About this sermon
In Athens Paul proclaimed to the philosophers the God they worshiped as unknown: the God who made the world and everything in it does not live in temples made by hands and is not served as though he needed anything. He gives to all mankind life and breath and everything, and in him we live and move and have our being. God is self-sufficient in every way, so his people depend on him for everything and give him all the glory.
Sermon transcript
Acts 17, I’ll be reading verses 22-31. Acts chapter 17, reading verses 22-31. Give ear to the reading of God’s Word. So Paul, standing in the midst of the Heraclius, 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 the unknown God. What therefore you worship is unknown. This I proclaim to you.
The God who made the world and everything in it, being the Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man. nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.
And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined the allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God and perhaps feel their way towards him and find him, yet he is actually not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own prophets have said, for we are indeed his offspring. Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art or imagination of man.
The times of ignorance God overlooked, and now He commands all people everywhere to repent, because He has 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, by raising Him from the dead.
Amen to the reading of God’s Word. Let us look to the Lord in prayer and ask Him His wisdom. Let us pray. Our God, we thank You for Your Word, for its command for the truth, for its command for us to hear, for its command for us to obey. Lord, grant your Holy Spirit that we might understand. And if need be, pricked in the heart. If need be, Lord, embraced in faith. Lord, we thank you for this opportunity to come and gather. Lord, honor us with your presence and bless, Lord, your word to our hearts and to our souls. For I ask it, Lord, in your name. The name of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Amen. Amen.
I grew up out in Neusewickley Township. My residence has always been in Beaver County all my life. Out in Neusewickley Township, I grew up on a small farm, not large, but it was a farm. And we drew a lot of our own stuff. We had a garden. We sold things along the road. But also we had a lot to eat. We had tomatoes and potatoes and onions and lettuce and radishes. We had strawberries. We raised chickens. We raised beef. I had the grand champion baby beef steer of western Pennsylvania one time. Many times, everything that we had at the dinner table was from our own farm. But that does not mean that we were self-sufficient. We do a lot of things on our own. Make things, clothes, all that. We used to make only root beer. That was good.
No matter how much we do on our own, we are not self-sufficient. But God, God is totally self-sufficient in Himself. And it’s at the abundance of God’s own personal self-sufficiency that He meets our needs. We have needs. We have many needs. And God is so self-sufficient, and at His self-sufficiency, He is sufficient.
He is full of God in every way. in our Shuric Catechism. What is God? God is the Spirit. Infinite, eternal, and unchangeable is being, wisdom, power, holiness, goodness, justice, and truth. In His sufficiency, He is eternal and infinite and unchangeable. When you have a need, God is sufficient to meet that need. that we have. He is fully God in every way. Martin Luther said, let God be God. Oftentimes our idea of God is so small. And no matter how great our idea of God, it’s still too small. Because God is greater than what we can imagine in our finite minds. I’d like us to look tonight at God.
God in his sufficiency. And in his sufficiency, that He is able to meet our needs, that we might be sufficient for life in all things. We might think particularly about salvation. God is completely able, sufficient, to meet all of our needs for salvation, to take away all of our sin, all of our guilt, to give us righteousness, to make us perfectly Christ Jesus, one day to be glorified. As He is sufficient for our salvation, He is also sufficient for our lives. No matter what the need is that we have in this world, whether spiritual or any other, God is so sufficient, He is able to meet our need. And we have faith in that and live by that. God’s sufficiency is founded in his attribute of acidicy. That might be a new word. It was a new word for me when I began to study. God’s acidicy is the foundation of his self-sufficiency. Now what is acidicy? Acidicy is that God has life in himself. I said it means something that has life in itself.
And truly, the only one who has life in himself is God. And he draws unending energy from himself. He has life in himself, and he draws unending energy from himself. In John chapter 5, verse 26, we read, As the Father has life in Himself, so has He granted the Son also to have life in Himself. God has life in Himself. Jesus Christ has life in Himself. The Holy Spirit has life in Himself. God having life in Himself means that He is self-sufficient. He is self-sustaining. He is self-contained. He is self-existing. He is independent. God is life in Himself.
We need food. We need water. We need oxygen and all these things, but God needs none of that. God does not need any energy. He does not need gas power, natural gas. He doesn’t need coal or nuclear power. He doesn’t need any of these things that we know as energy in this world, because He is energy Himself. He does not need the sun, because He is light.
God is life, and all life is a gift from God, James 1, 17. Every good and perfect gift cometh down from the Father above, the Father of lights. He is life, and He gives life. God is life, John 1, 4 and 9. John 1, verse 4, And Him was life, and the life was the light of men. He was life, and He gave man life through that light. John 1, 9, The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into this world. Jesus Christ had that life, and He gives life. He has the energy, the ability. He is self-contained, self-existing. He is life and power.
