Romans 15:14-29

Gospel Lesson From Paul's Life

by Pastor Jim on June 3, 2007

The formal teaching piece of Paul's letter ends with His prayer in verse thirteen with a prayer to be "filled with joy, peace in believing and that they would abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit." He knows how challenging life can be when these blessings are in short supply. So, he asks God to pour these blessings out upon His church that they might bear a credible witness to the gospel of God's upon us who believe. However, these blessings don't come to us automatically. He writes that they come to us, "by believing." They come to us as we trust and organize our lives around His word and will. These treasures of joy are there for us, but they will only come to us as we chose to prize, treasure, and rely on the promises and commands of God instead of the many suggestions of anxiety, threats, sins, worries, and fears that are before us daily.

Beginning in verse 14, Paul is still teaching, however this time, not by way of formal instruction, but by his life. He begins to reveal the plans and motivations of his own heart. And we would expect nothing less than those plans and aspirations to be bound up with this gospel he has been describing all along.

The Gospel: A Review through Romans:

What is this gospel? It's a message of good news for sinners who, by faith in Jesus Christ, can be reconciled to God. It was not only announced in the Old Testament Scriptures; in reality, the gospel is the fundamental story line (hope) of the Old Testament Scriptures!¹ In chapter one, Paul writes that this gospel was promised to the prophets. In 15:9-13, the hope of this gospel was the hope of every piece of the Hebrew Scriptures. In Galatians three, Paul says that the Scriptures "preached the gospel before hand to Abraham." It was there all along. Through it believers experience forgiveness, peace with God and come to the obedience that comes from faith. "He defined this gospel as the, "power of God unto salvation for all who believe..." both Jew and Gentile. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God but the gift of God is eternal life through faith in the Lord Jesus. In the gospel, Jesus came to live the life we should have lived and He died the death we should have died. He did all of this in our place and on our behalf so that through faith in Him He our sin, failure, and death get obliterated by and exchanged for His righteousness, His obedience, and His resurrection. This gospel is about God doing for us in Christ what we could never do for ourselves. On the cross Jesus took the full blow of God's justice so all we would have to take are the blows of His mercy. Then, to prove that God accepted his love for us He raised Jesus from the dead. Just as Abraham and Sarah in their nineties gave birth to a son, those who trust Jesus receive the status of God's righteousness, as a miracle of grace.

Fundamentally, this gospel is about reconciliation. Through it sinners are reconciled to God. Through it we now have access to God as his children and we are now His heirs. In Jesus, there is no condemnation for those who believe. Beloved, God is now for us, who can stand against us? Nothing can separate us from the Love God has for us. If he did not spare his only Son will he not give you all things necessary for life and peace and obedience? In this gospel, we are reconciled to God.

And as a result, Jew and Gentile believers alike are now folded together into the one people of God. In Christ, we have been reconciled to each other. And what Paul has labored to say in these last two chapters is that through faith in the Lord Jesus peoples, races, nations, churches, couples, and families that have lived irreconcilable lives and have irreconcilable differences can now through faith in Christ can be reconciled to God and to each other. Given the history of the, gender, national and race relations it's a bold claim and assertion. For Paul, this reconciling power of the gospel that melts away the suspicions, hostilities, and pride between Jew and Gentile believers, is the living parable for all other fractured and polarized relationships in the world. It's the credible evidence that there is a power so great that can reconcile sinners to a holy God. The inability to lay hold of the grace that keeps believers reconciled renders the gospel unbelievable. If we cannot find a way to live in peace with each other given all that Jesus has done for us how can we speak about a God who reconciles sinners to Himself? I think this is why the offering Paul collected from the Gentile churches was so dear to him. It was the symbolic witness to the reconciling power of the gospel.

Paul Shares His Life

Now, beginning in verse 14, Paul ends his formal teaching and begins to share his plans and motivations for his life and ministry. We've listened to his teaching and for the next few Sundays we want to look at his life and how the gospel changed his life. Paul had never been to the church at Rome. He knew about the church from two of its members, Aquilla and Pricilla who had been forced out of Rome five years earlier under Claudius who had all Jews expelled from Rome (Acts 18:1: The exile of the Jews from Rome illustrates the hostilities between Jew and Gentile). Paul met this exiled Jewish Christian couple while he was ministering to the church in Corinth.

