WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:29.980 Thank you. 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:59.980 Thank you. 00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:29.980 Thank you. 00:01:30.000 --> 00:01:59.980 Thank you. 00:02:00.000 --> 00:02:29.979 Thank you. 00:02:30.000 --> 00:02:59.979 Thank you. 00:03:00.000 --> 00:03:29.979 Thank you. 00:03:30.000 --> 00:03:59.979 Thank you. 00:04:00.000 --> 00:04:29.980 Thank you. 00:04:30.000 --> 00:04:59.980 Thank you. 00:04:59.980 --> 00:05:29.960 Thank you. 00:05:30.000 --> 00:05:59.960 Thank you. 00:05:59.959 --> 00:06:29.939 Thank you. 00:06:29.959 --> 00:06:59.939 Thank you. 00:06:59.959 --> 00:07:29.939 Thank you. 00:07:29.959 --> 00:07:59.939 Thank you. 00:07:59.959 --> 00:08:29.939 Thank you. 00:08:29.959 --> 00:08:59.939 Thank you. 00:08:59.960 --> 00:09:29.940 Thank you. 00:09:29.960 --> 00:09:59.940 Thank you. 00:09:59.960 --> 00:10:29.960 Thank you. 00:10:29.960 --> 00:10:59.940 Thank you. 00:10:59.960 --> 00:10:59.980 Thank you. 00:11:29.960 --> 00:11:59.940 Thank you. 00:11:59.960 --> 00:11:59.980 Thank you. 00:12:29.960 --> 00:12:29.980 Thank you. 00:12:59.960 --> 00:12:59.980 Thank you. 00:13:29.960 --> 00:13:59.960 Thank you. 00:13:59.960 --> 00:13:59.980 Thank you. 00:14:29.960 --> 00:14:29.980 Thank you. 00:14:59.960 --> 00:15:29.960 Thank you. 00:15:29.960 --> 00:15:59.960 Thank you. 00:15:59.960 --> 00:16:29.960 Thank you. 00:16:29.960 --> 00:16:59.940 Thank you. 00:16:59.960 --> 00:17:29.960 Thank you. 00:17:29.960 --> 00:17:59.940 Thank you. 00:17:59.960 --> 00:17:59.980 Thank you. 00:18:29.960 --> 00:18:59.960 Thank you. 00:18:59.960 --> 00:19:29.960 Thank you. 00:19:29.960 --> 00:19:59.960 Thank you. 00:19:59.960 --> 00:20:29.960 00:20:29.960 --> 00:20:59.960 Thank you. 00:20:59.960 --> 00:21:29.960 Thank you. 00:21:29.980 --> 00:21:32.019 We it's we're looking put. 00:21:32.019 --> 00:21:38.779 becoming more and more and more subdivided as we add categories that divide one group from another. 00:21:38.920 --> 00:21:44.519 We are subdividing ourselves into smaller and smaller and smaller special interest groups. 00:21:44.660 --> 00:21:50.859 And when we do that, we are building walls. You have nothing to say to me. You have nothing to 00:21:50.859 --> 00:21:57.079 offer me. You can't ever understand what it's like to be me. We are building walls. And it's 00:21:57.079 --> 00:22:03.539 tearing our social fabric apart. And Paul is saying the God that we worship, the God that we need, 00:22:03.539 --> 00:22:09.559 is the God who doesn't operate according to our categories. The God who doesn't give a flip about 00:22:09.559 --> 00:22:16.299 our categories. The God who shows no partiality whatsoever. The God who sees every human being 00:22:16.299 --> 00:22:22.399 as a beautiful creation that he crafted with his own hands. Someone who bears his image, 00:22:22.400 --> 00:22:29.700 even if they reject him, even if they spurn his love. Paul says what we need is a God whose desire 00:22:29.700 --> 00:22:37.460 is to draw everyone everywhere together in his son, Jesus Christ, as one great family once again. 00:22:37.860 --> 00:22:45.720 That's who we need. So, so far we've seen two things. Paul says the God that you need is the God who made 00:22:45.720 --> 00:22:52.620 everything, who you can't curate. The God that you need is the God who unites us together in one common 00:22:52.620 --> 00:22:59.480 humanity, who doesn't operate by our categories. And the last thing that we see, that we have time to 00:22:59.480 --> 00:23:05.759 look at, is this. That this God, the God that we need, is the God who is able to give meaning to our lives. 