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. 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. 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. 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.” Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.
    So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 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. 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, 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’;
    as even some of your own poets have said,
    “‘For we are indeed his offspring.’
    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. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a 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.”
    Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked. But others said, “We will hear you again about this.” 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.—Acts 17:16-34

Introduction

I’m incredibly grateful to the Bethlehem family for how you have nurtured and encouraged me in my time here in seminary. I’m also grateful for the South Campus and my role as the intern for Neighborhood Outreach. What a joy to do ministry in the context of this local church, while being trained in seminary. 

We are in week two of a three-week, campus-specific sermon series on the dimensions of church life at Bethlehem—Up-reach, In-reach, and Outreach. Last week Pastor David Livingston preached a sermon titled, “Behold Your God.” He showed us from Isaiah 40 that God is huge, but that he is close.

My task is to preach a sermon on outreach. With such a broad topic, there are so many ways I could go about this. I could talk about mercy ministry and how the gospel transforms us to care about all suffering—from refugees, to orphans and widows, to marginalized populations right here in Lakeville. I could talk about cultural engagement and how our artists and writers can create and redeem culture, how our businessmen can be salt and light, how our lawyers can render service to the cause of justice, or how our politicians can fight for righteous laws. God cares about all that, and so must we.

But as I asked God to help me pick from one of those topics, he instead gave me a text. The text that I think God wants me to preach from this morning is Acts 17:16–34, about Paul’s brief time in Athens, Greece.  This text doesn’t even come close to capturing all that outreach is and should be in a local church. It actually leaves so much out on how we as Christians are to serve and love our city and our neighborhood.

So, why this text? Two reasons:

1. In a country where it is “in” to do social justice and community service, even if you are an atheist club or Fortune 500 company, we need to be reminded of how our outreach is fueled by God. This text does that. 
2. In a country where the church is beginning to encourage social justice and community service without having the verbal proclamation alongside of it, we need to be reminded of what it means to speak the gospel. We don’t want to do outreach that isn’t saturated with gospel proclamation. 

Now here’s me being honest—we don’t talk about God in certain areas of our lives or in certain relationships for three reasons. We don’t want to, we don’t know what to say, or we don’t know how to go about it. So I titled my sermon "The Motivation, Message, and Method of Evangelism." All I mean by evangelism is this: Telling people the truth about God and asking them to love it. 

Let’s take these three things in reverse order.

1. Method

So how do we go about doing evangelism in our natural web of relationships? We teach and reason with people about God.

I know, I was building up to this huge solution for how to talk to people about God, and all I say is talk to people about God. It’s anticlimactic, I know. But it’s my point. There are so many gimmicks, or quick conversion tactics, or new tools and strategies, but at the end of the day, a person comes to Christ by having someone teach them and reason with them about God.

Look at what Paul does in verses 17 & 18:

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. Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him.

Explanation: The Greek word for "reason" is dialegomai, which is related to the word from which we get “dialogue.” This word implies the notion of thorough discussion and explanation.

Paul is seeking to persuade people with serious discussion and argumentation. He’s trying to convince them, to win them. In other words, he is teaching them. A good teacher reasons with the students and seeks to draw out their false thinking so as to convince them of the point of the lesson.

Illustration: My First Efforts at Evangelism

Paul is not seeking superficial evangelism, and he is not seeking superficial conversion. He is seeking to teach and persuade at a deep, heart-transforming level.

