In Him We Live, Move, and Have Our Being
August 7, 2026
Acts 17:28 — For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.
Paul stood on Mars Hill in Athens, surrounded by philosophers who spent their days chasing the next new idea. Behind him sat an altar inscribed “TO THE UNKNOWN GOD,” a monument to a deity the city didn’t even know. Paul looked at that altar and told them the truth: the God they didn’t know was the very God in whom we live, and move, and have our being.
That phrase is easy to read past. But Paul wasn’t offering a poetic flourish. He was describing the only source of true life.
Everything we need, life, movement, identity, comes from Him alone.
Athens was a city full of temples, but Paul zeroed in on the one built for a God they admitted they didn’t know. He didn’t call them stupid. He called them ignorant, in the true sense of the word: uneducated about the one thing that mattered most. They had a name for every god they could imagine, yet the real God remained a stranger.
Paul even quoted their own poets back to them, a move that gave him credibility with a crowd that had dismissed him as a “babbler” just verses earlier. He knew his audience. He had done his homework. And he used what they already knew to lead them toward what they didn’t.
Then he made his point. The true God isn’t distant. He isn’t hiding behind an altar with no name on it. “He be not far from every one of us,” Paul told them. If you reach for Him, search for Him, feel after Him, you will find Him. That’s the meat of Paul’s message on Mars Hill: the God you don’t know is closer than you think. He wants to be known, and He wants to be the source from which you draw all that matters most in life.
In the beginning, God breathed into man, and man became a living soul. The very breath of God brought us to life. That’s not just poetic language about Genesis. It’s a picture of what happens to anyone who tries to live disconnected from Him.
A person cut off from God isn’t just missing something extra. They’re gasping for life-giving air, struggling to live like a branch disconnected from the source. That’s true for the unbeliever, but it’s just as true for the Christian in the room who quietly starts coasting on yesterday’s connection. Without a real, current connection to Him, we become a withering branch, a man gasping for the very breath that gave us life in the first place.
Paul wrote to the Colossians, “When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory.” Not when Christ, who is part of our life. When Christ, who is our life. So ask yourself honestly: what is your life actually about? Career, entertainment, recreation, achievement, all of it can be good in its place, but none of it can hold the weight of being your life. If Christ isn’t your life, you’re not connected to the true source, and you’ll spend your days searching, unfulfilled, gasping for air that only He can give.
Real change in a person’s life doesn’t come from sheer determination or a handful of good principles. Those might produce marginal improvement, but they can’t produce transformation. Only Christ can take a person from one condition and move them into another entirely.
He is the Potter. We are the clay. His strength regenerates us and makes us new creations, and through Him we move from one glory to the next. We move from hate to love, sadness to joy, chaos to peace, anger to longsuffering, harshness to gentleness. We move from wickedness to goodness and from doubt to faith. None of that movement is automatic. Without Christ, a person is stuck, unable to move forward, unable to advance beyond who they’ve always been.
Staying connected to Him is what keeps us bearing fruit, and that fruit is the evidence of a life actually being transformed. If you feel stuck, the question isn’t how to try harder. The question is whether you’re still connected to the One who does the moving.
Who you’re connected to has a way of defining you. It speaks to you. It tells you what you are, what you’re meant to do, how you’re meant to live. That’s why identity is never neutral ground. Something is always shaping it, whether you’ve chosen it intentionally or not.
I am not who the devil says I am. I am not who the world says I am. I am not who my own past says I am. My identity is in Christ, and He alone determines my worth. If you’ve let the wrong voices define you, unplug from whatever has been misdefining you. Detach from whatever worldly influence seeks to rewire who you are. Posts like what was left in the ark point to the same truth from a different angle: what you stay connected to shapes everything about you.
Consider who wrote these words. If there was ever a man who might say, “I’ve got this. I can handle things on my own. I don’t need a connection to any source beyond my own strength,” it was Paul. He had every reason to trust his own ability, his intellect, his religious pedigree. He told us as much in Philippians: I was circumcised the eighth day, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, a Pharisee, blameless by the law’s own standard. And after listing every credential he could claim, Paul called it all dung compared to knowing Christ and trusting Him as the source of life, transformation, and identity. You don’t get much stronger language than that.
“Without Him, I would be nothing. Without Him, I would but fail. Without Him, I would be drifting, like a ship without a sail.” In Him we live, and move, and have our being.
Pastor Matthew Ball serves as lead pastor of Faith Apostolic Church in Carmel, Indiana. This post is adapted from a Bible study on Acts 17:28, part of the church’s ongoing 2026 theme on staying connected to Christ.