I’ve tried to think of illustrations, because I realize this sometimes, you know, it’s about God. It’s hard to grasp things about how great God is, and God’s acidity is something that’s very hard to grasp onto and understand. I’ve tried to think of illustrations, because Christ used illustrations a lot, about nature and things like that. So I was trying to think of some kind of illustration, illustrate something that life in itself and is self-perpetuating.
There’s nothing. I thought about schools and how they have the children in the class do this echo biosphere. And they try to put plants and stuff in there where it will just keep living on its own. And what happens to them? If you ever had one, they die. We’ve tried it. Men tried to do it out west in Arizona. Some have a big one. People lived there for nine months or a year or something. It failed. It flopped. But God can exist on his own. He is able. He is self-sufficient. He has all energy, all power.
In visiting museums, I like to look at all sorts of mechanical things when I go to museums. In some museums, they have displays of machines. Perpetual machines. Perpetual motion machines. That when they’re started, they just keep going and running and running and running and running and they never stop. You know how they are in a museum? They’re just sitting there, not doing a thing. They depend on gravity or they depend on water, they depend on something else.
There’s no perpetual motion machine except God. He’s perpetual, always in motion. Powerful. The closest thing I can think of an illustration that we might know that is acidity, life in itself, would be the sun. It’s there. It gives life. We can see it. It seems perpetual, but what our sciences tell us it is running down.
We won’t see it in our lifetime, and maybe not in the Earth’s lifetime, but as the sun, God is greater than the sun in giving life and warmth and giving life to others and continuing on. We have references here in Acts chapter 17 about God’s self-sufficiency, his acidity. In verses 22 and following, we have these references of God.
I mean, Paul is in Athens. He’s talking to them who are very religious. He’s making reference to this idol that they had to the unknown God. And he says, I proclaim to you, Whenever a pastor stands up here, he’s proclaiming to you, God is proclaiming to you. And tonight I’m proclaiming to you that God is self-sufficient.
He has life in himself. He is sufficient to give you life for your every need. He’s proclaiming to them the one true God. in verse 25, “…nor is He served by human hands as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives all mankind life and breath and everything.” God doesn’t need anything from this world or from anyone else. He is indeed sufficient in and of Himself.
It says He gives everyone Verse 25, since he gives all mankind life, if anyone is living, it’s because God has given them life, according to the scriptures, what Paul is proclaiming. He’s given us breath. If you’re breathing, it’s because God has given you that breath. And everything And He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on the face of the earth, having determined the allotted periods, the times that they should live, when they should be born, when they should die, their allotted periods, and the boundaries of their dwelling place. He determined the places that we should live, that we should seek God and perhaps feel their way to God and find Him. In verse 28, it says, for in Him we live and move and have our being. Thinking about applications.
Having faith and believing in the sufficiency of God helps us in our fragile lives. We are very much aware how fragile our lives are, how quickly a life can be taken. In a matter of 30 seconds, nine people can be put to death with a gun. Life is fragile. How often I’ve heard at this time of the year, young people out in there practicing for sports. Suddenly a young man just falls dead. The breath is taken from him. His heart stops.
And we, if we’ve lived any years, we know how quickly someone might be here at church in the morning and not be here in the evening because God has taken them home. Life is fragile. We’re not too much better than a gnat that flies and sits down and we put our thumb on him. Life is fragile. Believing in a God who’s sufficient in every way helps us to live on day by day in these fragile lives that we live. We all have our allotted times.
I just got my real ID. I don’t know if you got your Real ID driver’s license, but just a couple of weeks ago, I went in and after going through all the loops and jumps and everything else, they gave me my Real ID. And on that Real ID, it tells me the date of my time when I began in this world. And one day, there’ll be a tombstone in a cemetery with the date. that my life here ended.
God knows those times. And in the time in between, He is sufficient to help us in these fragile lives that we live. God wants us to know that our lives are fragile. We’re to number our days rightly. God gave Israel a number of feasts, seven feasts he gave them.
They’re religious vacations that they would have each year. One of them that I would really like to participate in is the Feast of Booths. Remember the Feast of Booths? Every year, they would go out and live in tents or a loo tube outside. Why would they do that? To remember when they came out of Egypt and they lived in the desert for 40 years. Nothing there in the desert. But God gave them water, and God gave them food, God gave them meat. He provided for them. Their shoes did not wear out. It was to remind them that they are dependent upon God, and that God is sufficient to meet their every need. The Feast of Booths remind us that we are fragile, we are dependent, that we need God in our lives. If you will, turn over to Isaiah chapter 40. Isaiah chapter 40, I’d like to read verses 28 through 31 about our great God who is sufficient. Isaiah 40, beginning with verse 28. Have you not known Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary. His understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint. And to him who has no might, he increases strength. Even youths have faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted. But they that wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint.” God gives strength. He is sufficient. He’s the everlasting God. He does not faint, nor does He grow weary. We need Him. He doesn’t need us.
