August 16, 2026
"Drawing Near to the Far Off" (Acts 17:16-21)
Series: Acts: God's Vision For His Church Scripture: Acts 17:16–21
Hear now the word of the lord from Acts 17, verses 16 through 21. Now, while Paul was waiting for them in Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him. And some said, what does this babbler wish to say?
Others said, he seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus saying, may we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting for? You bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean. Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who live there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.
This is the word of the Lord.
Please be seated. And as you're taking your seats, let's join our hearts together this morning in prayer. Gracious Father, the voice of the Lord is over the waters. The voice of the Lord shatters trees. Of all that is in this world, your word is the most powerful force.
And Father, we pray that today your word would break us down as you bring us to a conviction of our sin and that your word would then build us up in the Gospel of Jesus. Father, we pray that you would give us hearts to understand and eyes to see and ears to hear by the power of your spirit, all that is contained in the good news of the Gospel of your son, Jesus Christ our Savior. It's in Christ's name we pray. Amen.
Well, the passage that we come to today starts a passage that we're going to break up. I thought about doing both this and the sermon next, but I wanted to give both of these sections their due consideration. Because there is much that goes into this particular passage as we read about what Paul is doing. Doing as he awaits the time when he is going to preach to the Athenians. In the city where Paul found himself, Athens.
It was a place of rich cultural and artistic and philosophical sophistication. They had history, they had heritage, they had answers to life's biggest questions. But they were a proud people. And humanly speaking, they had every right to be a proud people people. But in their pride and in their self satisfaction, they were far off from the living God.
Humanly speaking, they may have had reason for pride, but not in the sight of God. Especially because of the main problem that Paul Identifies here. You may know something about Greek mythology. Those are not just interesting stories. Those were their theology, their understanding of the gods who, as they believed, controlled everything.
But Paul knew the truth about the living God, the God who was there, the God who had created everything in the heavens above and in the earth beneath, and then the waters under the earth. And what Paul had come to do was to come like a hurricane, bringing the gospel to this place that rested self satisfied and smug. And as we look at this passage, I want to ask ourselves, are we any different in our sophistication and the technology that we wield and the mythologies that we tell ourselves about the creation of the world by evolution or by the Big Bang or whatever our modern mythologies might be? Are we any different in society today? We're looking at ancient philosophies, we're talking about an ancient city.
But again, these are real, ongoing human problems and we need to think about how this affects us. Two sermons, though. The first will be this week. And then I will not be preaching next week. We'll have a guest preacher, a familiar face.
But the week after that we will come, Lord willing, to plot Paul's sermon at the Areopagus. This morning though, we are going to give particular attention to the Christian attitude toward the lost that Paul displays here. And next week we are going to think about what Paul says when he preaches to those who are far off. Our theme this morning is draw near to those who are far off. That's the proper Christian attitude toward the lost.
Draw near to those who are far off. And just parts to this first of all, the far off, the far off. And those are the athenians in verse 16. And then drawing near. Paul's response to draw near to those who are far off.
1. Far Off (Acts 17:16)
So let's start in the far off. In verse 16 we read now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens. I want to sort of set the stage here. Have you ever had a layover or a stopover over in a city that was as good or better, perhaps in the city where you were going? A couple of times, I think.
Once My wife and I have voluntarily offered to get the free plane ticket or whatever for taking another flight. Once when we were here in Chicago. And Chicago is, like many people say, the Athens of the Midwest. And so we had a little bit of extra time. No one says that we had a little extra time here.
It was somewhat after my wife had graduated from college. Early in our marriage, we had no kids. And so we went downtown and spent some time with Some of her old friends. That's the kind of stopover or layover that you want something where you have something that you're able to do to kill some time in a place where you want to be. Athens would be the place to do that.
Athens was a city full of culture and art and history. And Paul does it seem tour the city, but he's not there as a tourist. We see that as he is walking around. He's not sort of drawn to the ancient ruins. He's not looking at all of the cultural places, all of the tourist traps.
We see that as he walks around, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. Now, what we think of when we think about Greek art in those days was straight up pure idolatry. Because the art that was famous in Athens and in Greek were made to be tributes to the gods and to all of their exploits. As one commentator put. And that's a good way to put it, because their exploits is true.
