Learn the Language

Everything that we’re going to be talking about today draws directly from the book of Acts. If you’ve got this, hopefully you brought this with you. These are these little journey guides, this field guide, that sort of walks you through where I’m page 16 today if you want to follow along here. If you’ve noticed in these field notes, they should give you like a lay of the land every single week. And there’s always a like a map of where this is happening. Because sometimes these things, these locations aren’t familiar to us. And so one of the things I wanted to do with you today is give you a little bit more of like a zoomed in feel, if you’re not as familiar with the Areopagus and Athens and all that sort of stuff. So check this out. We got a little image here.

You’re here near Austin, Texas. We’re going to give you some motion sickness and travel to the other side of the world. This is Greece. This is Athens. Now you’ll see here we talk about the Areopagus, which means Mars Hill. It’s that rocky outcropping. And then you’ve got the Acropolis right across the way. If you are standing today on the Areopagus, this is what you would see. It’s the ruins of the Acropolis with the Parthenon temple, the temple devoted to the goddess Athena. It’s still there. Thousands of years later. You could go and see all this sort of stuff. But I found it’s really helpful to kind of anchor your perception and like, everything that you’re going to hear about today happened right there. Like that hill of the rocks. There is the area. This is where Paul stood and had this conversation with people.

And I realize even as you see this, you may be going like, you know, appreciate the history lesson, pastor. It’s really cool to see that fan of the ancient world. Great. What in the world does that have to do with my life? Because this is rocky ruins. This is two millennia ago. That’s a different world. And it’s true. It is a different world. But what’s really remarkable is some similarities that start to crop up. And so here’s what I want to do. I want to give you some reasons why you might want to pay attention, because at first glance, and I’ve had that experience to you, reading the Bible is like, does this really matter to my life? Because so many of the things I deal with, they didn’t deal with. And I just want to offer you a few thoughts as to my why.

You really might want to be paying attention to this story, because here’s one of the things you want to understand about the Athenian, the Greek culture in general, but specifically the city of Athens. This was an extremely spiritual culture. These were highly religious people, people who believed in a lot of different things, but also had a true spiritual hunger. They were also this was a highly cosmopolitan, an urban area for the time. All right. It may not look like it to you, but this was a world leading city at the point in time. This was a place that was super famous. It was a crossroads of a lot of the elite, a lot of the different intelligentsia of the day. In fact, these were really well educated people. When you take into account the entire world, at that point in time, there was an extreme concentration of highly intelligent, advanced thinkers here in this area, which means it was a culture and I was a culture of idea and innovation.

You know, I know that UT thinks they invented the phrase, “What happens here changes the world.” That could have been said very much in Athens. In fact, they would have said no, we did that first a long time ago. The idea seriously, some of the things that their people went and taught are still taught in schools today. They’re the people who made waves back then, are still required reading. For many of you all here today, they had a high value on arts and entertainment in this culture. Now they didn’t do things like ACL, South by Southwest, Live Music, capital of the world, all that sort of stuff. But you know what they did have? They had philosophers, they had poets, they had plays. Are we starting to feel a little bit of familiarity yet? Because these cultures really do line up in many respects with the very place that we live.

And here’s what happened. The gospel, this good news about Jesus encountered this exact culture, a culture very similar to the one you live in. So what happened? What happened when this news about Jesus hit this highly spiritual, well-educated, cultural like, creative, innovative sort of culture? What happens many of us believe, I know as you’re here, maybe as a follower of Christ here, many of us believe Jesus, but we’re all really stuck when it comes to trying to figure out how to share that belief with other people in this context, I’ve talked to a lot of you, and I’ve been in similar places before when you’re just like, I don’t know how to kind of cross the gaps. I don’t know how to speak this in a language. It’s going to make sense to my coworkers or to the people I go to school with or to my neighbors, because it just feels like a world removed.