Now, I want you to get your money’s worth, so we need to consider two things concerning context:

1. America is not exactly like Athens. Look at verse 21: “Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.” There was no public and private or sacred and secular division in Athens. Anything was fair game to talk about, and it is all they did. In America, our culture has somehow adopted the policy that all matters of faith or anything that is important to you is private, and all else is public. How can you teach and reason when the culture has literally silenced this type of exchange of ideas in the public realm? Here’s where I have found a quote from Steve Childers so helpful. He says that the key to evangelism in the 21st c. is this . . . ready? Hospitality. His point: people exchange ideas and are willing to talk deeply and reason with others in the context of intimate relationships.
2. We aren’t Paul. Paul was a full-time preacher and a frontier church planter whose goal in life was to evangelize and create disciples for young churches. That’s how he made his living, and it was God’s calling on his life. Also, he was single. This room is full of people who are students, working men and women, and many of you are married with kids. This does not make you unspiritual. Nor does it mean you can’t do evangelism and make disciples. If you study church history, you see that the spread of Christianity in the early church was not mainly through preachers and clergy, but rather through soldiers and merchants, masters and slaves— regular people who worked jobs and raised families. This is encouraging.

Application: Who is it in your natural web of relationships that you want to reason with about God? What steps are you taking to gain an audience with them? It could be as easy as finding out what you enjoy doing and taking them with, or finding out what you are good at and serving them with that gift. Here are three shameless plugs.

• In the summer, host a block party on national night out and use this manual to plan it. 
• In the winter, host a Christmas Gathering in your home and share with your neighbors. 
• Lastly, use the Christianity Explored Sunday school this coming fall as a place to bring friends that might be willing to explore the basics in a casual environment. 

Honestly, though, these are just programs to help you share. I would probably be more excited if you told me no to all of these because you had plans with your neighbors.

So, the method of evangelism is to teach and reason with people about God. Let’s move now to the message.

2. Message

In this section, I want to walk through Paul’s sermon to the Areopagus in verses 22–31. This will help anchor the gospel message we present in a solid, biblical example. As I studied this message, I was feeling my categories being stretched a little bit. This is a hard, straight-forward message. Not only that, but some of the things that I normally would think are essentials in sharing the gospel simply aren’t there. For example, the words grace, love, new birth, justification, forgiveness, imputed righteousness, and atonement are not there. What do we do with that? Aren’t those the gospel words? Also, his sermon has a really strong emphasis on man’s sinfulness, God’s judgment, and the command for repentance.

Even more perplexing is that this sermon is not unique. It’s not like Paul blew it on this one and forgot to preach the good stuff of the gospel. This message shares the same main points with virtually every sermon in Acts. In fact, commentators say that this sermon is the sermon selected by Luke to represent all other sermons preached to Gentiles. The reason: it’s the only full one that shows up in Acts.

For these reasons I think this message is prophetic and timely, and what we see in it will help us greatly to grow in our evangelism today.

So my goal is to show what Paul said, why he said this and not other things he could have said, and how we can apply this to our evangelism today.

What Paul said: I break his message down into four parts: God, Man, Jesus, and Repentance

1. God

The main thing Paul is trying to get across about God is that He is the highest authority to which we are responsible. Mankind answers to no one else but God.

Paul shows this by teaching them that God is the Creator and Lord of all things. Look at verses 24–25: “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.”

The implications of this are staggering. The truth that God created everything out of nothing means that everything exists simply because God wants it to. It hasn’t always existed, and it doesn’t always need to. And all that God has made, he rules over with total authority. This is what Paul means by calling him Lord of heaven and earth.

Paul then takes it up a notch by teaching that not only is God Creator and Lord, but he wants to be found by his creatures

Look at verses 26–27: "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, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him."

Amazing. God has sovereignly ordained boundaries of where every man and woman will live—what country, what city, what neighborhood. And he has also allotted the period of time in which they live—the early church, the reformation, World War II, the 1970’s, 2013. God has chosen exactly the where and when of every person with this purpose: that they might seek him and find him (v. 27).

Again, Paul raises the stakes even higher. God will not wait forever to be found. He is not disinterested in his creatures' worship, but rather requires it as Lord. This is what Paul means when he teaches that God is a righteous judge.

Look at verses 30–31: "The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness."

God commands all men to come to him and to worship him. But the season in which God allows this repentance is not limitless. There is a day that God has fixed in his mind on which he will judge all men in righteousness. There will be no delaying or filibustering God on that day. He will judge according to his perfect or righteous standards, and he will let no unrighteousness in his creatures go unpunished.