A lot of what these gods did was point pornographic in nature and the representations of them, a lot of that was again worshipping these gods who were not gods. And so everywhere he went, he couldn't just be a tourist admiring all of these things. He was drawn fully into the wickedness and the paganism and the lostness of this city. And we read that his spirit was provoked within him. One commentator says this is probably too mild of a word, especially the NIV translation distressed too mild of a word.
It's probably better to say that Paul was infuriated by what he saw. In fact, if you look at the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the same word appears there to describe God's fury. Idolatry, especially the idolatry of his people. In the Old Testament, for example, the word appears in Isaiah 65, verse 3, where God talks about his people as a people who provoke me to my face continually. And then in Hosea 8, verse 5, the Lord says, my anger burns against them because of their idolatries.
We are seeing here a reflection of what we need to understand of basic Christian psychology. Now we live in a world awash with all kinds of ideas about psychology, all kinds of views of psychology. It is very important that we take our understanding of psychology from the Bible. This is not a psychology textbook. And yet we see deep insights and into the human psyche, that is the human soul.
And when we read about things like this, we are seeing the reaction of Paul toward what he sees. We see what theologians formerly called affections at play we call these emotions, but in older theology, a better or more precise term are affections. For what we are seeing here, affections are what we feel that trace strongly to our beliefs and our values. There's sort of another set of feelings. We sort of lump all of them together in the category of emotions, but we should distinguish them.
There are other kinds of feelings that arise from bodily desires. So you think about fear, from threats to our bodily safety, something like what happened on Tuesday. You think of lust or desire for bodily pleasure. You think of anger or sorrow for bodily loss. All of those have to do with the maintenance of our bodies.
But think about the times when you are angry or when you are joyful, not over something that's happening to you physically or could happen to you physically, but because you see truth or beauty, or on the other hand, you see wickedness and evil alive and in the world. And again, those are the feelings that theologians call affections. God has affections. He loves what is true and good and beautiful. And the Scriptures instruct us to meditate on these things, because when we meditate on these things, they not only sort of fill our minds with thoughts, philosophical speculation about what's good and beautiful and true, but they actually work their way down into our emotions, into our affections, where we respond with joy over things that are good and where we respond with anger over things that are evil.
And here is what's happening to Paul. He's responding with grief and with infuriation, not over something that is physically happening to him. Athens is a lovely place. It might have been a very nice day for him to take a walk as a tourist in that ancient, beautiful city. But he was angry, not because of what was happening to his body, but because there was folly and blasphemy against the living God by these idols that were set up everywhere that he looked.
Lenski writes in his commentary, the glory that Paul saw was utter shame. He was in no way humbled and abashed by the pride of this pagan flowering. He was only aroused to set the glory of God and of Christ where the glory of idolatry now spread itself. What Paul was recognizing is that for all of their sophistication and history and heritage, these people were far off from the living God. Now, before we look at Paul's response again, I want to take a step back to appreciate the way that Paul's feelings were trained and how they just sort of spilled out of him.
Rightly, because our culture has adopted the view that our feelings convey the purest form of truth about the most important subject that this world has to study me, myself and I. And so my feelings and the inner feels that I feel convey the most important truths about the most important subject that is to me. And so from the Disney message of follow your heart all the way over to the message that your feelings are reliable and true, if they inform you that you are a man in a woman's body, or vice versa, your feelings are the purest form of truth. And nothing, no reason, no biological reality, no rationality, no truth from God can stand in the way of that truth. But the Scriptures are so important because they retune us.
They help us to cut through the lies of our culture today, to understand the truth that God is the one who created our feelings, including our affections, and that God is the one who created our feelings to be brought under the lordship of Christ. The Scriptures, the best verse on how you can retrain your feelings, your heart, so that you are no longer conformed to the passions of your former ignorance. As Peter writes the best verses in Romans 12, verse 2. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what the will of God is, what is good and acceptable and perfect. The world says that your emotions teach your mind what is good and acceptable and perfect.
But the Scriptures say if you're confused up here, and if you let your heart to confuse you further about what's true up here, then you will never find the truth. Your transformation has to start in the mind. It has to start with the recognition that first of all, our hearts by themselves are unreliable sources of truth. As the Scriptures teach in Jeremiah 17, verse 9. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick.