From these two, he heard good things about the church (15:14). He was eager to pass on to them what he had learned about Jesus and the gospel. So, in this letter he wrote about the fundamentals of the faith and what it means to be and live as a Christian. He also wrote about the responsibility they had, as a fellowship of Jew and Gentile believers, to bear a witness to the reconciling power of the gospel. Now at the end, he wants them to know his plans and requests. Listed specifically there are four:

1. In (22-24), he tells them that he intends to come to Rome soon, but not to stay. He has no plans to be their pastor or to take charge of their church; he wants to visit them, take a sabbatical, and then go on to Spain.

2. In (22), he tells them that he's been busy visiting churches on the northern side of the Mediterranean from Jerusalem all the way up to Illycrium (Montenegro) which is on the Adriatic coastline, further north than any city mentioned in Acts with reference to his missionary journeys.

3. In (25-29), he writes that he first has to go to Jerusalem to deliver the offering he's been collecting for years from the Gentile churches. These Jewish believers in Judea have suffered severely under a famine. I hope to spend some time on how significant this was to Paul and the gospel next Sunday. Other than establishing new churches, he had no greater project.

4. Finally, in (30-33), he requests their prayers that God would deliver him from those who would do him harm in Jerusalem. This was a prayer that God denied. Instead of getting to Rome soon, he was arrested and spent two years in prison. It was his desire to go to Rome and be refreshed (32) by their company. God had other plans for him. I wonder if Paul would find us refreshing. Are you a refreshing person? Ask yourself, when people are around you are they refreshed? Even though it was to be an unfulfilled expectation, Paul was looking forward to being lifted up and refreshed by their company.

Gospel Motivations:

This morning let me organize these verses around three motivations that controlled Paul's life. First, he was motivated by authentic worship (15-16). Second, he was motivated because he saw himself on the receiving end of the miracle of grace (17-24). Third, he wanted to bring the tangible evidence (the Gentile offering) of the church's love and unity to the Jewish believers at Jerusalem (25-29). This morning let's consider the first two motivations.

First, Paul did what he did because he was motivated by authentic worship.

"And concerning you, my brethren, I myself also am convinced that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, and able also to admonish one another. But I have written very boldly to you on some points, so as to remind you again, because of the grace that was given me from God, to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles, ministering as a priest the gospel of God, so that my offering of the Gentiles may become acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit."

Notice that Paul has no great worries about the church; they are full of goodness, knowledge, and are quite capable of admonishing one another. However, he has had to be firm (bold) about this issue of not welcoming each other. If they continued to divide on the fault line of race it would discredit the gospel. So, he had to be bold in his exhortation to open up their hearts and homes to each other and worship the Lord with one voice. But, he speaks boldly like this because by God's grace he's an apostle of the gospel. Dividing along the lines of race was a contradiction of the gospel. How much more of a contradiction are the silly and trivial things the church today separates over? So, he was bold about that. One can only imagine what he might say to us today.

His Life an Act of Worship:

But notice that he sees his life and mission as worship. Now, this is going to sound strange to us because the church today thinks differently about worship. However, the term Paul uses here for minister and ministering is lietourgon. From this Greek word, we get our English word liturgy. It refers to the duties of a priest at Temple worship. He could have said he was a servant (deaconos) or a slave (dulos) of Jesus. Instead, he used the word lietourgon of Jesus Christ. He sees his life as a priestly duty (16). He chose this word because he saw all of life as worship. He saw his mission of leading Gentiles to Jesus as an offering acceptable to God and made so by the Holy Spirit.

Paul is tying together his life of worship with his definition of worship in Romans 12:1. Again, his definition of worship is much different that our contemporary idea. Today, most think of worship as what you do in a worship service or more specifically what you do while singing. Worship is often packaged and marketed to appeal to consumers. That's how things work in a free market. But when Paul defines worship he defines it like this. He says,

"I urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service of worship (lietourgon). So don't be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your minds." (Rom.12:1-2)

For Paul, worship could never be defined by a weekly event no matter how excited, lathered up, or enthusiastic people might get. Worship is a life committed to becoming a sacrificial offering unto God. Worship is about us becoming the offering. Do you know what happened to the offerings the priests brought before the Lord in Temple worship?" Beloved, they got utterly and totally consumed and spent for God. Paul says that worship is not you bringing an offering (though that is a piece of worship), he says that you are the offering: the living sacrifice. The idea of worshipers as consumers exchanging goods and services couldn't be more of a contradiction. Authentic worship is about the worshipper becoming consumed and spent in the service of God not consuming his preferences and pleasures in exchange for his participation.