00:23:07.759 --> 00:23:12.539 Every human being wants to know what life is all about. Every human being wants to know what their life 00:23:12.539 --> 00:23:19.599 means, if anything. In Athens, there were two major philosophical schools that attempted to answer 00:23:19.599 --> 00:23:24.899 this question. First, we had the Epicureans. And Paul had interacted with both of these groups 00:23:24.899 --> 00:23:30.079 quite a bit. We see from the way Paul speaks to them that he has a deep working knowledge of their 00:23:30.079 --> 00:23:34.920 various philosophical viewpoints. And so, the Epicureans were people who believed that the gods, 00:23:35.039 --> 00:23:42.359 if there were even gods, and that was debated, were far away. They were distant. They weren't 00:23:42.359 --> 00:23:50.240 concerned with the affairs of human mortal beings. And so, the Epicurean vision of life said, you know, 00:23:50.299 --> 00:23:56.740 the gods, if they're even there, they don't care about you. They don't care about your life and your 00:23:56.740 --> 00:24:05.179 piddly little conflicts. So, life is about having the most pleasurable, the quietest, the most peaceful 00:24:05.179 --> 00:24:10.719 life you can. Don't concern yourself with destiny. Don't concern yourself with purpose. Don't concern 00:24:10.720 --> 00:24:18.140 yourself with the afterlife. Just get the most you can while you're here out of your life. The Stoics, 00:24:18.259 --> 00:24:25.000 by contrast, were pantheistic, meaning they believed that God was more like an impersonal force that could 00:24:25.000 --> 00:24:33.140 be found everywhere in all things. And so, for them, life was actually about trying to tap into and align 00:24:33.140 --> 00:24:40.500 yourself with that divine inner presence, that divine spark inside you. And so, there was a high focus on 00:24:40.500 --> 00:24:47.200 the cultivation of virtue as a way of aligning yourself with the divine. And as you hear these, 00:24:47.299 --> 00:24:53.299 you may realize what's actually true, that there are versions of Epicureanism and Stoicism that persist 00:24:53.299 --> 00:24:59.140 in cultures around the world today. They never went away. They just sort of change form. They adopt. 00:24:59.279 --> 00:25:06.500 They evolve. They fall under new labels. But today, you might see Epicureanism or Epicurean ideas 00:25:06.500 --> 00:25:13.200 in modern Western spirituality, right? It's a kind of deism that assumes if there is a God, he's not 00:25:13.200 --> 00:25:17.099 really concerned about our day-in, day-out lives, and he just wants us to be happy. He's there to give us 00:25:17.099 --> 00:25:23.859 the thumbs up, right? Stoicism persists today, and that tends to resemble some of the Eastern religions. 00:25:24.039 --> 00:25:29.440 There's been a lot written on the parallels between Stoicism and Buddhist philosophy or Stoicism 00:25:29.440 --> 00:25:36.299 and Hinduism, right? These days, though, we're not just limited to these two philosophical schools 00:25:36.299 --> 00:25:43.799 of thought. We can go almost anywhere, and people actually look almost anywhere to find a source of 00:25:43.799 --> 00:25:50.640 meaning in their lives, right? So, people look to anything to give them a sense of meaning and 00:25:50.640 --> 00:25:54.860 purpose. So, again, because of the week that we've just had, I think it's germane to talk about 00:25:54.859 --> 00:26:00.419 the election and the fact that many people we know, including probably some of us, if we're honest, 00:26:01.179 --> 00:26:08.479 tend to derive our entire sense of meaning from political activism. I have close friends and 00:26:08.479 --> 00:26:14.139 family who I think derive almost all of their sense of meaning in life. The reason they get up in the 00:26:14.139 --> 00:26:21.019 morning is political activism. And so, Paul speaks directly to these various schools of thought. In verse 26, 00:26:21.019 --> 00:26:28.119 he says that God made everyone, and then he says, quote, having determined allotted periods and the 00:26:28.119 --> 00:26:33.579 