Acts 17:19-27

¹⁹So they took Paul to a meeting of the town council, and they asked him, “What are you telling everyone? Tell us what this new message is all about.

²⁰You are saying things that shock us, and we want to understand what you mean.”

²¹You see, the Athens people, and the people from other places that lived there, they liked to talk about new ideas all the time, and they liked to hear anything new that other people told them.

²²Then Paul stood up and talked to the council mob at Athens. He said, “I can see that you Athens mob think a lot about gods.

²³I walked around this town and I saw a lot of statues that you set up, to show respect to a lot of gods. And I saw another stone that you set up, and you wrote on it, ‘This is for that god that we don’t know.’ Hey, you show respect to him even though you don’t know him. But I do know him, so now I want to tell you all about him. I’ll tell you about that God that you don’t know.

²⁴He is the God that made all the world, and he made everything in the world. He is the boss of everybody everywhere. He is boss up in the sky and he is boss down here on the ground. So nobody can build a house big enough for him to live in.

²⁵And he doesn’t need us to do anything for him. You see, he is the one that makes us alive, and he gives us our breath, and he gives us everything we need.

²⁶At first he just made one man, then later we all came from that man, all of us in every tribe everywhere came from that man. God gave each tribe their own country, and he said where they can live and how long they can live there.

²⁷He did this so that we can look around for him and try to find him. But really, he is not very far away from any of us.