Acts 17:23 (NIV) “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.”

As the Apostle Paul was making his way around Greece, He came to Athens. There he found that the city was full of idols. As he spoke to the people about the one true God, he got into a conversation with some Greek philosophers who then invited him to a meeting of the Areopagus, which was a council of philosophers, scholars, and former civic officials who gathered there. In order to make headway with them in speaking to them about Jesus, he referred them to an altar in the city that had the inscription, “To An Unknown God.” He used that as a launching point to tell them about this unknown God that they were honoring. With that, he proclaimed the gospel of Jesus to them.

This made me think of the multitudes of people in this world that also worship an unknown God. I mean unknown in the sense that they may worship Him formally as a religious practice or a tradition but who do not know Him personally. I know many who profess to be Christians that when you speak to them, it is obvious that they know very little about who He really is. They either see Him as God up in heaven or on a coarser note, “the man upstairs.” The point is, they may believe that God exists and that Jesus is the Son of God, but that’s about as far as it goes, They may even “say their prayers,” but they say them without knowing who they are really speaking to.

That’s a sad thing because Jesus came to earth to make the Father known to everyone, if they previously did not know Him. Obviously, God has been revealing Himself to mankind ever since Creation began, but it has always been only a remnant who have taken the time and who have made the effort to get to know this awesome, mighty, merciful and compassionate God. That is true even today. Out of the many people who attend church on any given Sunday in this country, only a remnant truly knows Him. The rest are in the same category as the Greek scholars and philosophers of Paul’s day who had an altar dedicated to an unknown god.

How about you? Do you truly know Jesus? Have you formed an intimate relationship with Him through prayer and through reading His Word? Is your heart captured by His love and does He have your devotion? Don’t be like the foolish people of Paul’s day or even the woefully ignorant people of today who don’t give the Lord much of a thought and who have only a passing association with Him if they have one at all. Love Jesus with all your heart. That happens when you get to know Him as your known God through constantly asking, seeking and knocking to get to know Him more and more.

Pastor Joey Vazquez