boundaries of their dwelling place. Verse 27, that they should seek God and perhaps feel their way 00:26:33.579 --> 00:26:39.720 toward Him and find Him. So, this is a powerful statement of meaning and purpose in the human life. 00:26:39.799 --> 00:26:44.599 To the Epicureans, he says, you know, the Epicureans, people who thought that God was far away and 00:26:44.599 --> 00:26:49.819 unconcerned, to those people, Paul is saying, God's not far away, He's right here. 00:26:51.019 --> 00:26:58.779 He is with you right now. And He is intimately involved in the details of your life, where you 00:26:58.779 --> 00:27:06.039 live, how you grow up, who your mom and dad were, who your siblings are, where you went to school, 00:27:06.539 --> 00:27:12.619 all of the experiences, the good, the painful, the bad, the ugly, all of those experiences in one way or 00:27:12.619 --> 00:27:18.299 another, God is intimately involved in those things, right? And then to the Stoics, Paul says, 00:27:18.299 --> 00:27:25.000 God is not simply this impersonal force that dwells in everything in the world. God is a 00:27:25.000 --> 00:27:30.700 personal being. He's a relational being. He's a being who exists outside of you. He's the being who 00:27:30.700 --> 00:27:35.559 made all of this, and He's a being who wants a relationship with you. And a relationship is only 00:27:35.559 --> 00:27:44.299 possible between persons. This God wants to know you, to have a relationship with you. 00:27:44.299 --> 00:27:49.500 So what this tells us, and we're going to get more into these themes next week, but what this tells us 00:27:49.500 --> 00:27:58.579 is your birth wasn't random. You weren't randomly assigned a family by genetic fate, right? The fact 00:27:58.579 --> 00:28:05.779 that you grew up when you did and where you did and with whom you did was intentional. God decided, 00:28:06.180 --> 00:28:11.119 I want this particular person here. I want this particular person here. I want this particular 00:28:11.119 --> 00:28:15.679 person here with these people facing these challenges, overcoming these obstacles. I want 00:28:15.679 --> 00:28:22.839 them here, right here, right now. That's what Paul's saying. So think of the people that we know 00:28:22.839 --> 00:28:27.799 show us this in the Bible. Think about Joseph, right? He was tragically betrayed by his brothers and 00:28:27.799 --> 00:28:33.839 sold into slavery, and for years he's thought to be dead by his father. But thanks to the blessing of 00:28:33.839 --> 00:28:40.339 God, rises in stature in the Egyptian government. And then many years later, when his brothers come 00:28:40.339 --> 00:28:46.179 desperate, looking for aid because of a famine, Joseph is the one who has to decide their fate, 00:28:46.599 --> 00:28:50.819 right? And many people would say, you wronged me. I'm going to wrong you back. Go and die a horrible 00:28:50.819 --> 00:28:56.759 death. But not Joseph, because Joseph believes that God determined and allotted the boundaries of his 00:28:56.759 --> 00:29:02.939 dwelling. God didn't abandon me. God was with me in all of this. And so his interpretation is to say, 00:29:02.939 --> 00:29:09.720 you know, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. That's unbelievably transforming, 00:29:09.720 --> 00:29:14.680 right? Think about Esther. We looked at Esther not too long ago in our church. The Jewish people are 00:29:14.680 --> 00:29:21.559 facing annihilation. They're about to be wiped out. And Esther happens to find herself high up in the 00:29:21.559 --> 00:29:27.380 Persian government, right? And think of Mordecai coming to her and saying that Esther has been brought 00:29:27.380 --> 00:29:33.920 to the Persian court for such a time as this to intervene and save her people. Seemingly random events 00:29:33.920 --> 00:29:39.720 knitted together in a tapestry of redemption and salvation, right? So according to Paul, 00:29:39.880 --> 00:29:46.440 this isn't extraordinary with God. This is ordinary. This is normal, mundane reality when you know the true 00:29:46.440 --> 00:29:54.060 God. In other words, every single one of us is like Joseph or Esther. We can all say the same thing. 