Remember Star Trek? Remember how it started with the Captain’s log? These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise, its continuing mission to explore strange new worlds and to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Let me ask you a question, if all of your programs and efforts were producing at 100% of their capacity, would you be changing the world? Are we still “boldly going?” Who are we closest to? Or are we really just light years apart from even those sitting closest to us?
Acts 17
16 While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. 17 So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks,
Here we see humanity crying out for God, a city so disconnected with God that they have idols for every human thought just to cover their bases, this disturbs Paul…..so? If that’s the case why does Paul go to the local synagogue? Doesn’t that seem disconnected, doesn’t that seem unrelated?
Let me ask you a question, does ‘doing church’ change the world? Because it is what I would call, our FIRST SPACE. It’s where we feel comfortable.
- We feel comfortable in our first space.
- we like people who are like us
- but shouldn’t we like people who are different than us?
- Do atheists feel comfortable in our first space?
- even if it is YOUR community, everyone needs to feel like they belong to something
Acts 17
17 So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there.
- Our SECOND SPACE is the world
- We tell Christians to become relevant and to get back into the world but that should be the most natural thing….
- if church isn’t a place that the world feels comfortable in, what did we do to disengage them?
- What do we do to keep ourselves relevant to the world?
- I know people think as a pastor I am not a relevant person, when I tell people I am a pastor it’s like telling people, “hey, I’m a cannibal want to have lunch?” I come up with creative things instead, I tell people “I am a futurist.”
- Seekers are not looking for the next best apologetical sermon or great debaters – they are looking for presence.
- “Tell me all your thoughts on God.”
- We are afraid of the SECOND SPACE
- because here we have no fans, we have to earn the right to be heard
Acts 17
18 A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.
And look at these next verses….
19 Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? 20 You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we would like to know what they mean.”
Four words…. THEN THEY TOOK HIM
It’s here in this last space that Paul is able to say….
22 Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.
- The THIRD SPACE is a place you can only go to when you are taken.
a. here, you have to earn your right to be present
34 Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.
b. and at first people will begin to follow YOU
c. because YOU are the only Christ they know, and you then lead them to Christ.
How does this happen? If you stay in your first space, you are only going to reach people like Mary and Martha and Thomas – but out in the third space, you get to reach Dionysius, a guy named after the pagan God of drunkenness. How does that happen?
How do you take your ministries from reaching Thomas to Dionysius?
Do we really only want to be popular in the first space?
Jesus said in John 3:17
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
And then a little later in John 10:10
I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
We need to boldly go into these new spaces and begin to change the world. People all around us are thirsting for this gospel, and although they are next to us on buses, sit next to us in coffee houses, on airplanes, in class – we act as if they are light years apart.
Boldly go
