Acts 17:19-30

¹⁹So they laid hold of him and took him to the Court of Areopagus. “May we hear,” they asked, “what new teaching this is which you are giving?

²⁰For you are bringing some strange things to our notice, and we should like to know what they mean.”

²¹(All Athenians and the foreigners staying in the city found no time for anything else but telling, or listening to, the last new thing.)

²²So Paul took his stand in the middle of the Court, and said — “People of Athens, on every hand I see signs of your being very devout.

²³For as I was going about, looking at your sacred shrines, I came upon an altar with this inscription — ‘To an Unknown God.’ What, therefore, you worship in ignorance, that I am now proclaiming to you.

²⁴The God who made the world and all things that are in it — he, Lord as he is of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by hands,

²⁵neither do human hands minister to his wants, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives, to all, life, and breath, and all things.

²⁶He made all races of the earth's surface — fixing a time for their rise and fall, and the limits of their settlements —

²⁷That they might search for God, if by any means they might feel their way to him and find him. And yet he is not really far from any one of us;

²⁸for in him we live and move and are. To use the words of some of your own poets — ‘His offspring, too, are we.’

²⁹Therefore, as the offspring of God, we must not think that the Deity has any resemblance to anything made of gold, or silver, or stone — a work of human art and imagination.

³⁰True, God looked with indulgence on the days of people's ignorance, but now he is announcing to everyone everywhere the need for repentance,