Acts 17:23
S—For as I went through your city and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, “to an unknown god.” What, therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.
H—Paul gives us a model here that can be so useful in helping to connect folks to the movement of God in their lives. Paul is in Athens, a town that is polluted with religion, philosophy, and ideas. As Paul begins to make an appeal for Jesus he meets his audience where they are by starting with their culture, language, and ideas. He uses their culture to begin to explain the w
ay of Jesus. He doesn’t bombard them with christianeeze; He doesn’t speak to them with churchy slogans and ideas that are foreign to them but instead speaks their language to connect them to Jesus.
A—so often in our culture church people want to speak nothing but the language of the church to those that don’t know the language. When we approach “Athens” and try to speak our language instead of meeting folks where they are we do nothing but build a bigger wall between them and Jesus. People don’t get “the lamb was slain; Jehovah Jira; Slain in the Spirit; Holy Ghost” all of it is irrelevant to those who are not yet followers of Jesus. For too long the church has arrogantly sent a message to the culture that “once you can look, act, and talk like us then we will accept you” instead of meeting the culture where they are and speaking their own language that they might be connected to the saving love of Jesus Christ; it is time for that to change.
P—Jesus, I pray today that you would help me not to be a stumbling block to a not yet follower of Jesus coming into contact with you because I expect them to meet me where I am instead of me traveling to meet them on their own terms. I pray more followers of Jesus would spend more time in bars then in big steeple churches. That we would go to those places that Paul would have traveled instead of living in our Christian bubbles of irrelevance. I pray you would make Crossroads into the kind of community where we penetrate the walls of Athens and connect people to the “unknown god” that is already at work in their lives. Amen.
E—like Paul, I am called to go to Athens not as a stumbling block but as a tool to connect people to the “unknown god” that is known in Jesus Christ.
Peace from Pastor P
www.wedesiremore.com; chadpullins@connect2crossroads.com
