Understanding, Affirming and Confronting
The following are quotes from The Heart of Evangelism by Jerram Barrs that are referring to or relate to the passage we are studying this week- Acts 17:16-34.
. . .Where did Paul begin? Did he begin by attacking their idolatry or their endless speculation that never arrived at the truth or their love of argument for its own sake or their devotion to rhetorical skills regardless of the truth or falsehood of the subject? No! Paul began by commending them for their religious longings, for their desire to worship.
Paul was not flattering them or being sarcastic about their religion but was identifying a point of contact he could use for communicating the gospel. Their religious nature and the altar to the unknown god became bridges for declaring who God truly is. Paul’s commitment was to ask: ‘What is right with their thinking? What can I commend about their way of life?’ So often we think of dealing with the ideas of non-Christians as a matter of attack: ‘What is wrong with their thinking? Where can I attack their ideas and way of life?’ Paul seems to have taken just the opposite approach.
It is true that believers and unbelievers are in different kingdoms. . . But they never escape the real world. . . In addition to this people never escape their own humanity. They are made in the image of God because that is the way God made them. Consequently there will always be contact points for the believer to find. There will always be elements of the truth in any unbeliever’s thinking because they have to live in God’s world.
Just as Paul built bridges to Israelites and to pagans, so we are to learn from his example and build bridges to our contemporaries. If we are to apply this principle to our own attempts at outreach, we need to reflect on the state of religious belief and church commitment in our society today.
As we consider these examples of Paul’s efforts to show his acquaintance with the ideas of the men and women who were listening to his words, we have to concluded that Paul had done his homework. He respected his hearers sufficiently and had a deep enough care for them that he had worked at understanding their ideas and their religion. In fact, as we have seen already, Paul tells us that this commitment governed all his communication and the way he lived every day. ‘I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.’ -1 Corinthians 9:22. Paul was able to enter the culture of others in order to reach them. His motivation was love for Christ and love for those he met.
Sometimes our evangelism does not make the effort to understand what people believe or why they believe it. Consequently it fails to communicate. Either this need for understanding is considered unnecessary. . . Or it is assumed that everyone in our society is in the place of the Jew or the God-fearer of the New Testament. . . A third reason for the failure to do the hard work that is necessary to understand people is that sometimes we are plain lazy and cannot be troubled to rouse ourselves to make the effort to find out what other people think and believe.
Paul clarified the Gospel by telling the Athenians that their deepest longings were met in the truth of who God is. He declared that their wisest thinking was fulfilled and surpassed in the revelation God had given about Himself and that their most cherished ideas were transcended and completed in the message of Jesus, the man whom God appointed as His ambassador.
Because of this reality of disobedience and rebellion, the Gospel will always be experienced as a challenge. It will challenge the mind, for it always confronts false belief with the truth. It will challenge the will, for it cuts to the core of our insistence on turning away from God and going our own way. It will challenge the heart for our hearts are devoted to many masters in place of the one true Lord. Any faithful communication of the Gospel must come with this challenge. In fact, it is appropriate to assert that if there is no challenge, there is no genuine presentation of the Gospel.
Just as with the Jews, Paul’s challenges were spoken to the beliefs and convictions that were at the heart of what it meant to be Greek, and above all Athenian. These cherished notions were their glory and their pride. Paul’s purpose was to bring them to a point where they would begin to question their most precious assumptions about themselves and to doubt what they had believed. Onely when this happened would they be humbled before God, turn away from what had captured their devotion and turn instead to Jesus as their sole hope and confidence before God. Christ must be their wisdom, the source of boasting, the One who gives them a sense of identity, their secure anchor for eternity.
Reflecting on the challenges Paul made in these two different settings, we should notice that it was the most precious things in each culture that Paul confronted. Why was this? At the heart of all sin, unbelief and rebellion against God is pride.