Sermon on Acts 17 by Finn Chirnside: Paul's approach to evangelism and the call to prayer
Finn Chirnside, Associate Vicar at Sumner Redcliffs Church, preaches on Acts 17:22–31, exploring how Paul contextualized the gospel for a Greek audience in Athens.
Summary
Finn Chirnside delivers a sermon on Acts 17:22–31, using the example of Paul's speech at the Areopagus in Athens as a masterclass in contextualizing the Christian gospel for a non-Jewish audience. He opens with a reflection on Chick Tracts as a dated evangelism tool, arguing that their assumptions no longer fit the cultural moment. The heart of the sermon traces Paul's method of affirmation, contextualization, and proclamation — meeting the Athenians through their own poets and philosophers before pointing them to the God of the Jewish and Christian tradition. Chirnside closes with a strong call to prayer, arguing that everything Paul accomplished flowed from a deep life of prayer and reliance on the Spirit, and that the same must be true for Christians today.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Opening: Chick Tracts and the problem with generic evangelism
Finn Chirnside: Does anyone remember Chick Tracts? One person — hey! The 9am, no one knew. And it was really awkward, because it was the whole set-up, and then people were just like, "Bro, what are you talking about?" And I was like, well, I thought this would meet people in the middle, now it's just been uncomfortable, so that's fun.
Maybe if I explain a bit more. Chick Tracts were like these little cartoon Christian drawings that you'd see. Basically it'd be like: oh, here's a person. Oh, he's going to hell. Oh, no, he's not going to hell anymore. And it would be like the people who do evangelism on the streets would hand them out. Or you'd find what looked like a bank note, and it would say a million dollars. And you'd be like, oh, a million dollars! And then you'd read it, and you'd go, oh, it says Jesus died for me. And that's cool. Thanks. I'm going to go to heaven now. That's lovely and good.
These things came out in the 1960s by a guy called Jack Chick — which is almost like a tongue twister. And it came out of fundamentalist Protestantism, and it was kind of a reaction to the sexual revolution, among other things. It was a way that at the time seemed to work semi-well to make people go, oh, I probably should take God seriously and come to follow Jesus.
The general presentation of the Chick Tract was something like this: you are a sinner; sinners offend the holy God; God can't let sinners into heaven; Jesus came to deal with your sin; he was punished in your place, and he rose for you so you could go to heaven. They would usually end with telling you to go to church — but make sure they only read the KJV, and make sure you don't go near those Catholics. That was really important: you didn't touch the Catholics.
Here's the thing — the generic presentation of the gospel in those tracts is actually true. Maybe aside from the Catholic thing, that's a whole other problem. It's not the wording I would choose, but it's true, most of the time. But the big question is: Chick Tracts may once have worked as a tool for evangelism, but do they work now?
When I read them, I don't see space for nuance, which is an important value in our culture. I see a self-centered gospel that doesn't give a vision for the world outside of myself — it's all about the fact that I get to go to heaven. Which is true, I'm not discrediting that. But the gospel is more than that. And these tracts don't give a vision for what the world can be and will be one day.
Christians and people of other religions can often criticize escapist content — Netflix, porn, Tinder — and say, oh, they're just trying to cope with the world, they can't handle it. But this version of the gospel is escapist as well, because it's like: don't worry, the world's terrible, but one day you'll get out of here and go to heaven. And it's actually consumerist, because it's all about you. Once again, it's true, but it's not the fullness of the story.
The gospel is a story — and this is important — it's centered on Jesus. And because it's a story, you can present it in different ways depending on your context while retaining the important truth at its heart.
Background: Paul's journey to Athens in Acts
And this is where we find Paul. For those of you who don't know how we got here: at the beginning of Acts, Paul was a persecutor of the Christian community that had been growing dramatically since the Feast of Pentecost, which is when the Holy Spirit falls on the believers. Paul is a super nerd. He's a member of the Pharisees — basically one of the Jewish elite class — and he actually supervises the execution of the first Christian martyr, and then starts a systematized persecution of the wider church. Long story short, he encounters Jesus, and he comes back to the Pharisees and the Jews and says, hey, I'm now one of the Jesus people.
