March 6, 2023

Acts 17: 23 “For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.” (NIV)

To whom are you addressing your worship?*

Paul was in Athens, waiting for his friends to join him. He was distressed by the sight of this city that was full of idols. It wasn’t enough for him to reason in the synagogue or with the people in the streets; he delivered a speech in the Areopagus – the home of the supreme tribunal of Athens.

The beautiful part of this story is how it illustrates Paul’s ability to turn anything – and everything – into a teaching moment. He may have taken advantage of the ignorance of the people of Athens as a launching point for a sermon, but he never called them ignorant. How effective would his message have been if he had started by trying to make his listeners feel stupid? Beginning with what they knew – and with what he knew about them – Paul crafted a speech to appeal to their level of sophistication without compromising the truth.

I don’t know the demographics of my readers. I tailor my daily posts for the audience that I think is out there. I assume that each of you believes in God and that you are familiar with Christianity, even if some of you don’t claim to be a Christian. I always encourage you to read the scripture for yourself because the context is important to understanding the message, and because you should verify that I am being true to the word.

So, here is where I apply today’s passage to you and me. Before we feel superior to the Athenians, let’s examine our own convictions about the God we worship. Have you ever heard someone express this sentiment: I would rather believe in God and find out I was wrong than not believe in him and find out I was wrong. It sounds good at first. But how different is that attitude from that of the Athenians who added an altar to an unknown god to their mythological pantheon? If you can allow the possibility that God might be a fairy tale, you are not worshipping God. God can’t be worshipped “just in case.” As Jesus proclaimed, in John 4: 24, “God is spirit, and his worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth.”

The worshipper can rise no higher than the god he worships.*