God is the highest authority to which man is responsible.

2. Man

Now man’s credentials aren’t quite as impressive as God’s. The worst part is that we don’t even realize it. More often than not, the people I have shared the gospel with honestly believe they are good people.

Now Paul actually does have something optimistic to say about mankind, so let’s look at the good news first and then the bad news.

Good: Man is made in the image of God. This is breathtaking. The very God who created everything out of nothing and upholds the universe with the word of his power has bestowed on every man and woman the dignity of bearing his image.

I am getting this from verses 28–29. Paul quotes a Greek poet who claims that mankind is God’s offspring, and then in verse 29 he agrees with this, saying, “Being then God’s offspring.” Now at one level this is good, but at another level this is actually bad news. It is bad news because it actually increases our responsibility before God. And increased responsibility before God is not good news to the creature, because the creature is not righteous.

In fact, man is guilty of the sin of idolatry. I see this again in verse 29, just keep reading. “Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone.” Man is guilty of exchanging the glory of the living God for dead idols. God made man in his image, and man made God into other images that are no gods at all. Now this role reversal may seem innocent, until you realize that behind this sin, this exchange of worship from creator to created things, is the very root of man’s sin. The root is man’s desire to be like God.

I see this in verse 29. Paul says that idols are “images formed out of the art and imagination of man.” Man has taken it upon himself to decide what is worthy of worship and what is not, what is good and what is evil, what is God and what is not. This is the pride that goes to the root of all human sin, that man tried to climb up to God’s throne and steal his place as rightful ruler.

Here’s a way to think about the picture that has just been painted about God and man. Imagine what it is like when you go to a game at the Metrodome downtown. No matter how big the crowd, only one can come in at a time. This is how the judgment will be. God will line up all men and women from throughout history, and one by one by one, he will judge them as he sees right. There will be no secret smuggling into the stadium. All secrets and sins will be laid bare before the judge, and man, if still in his sin, will be found wanting and cast out into Hell. This is right, and this is terrifying.

3. Jesus

But there’s more to the message; as man climbed up in his sin, God climbed down, and the eternal Son became a man.

Now when I have normally talked about Christ in a gospel presentation, I want to emphasize that he is the savior and substitute for sin. This is what I expect from Paul next. He doesn’t contradict these truths about Jesus, but what he really emphasizes is Christ’s Lordship as the representative of God to man. In fact, Jesus here is the mediator of God’s righteous judgment, not his grace, though both are true.

I’m taking this from verse 31: “He has fixed a 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.”

This just brought the historical resurrection of Christ to life for me. It is a living proof that God will judge all men through Christ on the day that has been fixed. We just need to pause and marvel at the resurrection. If it’s true (which it is), we just need to let the implications overwhelm us. God has condescended so much that he’d even give us proof, with witnesses, that all that he said about himself and about us is true.

But now I finally want to ask the question—why is this message so hard? Why is Jesus as judge represented here, and not Jesus as savior? Did Ray Comfort travel back in time and pay the apostle Paul to come down hard with the law and with sin?

The answer to that is obvious: Yes. Not.

4. Repentance

I think the reason that Paul does this is because he is seeking repentance. Like a doctor who works with a scalpel, creating instant pain for the patient, so Paul works with the sword of the gospel to pierce hearts for repentance. Simply put: Paul wants to get people lost before he gets them found. Like a movie that creates suspense before relief, Paul wants his hearers to be under the conviction of the Holy Spirit for their sin before he applies the comforts of the gospel to their wounds. 

I see this in verse 30: "The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent."

The repentance God wants is not a shallow thing. It is a complete change of mind and heart. Paul wants to see people utterly convinced that they will be judged by Jesus for their sins. If you want to call it fire and brimstone, go ahead. I’m OK with that. Repentance is more than just fear of hell, but at first it is not less. Real repentance consists of 1) a genuine conviction that former sins and idols were wrong before God. 2) a growing hatred of those sins and idols 3) a desire to turn to God and to cast one’s self on him for mercy.

