Greetings Flag Branch members and friends and thanks for taking the time to join me, Pastor Jordan, for some Fine Points from Sunday’s service and message “The Latest New Thing”.
The latest new thing is what the writer of Acts said the Athenians spent their time listening to and talking about. In fact, it was what they spent the majority of their time doing. Seeking to know and to tell others about the latest things is a sign a person is idolatrous.
If God is not first in a person’s love, honor and reverence then something else has to be. That something else can be a person, a place, a thing or an idea as long as it can be objectified. In order words, we can direct our feelings, time and energy toward it and it is often something we refer to as mine.
When Paul arrived in Athens, he found a city given wholly to idol worship. And while that probably included images dedicated and erected to honor who they called the gods, all of it was symptomatic of a people who didn’t know, or if they did know refused to follow, their purpose for being.
Upon seeing this, Paul made an effort to enlighten those he could wherever and whenever he could including in the synagogue and marketplace. The intellectuals of the city got wind of what Paul was teaching and wanted to know more even though they regarded him as a “babbler” or someone incoherent and jangling in thought and message.
It seemed more of the fact it was something new that they didn’t want to miss and hear than them taking or regarding anything serious from one they called a babbler. But Paul preached the gospel to them and their reaction to it was predictable. However, one of their most respected members and several other believed Paul and became disciples.
How like the Athenians people are today. We have little regard for the gospel and sometime even less for those who preach it. Yet it is through the foolish of preaching that God has chosen to save His people. And like at Athens, all who hear will not disregard it, but some will believe because they are the children of God.
People are constantly searching for new things to fill a life devoid of its true purpose. They seek to give their live meaning, purpose and fulfillment through the things they experience. Experiences come through trying new things. It can be a new scent or smell, a new taste or touch, a new feeling or new sound or something not seen before.
These things often lead people into different ways of seeing and thinking about themselves. They often leave us in a worst place than we were before we experience that new thing. But it is all vain, all academic, all irrelevant because it was all to what end? What did it get us besides a bunch of feelings that were sometime good and at other times bad?
Is and was that the purpose of our life to feel feelings? Feelings by the way we will at some point never know we had. The gospel tells us we are made for the purpose of becoming the offspring of God. If that is the case, our life should be spent fulfilling that purpose. And every and anything else we do with our life beside that is simply idolatry.
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Pastor Jordan
