Today, we’re wrapping up our series, “This is What We Do” where we were exploring 7 spiritual practices and disciplines that root us in faith and make us effective Christ followers. Today we’re talking about taking the good news of Jesus to our families, our friendships, and our workplaces.

Charles Spurgeon, a 19^th century British pastor, remarks in his book “The Sword and the Trowel”:

If Jesus is precious to you, you will not be able to keep your good news to yourself; you will be whispering it into your child’s ear; you will be telling it to your husband; you will be earnestly imparting it to your friend; without the charms of eloquence you will be more than eloquent; your heart will speak, and your eyes will flash as you talk of his sweet love. Every Christian here is either a missionary or an impostor. Recollect that. You either try to spread abroad the kingdom of Christ, or else you do not love him at all. It cannot be that there is a high appreciation of Jesus and a totally silent tongue about him. (1873, 126-127)

A few weeks ago, I shared these statistics about Christianity from the Pew Research Institute:

• If you were born before 1964, the likelihood you’d belong to Christian church was something like 40-50%. Meaning about 40-50% of the people can claim a church they are part of or identify with.
• If you were born between 1965 and 1983, you were 20% likely to belong to a Christian church.
• If you were born in 1984 or afterward, you were less than 10% likely to belong to a church.

When you crunch the stats and combine all the generations and multiply it against the spread of the population, depending on which state you’re living in, that the likelihood of a person identifying as a Christian is something like 30-40% of the population. If you live in a state with lots of transients (like Maryland), that goes down to 30% and if you live in a state with more established residents who retire there also, that goes to 40% (Florida).

For us, that means 70% of the people we interact with a daily basis, will not and cannot experience the love and mercy of Jesus in their lives without us being present in their lives.

• That’s 7 people out of 10 in your family, block, schools, or workplaces.

Now, ask yourselves: can you realistically live in the same world they live in, seeing the atrocities they see, experiencing the tragedies they are living through, and keep the hope of Jesus’ love and mercy to yourself?

Of course not. That’s inhuman. We’re not imposters masquerading around as disciples of Jesus, playing church, trivializing religion.

We love God and love the people God placed around us, so we share the hope we have in Jesus with those who don’t have any hope in their lives. That’s what missionaries do: they love the people placed in their lives enough to share the good news of Jesus with the people they love in whatever words they can muster and through any actions they can perform.

I know what you’re thinking. Jonathan, if you only knew some of the people in my life, you’d know they’re unlovable!

• You got these uncles, cousins, and nieces, and man, the things they do, the things they say…
• You also have that manager that’s sending you emails and text messages right now! How unbearable! Can’t a person just scroll through the church’s Instagram page during the preaching in peace?

What if these very unlovable people are in our very lives so that we could love them by sharing the hope of Jesus with them? Doesn’t Jesus’ love compel us to love them and share the good news we have, however we can?

If Jesus is precious to us, then we will share him with everyone we encounter, everywhere we go.

We’re going to be in Acts 17:16-34 today.

Let’s pray.

Father in heaven, thank you for gathering us together for worship. Lord, we love you and we long to make our love for you known to everyone in every way we possibly can. We know that it is not possible without your anointing. I ask that you fill us with the Holy Spirit and let him work in us so that we can love the people you give to us. Today, give us fresh eyes, fresh ears, and fresh minds for the scripture. I pray that as we read the Bible today that we would understand the Apostle Paul, his motives, and how he gives us an example to love people uniquely placed around us for your purposes. Give us conviction, give us opportunity, let us live boldly as your beloved missionaries heralding the gospel that changes our lives as we share your love with others through our service. We pray these things in Jesus name. Amen.

Acts 17:16.

¹⁶ 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. ¹⁷ 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. ¹⁸ 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. (Acts 17:16-18 ESV)

Some context here, Paul was separated from the rest of his group in a city called Berea and was smuggled along to Athens via boat. Now, as Paul is wandering in the great city of Athens, Luke, says Paul’s “spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols.”

When Luke says provoked, he’s not talking about becoming angry, he’s talking about having his sensibilities shaken to the core. Paul witnesses a city full of people, who are created and loved by God, being manipulated into quiet destruction by dead, speechless things given life by people’s misplaced devotion, love, and adoration. The Bible tells us that our witness and experience of idol worship should cause us

• to be sad.
• to grieve.
• to be shaken to the core.
• But more importantly, we should be moved to action.