Others of us might relate a little bit more with the Athenians. They were the ones saying, “What is this babbler trying to say?” You may feel like that when you come to the Bible, or when you hear about people talk about Jesus or Christianity. You’re like, what are you? What are you having talking about? Because what we talk about in here feels so far removed from next Wednesday in your life. And you’re like, what does this have to do with real life? What’s this babbler trying to say? No matter where you are on that continuum, I just want to invite all of us to pay a little bit closer attention to this part of the journey through Acts, because it may actually be closer to home than it looks at first pass. So let’s dive in. Let’s kind of look in a little bit.

So Paul, now a missionary, arrives in Athens. It’s a city full of idols is how it’s described. So Athens was a lot of things, but they were also high on the spirituality front, which means idols like a visible focal points for worship were everywhere. You obviously had a big one built on top of the hill. It’s still there, but they had it all over the place. Idols. And here’s the really magnetic thing about a highly spiritual culture. When you introduce idols into the middle of it, idols aren’t just a focal point for worship, they’re also access points for control. An idol is a place where you can wield a little bit of control over the thing you worship. Now, you may not think of it like that, but that’s how it ends up playing out. And here’s how it worked for them. In the ancient world, deities needed a level of, let’s just call it management, all right?

They needed to be managed a little bit. These were highly powerful spiritual beings, really strong spiritual realities. But they weren’t particularly kind or benevolent. These were powerful things with kind of a mind of their own, and they sort of did what they wanted to do and ran over people all the time. The point was, to the average Athenian, you couldn’t trust the gods. The gods weren’t necessarily a good thing. They just were a real thing that you had to account for. So idol worship was a kind of hustle. If you want to think about it like that, keep them happy. Things will go well for you. So make your sacrifices, burn the incense, go and pay homage to this God. Keep them all happy. Keep them off your back. Manage them, appease them, keep them happy.

But here’s the really big problem in a culture like this, especially for very smart people. So how many gods are there? How many are? In a polytheistic culture? Different gods can be in charge of a lot. In fact, you’ll see this even in some of our current world religions today. There are gods that are literally in charge of everything the tides, the moon, the the air currents, the earth, the waters, everything and everything in between. You can name a god for everything. So people who are highly spiritual and are thinking all this through are like, you know what? We don’t know who for sure is out there, and we definitely don’t know who is in charge at the given moment. So what do you do as a smart person? You cover your bases and then you see this. You heard Daniel Rita earlier. They had an idol that’s just like to an unknown god. Like, if so, if you if they come along, we’ll be like, hey, we got you covered, all right? You don’t need to be mad at us. We’ve already thought we’ve already accounted for you. It’s like pre managing a god that you’re not even sure about. It’s just smart work by really intelligent people thinking about how to do all this. It’s a wise move. It’s kind of like the agnostic approach. Right. Maybe you’ve heard of agnosticism where you’re like, no one can know for sure this is what they were doing. They’re like, we don’t know what God’s out there. So we’re just going to kind of we’re going to diversify our investments and we’ll just kind be safe either way. That’s how the Athenians showed up. And that’s what Paul saw when he came there.

Now here here’s Paul. He is a Jew by heritage. He grew up in a very, very devout tradition of Judaism. So much so he talks about later in one of the other letters to another church in Galatia. He’s like, hey, I persecuted the church. I tried to kill Christians because I thought they were wrong. I thought they were teaching falseness about God. But then he has an encounter with Jesus. It turns him upside down. He is now a lead proponent of Jesus, and is traipsing across the ancient world trying to tell as many people as he can. He is a missionary. He is on mission to reveal this gospel about Jesus. And so he lands in Athens and he starts spending time there. You’ll notice in verse 17, he’s just hanging out. He’s getting to know people. He’s spending time, he’s observing what’s really going on. And then in verse 17, he reasons with the Jews. He goes to the local synagogue and hangs out with some of the devout people. So these are people who would have known the scriptures. They wouldn’t have known necessarily about Jesus, but they understood Moses. They understood the law and the prophets. They had the history of the Jewish people in mind. And he says, I think I’m going to go to the synagogues first. Did you notice he focuses his efforts on people who might be primed for good news about Jesus? He didn’t rush to the top of the temple and say, let me tell you, he goes to people who might be a little bit open, who are ready to connect some dots about who Christ is and what they’ve known of God. I just think it’s interesting that he didn’t rush to confront people he didn’t fully understand. Sometimes we think that’s boldness. Just rush out and say it like it is. But he spent a lot of time watching, listening, talking, and paying attention to what was going on around him. It was a culture jump. We have no evidence that he had ever even been in this city before. And while he was familiar with the Greek culture because it was everywhere in his day, he had never been to this city. It was a culture jump and he respected, took his time, watched and paid attention.