00:29:54.059 --> 00:30:02.619 I'm here for such a time as this, right? What the world, what my family, what co-workers, what that 00:30:02.619 --> 00:30:10.119 horrible boss, what the person who abused me, what they meant for evil. Somehow, in some mysterious way, 00:30:10.700 --> 00:30:18.220 God was in it. God was working through it somehow. And this completely transforms how we make meaning 00:30:18.220 --> 00:30:22.819 of our lives, right? It transforms how we think about the election, which has been very traumatic for many 00:30:22.819 --> 00:30:28.939 people. What it tells us is that no matter who sits in the Oval Office, God's purposes are not thwarted. 00:30:30.259 --> 00:30:38.519 God's purposes are not thwarted, right? The Bible has powerful people or powerful examples of God using 00:30:38.519 --> 00:30:44.599 pagan political leaders like Cyrus for his purposes, whether they know it or not. God can use people 00:30:44.599 --> 00:30:50.599 whether they believe in him or not, right? So the idea that if God's man isn't elected, that somehow we 00:30:50.599 --> 00:30:55.079 have failed or that God has failed or that all is lost or that God now doesn't have power over the 00:30:55.079 --> 00:30:59.799 direction of our country, that idea, in my opinion, is more of a pagan idea than a Christian idea. 00:30:59.839 --> 00:31:05.000 Because unlike the Greco-Roman pantheon, the God of the Bible is sovereign over all human affairs. 00:31:06.179 --> 00:31:09.179 His purposes can never be thwarted. That's what it means to be sovereign. 00:31:11.219 --> 00:31:14.419 All right, so it changes how we think about the election. It transforms how we think about the pandemic. 00:31:14.420 --> 00:31:21.960 We believe that sickness and death are the result of sin. It's part of what it means to live in a broken 00:31:21.960 --> 00:31:29.120 world. But I know people who have gotten sick, who have lost loved ones, who have lost their jobs, 00:31:29.480 --> 00:31:34.640 who have struggled financially. I know people who have every right to complain, every right to shake 00:31:34.640 --> 00:31:40.440 their fist at God, right, according to how most people think. But I know people like this who are 00:31:40.440 --> 00:31:44.759 looking at their suffering and they're saying, you know, I don't know, I wish this hadn't happened 00:31:44.759 --> 00:31:53.279 to me. It's been hard. But God has been in it. I feel closer to God than I ever have before. My prayer 00:31:53.279 --> 00:32:00.220 life is richer. And more than that, I can see how God is using these experiences to completely change 00:32:00.220 --> 00:32:06.880 how I think about my priorities, where I spend my time, right, how I spend my money, how I spend my energy. 00:32:06.880 --> 00:32:13.880 People are completely rethinking their lives and seeing God's fingerprints on that change. 00:32:14.940 --> 00:32:20.540 It transforms how we make sense of and think about our past, our own childhood, the family we grow up 00:32:20.540 --> 00:32:25.960 in, right? I was actually just a couple of weeks ago talking with a friend of mine who's a black 00:32:25.960 --> 00:32:31.300 Christian man who grew up in a majority white setting, right? He went to a white neighborhood, 00:32:31.299 --> 00:32:38.899 white, mostly white church, white school. And he was talking about how hard it is because the culture 00:32:38.899 --> 00:32:43.799 these days, there are a lot of people telling him that he should be angry, that he should be angry at 00:32:43.799 --> 00:32:47.839 his parents, that he should be angry that that happened to him, that he was robbed of his death 00:32:47.839 --> 00:32:55.139 ethnic identity, or worse, that he's living as a sellout. And he quoted this verse to me. He quoted Acts 17. 