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
Many years ago Max Lucado wrote a book titled “A Gentle Thunder” that included this story:
Sometime ago I came upon a fellow on a trip who was carrying a Bible.
“Are you a believer,” I asked him?
“Yes,” he said excitedly.
I’ve learned that you can’t be too careful.
“Virgin birth?” I asked.
“I accept it.”
“Deity of Jesus?”
“No doubt.”
“Death of Jesus on the cross?”
“He died for all people.”
Could it be that I was face to face with a Christian? Perhaps.
Nonetheless, I continued my checklist.
“Status of man?”
“Sinner in need of grace.”
“Definition of grace?”
“God doing for man what man can’t do.”
“Return of Christ?”
“Imminent.”
“Bible?”
“Inspired.”
“The church?”
“The body of Christ.”
I started getting excited. “Are you a conservative or a liberal?”
He was getting interested too. “Conservative.”
My heart began to beat faster,
“Heritage?”
“Southern Congregationalist Holy Son of God Dispensationalist Triune Convention.”
That was mine!
“Branch?”
“Pre-millennial, post tribulation, non-charismatic, King James, one-cup communion”
My eyes misted over. I had only one other question.
“Is your pulpit wooden or fiberglass?”
“Fiberglass,” he responded.
I withdrew my hand and stiffened my neck. “Heretic,” I said and walked away.
TENSION
Obviously that story is made up, but unfortunately it may not be quite as far fetched as we might think. I know that over the years I’ve seen Christians who have become estranged from each other over issues that are just as trivial as what material the pulpit is made of.
But this story does raise a couple of important questions, ones that we’ve discussed during the Bible Roundtable recently:
• How far should I go to make sure that I don’t judge my brother or sister in Christ for their convictions or become a stumbling block?
• Are there some beliefs and/or convictions that are so important that I need to hold tight to them even if they do cause division? If so, what are they?
TRUTH
Fortunately for us, Paul is going to help us answer those questions as we continue our study of his letter to the churches in Rome.
If we were in a courtroom, the passage we’ll look at this morning would essentially be Paul’s closing argument for his entire letter. Although he continues to write another chapter and a half and those words are important and related to the rest of the letter, Paul concludes his main argument in the first half of Romans 15.
Starting at the beginning of chapter 14, Paul has been writing about the relationship between love and Christian liberty and how to handle the conflict that has arisen in the church due to differing convictions.
In chapter 14, he approaches this from more of a negative perspective. We are not to judge our fellow disciples for their convictions or exercise our liberty in a way that becomes a stumbling block for them.
Today, in chapter 15, he will approach that same idea from a more positive perspective.
[Read Romans 15:1-13]
For our main idea today, I’m going to borrow from the words of the great Chicago Bears running back Gale Sayers:
I promote unity in the church when
God is first,
others are second,
and I am third
I want to make a few general observations about the text, but then I want to spend most of our time this morning making this really practical for all of us by answering the two questions I posed earlier:
• How far should I go to make sure that I don’t judge my brother or sister in Christ for their convictions or become a stumbling block?
• Are there some beliefs and/or convictions that are so important that I need to hold tight to them even if they do cause division? If so, what are they?
It is easy for us to look at this section of Paul’s letter and conclude that Paul is concerned about healthy relationships so that we could be happy. But Paul’s ultimate concern here is that God would be glorified through those relationships. Three times in this passage, he writes about the glory of God:
that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. (v. 6)
…for the glory of God. (v. 7)
… that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. (v. 9)
When we love others with the kind of uncommon love that Paul is writing about here – a love that puts the interests of others ahead of our own – that brings glory to God because only God can make that happen. When outsiders look at the church, they ought to marvel at the kind of love we have towards each other and ask “How can that be?” And when we answer, “It is because God has changed our naturally selfish hearts”, then God is glorified. And when God’s glory is our main focus, guess what? We will see unity in the church.
The second thing I want us to note about this passage is that it contains two prayers:
May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus…
(v. 5))
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing…
(v. 13)
By including these two prayers, Paul is reminding us that what he is asking his readers, and us, to do, can’t be accomplished in our own strength. We need God’s help and se we also should be praying these prayers both for us as individuals and for us as a body. So again, this is part of putting God first in our lives.
The third thing we need to note is that there are two commands in this passage:
Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.
(v. 2)
Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.
(v. 7)
This is the part of the passage that deals with how I make others second behind God but ahead of myself. Since these commands are really the heart of this passage, we’re going to dig into them deeper as we proceed.
Finally, I want us to not that Paul wants what he is writing here to be a source of hope:
…that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.
(v. 4)
…so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.
(v. 13)
Last week we talked about this idea briefly in relationship to the Old Testament Scriptures. We said that the kind of hope Paul is writing about here is much more than just wishful thinking, It is confident expectation that is based on God’s character, especially His faithfulness.
APPLICATION
Just that quick overview of the passage shows clearly that…
I promote unity in the church when
God is first,
others are second,
and I am third
So how do I do that practically? How do I make sure that God is first, others are second and I am third? We’re going to approach that question from two different angles this morning. Here’s the first question I want to ask:
WHO DO I AIM TO PLEASE?
