There was a season in the 90s and early 2000s when a whole generation of youth groups learned to evangelize with a single question. It was called the good person test. You walked up to a stranger and asked, do you think you're a good person? Most people said yes. Then came the follow-ups. Have you ever murdered anyone? No. Well, Jesus said if you have hated your brother in your heart, you have committed murder. Have you ever stolen anything? Ever coveted? Ever lusted? Five questions in, you'd say, that's a five out of ten — a 50 percent. When I was in school, a 50 percent was an F. Do you still think you're a good person?
Picture about thirty teenagers between the ages of twelve and eighteen dropped off at the North Town Mall to run that play on strangers. It didn't work super well. It did work sometimes — a few people genuinely wanted to have a conversation, and some of them ended up in church. But as this Sunday's message put it, it was a one-size-fits-all call to evangelism. Acts 17 shows us something far better.
The Word That Started It All
In Acts 17:6, an angry mob drags a man named Jason before the city authorities and shouts that Paul and Silas are the men who have turned the world upside down. The Greek behind that phrase means to disturb, to trouble, to upset, to stir up, to unsettle, to overthrow. The picture is walking out into the river or the lake and feeling your feet hit the bottom, and the silt comes up, and the water goes cloudy. Things that had been left settled for a long time were no longer allowed to remain settled.
That is not a bug in the gospel. It is the design. When you hear it, it requires something of you. But notice the second word, from Paul's later letter back to that same church: how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God. That is a completely different verb — one that is immediate and decisive. English doesn't carry that force well. Tell your kids to take out the trash and it might happen in thirty-five or forty minutes, maybe later. Turning to God is not on that timeline. Which means a person can be genuinely stirred up and still never turn.
Three Cities, Three Doors
Thessalonica was the capital of Macedonia, a major cultural center with a large synagogue. Paul went there first, as was his custom, and for three Sabbaths he did four things: he reasoned, he explained, he proved, and he proclaimed. Some believed. And then the opposition came — but look at its motive. Luke says the Jews were jealous. Not offended by the doctrine. Jealous that more people were responding to Paul than to them. That temptation has not aged a day. Well, that church down the street has 7,000 members and we only have five, so they must be doing something wrong.
They ran that night to Berea — about fifty miles, roughly Sandpoint to Spokane, on foot, no horses, no carriages, after a full day of standing and debating in a synagogue and no sleep. And there Luke calls the people more noble, because they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. That habit is exactly what made Berea one of the most biblically grounded churches of the era. And when opponents walked those same fifty miles just to agitate the crowds — a level of pettiness that is genuinely hard to imagine — the Bereans knew the text well enough to answer them.
Athens: More Idols Than People
Athens was different. The navy was gone, the empire was gone, Rome was in charge, and what was left was philosophy and statuary. Around ten thousand people lived there, and the poets of the era wrote that there were more idols than residents. Two schools met Paul in the marketplace. The Epicureans held that the highest good is pleasure, specifically defined as freedom from pain, fear, and anxiety, and that the gods exist but keep their distance. The Stoics taught reason, harmony with nature, and self-sufficiency as the greatest good. Neither is unrecognizable today. One sounds like the person who says they're spiritual but not religious. The other sounds like a certain kind of North Idaho independence. Neither impulse is evil — but as we heard, nothing about lack of anxiety or fear or pain is bad; making that your good is.
So Paul stood in the Areopagus, an amphitheater on a cliffside with the sea behind him, and he did not open with an Old Testament prophecy. He pointed to an altar they had built to the unknown God — a catch-all, in case they had left a deity out and offended him — and said, what therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. Then, in about three sentences, he took their whole system apart. The God who made the world and everything in it does not live in temples made by man, in the city of temples made by man. He made from one man every nation of mankind, so Athens was not specially formed from Athenian dust after all. He is not distant; he determined their times and boundaries so that they would seek him. And to close, Paul quoted two of their own poets, Epimenides and Aratus, lines originally written about Zeus, and aimed them at the living God.
Your Altar, and Your Person
Then the message turned toward us, and it did not stay comfortable. We may not carve statues, but we build things. An altar to goodness — I go to church on Sundays, I tithe, I go to men's breakfast, I'm good enough. An altar to success — do you see what I've built? An altar to family security — I don't read my Bible, but I take care of my family, and God knows that's what's important. An altar to political power. And then one more, tucked in among the rest: a temple to the unknown God, which we visit on Sunday mornings. But the God who made the world and everything in it does not live in the temples we build for ourselves.
Which is why the closing question was not the one from the mall. The question this morning is not, are you a good person? The question is, have you turned from your idols to the living and true God? And if the answer is yes, there is a next step: go and do likewise. Most people will never walk through the doors of a church building — but this congregation will meet more people in a week than any Sunday service ever reaches. Go find the coworker who is spiritual but not religious. The friend who finds God in the mountains and the trees — ask him who he thinks made them. The neighbor who has been hurt by church people, who needs to see you live consistently long enough to trust you. The family member who thinks Christianity is fine, just not for them.
Some will get hostile. Keep going anyway. We don't need one rigid script. We need the same gospel, the same courage, the same willingness to adapt our approach. The world is still being turned upside down.