In Christianity, idolatry is traditionally understood as the act of worshiping something or someone other than the one true God. Worship, in this context, typically implies acts of adoration, dependence, and prioritization. This definition often conjures images of carved idols or golden statues—physical objects revered in place of God. Yet, the New Testament broadens this concept, equating greed with idolatry. This perspective invites us to rethink idolatry’s implications for our spiritual lives and interactions with the world around us.
Continue reading “The Hidden Idolatry of Modern Christianity”Tag: christianity
Effective Evangelism: Spiritual Insights from Acts
The phrase “ends of the Earth” as it appears in the book of Acts pertains to those who are far from God. Acts chronicles a great deal of evangelistic activity, yet it offers only a few instances where we are provided with detailed accounts of the messages shared with people who are in this category. These examples warrant closer examination to uncover insights about the methods used and their outcomes.
In one such example, Paul and Barnabas visit the city of Lystra (Acts 14:8-18). Here, Paul performs a miraculous healing of a lame beggar, which evokes a dramatic response from the townspeople. Believing that Paul and Barnabas are manifestations of their gods, Hermes and Zeus, the people prepare to offer them worship. This reaction is linked to a regional myth about the gods previously visiting in disguise and being overlooked, leading the people of Lystra to vow not to repeat the mistake. Paul and Barnabas reject this misplaced veneration, redirecting the crowd’s attention to the one true God. Interestingly, Acts does not record Paul explicitly mentioning Jesus in this instance. The outcome? There is no mention of conversions, and Paul and Barnabas eventually move on to the next city, seemingly leaving behind a community unchanged by their message.
Athens presents a starkly different scenario (Acts 17:16-34). Paul engages with the local populace in the agora, or marketplace, which leads to his invitation to address the learned elite on Mars Hill. His speech here stands out for its cultural resonance: Paul begins with the Athenians’ own worldview, referencing their religious practices and even quoting Greek poets to introduce them to the concept of the one true God. From this foundation, he moves on to the subject of Jesus and the resurrection. The results in Athens were more mixed: some listeners believed, while others expressed a desire to hear more, and still others dismissed him outright. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that Paul tailored his approach to align with the intellectual and cultural framework of his audience, resulting in tangible spiritual fruit.
Later in Acts, Paul finds himself arrested in Jerusalem, leading to an audience with King Agrippa (Acts 26:1-32). Given this opportunity, Paul shares his personal testimony, recounting his dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus. Rather than addressing Agrippa’s specific concerns or context, Paul focuses on his own story. The outcome is clear: Agrippa is unmoved, dismissing Paul’s appeal and showing no interest in embracing Christianity.
It is worth noting that the examples above are the primary instances in Acts where messages are delivered to those far outside the Jewish faith or the category of “God-fearers”—non-Jews who already believed in the God of Israel and needed to be introduced to Jesus. Among these three encounters, Paul’s only apparent success was with the intellectuals at Mars Hill. A possible reason for this lies in his method. Unlike in Lystra or before Agrippa, Paul at Mars Hill made deliberate use of the listeners’ cultural context and knowledge to frame his message.
In contrast, Paul’s approach in Lystra seems detached from the people’s preoccupations. The townspeople’s focus on their local myth appears to be ignored or unacknowledged in Paul’s exhortation. His message is a generalized appeal to accept the God of Israel, devoid of specific references to Jesus. Similarly, with Agrippa, Paul relies solely on recounting his personal spiritual journey, without any evident attempt to connect with the king’s unique perspective or concerns.
This leads to a broader reflection on the effectiveness of Paul’s strategies. Could it be that these accounts reveal the importance of speaking not just from personal conviction but in a manner that resonates with the audience? Paul is often assumed to have always spoken under the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit, yet Acts does not explicitly affirm this in every instance. The varying outcomes—particularly the apparent lack of conversions in Lystra and with Agrippa—might suggest that even Paul had to navigate the challenges of effective communication and cultural engagement.
Indeed, Paul later requests prayer for boldness and clarity in proclaiming the Gospel (eg, Eph. 6:19 and Col. 4:4), an acknowledgment that effective evangelism requires divine empowerment as well as thoughtful preparation. This is what I’ve termed “speaking in power” in this blog, and highlights a significant tension in Christian witness: the balance between faithfulness to the message and adaptability to the audience’s needs. The examples in Acts remind us that successful communication of the Gospel often requires humility, contextual sensitivity, and reliance on the Holy Spirit.