So Athens again, it’s a hot spot. It’s a hot spot for schools of philosophy. And now you may think of philosophy as utterly abstract, dry, boring, sort of like ancient literature and all this sort of stuff. But at the time, philosophy represented the cutting edge of thought in their culture. These were really intelligent, wise people who thought a lot about life, and they were trying to reason out the best paths for human flourishing. That’s everything. That philosophy was all about intelligent, learned, wise people. Like I mentioned earlier, you still have to read their work today. Good luck. Any book written today that lasts 2000 years that people in higher education still have required reading to do. These were really, really thoughtful people. And notice some of these schools of philosophy, the Epicureans, Stoics. Maybe you’ve heard those terms before. These were kind of like schools. These are led by kind of like a, hey, we had Epicurious or stoicism. We had these thoughts that are guiding the way that we look at the world. They engage with Paul when they hear him speaking. He wasn’t up in their face trying to tell them all about Jesus. He was focused on his task of proclaiming Jesus as Messiah and King. It took him out of the synagogues into some public areas where they would have kind of like a free forum of discussions and things like that. He’s out there talking about Jesus, about how God raised him from the dead, and it catches their attention and they start leaning in a little bit of like, no, no. What are you saying again? Who? Jesus. Who what? And and God did what? This court their attention.

And Paul wasn’t chasing after them to try to get on their agenda. See, the Athenian culture lived with an itch for something new. They wanted. They were. They were thoughtful people. They were curious people. And so they’re always looking for what’s the new thing now? Truth be told, their media options back then were pretty limited. If you could, you could get it announced by like a messenger or written on a piece of parchment or something like that. But I tell you what, these people would have stuffed themselves with things you have available today. They would love YouTube, they would love podcasts, they would devour Reddit. They’d be on online forums all the time. The Athenians lived on information overload with an insatiable appetite for more, more, more. Tickle our ears, peak our curiosity, give us something we haven’t heard before. Starting to sound familiar yet? Like this is very much where they lived. So let’s take a closer look at how Paul approaches these Athenians. He’s been listening. He’s been paying attention. He’s been talking with them here and there. And then he’s finally asked to present his teachings to them. And more of a formal manner. Areopagus, Mars Hill. And you want to think about that meeting is more of like college classroom meets city council. Like that’s what it felt like to be invited to speak in this space. So in verse 22, Paul begins highlighting and complimenting them on something very positive about them. In his eyes, he says they are religious, meaning they took spiritual reality seriously. And I don’t think that’s just flattery on Paul’s part. Like trying to warm up the crowd and trying to win and Curry favor. No, this is a genuine compliment from Paul. He’s been paying attention to them. He watches what they do, and he commends them for their spiritual curiosity, curiosity and attentiveness. And then it picks up in verse 23, he says this. “For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription to the unknown God.” Paul shares his observation about their idols and their altars, including this unknown God altar. And that is where he sort of begins here. Highly intelligent people admitting they don’t know it all. They don’t know. They’re not sure. Maybe we’ll see. And this is precisely where he finds an entry point into their mindset. He uses it as a beginning of the proclamation of the good news about Jesus. He takes one example of humility in that’s already built into their culture. We don’t know. It says, great, let’s start there. What you don’t know? I’d love to talk to you about. I’d love to use that as a jump off point to tickle your ears, to give you some new information, something that you’ve thought might be out there. So let’s talk about that for a minute and then skipping down, watch what else he does. In verse 28 he starts quoting reverse has like quotes around it. He quotes two different authors. He says, “in him we live and move and have our being.” That’s a quote. And then, “as even some of your own poets have said, quote, for we are indeed his offspring.” Paul is quoting their poets. These are quotes from Epimenides and Aratus, two famous Greek philosophers, poets, writers of their day. One of them lived 600 BC, so this has been around for a long time. What Paul is doing is validating their sources of knowledge. Hey, I’ve read your people, I’ve listened to what you said, and you know what? Some of those guys, they were sharp. They had some good stuff going on. He connects with them in their language and it conveys respects. He is telling them without saying it. I’m a student of your culture. I’ve been paying attention to the to the work that you all have been putting out in the world. This is like someone quoting Willie Nelson, Gary Clark Jr, or Matthew McConaughey to an Austin night. Like we’ve been paying attention. We know those may not be like the leading thinkers all the time, but there are people who speak our language. There are people who’ve shaped the culture. And by doing this, Paul actually imitates Jesus in his efforts to connect with people in a way that they could easily understand. If you look at the ministry of Jesus and look at how he teaches, you realize real quick, Jesus is pretty famous for using parables. Write stories, simple stories that had all this layered meaning in it. He was talking about deep things, about God and life and humanity. But he would say it’s kind of like seed in the soil. Or think of two brothers with a father and like he would just tell these little stories that really conveyed it a lot to people. But he did it in a way where it sort of got around your barriers. If he had just tried to tell you like a here’s my treatise on God, a lot of people might have either tuned out or not or pushed back. But he told a story and it sort of went around their barriers and they could hear it. It stuck with them. Paul