Acts 17:16–34 | Quest For Spirituality

Preacher: Joel Fair
Scripture: Acts 17:16–34

N.T. Wright Simply Christian
The Christian explanation of the renewed interest in spirituality is quite straightforward. If anything like the Christian story is in fact true (in other words, if there is a God whom we can know most clearly in Jesus), this is exactly what we should expect; because in Jesus we glimpse a God who loves people and wants them to know and respond to that love. In fact, this is what we should expect if any of the stories told by religious people—that is, the great majority of people who have ever lived—are true: if there is any kind of divine force or being, it is at least thinkable that humans would find some kind of engagement with this being or power to be an attractive or at least interesting phenomenon.

F.F. Bruce NICNT
But there was in Athens a venerable institution, the Court of the Areopagus, which exercised jurisdiction in matters of religion and morals. This aristocratic body, of venerable antiquity, received its name from the Areopagus, the “hill of Ares” (the Greek god of war), southwest of the Acropolis, on which it traditionally met... Its traditional power was curtailed with the growth of Athenian democracy in the fifth century B.C., but in Roman times its authority was enhanced and it commanded great respect. Before this body, then, Paul was brought, not to stand trial in a forensic sense, nor yet to be examined with a view to being licensed as a public lecturer, but simply to have an opportunity of expounding his teaching before experts.

Kent Hughes Preach The Word
Paul began dialoguing with anyone who would talk, and he found three groups of hearers—those who were religious (“the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks”), street-variety pagans, and intellectual philosopher-types called “Epicurean and Stoic philosophers.” The latter two groups represented the competing philosophies of the day. The Epicureans believed that everything happens by chance, and death is the end—extinction with no afterlife. They believed there are gods, but those gods have nothing to do with the world. They were practical agnostics who believed pleasure is the chief end of man and that a simple lifestyle is the most pleasurable. The Stoics were pantheists, believing that everything is god and that whatever happened to them was their destiny. Consequently, they sought to live with apathy and detachment—fatalistic resignation. Together, these two philosophies represented the popular pagan alternatives for dealing with the plight of humanity apart from Christ. Epicureanism? Simple lifestyle. Stoicism? Apathy. Both were highly intellectual, and both lacked divine validation. How would they respond to the gospel Paul preached?

1 Peter 5:7
casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.

Ephesians 2:10
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Revelation 12:10
And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God.