And if we’re not moved to action, then we’ve either become so numb to idols ruling over people’s lives or we just don’t love the people God loves. So,

Point 1. Seeing the idols in the world causes us to share Jesus

Here’s how idol worship works.

It’s not always about bowing down to statues. So before you rule out this passage as something inapplicable to your life, listen to what I’m saying: an idol is anything, person, or idea that takes up the space in your heart, mind, and soul that God should be occupying. Idol worship is placing the devotion, adoration, or love you should have for God toward things, people, and ideas that are not God.

Let me give you four common examples of idols and their worship today:

• The idol of power. We worship the idol of power when do all that we can, sacrificing everything (marriage, relationships, time) in our lives from success, or winning, or influence.
• The idol of money. We worship the idol of money when all that we do is about getting money and keeping money. That’s both for the glutton who spends uncontrollably above their means , yeah credit card debit, and for the cheapskate who won’t even buy their mama dinner or a nice pair of shoes.
• The idol of approval. We worship the idol of approval when we live like people pleasers. Other people’s approval comes to the detriment of your health, your emotions, and your character. I’ve actually heard you say no, you say no to serving God because you care more about what people think of you than you do what God thinks of you.
• The idol control. We worship the idol of control when we hold to unreasonable perfectionism, and are critically inflexible. So you helicopter parent, you have anxiety over every circumstance, and situation and you micromanage everything in your life.

Idol worship is what we do when we’re believing the lie that these things, ideas, and people can give us what we truly want.

But Jesus is the only one who can provide the fulfillment we long for. The reason Jesus left heaven to take the form of humanity was so that he could show us that idols have no power over him. In his perfect life, he became the perfect sacrifice, the fullness for what we always wanted but could not have. When Jesus was resurrected from the dead on the third day, we were given hope that even when this life is over, our eternity is secured with God, there is more to this life than we can possibly know.

In Jesus, our idols are neutered, our sins wiped clean away from the ledger of justice. And everyday we live in the reality of Jesus having perfected us through faith, we become more like him, perfect, loved, and fulfilled. Experiencing that reality compels us to share that with others whose lives are quietly being destroyed by the idols they worship.

If you’re here, and you’re not a Christ follower, and you don’t profess faith in Jesus as your savior, and Lord, I want you to know that God has been waiting to give that life to you: a life that is perfect and fulfilled by him. No longer a slave to inanimate things, but free to live as you were created to live. If you want to understand how you can have a relationship with Jesus, come see me after service, or there will be people on this side of the stage waiting who would love to walk through it with you.  

In verse 17 the Apostle Paul, being freed by Jesus Christ from living under the power of idols, heads to the synagogues where he knew he’d find Jewish people and devout people looking for that same freedom from idols.

Paul had a strategy to seek out people bewitched by idols so he could share Jesus with them. The type of people Paul targeted weren’t random. He sought out Jewish people and God-seeking people first because he knew where they would be—the synagogue. The Jews and religious people were “his people.” He knew they’d be there because that’s where he’d be and that’s where he was before Jesus saved him. The lesson for us is to first share the good news with individuals in our lives that we consider “our people.”

Who are our people?

• For those of you who are parents, that means going to your kids and sharing the good news of Jesus with them. If your kids are disciples of Jesus, then go to your brothers, sisters, parents, cousins, nephews, nieces. Your family is your people.
• For those of you who are immigrants, that means going to your native countrymen who are here struggling with the same things you are and sharing the good news of Jesus with them.
• For those of you who are part of a fan base, that means going to your fellow fans and sharing the good news of Jesus with them.
• For those of you who are police officers, firefighters, tradespeople, that means going to your colleagues and sharing the good news of Jesus with them because you’re at thankless jobs, but God doesn’t see them that way.

Remember the stat from earlier, 7 out of 10 people in your life are living without the gospel in their lives. You know where your people will be. You know where you can find them, so go and share the good news with them because you love them and there are idols in their lives that are killing them.