Paul, alongside Peter, are kind of the two main human characters in Acts. Well, actually — I take that back. The main character in Acts is the Spirit of God. The main human characters are Paul and Peter. They're both important because they represent the question: how do we work this Jewish religion into the fact that it's now a multicultural family that is meant to live in harmony with one another? Basically, all the epistles are trying to address this. How do Jews and Gentiles with vastly different cultural backgrounds come to follow Jesus together? Peter kind of represents the Jewish Christian movement. Paul kind of represents the mission to the Gentiles. It doesn't mean they exclusively just do their own thing, but that's the general idea in the text.
The passage we read today is in the middle of Paul's tour of Greek cities, and this is his element. He's highly educated. He's read all of the Greek poets and philosophers. They let him into the Areopagus — and then he's invited to go speak where all the smart people are.
Just before this text, Luke, the author of Acts, has a wee dig at the philosophers and the Athenians. He says they always love to talk about the latest ideas. Have you met anyone like that? Maybe like me. Someone who's so obsessed with new ideas that they never actually settle on anything. Or someone who's so obsessed with finding a better girlfriend that they don't just go, actually, my girlfriend's kind of awesome, I think I'll stick with her — and they get to 35 and they're lonely.
This is kind of like Nietzsche's idea of the intellectual conscience, which I talked about a few weeks ago — the idea that you should always be questioning, and that it's actually morally wrong to settle, that if you settle you're failing as a person. This was Friedrich Nietzsche, and this is kind of the roots of a lot of the ideology that followed. The Athenians are kind of like that, except they also have their own gods chilling on the side. But those gods don't really demand much from you — just a little bit. So you can have all of your skepticism and all of your different ideas at the same time. It's all very fun.
Being open to new ideas is good. But it is not good if you ground your whole life in a constant openness or skepticism. And Paul, in the middle of all of these nerds who love the ambiguity, comes crashing in with objective claims about the nature of all reality — claims they can't ignore and will have to reckon with. Either you mock it or you embrace it. You can't just go, oh, that is nice. Well, people do do that. But actually, if you think about what Jesus is claiming, you've kind of got two options.
Paul's method: Affirmation, contextualization, and proclamation
There is something really important to say from the start. Paul's message here in Acts 17 is drastically different to Peter's message in Acts 2, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago. The basic concept is called contextualization — it's a missiological idea about how you present Christian truth in a context that makes sense. If Jesus was a Japanese man, he would have been called the rice of life, not the bread of life. Because it's contextualizing — it's keeping the core, but saying the same thing in a way that connects. It's a very fun idea, Jesus being the rice of life. I love Japanese rice.
When Peter speaks at Pentecost, he's speaking mainly to ethnic Jews or Jewish converts. They know the Jewish story. They know Genesis. They probably know the whole thing off by heart. They understand what's going on, and many of them were probably involved in actually getting Jesus killed. None of these things are true in Athens. The Athenians have no idea about the Jewish religion. So Paul has to find a way to communicate what's important without that background.
What both Peter and Paul focus on is really important: resurrection and repentance. Those are the two things they really hit. Because Jesus has come, died, and risen, God calls people to repent of going their own way and to come to the one who made them. That is, very simply, what they prioritize.
So the question is: how does Paul communicate the Jesus message through a Greek lens while keeping the core strong and true?
The first thing he does is affirm the religious nature of the Athenians. He doesn't say their religion is correct, but he says, good on you for at least being religious. Good on you for going, oh, religion is probably something that makes sense of the world. He says that's good, but he uses it as a gateway to then contextualize.
He moves on to the idea of the unknown God — this altar that's in the pantheon of gods. This might lose some of you because he does some philosophical jujitsu here. It's genuinely hardcore what he does. But some of you will like this, and the rest of you come back in about three minutes.
