Acts 17 and the Gospel

Acts 17 is one of the prime passages that is looked to when wrestling with contextualizing the gospel to a culture.  The Apostle Paul was very good at explaining and communicating the gospel.  All throughout the book of Acts he is constantly looking to preach the gospel.  Jesus did the same thing.  The Southeast Church is going through the book of Mark right now.  We're seeing how Jesus made proclaiming the gospel the primary concern of his ministry.

So when we look at Acts 17 we get excited about how Paul addressed the culture and proclaimed the gospel.  What we often fail to consider is the response and how Paul handled it afterwards.  Directly following Paul's time in Athens he headed to Corinth (Acts 18).  When we look at the beginning of 1 Corinthians where Paul is recounting his state when he arrived we see something interesting.  In the beginning of chapter 2, Paul writes "And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom.  For I decided to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified."

Paul had just seen how his great contextualization of the gospel resulted in very little result.  I'm by no means arguing that we should avoid contextualization, but rather that we need to really look at culture and invest time and thought into how we do it.  The gospel is going to sound crazy to most people because it divides our nature as sinners and we don't like that.  We want to be in control.  We pull our own weight and don't need help.  The gospel is the opposite of this.  The gospel says that we can't do it and so we have to rely entirely on what Christ has already accomplished.

Paul saw results and people being saved in Corinth.  Let's not get too excited about the one stop that Paul didn't see people get saved and even crushed his spirit to a certain degree.  Let us be bold in preaching Christ crucified on our behalf to accomplish what we cannot.  Let us rest in the Power of God that is made known to us because of the resurrection.

Relationally Thinking

The other day I was pondering what it means to "have a relationship with Jesus". I was watching this video a church made about their history and growth and someone in it was talking about how they never had "a relationship with Jesus" before, but rather church was just religion. Now before I get ahead of myself I agree that we are created to be relational creatures modeled after God (the Triune God). I agree that it is imperative that we have a relationship with Jesus. But since Jesus is in heaven with God the Father, how do we have that relationship? The easy answer is through the Holy Spirit, through the Word of God (the Bible), and through prayer/meditation. This doesn't quite satisfy me though. So I started to ponder it and think through some of the practical issues with that. Here are my results:

1. We are relational creatures made in God's image and therefore must have relationships in order to operate as we are designed.

2. The church is the literal physical body of Christ. Jesus is the head, we are the body. We must operate as a body and be unified in our local churches.

3. In order to have that relationship with Jesus, we must work it out through the body of Christ. It is through living in the church community that we have the opportunity to flush out the intricacies of being a Christian.

This is not to say that it is only through community that we can have a relationship with Jesus, but rather to say that through community we are able to have a complete relationship with Jesus. We must still be spending time in the Word on our own, in prayer on our own, and relying on the Holy Spirit daily. So the bottom line is that you better be involved in a community of believers where you can serve, love, rejoice, mourn, celebrate, pray, meditate, worship, and live relational lives which will reflect who our Creator is.