I retired just a few years ago, and one of the things I had to do when I retired to go through all my books in my library, I came across this one old college book of readings. I had a class in college where I had a speech. It didn’t help me much. I still try. The Lord helps me. But I had a speech class. I had a lot of speeches. I had speeches classes in elementary school. They’ve always tried to help me, but the Lord is good. But in this reading, I looked in this book of readings, and there’s a reading there that I had used in the reading class that I liked. I liked. But it has heresy in it. It’s real out and out heresy in it.
It was called The Creation, written by James Weldon Johnson. And it’s just a beautiful thing, picturing God as a man who decides he’s going to create the world, and he gathers up balls up some dirt and throws out the earth. He balls some more and throws the stars in the sky. And he walks on the earth and he makes the valleys and the mountains and he spits out the seven seas.
And then it says, God stepped out in space and he looked around and said, I’m lonely. He looked on his world with all its living things. And God said, I’m lonely still. Then God sat down on the side of a hill where he could think. By a deep, wide river he sat down. With his head in his hands, he thought and thought until he thought, I’ll make me a man. And it goes on how God stooped down on his knees and breathed in this lump of clay and it became a living being. And it’s delightful to read, but heresy.
God wasn’t lonely. He was self-sufficient. He has life in himself. He did not need to make this world. He did not need to create us. God is a trinity. And God has relationship and fellowship within himself. He did not need to make us in any way. He’s entirely self-sufficient, self-sustaining. There was no void in God that needed to be filled. God’s self-existence is a basic truth of self-sufficiency. Think about God’s self-existence. All these words help explain each other. God’s self-existence.
Psalm 92, before the mounds were brought forth, wherever you had formed the earth and the world from everlasting, everlasting your God. Psalm 93 to your throne is established from old. You are from everlasting. There is never a time that God didn’t exist. Genesis one, one in the beginning, God, there’s never a time that God did not exist. R.C. Sproul has written on his thought about the existence of God.
He said in his reasoning, his writing, If anything exists, then something has always existed. If there was ever absolutely nothing, then nothing could possibly be now, because you cannot get something from nothing. Conversely, if there is something now, then there is, and of itself demonstrates that there was always something. And that which always is exists in and of itself. That is, the one who has the power of being within himself. That’s the living God. If there is a time in which there is nothing, like some would seem to want to put forth, then what we’d have today is nothing. But there is something.
And if there’s something that exists now, then there is something that always existed. And what always existed had the power and the ability to make all that is here now in all the universe. It not only had the power to create this, but it also had the power to always exist.
And that’s the description of our God. He is a God who self-exists. He is a God who is self-sustaining. He does not, as we read in Isaiah 40, he does not faint or grow weary. God is not running out of power. He is independent of all. He doesn’t need any for help. He is self-contained. Think about Moses when he saw the burning bush and he pushed God, what’s your name? And God says, I am that I am. He’s always been, always will be, needs no one else. He’s self-contained. He’s self-contained, that we’re talking about in Exodus 3, 14 through 15. He’s self-contained. Once in a while, my wife will go, and I will go. I’m sorry, my wife’s not with me tonight. Her knee is having problems, and it’s hard to get around.
But sometimes we go to fairs, and we go to, the big exhibition hall in Pittsburgh, when we go to the trailers, the camping stuff, just to look, just to look. And once in a while you’ll see on a trailer that it’s self-contained. That everything is in that trailer that you need. Electric and power and septic and everything, that trailer is self, now think about that, a trailer that is self-contained. It’s a trailer.
There was one time some members of the church loaned us their RV for a short trip. It was just like being at home. You had all the problems at home. We had electrical problems, septic problems, along with mechanical problems. These things are now self-contained. God is totally self-contained. He’s not dependent on any other. He has life in Himself in every way. God does not need anything outside of Himself. He is independent, needs nothing from anyone.
He is truly self-sufficient, and from His abundance, He’s able to supply our needs. We are dependent, and we are made to need God. and others. We need oxygen, we need water, we need sun and food, and we need God. And out of His sufficiency, He’s able to meet all of our needs. In Him we can find contentment. In Him we can find satisfaction. In Him we can find pleasure, all the pleasures that we need. Our sufficiency for life is in God. Everything you need for your work, for your relationships, everything in this world is in Jesus Christ. And he receives all the praise and the glory because he is self-sufficient in every way.
Let us pray. Lord, we thank you that you teach us so much. And we thank you that we are dependent upon you. Forgive us when we try to do it ourselves in our own way. Lord, help us this week. Lord, I don’t know what’s ahead. There’s always challenges that feels like we cannot meet. But God, you’re able to. I thank you, oh God, for who you are. And help us to know more of you and your greatness. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen. Let us sing number 148B. Hallelujah! Praise Jehovah. 148B. Please stand to sing if you’re able.
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