NOTE:
This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message. The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.
ENGAGE
On New Year’s Day, Mary and I woke up to this view in our back yard.
[Show photo of snow in back yard]
Although that snow melted pretty quickly, on Friday of that same week, when we went for a hike in Catalina State Park, there was still a fair amount of snow in the upper parts of the Catalina Mountains, although it’s a little hard to see in this photo.
[Show photo of mountain with snow]
And while there was same water flowing in the Canada del Oro, we were able to rock hop over the crossings without getting our feet wet.
Now I understand that snow is not an inanimate object. But if snow had feelings, I would imagine that it would want to remain right where it is, preferably in the shade, and in the coldest possible weather so it wouldn’t melt.
Unfortunately for that snow, we had another storm come through last Sunday, a much warmer storm. And if the snow did have feelings, it probably felt like this during that storm.
[Movie clip from the Wizard of Oz]
So when I went for another hike in Catalina State Park again this week on Tuesday, the same stream that we had easily been able to cross without getting wet just a few days before that, looked more like this.
[Video of stream]
That snow that fell on New Year’s Day was doing exactly what it is designed by God to do – to fall on the ground, where it eventually melted. Some of it soaked into the ground right where it fell, but most of it flowed down those slopes and watered plants, provided refreshment for the animals and replenished the groundwater. And had it been able to somehow remain on those slopes without ever melting, it would have never accomplished all that it was created by God to do.
TENSION
As I was hiking on Tuesday, it occurred to me that is a pretty good metaphor for how Jesus wants His disciples to live. He never intended for us to enter into His kingdom and then just plant ourselves there, live comfortably, and ignore those who are not yet part of His kingdom. Instead He wants us to flow into the world and to bring refreshment to those who do not yet have a relationship with Him.
But unfortunately there is a common barrier that often prevents us from doing that. This morning, we’ll discover what that barrier is and talk about some practical things we can do to overcome it.
TRUTH
We’re nearing the end of a section of Paul’s letter to the churches in Rome where he is addressing the question of whether God’s plan for Israel has failed – a question that arose because of the fact that not very many Jews were recognizing Jesus as the Messiah and putting their faith in Him.
That section began in chapter 9 where Paul made the point that this was completely consistent with God’s sovereign plan, since He had always intended that only a small remnant of the Israelites would put their faith in Jesus. Not all those who were physical descendants of Abraham were chosen by God and that had been the case all throughout the history of Israel.
Then in chapter 10, Paul addressed a second reason that God’s plan for Israel had not failed – the Israelites were responsible for their own choice to rebel against God time after time until their hearts had become hardened. So those two chapters clearly reveal the balance between God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility.
Then, as we began in chapter 11 last week, we saw that Paul addressed the question of whether God had rejected Israel. And, while at first glance that question might seem irrelevant to most of us who are Gentiles, we saw that it was indeed a very relevant question for two reasons. First, if God’s promises to Israel can fail, then how can we be assured that the promises he has made to us, especially those in Romans 8, won’t fail, too? And second, if God rejected Israel due to their disobedience, how can we be sure He won’t do the same with us when we inevitably fail Him? We learned in that passage that since God had not rejected Israel that we can be confident that He is not finished with us yet either.
So with that background in mind, let’s pick up in verse 11 of Romans 11:
[Read Romans 11:11-24]
Earlier I mentioned that we were going to identify the barrier that prevents us from being effective in reaching people for Jesus. Here is what this passage teaches us about that barrier:
This is a really intriguing passage to me. Up until now, Paul had primarily been addressing the arrogance of the Israelites who thought that they were superior to the Gentiles because they were God’s “chosen people”, but now he turns the tables and warn the Gentiles about being arrogant because they now make up the large majority of the church.
Once again, Paul begins this section with a question that expects a negative answer. He asks if the Jews have stumbled so that they might fall. It can be difficult to get the sense of that question from our English translations. Essentially Paul is asking if the Israelites have fallen so far that it’s no longer possible for them to recover – kind of like the Life Alert commercials – “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” And again, he answers with the most emphatic “no” possible – “by no means”.
Paul then goes on to explain why that is the case. Before we dig into the text here, I need to make one important point. In this section, almost all the pronouns and the verbs are singular because Paul is addressing the Israelites and the Gentiles as a people and not as individuals. That is an important distinction that will prevent us from making wrong conclusions about what Paul is teaching here. Each person within those groups is still responsible for his or her own decisions when it comes to putting their faith in Jesus and being saved.
Paul describes a four step process that God is using here:
1) Through the “trespass” of the Israelites, God opened up the possibility of salvation for the Gentiles. That trespass of the Jews was to reject God’s plan of salvation through faith in Jesus alone.
2) God did that to make Israel jealous. Although we tend to think of jealousy in negative terms, this is actually a positive in God’s eyes. The idea here is that when the Israelites observe how the Gentiles are experiencing the blessings of God that come through faith in Jesus, they will want that for themselves.
Those of you who have kids can probably relate. Say you’re going to the store and you ask one of your kids if they want to go with you and they’re too busy with their favorite toy, so they say “no”. But what happens when you ask one of your other kids if they want to go and they say “yes”? The first one is immediately afraid they will miss out on something, so they want to go, too.