used Greek poets and their philosophers to not only convey respect, but it also helps the Athenians bridge they have. Paul is presenting ideas they don’t understand, so he uses an idea that they do and tries to connect the dots for them. Let me say it to you in a language that you do understand, because some of the stuff about Jesus may not be as intuitive. So let’s leap off of what you do get. That’s how he sets it up. That’s his angle as he steps in there. But let’s zoom in just a little bit more. We’ve seen how he approaches them, but what does he actually tell them. Because this will be the acid test, right. Is he going to kind of camouflage the message of Jesus? Are we going to try to make it as palatable as possible for the Athenians? Let’s try to speak like a scholar. Let’s speak like a philosopher. Is he going to make it more digestible? What’s he going to do to change the message? And the answer is not much. He really doesn’t. He doesn’t disguise much at all. He uses the unknown God part as a jump off point, and then he immediately outlines key things about the nature of God, the nature of humanity that most likely everyone in the room disagreed with. He just leaps right into it. He starts course correcting their spiritual understanding, meaning he starts telling them a different story than the one that they’re familiar with, and he leaps right into it. So let me I just thought, you know, maybe it would be helpful for you to hear it, because here’s a few elements of the gospel that he proclaims to the Athenians. And so let’s just be clear, because maybe you’re looking to how would I how do I share the gospel with somebody else? I don’t know, I’ve never tried to do that. Or maybe you think you’ve heard the gospel, but have you heard actually what he says? Here’s some of the elements of Paul’s gospel. He says there is one God, not many. He says there’s one God. So right away, in view of the the Parthenon up there on the hill, he says, guess what? That’s not the real God. He immediately like, kind of just flies in the face of like, they think there are lots, maybe who knows how many gods. And he says there’s just one. There’s one God and not many. He says, and this God is actually the true creator and ruler of the cosmos. You don’t have to bow down to all these different deities that you think are maybe in charge of everything. There’s just one. He has created all things. And he says, oh, and by the way, humans cannot box him in or manipulate him. Your idols are wasted energy. You’re not going to box him into a temple on the hill, and you’re not going to manipulate him through your hustle of the idols because he has no needs. It’s a really interesting thing about the nature of God that he puts forward right from the beginning. God doesn’t need anything from you. He is the super abundant source of all life. It is cascading out from him and humanity. You, me, we are an intentional creation and he is supervising all of us. Paul is just making it really clear you’re not in charge of your life. I know you may think you are and you may like to feel in charge, but God is supervising all of this, and he’s not just doing it like a boss. He wants to connect with you. He wants to connect with us. And he actually isn’t far away. He just feels like he is, and why he’s left us in a spot where we have to feel our way toward him is what the Scripture says, what Paul says, because there’s something malformed in us innately, because we don’t detect him, we don’t discern him clearly. We tend to make up ideas what he is like, the idols, the temples and all this stuff. That’s his gospel. I mean, like, Paul is not pulling punches with punches with the Athenians. He clearly identifies and then confronts their idolatry. He’s basically saying, you’ve made an error in your thinking. Have you ever tried to say that to a highly intelligent person? It usually doesn’t go well. It’s not what they enjoy hearing. You’ve made some serious errors in your thinking. God is not something visible. He’s not something elemental. He is not controllable. You cannot manage this God. In short, he’s saying he is not what you have imagined him to be, which is actually part of good news. And I think in many respects, it’s good news for a lot of us, because some of you have been told a story about God and it makes them seem vengeful, capricious. Can you ever. Is he ever. Is he just out to get you? Can you really trust him, or is he even really have a hand on the wheel? Because look at our world. You have a story you have concocted or been told about God. And just like Paul, maybe you need to hear he is not like you have imagined him. Human beings do a really miserable job of trying to come up with an idea of what God is like. Our human thinking always falls short of the real thing, and you need a revelation. God has to reveal things in your state. You’re feeling your way toward him like in a darkened room. He has to turn on the lights and reveal some things to you before you’ll ever see him before, as he truly is. And so Paul turns from that into verse 30 and 31, and he starts dishing out some really good news. He says, by the way, all of this, I know it seems discouraging. It’s a little bit of like I’m sort of like confronting you with something. He says. You know what? All this idol worship, all this confusion, all this feeling around in the dark, you can turn from all of it right now. You can repent, which is a word that we don’t use a whole lot. And it just means turn, rethink it, go this way. Not that way anymore, he says. You can repent and put your confidence in God’s man is the way he says it. God’s man. There is this man, Jesus, this one who God has really who reveals who God really is. We’re all trying to figure it out. We’re all feeling our two way toward him. So God sent Christ Jesus as the revelation. I’m telling you, this is what I’m like. And not only that, he then exalted Him as King. He is the one and you can trust him. You can trust this Jesus. He is the one from God. He’s the one who reveals God. And now God has put him literally in charge of everything. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him. He is supervising the world. Paul hinges interestingly, the reliability and the truth of all of this on Jesus resurrection. That’s a huge part of his gospel. He says, the whole Jesus being raised from the dead, that’s how you can know he is trustworthy and true, because no other person in the history of the world has been raised from the dead, never to die again. People have been resuscitated, but they die. Jesus has been resurrected and he is still alive here today. He is saying, this is central to the good news. It’s why you can go of all the different people in the world who claim to know something, who claim to be experts, who other founders of religions who vie for your allegiance. He says only one has God ever backed up to the point to say, this guy shouldn’t stay dead. I’m bringing him back. It’s another way of Paul implying if the resurrection is real, it’s all real. It’s God’s stamp of approval on everything Jesus said on who he was, on what he did. It validates Jesus as the one from God. And that’s why the resurrection is a really essential part of when you and I share the good news of who Jesus is. So Paul does all this, right? So here he is, Paul, student of the culture. Respectful, thoughtful, bold, intelligent, passionate, filled with the Spirit of God. Drops the mic. That’s it. That’s basically what he says to this crowd. And I think it’s really helpful if we notice the varying responses that he gets, because perhaps, maybe we should expect the same. First of all, mockery. That’s good to pay attention to, because sometimes we share what we really believe of Christ, and it’s a joke to somebody else. And it was to them. Many people in the crowd literally thought he was in The Idiot for all of this. Like they make fun of him in the on the spot before he even leaves the room. They’re making a joke out of what he believes. Part of that is because of their opinions about resurrection and the body. They didn’t believe that the body should last forever, so anything about Jesus being raised from the dead just kind of went past them. They’re just like, are you kidding me? That’d be ridiculous. But they mock him and sometimes we will get mocked for just putting out the simple truth of who Christ really is. Other people, though, respond with curiosity. Some are not necessarily convinced, but they want to hear more. They’re like, we would like, we want to. There’s more here that I think we need to like dig into a little bit. So they’re not mocking, but they’re not exactly in it yet either. And then you see this small little trickle of another response. And that’s acceptance and trust. They believe what Paul is saying. They trust what he is telling them and they go with him. It’s a really interesting statement about belief real quick. I don’t have time to go into a lot of this, but we read this word, belief in the Scripture. And I think a lot of times we assume when we believe something, we sort of intellectually get it. That’s believing something. That’s not what they’re talking about at all. When someone believes in Christ and puts their faith in Christ, it is more akin to the spiritual posture of what you did when you sat down in the seat and you came in here today, most of you didn’t really do a lot of math is like, is this chair going to hold me up? Is this let me let me think all this through. If you did that, I could I could see you from a distance. Because if you’ve ever sat down in a chair, you’re not sure it’s going to hold you up. You look very different as you go down to that chair. Right? You’re kind of like weighing it out. You sat down and just went for it, right? That’s exactly what believing in Jesus is meant to look like. Just plunking down like your confidence in him. There’s a few people that said, you know what? I think you’re right. And not only I think you’re right, I’m going to trust you. I’m going to go with what you’re saying about Jesus. But here’s the thing I don’t want us to miss real quick before we turn back to us and what we do with this. These responses to Paul were primarily about his message. Those that mocked couldn’t stomach the idea of the resurrection of the dead. Those that were curious said, we will hear you more about this. And those that went with Paul joined Paul in believing none of their responses were much about the messenger. The clear issue was the message he proclaimed. Paul really wasn’t the focus of their acceptance or rejection or even their curiosity. They weren’t thinking like that was well spoken. Paul, I really liked the way you said that. Or I read they were talking about his message. That’s what was really that was the impression that was left of him, of what are you talking about? In the end, it was Jesus that they had to decide what to do with. So let’s see what we’ve learned not only from this story, but perhaps kind of drawing on this entire journey through the book of Acts up to this point. Like I said, maybe you’ve wanted to know, how do I how do I share this gospel? I see these people in Acts. They’re so bold. They’re sharing this all the time. I don’t know where to start. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to to best approach the people, my contemporaries and my culture. Well, Paul has done this with an eerily similar culture, it turns out. So let’s find a few steaks we can drive into the ground about communicating this good news to the people around us, first of all, and I think you see this again and again. The book of Acts is you rely on the spirit of truth. Jesus said, The Holy Spirit will lead us into all truth, and people need revelation from God, not just really good, convincing or persuasion on our part. You can’t sell Jesus to somebody, okay? God has to do something that you cannot do, and the Holy Spirit will lead people into truth. He will use your voice, but it’s his work that’s opening up the heart. So on a very practical level, what does that really mean? Like, what does it mean to rely on the spirit of truth? Well, before you speak, pray, you talk to God first. You talk to God. Try to do it. While you’re talking to the person, ask God, will you please show up? Do what only you can do. Your confidence is in God’s ability to reveal, not in the clarity of the words that you’re saying. I’m trusting that God is acting here. I once heard a pastor say, the most important thing that happens when you’re sharing the gospel is what God does between your mouth and their ears. It’s not about you. It’s not even really about them. It’s about what God’s going to do in the middle of all this. So you can take the pressure off of you having to say it all perfectly okay. Because there’s been some really flawed messengers over the last 2000 years, but God still gets his point across to people. All right. Because he’s the one revealing it.