I don’t have to just explain it, I can show you this. Look at verses 32–34: “Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked. But others said, 'We will hear you again about this.' 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.”

This group believed in the resurrection and all the implications of it, and they repented, turning from idols to God. It doesn’t say they “turned to God,” but I imply this from the fact that they joined Paul, who was the leader of the churches of Christ among the Gentiles.    

1 Thessalonians 1:9–10 gives a beautiful picture of what this may have looked like in their hearts: “For they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come."

Illustration: Paul Washer has helped me so much in understanding the nature of repentance and the place of this type of hard preaching. I recently read a quote from him that was really helpful to me. He has a paradigm of a sword, a basin, and a towel. Sometimes we need to use the sword to pierce hearts to fear God. This approach is mainly used for those who are not convicted about their sin and who have not yet believed. However, with those who are convicted of sin and of the coming of Jesus to judge, the basin and the towel are the appropriate gospel tools. What he meant was this: once a heart fears God, we must apply the comforts of the gospel of grace, mercy, and love. Until then, though, it is grace, and mercy, and love to use a sword because it might be the very thing they need to seek repentance.

This actually seems to be Paul’s pattern. He would preach with his sword unsheathed at first, and then with those who were pierced, he would wash their feet with the basin and the towel. I think this is what he means when he tells the Ephesians that he taught them the whole counsel of God in the three years he stayed and taught there. If you look at the letter to the Ephesians, the words love, grace, mercy, and kindness are major themes. It is perhaps the most comforting epistle to the Christian. Once Damaris and Dionysius joined him, we can conclude that he began to speak these beautiful gospel truths to them and to encourage them with the love of Christ.

Application: So how does this apply to us today? I don’t think we should just wield our sword recklessly, as if everyone knew as little about God as the people of Athens. I think we as a country are growing less churched and less knowledgeable about God. This may mean we increasingly have to speak with this type of hardness.

That said, I want to speak a word to the person here who may have had a horrible experience with church, or with a pastor in the past. If you have been grievously sinned against or abused by someone who called themselves a Christian, I want you to know that they will be judged for their sin. Hearing these things may be horrible because they conjure up all the memories of hurtful past experiences. I want you just to feel God’s compassion on you and hatred of the sin committed against you. At the same time, if you are still unsure of Christ because of those experiences, I want to lovingly call you to repentance. You pains are real, but so are your sins as well. You are not guilty for what has been done against you, but you are guilty for your own sins before God. Please, come to him today and receive the help you need to be forgiven and to forgive.

If you are a Christian who has been walking solidly for years, but hasn’t used the sword ever, I want to call you to that. I’m guilty of it myself, I have to confess. Too much of my ministry to high school students when I was a leader in Young Life was an attempt to make kids think that God wasn’t the proverbial kill-joy, that he didn’t hate fun, and that he was adventurous and fun. I’m still working through this, but I know that I would have spoken more seriously with kids about sin and the judgment if I could go back.

How do we actually step out and do this? I want to look at what drove Paul and what can drive us today to be passionate, steadfast, and joyful evangelists.

3. Motivation

Knowing and loving the glory of God in the gospel is the ultimate motivation in evangelism (Acts 17:16–17).

I think this point is the most important of all the points so far. If we don’t get this right, we will not persevere in our evangelism. We will stop the second things get hard.

Although I think the rest of the Bible teaches that God’s glory is the ultimate motivation for the Christian to do all things (“do all things to the glory of God”), I think that the first verse of our passage today demonstrates it also.

Now while Paul was waiting for them in Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. 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.—Acts 17:16

The logic of this sentence goes like this: Paul reasons with the people of Athens because his spirit was provoked by the idols of the city.

