Welcome everyone, for those of you who don’t know me I’m an average video game player with an above-average desire to write sermons and spread the good news of Christ our Lord and Savior. I am a flawed human like every one of you and wish for nothing more than to be continually worked into a new creature of God’s design. Those who know me call me kind, intelligent, and creative.
Now, it may seem to you that an introduction is an odd way to start this sermon, I agree. However, I want to make a point with this. You don’t know me, well you probably don’t anyway, the point is we are lucky to live in a day and age where we can know virtually anything we want. In the song “Welcome to the Internet” comedian Bo Burnham says, “Welcome to the internet, Have a look around, Anything that brain of yours can think of can be found, We've got mountains of content, Some better, some worse, If none of its of interest to you, you'd be the first.” Now this isn’t a recommendation of that song mind you, but rather to point out what we know as Christians that even secular media recognizes; the internet is a mixed bag of good, evil, and morally gray.
This relates back to my introduction like this, you could, now please don’t, but you could use the resources on the internet to learn nearly everything about me. Those pictures posted to Facebook from my time in high school tell you what school I went to, what friends I had, and that I was in the top portion of my grade academically. If you really wanted you could learn my search history and figure out how many times I had to Google Bible verses when writing this sermon. Or you could find my address and send harassing letters. Again, please don’t, but you could.
We live in an age when virtually everyone on the planet has access to the greatest well of knowledge in human history… and we use it to look at funny cat pictures. The glory of the internet, am I right?
Before the internet however, a time when audience members my age and younger weren’t even alive for, people had to do things the hard way and either find something out for themselves, guess, or deal with the fact that they just didn’t know.
That leads us to Acts chapter 17 of the NIV version, where it starts in verse number 22 and continues to 27, “22 Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you. 24 “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.”
So, what exactly is going on here? Paul is preaching to the people of Athens in their place of meeting, the Areopagus, and is talking to them about the altar they have to an unknown god. Now the people of Athens didn’t have a shortage of gods and goddesses, anyone who knows anything about Greek and Roman mythology knows that. The Greeks had gods for the weather, gods for death, gods for crops and plants, and they even had gods for every minute of the day! (Yes, I am serious about that.) And yet, they knew even with all their gods, that it wasn’t enough.
Athena, who mythology said built their city and gave the people the olive plant, wasn’t enough. Hades, who ruled the underworld, wasn’t enough. Hestia, who was the goddess of the hearth fire, wasn’t enough. None of them were enough. For every god or goddess they had, they still couldn’t fill the hole in their hearts that yearned for a connection with the divine. And so, they made an alter to the unknown god, in hopes of connecting with whatever it was they were missing.
How sad is that they felt so empty with all their false deities that they were willing to worship something unknown simply because it might be the thing that would be there for them, the thing that would comfort them, the thing that would be the one who would love them.
How lucky are we to know the God we worship? Sometimes in our day-to-day life, we get overwhelmed by everything around us, the noise is defining. There is always a new show to watch, a new book to read, a new song to listen to, a new technological marvel to learn about, the list goes on and on of the things that take our attention. And yet, there still is the God who loves us, who lets us learn more about Him through our relationship with Jesus.
We don’t have to hope that what we are doing will be good enough, because He’s already paid the price for us, for everyone who wants Him, He’s there. And the way you can learn about Him is the same way you can learn about me. You could use the internet to stalk me, or you could try being my friend.
We can learn about Jesus on paper, know every verse, go to church every Sunday, and do everything to look like the perfect Christian, but without a relationship with Him, it doesn’t matter. The pastor who spent 60 years preaching but never believed a word of it will go to Hell and the porn star who died at 25 in a car crash and had a deathbed conversion will go to Heaven. It doesn’t matter how good or bad you are, only what you do with Jesus.
Jesus is there, He wants to be your friend, He’s so desperate for your love that he was willing to die for you before you even were born. All you have to do is know Him, and reach out to Him, not like a distant thing to be speculated on and studied, but like a friend.
The Athenians didn’t know what they were worshiping, but we do, and we can have a relationship with our God that they could have only dreamed about before Paul came to tell them the good news. So, as you go about your business today, thank God that He has made Himself known to us.
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