3) That meant blessings for the entire world, which by the way was God’s original purpose for choosing the Israelites in the first place.
4) And that jealousy would also lead to the ultimate salvation of the Israelites, which would multiply those blessings even more.
So we see here that God really does work all things together for good and that He can use even human sin and rebellion to accomplish His purposes.
Then in verse 16, Paul gives us two illustrations of how this process works. As always, we need to be careful here not to press the details of Paul’s illustrations too far and misinterpret the ideas he is expressing here.
The first illustration is that of the lump of dough. Paul is referring here to Numbers 15:17-21 where God instructed the people to offer the firstfruits of their dough to God when they come into the land He was going to give them.
Every time in the Bible that an offering of the firstfuits is made, it is done with the idea that the offering of the firstfruits makes the rest of the harvest holy as well. “Holy”, as Paul uses it here in verse 16, is not referring to personal or inward holiness, but rather to the idea of being “set apart” or “consecrated” to God. Paul is probably thinking here of Abraham as the firstfruits since the promises about Israel were made to him first. And the idea here is that since God set Abraham apart, then Israel as whole was set apart and therefore God is going to keep His promises to them. Or, to look at it from a slightly different perspective, we could say that since Abraham belonged to God, so did the entire nation of Israel as a people.
Paul goes into the second illustration in much more detail. And here is where we don’t want to get too bogged down into some of the details and miss the main idea.
I am by no means an expert on olive trees, but I have done a fair amount of study on them this week. In Paul’s day, it was far more common for a branch from a cultivated olive tree to be grafted into a wild olive tree than the other way around like Paul pictures here. That’s why in verse 24, Paul writes that grafting a wild branch into a natural tree is “contrary to nature”.
About the only time anyone would graft a branch from a wild olive tree into a cultivated tree is when the cultivated tree quit producing fruit in order to invigorate that tree.
Although Israel is pictured as an olive tree is a few places in the Old Testament, here it seems to represent God’s people as a whole. In the Old Testament era, that was Israel, but now in Paul’s day it was composed of the church, which primarily consisted of Gentiles. In both cases, there are individuals within those groups who possess a genuine faith and those who do not. So again, Paul is addressing these groups as a whole and not individuals.
The nourishing root primarily represents Abraham similar to the way the firstfruits of the dough did. And the two kinds of branches represent the Israelites and the Gentiles. The Israelites are the natural branches and the Gentiles are the branches from the wild olive tree.
It is important to note that in this section, most of the verbs are passive verbs, which indicates that this is all God’s work and not anything that any of us can accomplish on our own.
Because they refused to place their faith in Jesus, God took the unbelieving Israelite branches and broke them off and grafted in the branches from the wild olive tree that represented the believing Gentiles so they could be nourished by the root. Notice here that God did not cut down the original tree and replace it with a new one. The church is not a replacement for Israel.
But apparently, some of those Gentiles had become arrogant toward the Israelites who had refused to believe in Jesus and now they were the ones who were considering themselves to be superior to the Jews, much like the Jews had viewed the Gentiles for so long. So Paul reminds them that they are not supporting the faith of Abraham that is the foundation and nourishing root of their faith, but rather it is the other way around. Their faith is being supported by those Jewish roots and therefore they should not be arrogant, thinking that they were somehow superior to the Israelites.
He goes on to point out that the natural branches representing Israel had been broken off because of their unbelief and reminds the Gentiles that unless they continue in their faith, God will break them off just like that, too.
This is the point where it is particularly important that we remember that Paul is speaking of the Gentiles as a group and not of individual believers. He is not teaching here that a genuine Christians can lose his or her salvation. That would be completely contrary to what he had promised earlier in Romans 8 when he wrote that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ.
But what he is saying, and we’ll see this in more detail next week, is that there will come a time when the Gentiles are going to forsake God as a people and be cut off and the Israelites will return to God and He will graft them in once again. And when that happens, just like there are individual Jews who are coming to Christ right now, I think it’s safe to conclude that there will be individual Gentiles who will still place their faith in Jesus, but that will be the exception rather than the rule. And personally, I wonder whether we aren’t rapidly approaching that day.
Hopefully you can see now why I said earlier that…
Paul has had to address both the Jews and the Gentiles in this regard in his letter. For most of the letter, he has been writing to the Jews about their holier than thou attitude toward the Gentiles that prevented them from fulfilling God’s purpose for them to bless all the nations of the world. And now he is directly addressing the Gentiles who were also prevented from carrying out the task of bringing the kingdom of God near to others because of their pride and arrogance.
I would like to believe that we don’t still have this problem in the church today, but unfortunately, that is just not the case. Sometimes that arrogance is manifest in the overt anti-Semitism that seems to be more and more prevalent in the church, or at least among those who would claim to be Christians. But what is far more pervasive, and more dangerous in my opinion, is the more subtle ways that arrogance creeps into our lives. Let me mention just a few of the most common:
• Whenever I look at someone else and think that there is no way that God can reach that person, that is a form of arrogance that implies that there was something in me that caused God to want to save me that is not present in that other person’s life.