The second thing is lead with respect. Lead with respect. Approach others with respect and dignity. Because if you don’t genuinely value or care about them, they will feel it. And most of the things you’re trying to generously tell them will come across as condescending or confrontational when it doesn’t have to be. If you genuinely value and respect other people, you can lead that way. And I know that kind of flies in the face of our cultural assumptions. Most of us walk around. You had to earn my respect, and I hear you on that. But Paul led with respect. He gave them respect from the outset. It often means you’re going to have to get to know them. You’re going to have to develop a little bit of a relationship with them and care about them as people, before you try to debate or argue with them. This came home in a really interesting way and really a difficult situation for a former Muslim named Nabeel Qureshi. He wrote a really famous book called “Seeking Allah Finding Jesus,” and he writes about his friend David Wood, who shared Christ with him over several years within this deepening friendship. And he had eventually led to him becoming a follower of Jesus. He says this even though the gospel was his David’s passion, he did not bombard me with his beliefs straight away. The discussions arose much more naturally after we became friends and in the context of a life lived together. In fact, I was the one who brought it up. The context of a friendship between a Christian and a Muslim is where this began. It didn’t start with a debate and said, in fact, speaking, he was speaking directly with David years later. And they were he was they were sort of talking about the role of friendship in his journey to faith. And he said this as we love people like you did with me, I became your friend and we lived life together. You loved God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength while you also loved me. I got to see that. The danger is when people only love their neighbors but don’t proclaim the gospel. Or on the flip side, they proclaim the gospel, but they don’t love their neighbors. You need to do both in tandem. It was both in tandem that led a devout Muslim on a long journey where it wasn’t David trying to coerce him, it was David offering up. Here’s what I’ve experienced. Here’s what the scriptures say, and God revealing to this man so much so that he became an ardent proponent of Christ. You can find some of his stuff on YouTube and read the book for yourself, but I think in this context, you see it and you begin to understand what Paul did, which is kind of the third thing I want to offer to you is seek to understand, seeks to understand. Fear shuts down conversation so fast. And a lot of times in our world, we approach people different from us with fear first rather than curiosity and really seeking to understand. I just want to say this really clearly because it just feels as I prepared for this, like it keeps getting like underlined in my mind. You can trust God to talk with someone that is different from you. We are often lived like I can’t be around people that are like Uber different from me, especially if we might disagree on something. The truth is, is you don’t have to believe everything they say, okay? Like just it’s okay. And guess what? They don’t have to believe everything that you say either. We can still be in relationship with people that we actually disagree with. A relationship can withstand disagreement. It doesn’t have to prevent it. So what does that look like? Practically like how do you how do you step up into that? Well, maybe it means listen to them while they speak instead of formulating the next thing you’re trying to say, which is just a good rule of thumb and life, by the way, just listen to what people are actually saying before you try to come back with your thought. Maybe you could follow the lead of Jesus and ask questions. Jesus was a master in asking questions by most scholars. Count in the. In the Gospels alone, Jesus asked 307 questions that we can at least have record of 307 questions. He even gave questions back to questions he was asked 183 questions in the Gospels. Do you know how many times he gave a simple statement back as an answer? Three times. That means he answered a question with a question 180 times. He knew that people understand and grow through insight that unlocks from the inside, and the best way to get that unlocking happen is to ask a question that leads them to an answer versus shoving an answer at them. Maybe you lead with questions. Tell me about that. Tell me why you think that you might be surprised what it begins to unlock.