Modern Legalism
One of the goals of this blog is to seek an understanding of what’s not working in today’s church, at least from the standpoint of evangelism. The letter to the Laodiceans, for example, is useful for suggesting areas to look at.
One of the things that came up there, for example, is the prevalence of legalism today. In the letter, Jesus’ direction to buy white clothing could be interpreted as being a move away from legalism, suggesting that legalism was one of the things causing the Laodiceans to be lukewarm.
However, I did not define “legalism”, and it would be helpful to think through that at least a little.
In the New Testament, the clearest use of the term was to refer to the Old Testament Law, the Torah. Paul wrote about the error of believing that obedience to the Torah was the key to being saved. Instead, he taught that faith in Christ was key, that the Law was a kind of pointer to our need for Him.
This wasn’t an entirely new idea, because in the Old Testament, prophets pointed out that even performing a good sacrifice, for example, wasn’t acceptable if the people’s hearts weren’t right.1
Now, Christians today generally don’t follow the Torah, or believe it to be a key part of salvation, but the idea of following rules still exists in other forms. It can start by thinking of the Bible as a sort of rule book, with a list of dos and don’ts that must be followed.
For example, it’s possible to believe we must dress properly for church in order to be acceptable to God, perhaps even that He will punish us somehow for not doing so. There are many variations on this theme, but the most extreme version may be to believe that we need to perform certain actions in order to ensure our salvation. Someone may believe that they need to tithe or they won’t go to heaven, for example.
Usually, though, this sort of legalism doesn’t go so far that Christians worry about their own salvation.
It seems much more common for us to believe that other people’s behaviors affect their salvation. It’s easy to find examples of Christians condemning someone else’s actions so strongly as to say that, unless they change their actions, they cannot be saved. This causes Christians to focus on the actions of unsaved people, rather than their relationship with God.
I think this is a very clear example of modern legalism, in which we revert to the idea that obedience to some sort of law, such as the Bible as a rulebook, is necessary for salvation. In that view, trusting in Jesus might also be needed, of course, but it’s not enough without following the rules.
So when I talk about legalism in this blog, I’m talking mainly about this last perspective, that some sort of rule following is necessary to be saved, and especially when this view is presented to people outside the faith.
- See, Hosea 6:6, Isaiah 1:10-17, Amos 5:21-24, Micah 6:6-8. ↩︎
Pentecost and the End of Slavery
Pentecost is often seen to be the start of the church, as the Holy Spirit filled the small band of believers. Sometimes focus is placed on the result of the Spirit’s filling, namely speaking in tongues, as an indication of the presence of the Spirit. Others see the primary impact to be the fellowship that existed shortly after this event as more and more people entered the community.
In this blog, we’ve looked at the effectiveness of Peter’s speech, how it was the first example of Jesus’ statement that the Father would give us words to speak of Him, and how this example was followed by others in Acts, modeled by Paul’s prayer requests, and described in the theology in his letters.
I think that there’s another way of looking at the Spirit’s effects in the lives of the early believers, and that is to consider the difference between freeing slaves and ending slavery that I discussed earlier. In that discussion, slavery was used as both a literal problem and as a metaphor for the many ways that people are subject to the kingdom of this world, rather than the kingdom of God. The idea is that, while it is good to free slaves, to help people whenever we can in whatever ways we can, it is better to remove the institutions of slavery completely.
Continue reading “Pentecost and the End of Slavery”Lukewarm Tools
On its own, humanity lives enslaved to a worldly system of excessive pleasure, greed, and selfish pride.
Jesus proclaimed freedom, the coming of the kingdom of God, in which such slavery would no longer exist. All forms of slavery that could not be eliminated through natural means would be eliminated as He sent His disciples out to announce this good news and bring about the kingdom, changing the nature of the world. To be effective at this work, the disciples learned to be channels through which the Spirit worked to change hearts, not just minds.
From the beginning, Christians followed this call in ways that overtook empires and changed society, altering the very fabric of Western civilization. When freeing slaves looked like healing people, ending slavery looked like establishing hospitals, advancing medicine. Reading and writing became ubiquitous as formal education was made widely available even up to university levels, and the institution of literal slavery itself was dismantled. All these are examples of the Spirit working through those who had more in order to help those with less.
Today, however, we have gone back to natural means for establishing God’s rule, relying on human capabilities. Through things like rationality, organization, and legalism, we have worked to change circumstances and behavior. This seems successful as we continue to free slaves, but falls short of both Jesus’ command and the early church’s example of ending slavery. Many of our efforts today reach only some of those who need to hear of God’s love, and so limit the degree to which the kingdom can advance.
