Religion and Money; Acts 19:21f

If pagan Ephesian idol makers were unable to separate out their pagan object of worship, their approach to their occupation and their money, how much less should we be able to separate worshipping the living God from our occupation, our money, our use of our homes and our whole identity. We have no identity outside of Christ anymore, so why do people in churches sometimes look like they are flirting with Christianity or playing religious games with God?

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Preaching to Bright Pagans 2; Acts 17:29-34

Here are ten reasons why God hates idols and we should hate idols

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Preaching to Bright Pagans 1; Acts 17:22-28

All Christians need to get this firmly nailed down in our minds. God cannot be served by human hands. It is so tempting and enticing to reason thus: God is holy, I am sinful, therefore I must work and work at moral improvement to be able to please him and make myself acceptable in His service. And then God will accept me because I am sincere and hard working. This is the opposite of the good news, but its very tempting and attractive to moral, hard-working, self-sufficient people. (Even Christian vocabulary like "church services" gives the impression that we get together to provide God with something.) Self-sufficient people don't like the idea that God doesn't accept us because of anything we can offer. He only accepts us because of trusting Jesus.

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Default Position; Acts 17:16-21

A student once said to me "I don't think there is any such thing as an "evangelistic opportunity"." When I asked what he meant he replied "the very vocabulary leads us to a wrong default position. As soon as we speak in those terms we immediately imply that there are times of evangelistic opportunity and times that aren't. Witness becomes an occasional subset of my life rather than the default position from which I approach everything that happens to me all the time."

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Doing Things New Ways; Acts 17:10-15

I think we are justified in reading the section from the Macedonian vision onwards as God preparing and training the team for radically innovative evangelism. Acts 15 established that you can become a believer in Jesus without becoming a Jew. That was blockbusting. The Macedonian vision is then fascinating for what it doesn't say. It doesn't say "a Jewish man from Macedonia was urging us to help them." This was a call from God to take the gospel not only to fresh geographic areas, but to think for the first time about how you do that for completely different religions and worldviews. Let's not underestimate how radical that vision was.

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Many Hardships; Acts 17:1-9

the passage is a teaching on persecution. First the organised mob used violence to intimidate. There was a lynching party. When they couldn't find their chief targets they changed their approach. Dragging Jason and others before the authorities they bully the authorities with the charge that these men are (a) causing extreme trouble and (b) committing treason. Note that they got the message right - that Jesus was being proclaimed as King

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Worship, Prayer and Fasting

worship/prayer/fasting is nevertheless an excellent response to God speaking to us through the scriptures. Together they constitute an good biblical picture of seeking God and desiring God. It is easy to think that desiring God means going to a good Bible study. I think it better to say that having been to a good Bible study, a biblical test for whether our desire for God has been whetted is whether we want to pursue him with worship/prayer/fasting as a result.

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