Looking for God's fingerprints in Hollywood movies, Eminem's music, and American culture
The Life of Paul 6.0
Acts 17
by Eric Stillman 
December 10th, 2006

Play

Download mp3

How do you share your faith in a post-Christian world, where many either don’t really know the Biblical story or think they know it and have already rejected it?  How do you convince someone of the truth of Jesus when you can tell someone God loves you and they will answer, “which God are you talking about?”  How do you share your faith in a relativistic culture where people think that what’s true for you doesn’t need to be true for them?  A world where it is seen as arrogant to say that Jesus is the only way to heaven?  Where people are open to spiritual things but are wary of committing to one particular religion?

Tom Clegg and Warren Bird said in their book, Lost in America, “The unchurched population in the US is so extensive that, if it were a nation, it would be the fifth most populated nation on the planet after China, Soviet Union, India, and Brazil, and the largest mission field in the English-speaking world.”  The challenge is huge, even in America, and it’s even harder because of our relativistic, post-Christian culture.

But it’s not impossible.  We’ve been looking at the life of Paul as recorded in the book of Acts, and today we come to the single most analyzed passage in all of Acts in Acts 17.  In this chapter, Paul is in Athens, and has the challenging task of trying to convince a group of educated, highly philosophical, relativistic, spiritual but not Christian or Jewish society of the exclusive truth claims of Jesus Christ.  As difficult as the task is in America, Athens may have been even harder.  I think we have a lot to learn from this passage, because I see many similarities between what Paul faced and what we face today.