Whiteboard: At the Areopagus

You are looking at the blog title and you are thinking to yourself, "I don't even know how to pronounce that word, much less what it even means..."

Well, good news! That is exactly what I'll be explaining on Sunday (not just how to pronounce the word 'Aeropagus' but also exactly why that obscure geographic reference in the Acts of the Apostles is so very important).

In meantime, I hope you will read through Acts 17:22-31 (conveniently reprinted at the bottom of this post) and feel the power and the promise of some of the most familiar words in the New Testament: "For in him we live and move and have our being."

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Acts 17:22-31

Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, ‘Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, “To an unknown god.” What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For “In him we live and move and have our being”; as even some of your own poets have said,
“For we too are his offspring.”
Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.’