The God who made the world and all that is in it is neither served by human hands nor do we owe him anything. The human person is a religious being. As a matter of fact, he is notoriously religious. Paul himself comes to this realization when his preaching mission takes him into the land of the Athenians where he stumbles upon an intriguing phenomenon. For in addition to the plethora of gods worshipped by the Athenians, Paul finds that they have an altar dedicated to an unknown god. The Athenians realize that their list of gods might not have exhausted all the gods out there, and so a to be safe, they include these unknown, unnamed gods in their calendar of worship. It is something that impresses Paul and he commends them for their “religiousness.” He jumps upon that opportunity to proclaim to them the one God who made heaven and earth and to whom worship properly belongs. However, he tells them that the worship due to the one creator God differs from the kind of worship they are used to. “The God who made the world and all that is in it does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands, not is he served by human hands because he needs anything.” Paul wants to dispel the wrong notion of worship that was prevalent among the Athenians (and which is still prevalent today). We owe God our worship. As religious beings, we recognize that we live in a relationship with a superior being, a being in whose power we “live and move and have our being.” But our worship of God is not a service (in the sense of us doing something for God). Our worship of God is both a praise and thanksgiving, and is something that we do, not for God, but for us: “Our praises add nothing to your greatness but profit us for salvation” (Common Preface IV). Salvation is not earned, for in Jesus Christ, we have all been saved. However, one must realize his/her need for salvation, and that his/her salvation has come from God. It is this realization that moves one to offer worship to God. This is precisely the content of Paul’s proclamation to the Athenians: “God has overlooked the times of ignorance but now demands that all people everywhere repent because he has made this possible in the one he raised from the dead.” We are moved to worship God because of what God has already done in the person of Jesus Christ. It is this knowledge (of God always acting on our behalf) that fills us with confidence that the God who has acted in the past will also act in the present and in the future.