Who can understand it? So truth has to start with the mind, especially the mind soaking in and absorbing the careful reading and studying of the Scriptures of God and the sermons you hear and the teaching of God's Word that you hear in your church. This is crucial. It is essential to establish in our minds a bulkhead, a pillar and buttress of the truth on the Word of God. What starts with the mind then begins to transform the affections.
You no longer look at evil and feel a thrill. You no longer look at good and are repulsed by it. Whether your affections start to draw you toward what they should draw you toward and draw you away from the evil that you should be keeping away from your affections, rather than becoming a liability in your life, they become an ally in strengthening, steeling your heart to move away from the evil and towards what is good. And what starts with your mind and then transform your affections, then moves to transform your life. It becomes so much easier to do the right thing not simply when you bear know what is right, but when you love it, when you want it, and when you are grieved and provoked and infuriated wherever you see evil continue to hold sway in this world.
Of course this is not something that we do as a merely human pursuit. This is the work of God's Holy Spirit, transforming us from the inside out. But starting with our mind, reshaping then our affections and then with mind and affections training the will to do what is right even when it is hard, you can't move past this too quickly. We need to train our minds and therefore transform our affections to see evil as evil. And so my question would be, are you then engaged in it?
Is your nose buried in the pages of Scripture to read, taste and see that the Lord is good so that you want what he has to offer? Or are you simply consuming the junk of this world and in the process your mind is being retrained to then follow the what the corruption of your heart wants and you will be conformed to the wickedness that this world wants to just wash you along with.
Let's go back to Paul. Paul as he has had a transformed by the renewal of his mind soul. Paul then reacts in a certain way. He starts with fury, with infuriation at what he is seeing. But look at what he does in verse 17.
2. Drawing Near (Acts 17:17-21)
This gets to the next section, drawing near what he does does not seem to follow what he initially experienced. Look at verse 17. It starts with the word. So some translations have therefore some translations have accordingly in other words, because or in line with or stemming from the fact that he was provoked by to infuriation by the idolatry that he saw. What does he do?
He doesn't withdraw from it, he moves toward it. Look what he does. So he reasoned in the synagogue. Now we first saw this word for reasoned back in chapter 17, verse 2. And I mentioned this is the chapter 17, verse 2 is the first time this word appears.
But we see it a lot a Especially when Paul reasons or pleads with the Jews from the Scriptures that Jesus is the Christ the Messiah. And so we see him here, according to his custom, going to the synagogue of the Jews, reasoning with them there. The Jews and the devout persons, that is the God fearers, the Gentiles who had not become fully Jewish by circumcision and everything that was required, but were there worshiping the God of the Old Testament with the Jews. And we read though that he was not only reasoning with them, but he was also in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. So let's start with the question, why did he start with the Jews?
Well, probably a couple of reasons. One commentator, Peterson, says he was bringing the gospel to those who were the most likely to become allies for continuing to preach Christ among these idolaters, even after Paul would leave, because he would not stay in Athens for very long. But the second reason is that he was equipping the Jews to a greater impact to the idolaters around them since the Gospel of Jesus, as opposed to the strict regulations of the Old Testament. The Gospel of Jesus offered free access to God through Christ by faith for Jews and Gentiles alike, without needing to go through circumcision or anything else that was required. But after preaching this message, and we've talked a lot about this message, we read, then he goes to those who are in the marketplace, the agora, every day, whoever happened to be there.
The marketplace was not just a place for buying and selling. Don't exactly think a mall, however, maybe think of a mall when there is some kind of a speech or a political rally or. Or maybe even evangelist. Who is there where the people are gathered and who's preaching to the crowds in that space? Because that's where people were for other tasks.
This is a place where there was philosophy and where there were debates and discussions about important things of the world. And here Paul goes there and he begins to talk and debate and reason with whoever is there.
Now, there are two groups that the Scriptures tell us that Paul meets, the Epicureans and the Stoics. Both of them are schools of philosophy, schools of thought. And to be very honest, these are very similar to the people that we brush shoulders and elbows with every day of our lives. You see, the Epicureans, even at that time, we are not the first people to think of science or even the atomic structure. The Epicureans were pure materialists.
