to sound weird, but he's not saying that the unknown God of the statue is the God of heaven.
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What he's saying, he's saying in your ignorance, you're worshiping all these gods that are unknown.
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I'm going to proclaim to you one who is known, who is the only true God.
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Beloved, that is what we are called to do.
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Whether you're at the fishing hole this week or whether you're at the water fountain at work this week or whether you're in the school this week with your friends at school or whether you're in the homeschool co-op and you're with your friends in homeschool co-op.
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If you're having an opportunity to share the gospel with someone and they don't know the Lord, your job is to take their ignorance and shed light on the, give them the light of truth.
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Take away their ignorance and give them the light of truth.
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Now what they do with that truth isn't your responsibility.
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And that's what we're going to see next week because we're going to see that even though Paul preaches a masterful sermon and he calls every man there to repentance, not everybody will repent.
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Some of them mocked him.
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Some of them said, hey, we'll hear you another time.
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This is interesting stuff.
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I'd love to maybe get Starbucks with you.
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We'll go get, you know, the ancient equivalent of Starbucks, whatever that would be.
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But some did believe.
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And this is my point to you today.
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Paul proclaimed the truth to them and he let God be the arbiter of who would believe.
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Would you do that? Would you be a person who's willing to stand for the truth and let God be the one who opens hearts? Don't try to manipulate an open heart by trying to find some neutral ground which there is none, but rather simply proclaim the truth to someone in love and let God be the one who opens their heart.
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It's what Paul did and we'll see next week even clearer how affirming he was of the truth.
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Would we do that today? Would we be the ones who speak to people who know not God and say the God that you don't know, he I proclaim to you? I pray that we would.
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Let's go to the Father.
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Father in heaven, I thank you for the truth.
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I thank you for the opportunity to preach it and I pray that we would as the apostle Paul go to those who are ignorant of you and that we would share the truth of the gospel with them.
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Not that they're ignorant that you exist, for every man knows that you exist, but they're ignorant of how to come to you.
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They're ignorant of their need of you.
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They're ignorant of their need for repentance.
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They place their trust in something else.
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Maybe it's in themselves.
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Maybe it's in their good works.
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Maybe it's in some other religious system, but they need to give that up and come to Christ and trust in him.
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Lord, bear us up and give us hearts to proclaim that truth.
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In Jesus' name we pray.
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Amen.
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Let's stand together and sing and prepare our hearts for communion.