The Exclusivity of Christ and It’s Implications In Our Lives
Acts 17:22-31
Acts 17:22-31
How’s everyone doing? Let’s pray…
Okay, we are jumping off of the Series through the Gospel of Mark tonight because I honestly couldn’t give that sermon as it was forming and so I have to go back this week and re-work it.
Instead, we are going to look at a passage that I kept going back to over and over again this week. It’s in Acts 17, starting in verse 22 this week. Go ahead and turn there.
We’re going to read it unpack some key points.
Just to get you up to speed if you’ve never read this passage, Paul was this church planter who traveled a great deal of the Roman empire preaching the Gospel. And as he preached the Gospel, he would watch as the Holy Spirit use the Gospel to save people out of their sins and into the mission of the Kingdom, and saved into the family of a local church.
Then as a church got it’s legs under it, Paul would appoint leaders, tell them to stay close to the Gospel and to beat down any wolves that tried to mess with the clear and simple Gospel message. And then he’d move on and start all over again.
God was just using Paul in amazing ways.
And every city was different. There was usually some opposition from either the old school Jewish community who didn’t believe in the Resurrection of Christ or the deity of Christ. They didn’t think that Jesus was the Messiah, so they would start trouble with Paul when He said Jesus was the Messiah, Jesus was the Christ and that they needed to repent and believe.
Another opposition group came from some of the Jewish people who did believe that Jesus was who Jesus said He was – the Son of God, the savior of the world.
In that respect they were like Paul, EXCEPT they caused a stink because they wouldn’t let go of their old rituals, and ceremonies that Jesus came to fulfill through His life, death, burial and resurrection.
So these guys would fight back against Paul because he taught what Jesus taught, that the only requirement for salvation was Faith in Christ alone. They said, yes. You do need to put your faith in Christ AND you need to do all of this other stuff like get circumcised, keep the old dietary laws and on and on.
Another group that Paul got grief from was the non-Jews who had a good racket going in their cities selling trinkets of idols or pimping out demon-possessed fortune tellers before Paul got there.
When the Gospel was spoken and Jesus’ name was dropped and the Spirit started changing lives, these guys started to loose money and loose control. So, they opposed Paul. For them, it was a business decision.
So those were three of the common groups who pushed back against Paul. And when I say pushed back I mean sometimes they put him in prison (Acts 16:23), some times they hurled rocks at him until they though he was dead (Acts 14:19).
Now, in Athens there is going to be a different kind of conflict. These people just hadn’t heard anything like this before.
See in most of the other places Paul had a springboard of the Law and the Prophets, the Hebrew Scriptures – what we call the Old Testament. Here there wasn’t that base level of understanding. So Paul had to see what they believed in and show them how there was more to be known and understood about the Spiritual realm.
They had a deity on every corner, a statue for every god they could think up and every statue was worshiped for a different reason, one for fertility, one for business, one for good crops and so it goes… It’s similar to the idolatry of the Old Testament that God pulled Abram out of, and that the Israelites went right back to later on.
It’s what we read about in Romans chapter one, where we are told that instead of worshiping the creator God, we turn our backs on Him and worship the things that we have created.
Why did they do that? Because if they created their own god to worship – a god of their own understanding – then they could call the shots with that God. They could make their God powerful in their minds without all commands on their lives.
But, IF God was above and greater than them, then He would control them and the commands on their life would not be as easily ignored.
So that’s what Paul’s walked into in Athens, now we’re going to pick up in verse 22, when Paul gets to talk to the big thinkers of the city.
{Unpack} In other words, you don’t have to wonder about the unknown God anymore.
Listen, this is the basic message of our faith. Remember, when we are saved FROM the punishment due to us for our sins, we are saved INTO a family.
While God is colossal, even though He is transcendent – outside of time and space, and not dependent on us at all; He is also immanent, which means that He comes down to our level He is always with us. And He has chosen to reveal Himself to us as our Heavenly Father.