He uses the idea of the Athenians' unknown god to explain about the Jewish and Christian God, who is drastically different to all other Greek deities worshipped in Athens at the time. The other Greek deities had a beginning — they themselves were not the creator of all things. Even Zeus, who was the king of the pantheon of gods, had a father. Stoics would sometimes refer to Zeus as the creator of the mortal world, but he also had a beginning.
In Greek thought, probably the closest thing to the Christian concept is the Neoplatonic idea of "the one," which comes from Plato's Republic and is later developed by other philosophers. The one is the idea of a creator who stands outside time itself, who is both the beginning and the end of all things, but is so simple that you can't even call the one a being.
So when Paul does the unknown God thing, he starts bringing in the ideas behind Zeus and then the one as touch points. Like Zeus, Yahweh is involved in all of creation — that's important. But unlike Zeus, Yahweh transcends all time and created all things. The one is the creator, like Yahweh is, but is not personally involved or caring for creation. So Paul is saying: you've got this part of Zeus that you've got kind of bang on a little bit, and you've got the idea of the one — but actually, the Jewish God is the one you're aiming for.
Paul quoting Aratus: "We are his offspring"
Now it gets pretty extreme. Paul quotes a poem that is originally about Zeus to describe how his God is the true father of all humanity. When he says the line "we are his offspring," it's a quote by the Stoic Aratus. I'll read the wider context, because when Paul would have quoted this to the philosophers, they would have instantly jumped back and thought about the rest of it:
"From Zeus let us begin. Him do we mortals never leave unnamed. Full of Zeus are all the streets and all the marketplaces of men. Full is the sea and the havens thereof. Always we have need of Zeus."
Sounds pretty Christian, right? But let's make it clear: Paul is not saying Yahweh is Zeus, or that they're on the same playing field. No one would have read it like that. What he's trying to do is use these touch points, and then also say that Yahweh is different and above all the other gods. All these ideas he's invoking — these meeting points of "yes, we are God's offspring" and so on — he's trying to say: what you were trying to articulate and capture in your thought about Zeus and about the one is found at its fullness, in reality, in the Jewish and Christian God.
The theological terms for this distinction would be natural revelation and special revelation. Natural revelation speaks to the intuition that the world seems to be wired for creation, so there's probably a creator. Special revelation is how God specifically reveals himself in the world — whether through the Exodus, through Scripture, or ultimately through the person of Jesus. It is an exclusive claim from the Creator of all things about the true nature of all things.
Paul uses natural revelation found in Greek religion — how they look at the weather and go, man, there must be a force behind this, and since the weather is the most important force for those cultures, of course Zeus is going to be the weather god — and he says, yes, I affirm the general principle, but you are still wrong. And then he uses the in-history special revelation of the Christian idea and of Jesus as a person. He says that what they thought they had in Zeus is truly found in Jesus.
The Bible does this all the time. There are clear parallels between Yahweh and Baal in the Old Testament. Some will then say that means Yahweh and Baal are the same person — but that's not at all what's happening. It's very obvious that's not what's happening if you actually read the book. It's trying to contrast, critique, and mock Baal religion, and to say that Yahweh is so far above those that he's supreme.
The key pivot: Idols, the Imago Dei, and the call to repentance
Paul then makes the key pivot. He meets the Greeks in the middle ground, offers a critique, and a call back to the true God — who is not just the God of the Greeks, but the God of all peoples. And he directly challenges their way of worship. It's not about idols or temples, because with idols and temples you actually reduce God down to a size that you can control. And you reduce the value of humanity.
So when Paul does his whole thing with "we are his offspring," he's using Greek ideas to communicate ultimately a Jewish and Christian idea — the Imago Dei — which is to say that all human beings are made in the image of God. And because we are made in the image of God, we have status and value that places us above all other parts of creation. When we make idols, we insult God by dumbing him down to something we can control. But we also degrade the status of humanity, reducing us to serve and worship something that we've been made to be masters of.