The word for “provoked” here has the connotation of intense anger. There was something so infuriating to Paul that the True God was being exchanged for false idols that he was emotional, moved to the point of speaking with whoever he could find. His love for God’s glory consumed him.

This is similar to the time when Jesus flipped the tables in the Temple. Both of them see things that steal glory from God and both of them react. But I want to point out that Paul’s anger about the idols of the culture does not lead him to tweet about it or to be so discouraged that he shuts down and simply gossips with friends about how bad things are. Rather, when he sees it, he moves towards people. What do you do when you see someone defacing the glory of God? Do you move toward them to speak with them so that they might know the glory that you know?

The next question that you will be asking if you are like me is this: how do we get gripped by God’s glory in that kind of way?

The answer is found in how Paul thought about the glory of God, especially in relation to his ministry. I want to argue that the way Paul experiences God’s glory is found directly in his experience of the gospel of grace. He unpacks it in 1 Timothy 1:12–17. In this passage he is reflecting on why he succeeded in ministry (motivation), and he is trying to pass it on to younger Timothy:

I thank him who has given me strength [this is referring to the strength to complete ministry successfully], Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his service, though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.—1 Timothy 1:12–17

Paul’s whole ministry in his eyes in grounded in the grace and love of God on him. He is still amazed at the grace he was shown, so much so that he slips into a doxology about the glory of God at the end: “To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.” Paul’s experience of the grace of God in the gospel (past, present, and future) is the very thing that leads him to say “glory be to God.” It is out of this gospel-saturated joy that Paul, with the same lips that used to utter blasphemies against God, speaks the gospel of God boldly and with perseverance. The gospel of God’s grace is the pinnacle of God’s glory to the Christian and the evangelist.

Illustration: The song we are about to sing captures this perfectly. "O for a thousand tongues to sing My great Redeemer’s praise, the glories of my God and king, the triumphs of his grace! My gracious Master and my God, assist me to proclaim, to spread through all the earth abroad the honors of they name."

I love that!

Concluding Challenge

Now, I want to close with a challenge that might feel a little contradictory to everything I just said. I want to challenge you to have a bigger appreciation for the glory of God in gospel of grace in your own life by seeking to see it in others’ lives, specifically  in the lives of unbelievers.

I’ve just said that if you have a big view of God’s glory, then as a result you will seek to share with others. Now I’m saying that if you share with others, you will have a big view of God’s glory and grace. Here’s the challenge. If you feel like you have a small view of God’s glory and you think it would never be enough to compel you to speak like Paul did, then the thing you need to do most is go out and share the gospel with someone in your life.

Yes, we need to pray, and we need to seek God in his Word, and we need to preach the gospel to ourselves, and we need to do all we can in the upward direction to compel us outward. But here’s my point: it works both ways. God has designed it so that when you go out to others, your need for him will go out the roof.

Take your small view of God’s glory and grace (which most of us would admit to feeling compared to John Piper or Jason Meyer), and take whatever ounce of faith you can find, and take a promise like Philippians 4:19: “And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.” When you go out and try to share and someone asks you a hard question, you get really needy for help. When someone blows off your coffee date because they start to rethink whether or not they want to be friends with the outspoken Christian guy at work, you get really needy.

When you have needs, that is when you ask for help from God, and that is when he supplies. Philippians 4:19 is a promise straight out of the mouth of God that if you have any need whatsoever, he will provide according to the riches in glory in Christ Jesus. The more you trust God with his future grace promised to you and step out to speak about God with others wherever you are, the more your needs will pile up and up and up and up. But as they go up, you will see God’s grace piling even higher to meet every need. The more we see that happen in our lives, the more we will say, “Woah, there are a lot of riches in the glory of Christ!”

A word to the parents: if your kids have a genuine faith, send them out to speak. And kids, if your parents have a genuine faith, send them out to speak.

Bethlehem South, let’s have a love for one another that doesn’t insulate, but a love that encourages and then pushes out so that when we come back, we have more needs and go even higher into the glories of God in our worship.