And then lastly, don’t blend. Be faithful. Don’t blend. Be faithful. Meaning. In the context of a culture, God calls you to a holy life. Holy means different, set apart, unique. He does not call you to a culturally relevant life. Now, that’s not to say you should walk around offending everybody because I want to. It just means you will feel at odds with a culture if you’re really following Jesus. Because Jesus is all about creating the culture of the kingdom of God, and there’s only one ruler of that kingdom, whereas the culture you live in wants to give its allegiance to a lot of different things, a lot of different forces, a lot of different people. So you’re always going to feel a little like, oh, you don’t feel quite like the culture around you. And that’s not wrong. It’s something different. It’s something that actually speaks out, and you don’t have to tiptoe when it comes to stating what you know to be true. You just lead with honesty, lead with respect. Choose to love the people around you. Jesus, Paul. They both understood the people that they ministered to without totally absorbing their culture. They chose to live in the Kingdom of God even amidst a different culture. Because understanding the culture is distinct from embodying the culture. You don’t have to become the culture to understand it and to interact and engage it. The truth is, most people need to see the difference that Jesus actually makes in your life before they can trust him to make a difference in theirs. And if you look the exact same as me, what difference did it really make in your life? Let it make a difference. I’m not saying you do it for show. Just be who God is called you to be. Don’t blend. Be faithful. You live in the culture of the Kingdom of God, and if it clashes, it clashes. That may be a part of what God is trying to show to the people around you. Regardless, the goal is not to get them looking primarily at you. It’s to be pointing them to Jesus. The message, not the messenger, is the focus. And if they’re going to be offended or repulsed man, let it be about Jesus and not about how you approached it or the tone you took with them. It’s just the message, and you can’t apologize for that. That’s him, and that’s their business with him. So as we step out into the world in this coming week, I wanted to remind you you and I were not alone. Not only do we have the great company of the, you know, these ancient missionary like the Apostle Paul, but we also have people right now who are a part of a worldwide movement, still living this out that we are partners together with in a gateway. We are specifically partners with a church planting organization called M4. They are really trying to bring the gospel of Jesus to the people of Europe. And I would love for you to hear from Miguel Castillo. He is one of our partners in Madrid, Spain, and he’s a fellow disciple of Jesus, trying to live out the same mission there in Spain that you and I are called to live out here in Austin. Check this out.