So Paul calls the Greeks to acknowledge the true God and to repent of their philosophical inconsistency and their false religion.
It's complex, but here are three easy keys to make sense of it: affirmation, contextualization, and proclamation. He starts by affirming them — good job on the religion, but you're wrong. Contextualization is meeting them in the middle with the poems and the philosophers. And then proclamation is saying, what you are trying to articulate here is actually found in Yahweh.
This is J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis's whole idea of Jesus as the true myth. All the different human stories are trying to reach out for something. And that something is actually grounded in history in the person of Jesus. It's not saying Jesus is a myth — it's saying that all human stories seem to be reaching for someone or something to make sense of it all, and that someone is Jesus.
Paul communicates what he sees as vital: that Jesus came, he died, he was raised, and he'll come again. Everything he is doing — the interplay with philosophy and religion — is to say that. And it's a masterclass in context without compromise: affirming but not cowardly.
If he had launched into a classic presentation of the Jewish law and done the "are you a bad person?" test, it wouldn't have worked. If he had tried to launch into Trinitarian theology straight away without the context of the Old Testament behind them, he would have completely lost them. He prioritizes what he thinks is the most important thing — the thing that, if he uses the right tools, they will go on to understand. And we see that later on, he does teach people the other stuff. He does do Trinitarian theology. He does talk about the renewal of all creation. But it all flows from starting with a gateway.
And we can actually see that it worked. Just after this passage it says: when they had heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered — fair enough — but others said, "We want to hear you again on this subject." At this, Paul left the council. Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus — what a word, I tried — also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.
It would have been a big deal for any of those philosopher nerds to come to follow Jesus. But if Paul had tried to do the Jewish context, you wouldn't have got Dionysius. There's no way. So clearly something he did worked.
To put it simply: Paul knows his audience, he understands their story, he understands their context, he prioritizes the resurrection as the core of the gospel, and he doesn't compromise the core — but he adapts how he gets there. Affirmation, contextualization, and proclamation.
Why Chick Tracts don't work now — and what does
And this, circling all the way back, is my problem with Chick Tracts. They come loaded with so many assumptions. They just assume that you believe the world has a God. Because if you launch straight into a moral code, what if you're Nietzschean and you don't even believe that morals exist? You'd be surprised how many people genuinely believe that morality is entirely subjective — that one thing is true for you and another thing is true for me. You can't start with the "are you a good person?" test on that. It doesn't work. But in the 60s it might have worked, because you had more religion as the foundation of the culture. Now you don't.
Part of the problem is that this whole presentation becomes the gospel itself. And I'm not knocking those people — good on you for going out and doing that. Well done. A lot of us could learn from them. But I just argue it's not the method that Paul uses.
So I want to offer some quick-fire thoughts on touch points for the gospel in our current culture. And hear what I'm actually saying — I'm not making political stances here. Don't read into me what I'm not saying.
Creation care. Regardless of what you think about it, caring for the planet is a hot-button issue at the moment. There is plenty of research to back up that one of the many reasons people aren't having kids is that they're so scared about what the world is going to look like in 50 to 100 years. They're going, why would I bring a kid into a world that's going to be burning? That's what they think is going to happen. And we've got to meet them at those touch points. Christianity affirms the vision of creation care. This is true. This is the garden. We're not called to destroy everything — we're called to care for it and to shield it. But we place it within a story that has a hope for the future. Creation isn't going to implode. It's not doom and gloom. It's a renewed creation. We care about creation itself, and the call for us is to be wise stewards of creation. That's a fundamental concept in Christianity, because it's a fundamental concept of the garden. All we are is garden people living in an un-garden world.
Human rights. This cultural moment, in case you haven't heard, is kind of obsessed with human rights. And that's a good thing. However, the very idea of human rights is ultimately a Christian idea, and the modern West has ripped the concept from its roots. It doesn't mean people don't have rights, but without God you can't justify them. If you've got a majority of a culture who believes that morality is subjective, how could you possibly talk about rights being objective? It literally doesn't make sense. But if you come in saying, yes, I affirm that you believe humans have inherent value — let me tell you where it came from, and let me point you to the one who defines and gives meaning to that. There's your touch point. You're affirming that you care about people, but you're also saying you've got to ground rights in something. Otherwise rights themselves become subjective, which is kind of what's happening.