After Paul went to share the good news with his people, he went to the marketplace and started engaging with people at large. Paul started to share the good news with people who couldn’t be more ideologically further apart from him and from each other for that matter—the Stoics and Epicureans. Stoics cared about virtuous behavior and living according to nature, while the Epicureans were all about avoiding pain and seeking necessary pleasure.

Paul’s example shows us that we cannot be and should not be shy about engaging people with good news even if we have nothing in common with them.  

• So what that we don’t have shared interests?
• So what that we don’t speak the same language, or eat the same food, or think the same?

Look what happens when we work up the courage and love to engage with people different than us. Verse 19.

¹⁹ And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? ²⁰ For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.” ²¹ Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new. (Acts 17:19-21 ESV)

When you take an interest in people to share your hope with people different than you, they actually take an interest in you and invite you to their things. Isn’t that something?

When you seek people out to engage with them in meaningful conversations about what you care about and how their lives can benefit, they’ll bring you to a seat that’s open at their table. And now, because you stretched out in love that way, your Christian faith is at least one of the voices available to them in their sphere. They invited you to speak into their lives. So speak into their lives with your faith.

The Athenians invited Paul, a Jew, to the Areopagus (the temple of Ares, god of war) and gave him an open mic. This is the equivalent of you being invited into the PTA meeting or a townhall meeting and given an open mic to share the hope you have in Jesus to all the people who showed up.

Verse 22.

²² So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. ²³ For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: ‘To the unknown god.’ (Acts 17:22-23a ESV)

Here’s the thing that a lot of us get wrong about sharing the gospel. We think of sharing the gospel as getting people to change their minds about their religion or their worldviews. But the example Paul gives in these two verses shows us it’s not about changing their minds or their worldviews.

Sharing the gospel is about showing people your way of living, not debating over different ways we live.  

Point 2. Sharing Jesus requires us to know people’s heart language

Paul first acknowledges their way of life. How do they see themselves living? “as very religious.” Paul speaks to their hearts.

People may not call themselves religious today, mostly because only crazy people are religious nowadays, but 90% of people will identify themselves as “spiritual.” They are very much be interested in connecting with a god, if not our God. They just don’t know how.

Acknowledging how people see themselves gives us the credibility with them to speak into their lives. In empathizing with the Athenians, Paul understood where their hearts were and how their worldviews were shaped and gave him the insight to shar the good news in ways that are meaningful to them.

Let me provide two very simple ways to understand people’s hearts and their worldviews as it relates to sharing our faith in Jesus with them. The primary difference between the two is the lens a person sees their own freedom, autonomy, and sense of self-through.

• Some people have a pre-Christian heart and a pre-Christian worldview –
  • These are generally people entrenched in other religions like Buddhism, Hinduism, shamanism, ancestor worship, etc, or like Judaism, Islam, etc.
  • Blessings and life come from successfully executing a series religious activities: you pray a certain number of times, you do a certain type of work, you obtain some type of status. Etc.
  • This also happens to be the Stoic’s worldview.
  • When people who hold this view and this heart posture are confronted with faith in Jesus, they see how the good news of Jesus offers them freedom and autonomy so they no longer burdened and pressured to pursue a need for fortune, wealth, status, honor, success, or perfection to be accepted by a higher power, by God.

• Then there is the Post-Christian heart and worldview –
  • These people usually come from societies and cultures where blessings and life comes from leaving behind a series rituals and religions.
  • They see having faith in Jesus as a loss of freedom. They see Jesus as putting rules on their lives, obstructing them from pursuing their own fulfillment, whatever that may be. That’s the post-Christian worldview in our culture today.
  • They balk at the good news of Jesus because they never actually experienced good news of Jesus, and because of the bastardization of our faith, they see the good news of Jesus being contradictory to their worship of pleasure and happiness.
  • This is also the Epicurean view.

So the goal of sharing our faith, the reason we are compelled to do it is because we love pre-Christian people who need to be freed from the idols shackling their lives from experience true freedom; and because we love post-Christian people who are being lied to about what true pleasure and happiness really is.

This hasn’t changed in the last 2,000 years because Paul is talking to both those camps at the Areopagus. Let’s pick this back up in verse 23.

^23bWhat therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. ²⁴ The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, ²⁵ nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. ²⁶ 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, ²⁷ 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, ²⁸ 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.’