Perhaps as Western society flourished as a largely Christian place, we became complacent to the spiritual needs around us. Perhaps we have allowed ourselves to feel good about freeing the occasional slave while leaving slavery itself intact. However, being a good steward of God’s grace means bringing reconciliation to society, not just individuals.
So, while we’re patting ourselves on the back for how many slaves we’ve freed, Jesus stands at the door, calling us out of lukewarmness with offers of His Spirit.
Creating God
There is a popular quote that expresses the ease with which we can deceive ourselves when it comes to understanding God:
“You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” ― Anne Lamott11
The quote makes the point that we tend to map our own preferences and biases onto God so that our image of Him is really just a projection of our own selves.
Although this quote was mainly about our relationships and how we think of other people, it seems the principle can also be applied elsewhere. In fact, there is probably a danger of mapping many of our own theological perspectives onto God, not just how we think about people.
Continue reading “Creating God”Idolatry and Mars Hill
Although there are various expressions of Christianity, many different denominations, one thing that is common is the belief that idolatry is a sin. In fact, perhaps one of the chief sins.
After all, the Ten Commandments clearly forbids it, and idolatry is clearly taught against all through the Old Testament, especially in the prophetic writings. The Jews were so strongly monotheistic that Rome gave them special leeway to practice their religion. Christians picked this up, of course, and were thus known as “atheists” because they did not believe in the deity of Caesar, only in the one true God.
Against this historical and theological backdrop, it’s interesting to look at Paul’s speech on Mar’s Hill.
When Paul was in Athens, he was very troubled by the amount of idolatry on display there. He started to speak about Jesus in the public square and as a result was asked to speak at the Areopagus, a group of intellectual Greeks. Among the things that they commented on was that he seemed to be speaking of “foreign divinities”.
Given all these things, one would expect a scathing polemic against idolatry and a clear declaration of God as the one true deity, incarnated in the one true Lord, Jesus Christ.
Continue reading “Idolatry and Mars Hill”Exploring Antioch and Laodicea
As discussed in earlier posts, I think that evangelism – proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God – is a key aspect of the Christian faith. It’s a vital part of the way we should live in this world, which is why Jesus pointed to it many times, trained and sent out disciples, focused the disciples on it in the beginning of Acts, and perhaps even why God has given us the book of Acts as the main picture of the early church.
Given the clear directive and the amount of effort put into evangelism, one would expect continual growth of the kingdom. However, this clearly isn’t happening, and it seems to many people that the world is getting spiritually darker every day. Whatever tactics are being used today to grow the kingdom, it’s clearly not working.
Trying to understand this led me to the letter to the Laodiceans in Revelations. In that letter, Jesus rebukes the church in Laodicea as being lukewarm, which in the context of the letter, likely meant that the church was ineffective and not fulfilling its purpose, just like both cool refreshing water and hot healing water became unpleasant, even useless, when piped from their sources to Laodicea, because the water was lukewarm.
Continue reading “Exploring Antioch and Laodicea”Remembering Resurrection
For many Christians today, it seems that the world is getting darker all the time. Not just in statistics like dropping church attendance, but in the growing secularism of many of our systems, the growing acceptance of immoral behavior in our leaders, the growing wealth disparity and other signs of a greed-dominated culture, and so on. In many cases, people still describe themselves as spiritual even when they stop associating with any specific religion, so the need is there, it just isn’t being met by Christianity.
Of course, there are many theories, books, and pundits that try to explain these observations, for most part focusing on the social, psychological, and sometimes even spiritual, trends of the last century or so. However, I’ve also noticed, really highlighted by the Covid pandemic, how different many of our beliefs and practices are from the early church.
Continue reading “Remembering Resurrection”Breaking Natural Cycles
When people look at trends in society, especially their relationships with history, it’s common to point out times when similar things happen over and over. This is sometimes captured by the statement that “those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”.1 Beyond that, various people have suggested that history proceeds through cycles, that similar behavior happens over and over, regardless of the political situation. It would seem that such cycles occur in varying situations because human nature itself is constant, so that large groups of humans will inevitably follow similar behavioral patterns.
For those who seek to make improvements to human society, it seems these cycles need to be addressed. But any attempt to break out of them would run into the same issue of unchanging human nature. Regardless of the social and political systems that we come up with, they don’t change our nature. And without a change to our nature, there will always be a tension drawing societies back to the same behavior.
Continue reading “Breaking Natural Cycles”
Exploring Antioch 