00:32:55.140 --> 00:33:01.380 And he said, you know, when I look at my life, I believe that God determined the boundaries of my 00:33:01.380 --> 00:33:06.740 dwelling. And then what he said is, he says, you know, I believe that God gave me these experiences 00:33:06.740 --> 00:33:13.160 because he's called me to a ministry of reconciliation. And all my life, he's been preparing me for that. 00:33:14.540 --> 00:33:21.020 Right now, nobody else can tell him that, right? But because he believes in a God who's determines the 00:33:21.019 --> 00:33:26.500 boundaries of our dwellings, a God who's intimately involved in the details of our life, he trusts God 00:33:26.500 --> 00:33:31.460 when he tries to make sense of his childhood. He trusts God's purposes in it. 00:33:33.720 --> 00:33:38.539 So all of these examples point to the truth that the God that we need is the God who is sovereign 00:33:38.539 --> 00:33:43.799 over all human affairs, a God who gives meaning and purpose to our lives. And here's the truth for 00:33:43.799 --> 00:33:48.180 you to consider this morning. You will never know your purpose in life apart from that God. 00:33:51.019 --> 00:33:58.740 You'll never know it apart from a relationship with him. So I encourage you, ask God why you're 00:33:58.740 --> 00:34:05.299 here. Ask God what his purposes in your life are. There's a reason that God put you here. 00:34:08.400 --> 00:34:15.619 So perhaps the most important decision that we need to make in our lives is this. Not am I going to 00:34:15.619 --> 00:34:24.259 worship, but whom will I worship? Will I worship the God that I think I want? Or will I worship the 00:34:24.259 --> 00:34:31.880 God that I truly need? As we've seen, the God that we want is a God who can be remade into our image. 00:34:32.880 --> 00:34:40.219 But the God that we need is the God who can remake us into his. The God we think we want is tribalistic, 00:34:40.219 --> 00:34:47.779 right? He's for me and my people. He's against my enemies. But the God we need is the God who unites 00:34:47.779 --> 00:34:56.459 us in a common humanity. The God we think we want is far away, uninvolved, impersonal, incapable of a 00:34:56.459 --> 00:35:00.919 relationship or doesn't care about having a relationship and lets us do whatever we want as a result. 00:35:00.920 --> 00:35:09.960 But the God that we truly need is personally and intimately involved and has orchestrated all 00:35:09.960 --> 00:35:15.559 time and space around one central mission to reclaim you for himself. 00:35:18.860 --> 00:35:23.619 And the good news of the gospel is this. As Paul says in verse 27, 00:35:23.619 --> 00:35:34.659 the God you truly need is not far away. He's right here. And in fact, he went so far as to send his son 00:35:34.659 --> 00:35:42.980 into the world and through his death and resurrection, he's opened the way for us to come to him in faith 00:35:42.980 --> 00:35:50.940 and to be forgiven and restored. And one day, along with the world, remade. 00:35:50.940 --> 00:35:57.039 Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for your word. And again, 00:35:58.220 --> 00:36:05.200 only you know what we need to hear because you, unlike us, are intimately involved in the hearts 00:36:05.200 --> 00:36:11.079 and lives of each person listening. And so I simply ask you to be the God that you are, the God that 00:36:11.079 --> 00:36:16.920 we need, the God who's able to speak to us in ways no one else can. And I pray that you would 00:36:16.920 --> 00:36:24.220 you would kindle in us faith, hope, and an assurance that we are deeply, deeply loved. 00:36:25.099 --> 00:36:27.360 We pray this in your son's holy name. Amen.