They believed that this world existed only because. Because matter is the only thing that has eternally existed. They believed in something very much like the Big Bang. They thought that everything just unfolded exactly like what you would learn in normal public schools and kinds of things where they're teaching this sort of thing. This is just a.
The stream of our culture as it was for the Epicureans. And because matter was all that existed, they talk about things broken down to the atoms again, we are not the first people to think of these things. These materialists, these rationalists, because they believed that matter is all that existed. Do you know what that created? It meant that we might as well eat and drink for tomorrow we die.
It meant that the pursuit of pleasure. These were also called the hedonists because hedone is the Greek word for pleasure. The pursuit of hedonism or pleasure was the only important pursuit that there was. And again, if you go to a normal college campus and you find the places I remember, I don't know if it was in Chicago or Minneapolis, but I was evangelizing. I was evangelizing on the street with someone who was a biology major who was trying to argue that evolution was true.
And then in the same breath he was talking about the sexual immorality that he was about to commit. These two things go together then as now, Epicureans. That's the Epicureans. The Stoics, however, are a different pursuit. These are the people who live a cultured, cultivated life where they depend upon philosophy to live a higher ethic.
They have some awareness of the gods and they have some outward religiosity. But they are trying to live their lives according to reason. They're self sufficient. They don't want to be with the unwashed who are just living their lives for the pursuit of pleasure. They are trying to live a sophisticated, urbane life.
And again, we find these people everywhere. In fact, there is a revival, the pursuit of Stoicism. If you go into a Barnes and Noble, you will find several best selling books written to promote Stoicism. The same Stoicism, the retrieval of the Stoicism that Paul is talking about here. So this is live and well in our culture today.
And as Paul preached, some people scoffed. What is this babbler, or literally it's seed picker, wish to say? Others seem to confuse him. They say he seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities. They understood Jesus as a God.
Then he talked about the Anastasia, the Resurrection. Either that was another goddess, maybe his consort, not sure. These were pagans. They simply misunderstood what Paul was preaching about. That word, the resurrection, what exactly that entailed.
But their ongoing discussions with Paul made them curious. And this is what led them to the Areopagus. Now we'll talk about this next place. The Areopagus is either a place that you can still go and stand on on top of a hill, although I understand it's fairly SL been worn down over time now, or this refers to the council, sort of the. The Tribunal those who were in charge of this city, who took their name from that hill.
It's not really clear which exactly or where exactly Paul is speaking in from. But they ask him to know what this new teaching is that you are presenting. Because these are people who spent all of their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new. They just wanted to hear the latest gossip, the latest thoughts, the latest thinking, the latest philosophy. This was entertainment to them.
And so they invite Paul to become a performer. Well, Paul will take up that mantle and preach them the gospel in the next passage, which we will look at, Lord willing, in two weeks. So I want to reflect on Paul's reaction here, and I want to go back to our theme. Our application is a draw near to those who are far off. Draw near to those who are far off.
Now, again, all of this starts with a renewal of the mind to see evil as evil and to be so trained in understanding evil as evil that when we look at the excesses of this world, we are not attracted to those things, we repulsed by them. We have to have hearts that recognize there is danger and there is disaster. A week ago, you could drive through the cities or the streets of our cities and not see disaster that was lurking in every home. Now the disaster has been made prominent. You sort of see it.
You can't go anywhere without seeing piles of branches and homes destroyed. It's just visually viscerally there wherever you go. But that same disaster, albeit in the spiritual form, is everywhere we go, if we have eyes to see it and if we see it for what it is, as evil. Again, Paul, as he walked through the city, he was not drawn to the beauty of the culture and the history and the art. He was repulsed by the idolatry.
And yet that didn't make him want to stay away from the people. It drew him nearer toward the Athenians. I think you saw an illustration of this maybe in your area too, in your neighborhood too, once everyone left their homes and stepped outside, whether there was bickering and neighborhood fighting before this, the disaster sort of brought people together, at least for a short amount of time, at least on a human level. It said, yes, there's disaster, but I'm not going to be judging you and hating you for the disaster that's in your yard. I want to move toward you and help you to clean it up.