Spiritual but not religious. Particularly in a place like Sumner, this is a big one. This affirmation is almost similar to Paul's affirmation of the Athenians. You trust in your natural inclination to practice spirituality. People do that — they go, oh, there's something more here, and so they do whatever, flip tarot cards or something. Not saying that's good at all, but they're at least responding to an inclination that there is more to the world than just the material. The touch point is: okay, you've at least got that bit right. But because Jesus has come into history and done everything he said and done, come to the true master of spirits — who is not just out there in the ether, but has actually defined physical reality himself.
The foundation of it all: Prayer
After all of that, there is one thing that is taken for granted in the text. Everything Paul did came from a place of deep prayer and being filled with the Spirit. As I said, the Spirit is the main character in Acts. By this point in the New Testament, it is just assumed that you know this. Jesus would pray before any big moment. He had developed a deep life of friendship and reliance on the Father as a human, through the Spirit. And we must be like that.
This is Paul capturing this idea in 1 Corinthians:
"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I might boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing."
And the love that he speaks of is not some subjective love defined by whatever the people at the Oscars say. It's defined by spending time with God in prayer and meeting him in his word.
I deeply desire that you would all be super nerds like Paul — that you'd go out and be able to meet your friends wherever you work, talk about coffee, and somehow use coffee to talk into a story about Jesus. I would love that. But above all, I want you to pray. Because if you set the order of your heart the right way and live from a place of being and not of doing, then you can go and do. You can go and be little mini Pauls where your actions and words are formed by the Spirit and not by the world around you.
Christians need to get high off their own supply. I'm being genuinely serious. You need to smoke what you're selling. If you're sitting there going, oh, come and follow Jesus — but then you're not doing any of the Jesus stuff — people will sniff it out. This is not me ripping you out. Everyone's at different stages in their journey. But it is an invitation, because it's actually good for your life.
I have two little kids, and my wife is pregnant with our third. I'm pretty tired. I don't spend two hours in contending prayer every day. But I pray a little bit. So the invitation is not to destroy your life and not sleep by praying. The invitation is: do you have 10 seconds? That 10 seconds will make the world of difference if you give it to Jesus.
I want the best for you, I want the best for this church, and I want the best for the church worldwide. And the most important thing we can possibly be is people who are saturated in the character and the presence of God. And then from prayer, we receive the wisdom to affirm well, to contextualize well, and to proclaim well.
Practical next steps: Pentecost and 24-7 Prayer
Two quick practical things. In two weeks, we'll celebrate Pentecost — come along. It's going to be great.
Second thing: leading up to that, 24-7 Prayer are running things up at the lighthouse. It's like a 10-day prayer period beforehand. We're not doing anything there officially, but I know people from the church are going to be involved. I would suggest just going to one session. Whatever stage you're at — if you're feeling dry, if you're not a follower of Jesus — I would just suggest, leading up to Pentecost, spending a bit of time, even 10 seconds, just saying: God, if you're real, show up. Or if you are a Christian and you're feeling a bit dry: God, would you come and refresh me and meet me and give me strength so that I can go and do the thing I'm called to do?
That'll strengthen your contextualization. That'll strengthen whatever you feel called to do in your workplace or the missions you're on. Everything, if it's rooted in prayer, you can go and do the Paul stuff. Otherwise it just won't be as good as you wanted it to be.
Just like here as a church — if Rev Harry Newton and I aren't praying, and we just sit around waffling about all this and don't actually do anything, then it's not going to go very well. Let's be honest. It'll flop eventually. We need to get high off our own supply. That's the most transformational thing, and then you can do all the other good stuff and it'll be great.