• When I am more concerned with satisfying my own personal preferences or in what’s in it for me than I am in doing what is best to reach others who are not yet part of the kingdom of God, that’s a form of arrogance that says that now that I’m in, I don’t really care about anyone else.
• When I expect those who ore not yet disciples of Jesus to act like a Christian when they are not and I judge them for that, that is also a form of arrogance that fails to recognize that before God drew me to Himself I was just like them.
APPLICATION
While there are some things about this passage that may be a bit difficult to understand, Paul has actually made it very easy for us to determine how to apply this to our lives. There are four commands in this passage that we can use as a foundation to develop some practical applications for our lives:
• Do not be arrogant (v. 18)
• Do not become proud (v. 20)
• Fear (v, 20)
• Note (v. 22) (This is translated “behold” in many of our English translations and is used by the New Testament writers to call particular attention to something important)
Instead of looking at each command individually, what I’m going to do is kind of combine them along with the surrounding text to leave us with…
THREE WAYS TO BE HOLY BUT NOT ‘HOLIER THAN THOU”
1. Get to know God – all of Him
This first principle comes from verse 22 where Paul commanded his readers to note, or consider, or behold, the kindness and the severity of God.
Unfortunately our human tendency is to want to put God into a box and to make Him into who we want Him to be. So on one hand, we see churches like the one here in Tucson whose motto is “Love. Period” who ignore the fact that a holy God does not let sin go unpunished. And then at the other extreme, we find churches who focus only on the wrath and judgment of God and who are therefore very judgmental and not very loving. And people and churches who live at either of those extremes just aren’t very effective in taking the gospel of Jesus to our culture.
If we want to be holy and not holier than thou, we need to get know God in His fulness – and that is going to include both His kindness to those who put their faith in Jesus and His severity toward those who rebel against Him and refuse to do so. That is why it’s so important for us to be reading all of God’s Word on a consistent, systematic basis and not just “cherry pick” our favorite parts of the Bible.
Getting to know God more fully will prevent us of thinking too highly of ourselves or being too judgmental about others.
2. Be “re-gospeled” daily
This is a term that I’ve used before, but my spell checker continues to flag it anyway. The idea here is that I constantly need to remind myself of the grace that God has extended to me even when there was nothing in my life that would have merited that in any way.
This is a principle that seems to keep coming up over and over in my messages, but that’s a good thing because I’m convinced this is probably the most important, and the easiest, thing I can do to prevent becoming arrogant toward non-Christians. And since I’ve been trying to incorporate this practice into my daily routine, I’ve seen God begin to transform the way I see myself and the way I see others. And I’m confident that God can do that in your life, too.
3. Don’t compare myself to others
This is what got both the Jews and the Gentiles into trouble. The Jews had long compared themselves to the Gentiles and they became experts in pointing out the faults in the lives of those Gentiles. But while they were doing that, they became blind to their own arrogance and pride.
And then, once the church began to consist of primarily Gentiles, they did the same thing. They began to compare themselves to the Jews and as a result began to think of themselves as superior.
Let’s be honest here. We’re all prone to compare ourselves to others, aren’t we? And if we want to make ourselves feel good, it’s usually pretty easy to find someone else that doesn’t measure up to us in some way.
• If I want to feel good about my marriage or my parenting skills, I can always find a dysfunctional family to compare to mine.
• If I want to feel good about my job, I can always find another employee who doesn’t do his or her job as well as I do.
• If I want to feel good about my prayer life, I can always find someone else who doesn’t pray as much as I do.
• If I want to feel good about my preaching, I can easily find some sermons that I don’t think are as good as mine.
But as Paul is going to instruct us in Romans 12, we are never to compare ourselves to others, but rather to make a sober judgement about our lives in light of God’s standards for us.
INSPIRATION
This week I met with several other pastors for our monthly luncheon and one of the things we talked about was what we wanted God to do in our churches for the coming year. And the most common thing that was expressed was a desire for their churches to become more outwardly focused.
Interestingly enough, that was one of the things our elders focused on last year here at TFC and I am pleased to say that I think we’ve made great progress in that area. That is reflected in the number of people we baptized and the number of new families we added to our body last year as well as in the amount of financial resources that we are able to allocate to missionaries and community outreach. In fact, we actually baptized more people last year than many of the churches that are considerably larger than us and we give a much larger portion of our budget to missionaries than they do.
So I just want to encourage all of us to keep that up. Let’s continue to look for ways to become holy rather than holier than thou so that we’ll be like that melting snow and carry out God’s plan to be a source of refreshment for the world around us through the gospel of Jesus.
[Prayer]
ACTION
As always, this message requires us to respond to God. Perhaps there is someone here today who has never put your faith in Jesus and become part of His family. If you would like to make that decision today, some of our elders will be at the back during our closing song and they would love to talk to you more about that. Or feel free to contact me or any of the other elders using the contact information on the back of the bulletin.
Finally, I want to encourage all of us to consider what we’ve learned today what actions we’re going to take in response to that by answering the three questions you find in your sermon outline.
What did I learn about God today?
What I learn about myself today?
What do I need to do in response to what I’ve learned?