Let’s take a closer look at the first two verses:
We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.
(v. 1-2)
When I first read that, my initial reaction to the command to please my neighbor was to think of all the times in the New Testament where I am warned not to be a man pleaser. And sure enough, I was able to find about a dozen verses that reinforced that idea. So is Paul somehow contradicting that here? Can the command to please my neighbor co-exist with the idea that I am not to be a man pleaser?
After looking at all those other verses I’m convinced that the two ideas can co-exist and that they really don’t conflict at all if I’ll take this approach:
• When I must choose between pleasing others or pleasing God, I will choose to please God
Paul expresses this idea quite clearly in another of his letters:
For our appeal does not spring from error or impurity or any attempt to deceive, but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, so we speak, not to please man, but to please God who tests our hearts. For we never came with words of flattery, as you know, nor with a pretext for greed—God is witness. Nor did we seek glory from people, whether from you or from others, though we could have made demands as apostles of Christ.
(1 Thessalonians 2:3–6 ESV)
It is clear here that when Paul writes about pleasing men, he is thinking about the kinds of things that we might do to gain favor or approval from other people for our own benefit. But Paul is writing from a completely different perspective in Romans 15. As we’ll see more clearly in a moment, there, he is saying that we are to please others for their own good, not for our personal benefit.
This passage just reinforces our main idea that we developed earlier – God must always be first in my life. So my first priority must always be to please God and not seek to please men. But, as we’ve seen for the last several weeks now, there are some things that aren’t addressed directly in the Scriptures. And most of the time, that means that in those areas the choice is not between pleasing God and pleasing men, but rather between pleasing others and pleasing myself. And in those situations…
• When I must choose between pleasing self or pleasing others, I will choose to please others
Paul is still writing here about the strong and the weak. Remember that how he uses those terms here might be quite different from who we might consider to be weak or strong disciples.
The strong are primarily the Gentiles, many of whom have come from pagan backgrounds and therefore are not hung up on following the Old Testament law. They have great freedom in Christ. The weak are primarily the Jews who are disciples of Jesus, but who are still trying to hang on to their Jewish traditions and the Old Testament law and who are insisting that the Gentiles do the same. It’s interesting here that Paul includes himself among the strong, essentially choosing to align himself with the Gentiles rather than his Jewish brothers and sisters.
The first thing Paul writes here is that the strong have an obligation to “bear with” the failings of the weak. That doesn’t mean that we merely “put up with” the actions of the weak while rolling our eyes and thinking demeaning thoughts about the other person. It means that we do all we can to support and undergird that other person as her or she grows in spiritual maturity.
Probably the best picture I can think of to illustrate this is when we went to Disneyland when our kids were young. When they got too tired to walk any more, we would pick them us and carry them. But as they got older and more mature, we needed to do that less and less. That’s a good picture of how we are to bear with those who are less mature.
In verse 2, Paul goes on to say that we are not just to tolerate others who are weaker, we are to please them for their own good and in order to build them up.
And then in verse 3, Paul quotes from Psalm 69 to show how Jesus did this in His life and how He is to be our example. Jesus willingly allowed the reproaches of others to fall on Him rather than on us. He did that for our good, not His. He took upon Himself our weaknesses and bore them on our behalf. In his gospel account, Matthew expressed this idea by quoting the prophet Isaiah:
This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: “He took our illnesses and bore our diseases.”
(Matthew 8:17 ESV)
When I choose to follow Jesus’ example and choose to please others rather than please myself, I would argue that I actually am pleasing God, too, because I am doing what I have been commanded to do in His Word.
We’re commanded to go even beyond just bearing with and pleasing our brothers and sisters in Christ. In verse 7, we are also commanded to “welcome” them. The verb that is translated “welcome” there is a difficult word to translate into English with just one word. In other translations, it is rendered “receive” or “accept”. In Greek, it is a compound word that conveys the idea of holding something or someone very close.
And Paul holds us to a very high standard when it comes to welcoming others. We are to do that the same way that Jesus welcomed us. As we saw earlier in Romans, he did that while we were still sinners. He didn’t wait for us to “clean up our lives” first. We need to accept our fellow disciples like that.
I hope that so far this has been practical and helpful, but we still haven’t fully answered the questions that we posed at the beginning of the message. In order to fully answer those questions we need to consider…
HOW TO HANDLE MY BELIEFS AND CONVICTIONS
Admittedly, what I’m going to share with you has become somewhat of a cliché, but one of the things about clichés is that they are often actually true and quite helpful and that is certainly the case here.
• In essentials, I will work toward unity
There are some doctrines and beliefs that are absolutely essential for salvation. That doesn’t mean that we have to understand all of them fully to enter into a relationship with God through faith in Jesus, but they are important enough that we can’t compromise on them and therefor they might lead to division.
While I can’t possibly give you a complete list of those things this morning, here are some of the most important:
o The diving inspiration and infallibility of the Bible
o The triune nature of God
o The full humanity and deity of Jesus
o The sinfulness of man
o Jesus’ substitutionary atonement for our sins on the cross
o The bodily resurrection of Jesus
o Salvation by grace through faith in Jesus alone
o The physical bodily return of Jesus in the future
o Eternal glory for disciples of Jesus and eternal punishment for those who are not
It is just not possible for us to be united with those who do not share these essential beliefs.
