How do you share your Christian faith with someone who's excessively bright and unreasonably cynical?

That's a tough assignment. It's hard to find the best words and the right tone in order to engage in healthy conversation.

Today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindall provides a first-century role model.

In Acts Chapter 17, we see Paul standing before an audience of intellectual elites.

Paul chose not to scold them, but to engage them in a thoughtful conversation.

Are you looking for ways to connect with your unsaved friends?

Chuck titled today's message, Preaching as Paul preached.

Paul stood in the midst of the Ariopagus. You can visit the site today, as I have. The marble is slick from the overuse of tourists' shoes and sandals and bare feet. The steps that lead up to it are quite dangerous

because they are not only slippery,

they are now worn into a slope.

So you crawl up sort of hands and feet at the same time

to get to the place where Paul once stood.

The marble is not wasted away that much.

And you see the Parthenon that Paul saw.

The only thing missing is the city full of idols, at least the literal ones. And Paul said,

now here begins the sermon. Verse 22, if you like marking your Bible, with the words,

men of Athens, that's the beginning of the sermon. Six sentences later, it will take you two

minutes to read the sermon, which was interrupted as he finished prematurely at the end of verse 31,

referring to the raising of Jesus from the dead. He begins where they were, and like all good

sermons, he took them to where they needed to be. The reason Paul could speak as he spoke was because he felt what he felt,

and he felt what he felt because he saw what he saw. Great sermons began with the insight

of seeing what others no longer see,

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