Submitting To Human Authority Series

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

How many of you here like freedom?

I think if we’re honest most of us do, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. However, many times the only way we can get the freedom we desire is to rebel against authority in some way.

• That usually starts very early in life. When you’re a kid and you want the freedom to eat what you want, you probably have to rebel against the authority of your parents who tell you to eat your vegetables or who make you eat everything on your plate before you can have dessert.

• And then you become a teenager and you want the freedom to stay out as late as you can. And that might very well lead to you rebelling against the authority of your parents again, by ignoring the curfew they set.

• And then you get your first job. And your boss assigns you a task that means you will have to take some work home at night or on the weekends. But you want the freedom to have that time for yourself, so you decide to rebel against the authority of your boss and just not complete that task.

• In fact, many of you this morning decided that you wanted the freedom to drive at whatever speed you wanted. So you considered those speed limit signs on your way here to be merely suggestions. But in reality, you did rebel against the government authorities who set those speed limits.

• Even the freedoms that we have as a country resulted from our founding fathers rebelling against the authority of the British government. And while I am certainly glad to live in a country where we do have so many freedoms, I think I can make a pretty good case that those founding fathers likely violated the Biblical principles that we’ll study this morning by doing so.

TENSION

Because of our natural love of freedom, the message this morning may very well be something that many of us don’t want to hear. But one of the benefits of preaching through a book of the Bible, like we’re doing with Romans right now is that we can’t avoid some of these difficult passages.

TRUTH

We are still in the section of Paul’s letter to the churches in Rome that deals with how we are to live practically in light of the doctrine that we find in the first eleven chapters of that letter. And although today’s passage might appear to be unrelated to what we’ve covered in chapter 12 the last three weeks, it is actually a natural next step in Paul’s instruction on how we are to live as disciples of Jesus.

[Read Romans 13:1-7]

Let’s begin with the main idea we find here, and then we’ll build on that:

My submission to human authority

is a reflection of

my submission to God

Or, to put it another way, your response to the authorities you can see is a reflection of your response to the authority that you cannot see.

At first glance, this passage appears to apply only to governmental authorities. And I think that was certainly Paul’s main focus here. But it really applies to all kinds of human authority. The word translated “governing” in verse 1 conveys the idea of superiority or something that is surpassing.

So it can apply to any human authority who is a position that is superior to mine. So it includes my parents, my teachers, my boss, law enforcement and other government officials. So that means that this passage applies to every one of us here because we are all under one or more of those forms of human authority. No wonder Paul starts this section with the words “Let every person…” So if you’re a person, you need to pay attention to what we’re going to learn today.

So here is how we’re going to approach this passage today. We’ll begin by identifying the general principle. Then we’ll dig into the reason for that principle. Finally, we will identify the only exception to the general rule

THE GENERAL PRINCIPLE:

• Submit to all authority

Because the verbs translated “be subject to” is such a key word, not just in this passage, but in several other places in Scripture, notably in the instructions to husbands and wives in Ephesians 5, I’m going to take a few minutes to go into some detail about its meaning.