²⁹ 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.

³⁰ The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, ³¹ 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.”  (Acts 17:23b-31 ESV)

Big Idea: Jesus calls us to share his story

Let me translate into today’s language what Paul shared as good news that gets to the heart of both pre-Christian and post-Christian people:

• The emotional, cultural, and existential burdens we struggle with in life causes us to become personally broken.
  • Everybody can agree to this, regardless of where people’s hearts are.
• In our brokenness, we fail to see and experience that there is more to life and that we’re actually part of something greater than ourselves.
  • If you’re reading in between the lines, what I’m saying is that idol worship in our lives is a problem and it’s killing us.
• BUT, there is a God who made us, who loves us, and therefore saves us for that greater thing.
• We are saved by trusting Jesus. We believe God became human and lived perfectly in this life, so we wouldn’t have to.
• We trust Jesus lovingly sacrificed himself so our emotional, cultural, and existential struggles can be wiped away in the love of God.
• We did nothing to earn it. We receive this generous gift from God through believing in him.
• Now we get to live with God and be everything God created me to be from now and into eternity.

God loved us, people who didn’t deserve to be loved, people who were broken beyond repair and sent Jesus to this earth so that he could die as the perfect sacrifice on our behalf. Through Jesus’ death on the cross, the payment for our adoption into the family of God was paid in full, making undeserving, unlovable people, children of God, freed once and for all to be loved and to love without fear, burden, or worry. When Jesus was resurrected, we were gifted the assurance to live free now and into eternity in the true and ultimate pleasure and joy as He continues to transform us through his story. That is the good news.

When our stories becomes irrevocably intertwined with Jesus’ own story, we are freed from the emotional, cultural, and existential burdens that are killing us.

Verse 32.

³² Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked. But others said, “We will hear you again about this.” ³³ So Paul went out from their midst. ³⁴ But some men joined him and believed, among whom also were Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them. (Acts 17:32-34 ESV)

Here’s my last point.

Point 3. Sharing Jesus requires us to be okay with disagreement

This may be the reason some of us have never shared the good news of Jesus with anybody. Just to re-assure you: we don’t share the good news of Jesus with people to win them over. We share the gospel to show them our way of life.

Paul shared the gospel with the Athenians because his heart ached for people who were living broken, hurt, unduly burdened, and lost. He shared the gospel of Jesus with them so that they could experience God’s love and grace. We too, are compelled to share the gospel with people because our heart breaks for people who are living broken, hurt, unduly burdened, and lost. Showing people our way of life may lead to disagreement, but that’s okay because their lives are valuable to us and they’re valuable to God.  

I have some very close friends in my life who aren’t Christians. In fact, they disagree with my faith, and my profession. Imagine that, when your faith is tied to your profession. Sometimes, I don’t know why they’re still friends with me even though they disagree with my faith and my profession, but as long as they are in my circle of friends that God put in my life, I’m going to share Jesus’ story with them because my life story is part of Jesus’ story and they’re going to hear about it every time we watch football together, every time we eat together, every time we go on vacation together, every time we talk on the phone.

Cedarbrook, our mission is to become radical disciples of Jesus. So do something radical and tell the people in our lives Jesus’ story, even if it they disagree with it.

Whisper his story to people you consider family, impart Jesus’ story to your friends. Let your heart speak, and eyes flash with the love of Christ as you engage them as a missionary for the kingdom of God so that they may experience God’s love and grace through you.

Let’s pray.

Father in heaven, thank you for freeing us to share your love with people you placed specifically around us, people whose heart languages we speak, and cultures we intimately understand. I ask that we can be bold about the freedom we enjoy by accepting your son in faith. I pray that we can connect people with you, not with cunning or eloquence, but with truth and power of your holy spirit. Lord, it is because somebody shared your story with us that our burden of guilt was lifted and our need of forgiveness was provided to us. It is because somebody shared your story with us that our shame, our impurities, our enslavements, our wanderings, and our restlessness were removed from our lives and instead were given blessings that we cannot even begin to enumerate or imagine. Thank you father. Give us opportunities this week to share your good news as we leave this place and go to the places you send us. We pray these things in Jesus name. Amen.