So
What…
…does that mean for my family?
Where in the Word?
Acts 17 On
the Road to Athens
Spotlight Verse: Acts
17: 22-23
“’ Men of Athens, I perceive that in
all things you are very religious;
for as I was passing through and considering the objects of your
worship,
Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing,
Him I proclaim to you…’”
…do we need? A bunch of
books any size, but the bigger the better! …can we talk
about? I’ve
heard it said that the longest 14 inches is from your head to your
heart. That
idea in some form or another may have run through Paul’s mind as he spoke
to the blindly intellectual crowd in Athens. Gather
your family around you and see if one of your children will volunteer to be
one of the people Paul was talking to.
Be sure you have plenty of books around you. Then start having members of your family
shout out things they know about God.
Each time something is mentioned, pile one book in your child’s
arms. Continue doing so until your
child can barely carry them all.
Then ask them to walk around the room or walk through a tight
hallway. The books will probably
begin falling, but even if they don’t, all those books will make it very
difficult to go anywhere. It seems
the books by themselves are more of a burden than anything. Merely
having a whole pile of things we know about God isn’t very freeing. It’s just a whole pile of stuff --stuff
that we will probably begin to shed if we don’t somehow get it into our
hearts where it can really make a difference. The task of getting it into our hearts, that’s the Holy
Spirit’s job. He’s the one who
takes what we know about God and turns it from being a burdensome yoke into
a life-changing yoke. To
put it differently, you can have a candy bar sitting on the table in front
of you, and you can list a great many things you know about it; but you
will never taste or experience that candy bar unless you decide to get up
and take a bite. Once you’ve chosen to take it for yourself, your taste
buds send those delicious sensations to your brain, and you know it was
well worth grasping! Only
a few of the intellectuals in Athens were able to taste of the One Truth
really worth grasping. Most found
the gospel of Jesus to be just something else to discuss and debate. But the few who chose to believe it were
blessed. Knowledge of God wasn’t an
end in itself rather, it was just
the beginning! …can we pray for? Let’s pray, not
necessarily that we know more about God, but that we know God more!