Buenos dias, Gateway Church. Saludos desde Madrid, Espana. I am Miguel Castillo. I’ve been working with them for Spain for the last ten years. We have been able to help more than 46 church planting projects, get off the ground all over, from little villages in urban Spain to big neighborhoods in major urban centers. And it’s been a privilege. My wife and I are actually part of a church planting team in Madrid called Ellen Church. And what does it look like for a day to day disciple of Jesus? What does a missionary lifestyle looks like? As we have just heard? Well, let me tell you about a friend. He’s now a friend. He was my neighbor and he’s still a good friend of mine back in September. I met Luis at the gym. We strike up a conversation. Next thing you know, we’re talking about philosophy, about theology. And I’m listening to him. And I’m respectfully trying to find out what are his passions, his desires, even his pain points as well. And how can I come alongside of him as my neighbor, as a good friend? Next thing you know, my wife strikes up a good conversation and a good friendship with his girlfriend, Mercedes. We invite him over in November for Thanksgiving. We have a great conversation about gratitude. And what does the Bible has to say about thankfulness? In February, he signs up to an alpha course that we launched at our church plant in Madrid, and he starts wrestling and debating with the different topics about resisting evil. And this God healed today. Does he speak to us today? Why did Jesus have to die and all these different things? He then follows up with the different next steps that we do as a church plan, which is called explore what they dive and we take people with to do a deeper dive into the scriptures. And he takes a step forward to accepting Christ. And he’s now a child of God, and we’re coming alongside of him to the point where him and his girlfriend want to get married in September. And guess what? Our church planter is going to be officiating their wedding in September. I want to encourage you that the day to day life of a disciple is just about making friends and getting them into the Bible, so be encouraged. It is possible. It is simple. May you be empowered by the Holy Spirit to be a day to day disciple of Christ right there in Austin, Texas.