So, Paul uses this language of worship to show how he lives his life. By the mercies of God he offers himself to God's purposes and presents himself and his offering of Gentile believers as acceptable and made such by the Holy Spirit. He spends his life sharing this gospel of the reconciling power of God as a broker between the great heritage and promises of God to Israel and the nations who knew little or nothing of such wonders and grace.

He takes his life that is filled with the mundane, ordinary stuff of traveling, suffering from exposure, abuse, huge disappointments, and unfulfilled expectations and offered them to God as worship. His plans for a refreshing sabbatical in Rome were circumvented by two years in prison, shipwreck, and house arrest. Has God ever rearranged some of your plans and goals? He was exposed to threats, beatings, stoning, imprisonment, rejection by his own people and what does he do with all of this? He defines all of this as an act of sacred worship: a fragrant offering to the LORD. Paul took the most mundane daily occurrences, conflicts, and sacrifices of life and offered them up to God in holy acts of worship. He sees himself as a priest, dressed in the dignity of his priestly garb, dedicating it, offering it up to God with praise and thanksgiving. For Paul, all of life was liturgy.

If you will lay hold of this same reality of authentic worship, it will transform your daily routine into glorious worship. When we offer our frustrations, struggles, and disappointments up to God in worship they are instantly redeemed. I challenge you to see if this isn't true. The moment you take your life and offer it up to God in worship, an amazing thing happens. It is no longer seen as worthless and meaningless. Also, mundane things become sacred things. A meal cooked for a neighbor becomes an offering to God. A get well card is an offering to God. A child held and loved is a liturgy. A vote for a good candidate, taking out the trash, mowing the church lawn, repairing the church sign, enjoying coffee with a friend, an employee treated with dignity all of these become beatitudes. A Sunday school class is a fragrant offering to God. It doesn't matter if there is one person there or a hundred, if it is worship, God is there! A phone call that invites someone over to share a meal is a praise offering. A failed expectation, unrealized goal, a betrayal, all can be acts of worship. Oh, not by today's definition of worship, but by Paul's and his life of worship, they can be.

Get God's Truth about Worship in your Soul.

If your idea of worship is defined by what happens when you meet others on Sunday morning or what happens when you sing you will be left vulnerable for most of your life. This is so because every decision you make is made on the basis of what you worship or what you hold dear, value, prize, treasure, and think of as worthy. That's why the old English word for worship was called worthship. Authentic worship is a matter of what you value every minute of every day. Paul envisioned every act of his life and mission as an act of priestly worship and liturgy before God. Do you? If you compartmentalize worship you will cut yourself off from the encouraging, fortifying, and redeeming resources of worship every day. For Paul, all of life was an act of worship. He was priesting himself and others into the presence of God, "ministering as a priest..." in communion with God and praise to God from whom all blessings flow, every moment of life. By the tender mercies of God he offered his body, his life as a sacrificial offering to God. And given the mercy he had received from God, he knew that it was only a reasonable thing to do. This is true for every one of us. Life is sacred worship

The second thing that motivated Paul here is the MIRACLE OF GOD'S GRACE (17-24).

"Therefore in Christ Jesus I have found reason for boasting in things pertaining to God. For I will not presume to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me, resulting in the obedience of the Gentiles by word and deed, in the power of signs and wonders, in the power of the Spirit; so that from Jerusalem and round about as far as Illyrcrium I have full preached the gospel of Christ."