Last spring a nearby religious group who would consider themselves to be Christians and who even have the name of Jesus in the name of their organization invited us to join with them for an event. But because we know that they don’t hold to many of these views, especially when it comes to who Jesus is, we politely declined the offer. And sometimes we’ll have to make a similar choice as individuals.
• In non-essentials, I will allow liberty
There are three kinds of issues that fit into this category. First there are some doctrines that are important for the Christian life and which might even border on being essential. But they aren’t essential to salvation. Among those would be:
o The significance, meaning and method of baptism and the Lord’s Supper
o Details about the end times
o The specifics of the creation account
o The roles of men and women in the church
o Speaking in tongues
These kinds of issues many have an impact on how close of a relationship I might have with another disciple. And on a church wide level, some of these issues are used as criteria for determining whether we will allow someone to become a member here at TFC. We do that as a means of protecting the unity of our church because someone who holds different views in those areas probably won’t be happy here in the long run and might cause division at some point.
The second kind that fits into this category are things in the Bible that we could call interesting, but not really essential, or even important. They usually involve minor details or interpretation of difficult or obscure texts. We’ve run across a few of these things in our study of Romans. And we shouldn’t shy away from them because they are in the Bible. But we also shouldn’t divide with other disciples over them either. A couple examples:
o Who were the sons of God and daughters of men in Genesis 6? (If you don’t know what I’m talking about that’s probably just as well)
o What was Paul’s “thorn in the flesh”?
Finally, there are issues that aren’t addressed specifically in the Bible about which genuine disciples will have different convictions. We’ve talked about a number of these over the past several weeks, so I don’t think I need to give you a list again.
• In all things, I will exhibit love
This has been Paul’s main focus for nearly four chapters now where he wrote “Let love be genuine” in verse 9 of chapter 12. And the main way that we do that is to put the needs of the other person ahead of our own. That applies to those outside the body of Christ, bust especially to our fellow disciples.
As we close, let’s look once again at the two questions we posed at the very beginning of the message:
• How far should I go to make sure that I don’t judge my brother or sister in Christ for their convictions or become a stumbling block?
• Are there some beliefs and/or convictions that are so important that I need to hold tight to them even if they do cause division? If so, what are they?
I pray that today I’ve given you some tools to help you answer those kinds of questions.
INSPIRATION
Today’s main idea is not only a summary of the passage we’ve looked at this morning, but it also summarizes the main idea of chapters 12-15 of Paul’s letter taken as a whole.
I promote unity in the church when
God is first,
others are second,
and I am third
I am convinced that one of the reasons we have such great unity here at TFC is because so many of you have this attitude. You genuinely want to please God above all else and you consistently put others ahead of yourself. And if that describes you, then I want to say thanks and I want to encourage you to keep it up.
But perhaps there might be some of you here today that would honestly have to say that you’re not there yet, that you are still self-centered most of the time rather than being God-centered and other centered. If that is the case then as we have a time of response in a moment, would you just confess that to God and ask Him to help you develop the kind of mindset that will contribute to the unity of our body?
[Prayer]
ACTION
As we do each week, we’re going to end with a time for you to respond to what God might be leading you to do as a result of being here today.
For many of us, at least part of our response is to give back to God out of the material resources that He has entrusted to us. When we give, we are being good stewards and acknowledging that all we possess actually belongs to God and not to us. I know that many of you choose to give online and if that’s the case, during our offering time I want to encourage you to take a moment to thank God for blessing you materially and commit your offering to Him.
Some of you need to take a “next step” this morning. Our Discipleship Path has been designed to help you do that. I want to focus this morning on the “Commit” step on that path. There are a number of Biblical commitments that are important in our journey with Jesus:
• If you have never made a commitment to put your faith in Jesus alone as the basis for your relationship with God, that is the most important decision you will ever make in your life. So we encourage you to make that decision before you leave today. If you you’re not sure exactly what that involves, we would love to talk to you more about that.
• Some of you have made that commitment to Jesus but have never been baptized by immersion, which is the Biblical model, subsequent to your decision to out your faith in Jesus. While that is not a requirement for salvation, it is an important act of obedience that publicly testifies to your faith in Jesus.
• Some of you have been coming here to TFC for a while and even consider this to be your church home, but you have never formally become a member. Once again, that is not a requirement for salvation, but we do believe that it is an important commitment that will help you to grow in your relationship with Jesus.
This morning, if God is leading you to make any of those commitments, or even if you would just like to get some more information, would you please talk with me or one of our Elders, either during our response time or after our gathering.
Finally, our response time is also a time for you to pray. Perhaps God has revealed something to you this morning that you need to confess to Him and seek His forgiveness. Maybe God is leading you to take some concrete steps to apply today’s message and you will want to pray and ask for Him to help you do that. It’s also possible that you are going through something difficult in your life right now and you would like for someone to pray with you during this time. Our Elders are available to pray with you.
