Wednesday, July 11th
Read: Acts 17
Sometimes people try to connect or make friends with you by attempting to relate to you in a funny way. You may have experienced situations in which a teacher or youth group leader attempts to identify with a group of teens in a ridiculous way. Instead of making a connection and therefore a positive influence, their strange behavior or inappropriate words did the opposite or what they intended—they drove away their ‘audience’ from them or caused them to be laughed at and mocked.
Paul and his friends were traveling from city to city, telling people the truth about who Jesus was. They arrived at Thessalonica and Paul explained from the scriptures that Jesus was the Christ. Now some Jews were persuaded, but not all. The rest, angry at losing men and women to his crazy new cult, organized a mob to find Paul and drag him before the authorities. Paul and his friends escaped just in time and traveled to Berea over night. I’ll bet that Paul encountered clashes in culture and group dynamics wherever he went but he pressed on in the knowledge that the gospel is for everyone.
Paul arrived at Berea and went straight into the synagogue to preach again. Paul was going strong, that is until the mob from Thessalonica caught up with him. He made a run for it again, waiting at Athens while his friends caught up. Now Athens was a marketplace of religion, filled with idols, foreign beliefs and different types of philosophies. In a single day you could be faced with beliefs and ideas to many extremes and be encouraged to pick and choose what suited you. Sound familiar?
This spiritual mess before him stirred Paul’s spirit. The city of Athens was filled with false gods, temples and altars to whatever people made up. And so he started again, teaching and preaching about Jesus. Now some philosophers approached him and asked about this new religious fad—Jesus Christ. Paul pointed at the inscription on one of their idols: ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ This unknown god, said Paul, was the real, eternal God who wasn’t made with human hands. He taught them about God using their own beliefs, their own philosophies and he quoted their own poets. Paul was able to connect with the philosophers on their own level by relating his message to their own passion and lives. The message of Jesus came through to these people. Though the resurrection of Jesus turned a lot of the people off (to the Greeks this was nonsense), Paul didn’t back down in sharing the complete gospel. To have given them only part of the gospel would have been to give them no gospel at all.
With converts in Thessalonica and Berea, you would say that Paul’s evangelical efforts were certainly successful, particularly at provoking religious fanatics and violent mobs! The Church today has also tried to tell the world about Jesus, but the response is quite often similar to the mob in Thessalonica. In part, this is because we sometimes go unprepared in that we don’t know who we’re ministering to or how we can relate to others. We often offend unnecessarily because we haven’t done our homework by studying and asking the Lord how best to reach specific groups of people or even specific individuals. We can learn a good lesson from Paul. He was a wise man by telling people he encountered during his travels about the love of God in ways they could understand.
Process:
– Do you have a friend who doesn’t know God? What do they think or believe about life and spirituality?
– How could you explain Jesus in a way they would understand? How can you show them that Christ wants to be a part of their life?
– How can we relate and explain God to different people in different situations?
Youth Department