Here, Paul mentions at least three wondrous things that happen through him. First, Gentiles came to faith in Christ. Second, signs and miracles accompanied his ministry. Third, he got to preach the gospel over 1,400 miles from Jerusalem all the way to the Adriatic coast. And he writes that the only explanation for any of this is what Jesus has accomplished through him. There is only one Christian celebrity and that is Jesus. Paul spent his life bragging on Jesus and making much about Jesus. Yes, by God's grace he was an apostle (1:5). And yes, God set apart the apostles by signs and miracles to establish their authority to represent Christ (2Cor.2:12)² . But Paul never got over the mercy and grace he received from Jesus. He doesn't brag on himself. He says, "I'm not interested in talking about me as if I had some inherent righteousness." At one point he even calls himself the chief of sinners (1Tim.1:5). He never got over the mercy and grace of God to forgive him and call him who at one time murdered and imprisoned Christians. I'm sure he laughed louder than Sarah upon hearing that he would be Christ's apostle.

Illustrations of Lives Motivated by Grace.

Let me mention two men who bore that same witness. I've referred to them before, but their witness is incredibly helpful and inspiring to hear again. In my seminary days, when Dr. John Stott came to preach in chapel, the student that introduced him went on and on about Dr. Stott's accomplishments. He spoke about Urbana, his church in London, his books, and his many awards. This introduction seemed to go on forever. When Dr. Stott finally got to speak, he thanked the student for honoring him. But he turned to us and he said, "If you could see me in my worst moments, not a chair in this room would be filled. Now, let's get on to talk about the grace of God to sinners like us."

When Dr. John White was doing his rotation as a medical doctor, he was required to do a rotation in a venereal disease clinic. On his first morning of work at the clinic he overslept. When he arrived, the doctors' entrance in the back was locked. So, he went around to the front and went in through the front like all the other patients. However, he didn't want to be identified as a venereal disease patient so he hurried up to the front of the line and gave the admitting nurse his name and said that he needed to get in. She said, "I'm sorry sir you'll have to get in the back of the line like everyone else." He said, "But, you don't understand; I'm a doctor!" She said to him, "I'm sorry sir this can happen to any of us. Now, you'll have to go to the back of the line like everyone else!" At that moment, he felt the pride in his heart. He didn't want to be identified with those "sinners". He was above that. And then he remembered Jesus standing in line, spotless, pure, sinless, perfect, holy, God with us...standing in line with sinners to be baptized by John the Baptist. Jesus was ready and eager to be identified with sinners like us. Jesus made no complaint. And, with that thought, his heart was melted by the grace and mercy of God who would stand in line with sinners like us and then take upon himself the sin we deserve so that we could live before God. Beloved, it's all of grace. This is what Paul is saying. Whatever we are... we are by the grace of God and that's all that is worth talking or bragging about...what Christ does.

The Slugger:

Debby and I get to watch a small friend of ours play little league baseball. He is so small it's difficult for pitchers his age to hit the strike zone. Rev. Kent Hughes tells this story of a little league slugger. It goes something like this. The Slugger: Have you ever seen a little league batter at plate who puts all sixty pounds into a ferocious swing and yet he barely connects with the ball. The ball barely scrapes the bottom of the bat, and crawls back to the pitcher. As The Slugger runs to first base, the pitcher gropes for it but fumbles the ball. However, because the batter is so slow there is still time to throw him out at first. So, he finally picks up the ball and throws it, but it's a mile high over the first baseman's head. Seeing his opportunity The Slugger makes his turn toward second. The right fielder who ran down the ball throws wildly to second, but the ball ends up sailing into left field. The Slugger is waved on to third puffing with a man sized grin and then, with the ball rolling into the parking lot beyond left field, he runs for home plate to be greeted wildly by his entire team and coaching staff, jumping up and down with high fives and knuckle bumps (gentle ones) congratulating The Slugger on his first home run hit.

This is what Paul is saying. "Look, I step up to the plate, barely tip the ball and somehow Jesus arranges for me to get to home plate". In Gal.6:14, he says, "May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." In Col.1:18, "Jesus is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy". Beloved, be a worshipper all day long. Offer everything you do, even the most mundane struggles and duties, to God in worship, He is worthy and you will be blessed if you do. It will give you enormous resources to prevail over the challenges you face.

May the miracle of grace humble us and at the same time fill us with great joy and hope. May his grace remind you that he doesn't love you because you are worthy. May his grace remind you that his love for you is a gift only to be received by grace. May his grace remind you that it doesn't stop with forgiveness but it also empowers us and enables us by his Spirit to live lives worthy of our calling and to make it to home base safely. Listen, no one can love you like Jesus. If you have not, believe in Jesus, trust in Him today. Worship Him and receive His grace today! .