Spending all our time discussing the latest ideas

This pas­sage from Acts 17 made me laugh in recog­ni­tion. How many of us are like the First Cen­tu­ry Athe­ni­ans, fol­low­ers of any­thing that is new: aca­d­e­m­ic trends, social net­works, the 24-hour news feeds? Paul’s mes­sage was sim­ple: that the God and peace we seek is close at hand and the one we’re most tempt­ed to overlook.

It should be explained that all the Athe­ni­ans as well as the for­eign­ers in Athens seemed to spend all their time dis­cussing the lat­est ideas. So Paul, stand­ing before the coun­cil, addressed them as fol­lows: “Men of Athens, I notice that you are very reli­gious in every way, for as I was walk­ing along I saw your many shrines. And on of your altars had this inscrip­tion on it: ‘To an Unknown God.’ This God, whom you wor­ship with­out know­ing, is the one I’m telling you about.
He is the God who made the world and every­thing in it… His pur­pose was for the nations to seek after God and per­haps feel­ing their way toward him and find him – though he is not very far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and exist.

This is the New Liv­ing Trans­la­tion.

One thought on “Spending all our time discussing the latest ideas

  1. I used to enjoy this song as a kid.…

    http://​www​.high​er​praise​.com/​L​y​r​i​c​s​3​/​I​n​H​i​m​W​e​L​i​v​e​A​n​d​M​o​v​e​.​htm

    which is from the end of this sec­tion of Acts here.

    Hav­ing read this sec­tion many times, at some point in my late teen years, I came to real­ize that reli­gion is not a good thing. And reli­gion is what Jesus came to set us free from. I looked up the root word for reli­gion which is akin to bondage. This is when I became a total lib­er­tar­i­an. I think our rela­tion­ship with Jesus changes us per­son­al­ly day by day, and as we relate to oth­ers we learn and grow from each oth­er. But every oth­er human being that we are not in close rela­tion­ship with should be giv­en the free­dom and grace to do as they wish so long as they do not harm oth­ers’ life, lib­er­ty or prop­er­ty. I tru­ly see this as the only con­sis­tent non-coercion non-force mes­sage of the Christ. We fol­low him or don’t fol­low him freely. And we allow oth­ers to also fol­low their con­science on how they assign val­ue to var­i­ous things. Those things that we view as impor­tant like Jesus for instance is some­thing we want to con­vince peo­ple of, but not force. The way of char­i­ty and per­son­al sobri­ety is up to the indi­vid­ual, and they should nev­er be forced by a church or the state to be char­i­ta­ble or sober. We should be influ­en­tial in those and oth­er areas as we fol­low Jesus, but we should nev­er expect the police pow­er of the state or the reli­gion of the insti­tu­tion­al church to usurp this per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty we have to lov­ing encour­age our fam­i­ly, friends, neigh­bors, co-workers, etc… to also fol­low the peace­ful, char­i­ta­ble, and lov­ing way of Jesus.

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