That's the heart of Christians, but not just about external things, although that's important, but about spiritual things. There's our outrage, and we should have outrage over the depravity of our culture? Does it draw us near to those who are being destroyed or whose lives are made a wreckage of so that they can hear the gospel of Jesus that will transform, beginning with the renewal of their mind? This is what Paul is doing. You know, this morning, I walked around my neighborhood praying, and I saw two things that stood out.
One was a rainbow pride, desperate, that was in front of someone's home. And another one was a statue of a Buddha still standing in a garden. And I was reflecting on this passage, and I was reflecting on the Epicureans and the Stoics. It seemed that I could not find two better symbols for the false teaching that Paul is interacting with here. On the one hand, you have the LGBTQ movement that stands with supposed science, which rationalizes and explains everything, every kind of pursuit of immoral and immorality pleasure that they might pursue themselves.
And of course, it's not just them. Our culture has been awash in all kinds of sexual immorality, putting heterosexual sexual immorality for a long time. And all of that makes wreckage of people's souls. And then I thought of that statue of the Buddha. The Buddha, like Stoicism, one in the Far east, one in Athens.
The Buddha, like Stoicism, argued that we must get above. We use philosophy to get above the suffering of this world, to find some kind of Zen, some kind of peace, some kind of tranquility that doesn't just pursue pleasure crassly, but that actually is trying to look for a higher and better way of living. And in that, there is so much pride that falls so far short of the glory of God revealed for us in the preaching of the foolishness of the cross. You see, what we proclaim is not that this material world is all there is. So that if all there is was taken from you in a moment by a storm, that's just tough.
And neither do we say that if you live this fine, sophisticated, urbane life, you will have the fine pleasures in life, because even those can be taken away in a moment. But these symbols, I was thinking, how do those make me feel? Do they stir up rage in me at the devastation that they represent inside those houses? Do they lead me to want to pray more fervently and to share the gospel with my neighbors more boldly and zealously? Do they push me, like Paul, to share the gospel with those who are on their way to any eternity of wrath Again, this week was just a glimpse of it.
And if they don't, then what's wrong with my affections?
Have I been conformed to the dullness of this world that is not outraged and not provoked to draw near to those who are far off. And if so, how can I ask the spirit of God to love the lost with the love that Jesus had, with the love that Paul demonstrates here?
We should have grief at physical devastation that we see. It should prompt in us the kind of compassion that wants to get out the chainsaw and help cut up some of the trees that are in our neighbors lawns. But more than that, where is our heart concerning sin for the world? Is it dull? Is it admiring?
Is it like a tourist walking through Athens just gobbling it all up, appreciating me? Or is it horrifying? And on the one hand, where is my heart?
We are called to reject the sin. We are called to love the sinner. Where is my heart toward the sinner? Is it where Jesus heart which took him into this world to walk amongst the filthy, the depraved, the self righteous and the defiled and lay down his life as a ransom for sinners? This remains the Gospel that is good news for Epicure, Epicureans, Stoics and Legalistic Christians and Jews like this particular person.
This is the gospel that all of us need. And it's the gospel that is held forth in the preaching that we find in this book. Where is your heart? Is it drawing near to those who are far off? Let's pray.
Heavenly Father, we do pray that you would draw us to people. Not people for their own sake, but people as image bearers of you as those who reflect your glory, however much that image is tarnished and damaged and ravaged by the wreckage of even willfully chosen sin. And so Father, we pray that you would make us people who are irritated and irate and infuriated over the sin of this world, and yet who have the greatest compassion to move towards sinners, to call them to faith in Christ. I pray that we would fear you, especially as we think of the forgiveness that you offer so that you might be feared. We pray this all in Christ's name.
Amen.
other sermons in this series
Oct 4
2026
"Preparation and Fulfillment" (Acts 19:1-7)
Preacher: Rev. Jacob Gerber Scripture: Acts 19:1–7 Series: Acts: God's Vision For His Church
Sep 20
2026
"Many Gifts among Many Members" (Acts 18:18-28)
Preacher: Rev. Jacob Gerber Scripture: Acts 18:18–28 Series: Acts: God's Vision For His Church
Sep 13
2026
"My Grace Is Sufficient for You" (2 Corinthians 12: 1-10)
Preacher: Rev. Jacob Gerber Scripture: 2 Corinthians 12:1–10 Series: Acts: God's Vision For His Church