Jesus used this picture for us over and over and if you are a parent you get this. Even though you are who you are with all of your indwelling sin and all of your struggles, you want what is best for your child. You don’t want them to be lost or confused. You aren’t going to hold back information that will help them know how to function in this world and you are going to let them in on who YOU are so that they can know about their family, their heritage and of what and whom they belong to.
So, connect the dots with Jesus’ word picture here. Your Father in Heaven also wants you to know all that you need to know, for your survival in this world of course, but more so that you can understand where you belong – in the Kingdom family.
That’s one of the reasons Jesus came, to stop us from chasing this false god and that false god - gods that could never save us or satisfy us or give us an eternal home or a family.
Paul says to the Athenians, you don’t have t wonder anymore. Your Father in Heaven, the God of the universe, the one true and eternal God has made Himself know through Jesus Christ – God in the flesh.
Before he talks about Jesus though, Paul has to smash some idols and really, to show how silly these false gods are:
{UNPACK} This is a lot like what Isaiah was told by God to speak against. In Isaiah 44, the foolishness of idol worship is spelled out by the man who toils to cut down tree so that he can use some for a fire, then carves an idol out of the other half of the same tree that he just cut down. And he worships that block of wood. God says that is foolishness onto sin.
Moving on to verse 30 this is the key verse so pay close attention here:
{Unpack} Paul says, listen that was sin to do what you have done back in the day – to worship those idols to bow down to those fake gods. You didn’t know any better. You knew there was a God – a creator and a sustainer, but you were way off the mark.
But now God has made Himself known to us all through Christ. And Jesus Himself said that He was the only way to God. The only way to escape God’s judgment.
Now, Paul says, it is time to turn away from that old “you” and turn to Christ. That’s what repentance is. It is a changing of the mind a changing of the heart. It is to do an about-face. In the military it is the action of pivoting to stand or move in the opposite direction from the original.
Before the Gospel was delivered by Paul, the Athenians where marching in the wrong direction and they didn’t have a clue.
The same was true in YOUR life and in MY life before we came to Christ. We were marching along.
We were following the orders passed down from our commanders, whether that was our old sin nature, the fallen designs of this fallen world or Satan himself. Most of us followed all three.
Before Jesus though, NONE OF US followed God.
But the Gospel was spoken and we turned.
We saw the damage caused buy our sin and the sin of the people around us and we saw our inability to fight that sin on our own and the Holy Spirit gave us the gift of faith – Faith to believe that Jesus was indeed the Son of God and that by his sinless life, death on the cross and resurrection from the grave, He rescued us from death and Hell and saved us INTO the family. Praise GOD!
If you are here and you’re a visitor and if you are not a believer. If you wonder what is church all about – what’s this church all about – that’s it. It is all about the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
And we are begging you with hearts of love to receive Christ tonight if you haven’t yet.
Maybe you never worshiped a statue like the Athenians. But we all worship something. If it is not God, the Lord Jesus Christ, then it is something.
I used to worship the bottle. Whiskey gave me orders as to what to think, how to treat people, where to spend my money, when to work and sleep and all the rest.
Other Christians here used to worship success. Their careers called all the shots in their lives before Jesus came into the picture and said repent. Come to Me (Jesus) and be saved.
Others worshiped their family, or one special person in their family. But they found out like all of us that people – even really great people – are horrible gods. They cannot give us what only Jesus can give us.
If you are not a Christian yet, what are you worshiping instead of Christ? Again, we call you to do an about-face and receive the gift of God’s grace in Jesus Christ tonight.
Because no matter what else has happened in your life up to this point, you now have the information you need. Like Paul said
And listen, the time is coming when there will not be any time left to turn away and turn to Jesus. Verse 31 reminds us that:
That day is coming. That day has been set since the foundation of the world. He doesn’t tell us when but He tells us how it will all go down.
The Scriptures tell us that we will all be judged as guilty UNLESS we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ The innocence of Jesus, which He gave us when He took our sin in that Great Exchange.
Let’s pray…
Communion…
