Acts, chapter 17 beginning at verse 22.

So Paul, standing in the middle of the Ariopagus, said,

Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious.

For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship,

I found also an altar with this inscription to an unknown God.

What therefore you worship as unknown?

This I proclaim to you, the God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of Heaven

and Earth, does not live in shrines made by men, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all

men life and breath and everything.

And he made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth, having determined

allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God in the hope that they might feel

after him and find him.

Yet he is not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being.

As even some of your poets have said, for we are indeed his offspring. Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is

like gold or silver or stone, a representation by the art and the imagination of man, the times of ignorance

God overlooked, but now he commands all men everywhere to repent because he is fixed a day on which he will judge the world in

righteousness by a man whom he has appointed and of this he has given assurance to all men by raising him from the dead.

The whole time that I was traveling in the Philippines and in Singapore I was asking the Lord every day almost what

texts should I try to expound on my return to Minneapolis in the first Sundays after I get back.

And the upshot of that reflection and that meditation was that I couldn't imagine just launching into a new series that had no connection with what I've

been thinking about for the past five weeks.

And so what I've decided to do is at least for these first two Sundays that I'm back, today

...