Wisdom in a Fallen World

All right, well, this Sunday we come to the end of our series in Romans. And it has been such a fun journey, hasn't it? We've seen how Paul lays out for us a really rich theology. And then last week, we saw that Paul starts doing something different, right? He starts taking all that theology that he's been doing for over a dozen chapters, and now he turns it to the church and says, this is not just a theology that is supposed to be done up here in our heads, right? I talked about this a couple weeks ago.

Theology is not something that we just do in our heads. The whole reason Scripture lays out so much beautiful doctrine for us is because it's life transformative, right? The words that we read in Scripture, the gospel that Jesus proclaims, the gospel that we saw throughout the Old Testament, all of that is meant to shape us into a new people in the midst of a broken world, right? It transforms us. And as we read these Scriptures, God's grace pours into us, and it transforms us so that we can live what we read.

That is such a powerful teaching, and it's so often forgotten today. We tend to reduce the reading of Scripture to a merely academic exercise, like we do too often with our devotional reading. And it's so easy to fall into that, right, where we have a study Bible and we sit there and read the text and we try to understand the background and we try to get these theologians insights into the text. But so often the study Bibles that we'll pick up during our devotional time, they don't help us grasp how this word is supposed to be transformative, right? How it applies to our life, enters into us and shapes us into a very different people.

And today, Paul is taking us in that direction as he closes out this letter, by focusing in, as he did last week, on a very particular aspect of the Christian life, which is our life in community. That's why Paul spends almost the entirety of chapter 16 of his letter to the Romans saying "Hi" to people and saying, hey, so and so says hi to you. It seems so simple, right? It may seem kind of weird, but, you know, we're sitting here hearing this read and we're like: "Well, why did Pastor Eric choose to read a bunch of readings to us this morning?" Well, it's because this is the type of community that the Gospel should shape us into.

He's writing this back in Rome, right? Back at that time, they didn't have instant messaging or phones where they could pick up and say: "Hey, how are you today?" This is how they greeted one another, and this is how much they cared for one another. In the early church, they said "Hi!" to one another by taking the effort of writing letters.

When Paul wrote this letter and then sent it off, it took a long time for the stuff to travel from one place to the other. And then we see in a lot of Paul's letters, those letters traveled around to other churches. They went to an initial church, but then traveled from church to church to church. And in doing that, we see something.

They cared so much about each other that they were willing to take the time to think of everyone. They wanted to greet all the people who had meant so much to them as they encountered each other. We also see in the greetings that Paul shares here that these were people who spent a lot of time traveling. Paul had never even been to the Church of Rome. We see that at the beginning of the letter to the Romans, where Paul says: I long to come to you, but I have not yet been given a chance.

But he cared for them because he knew that this church in Rome - these were his brothers and sisters he was writing to.

And he cared for them so deeply. Well, this is part of what the gospel does in our lives and I think it's something that we need to hear today. Just a few weeks ago.

The Surgeon General of the United States on May 3 published for immediate release a notification based off of a study that was done that notes that there is an alarming uptick in what he calls the devastating impact of the epidemic of loneliness and isolation in the United States. People are feeling increasingly lonely and increasingly isolated from one another, and there are a lot of reasons for it that the Surgeon General lays out. I'm not going to list off all of them, but you can find it online if you want to read through the release. But it's quite concerning when we are hearing the Surgeon General say there's an epidemic of loneliness that is leading people to commit suicide or leading them deep into depression. And some of the causes he does lay out that I think are particularly problematic are technology.

Now I love technology. I use technology all the time. I love my phone. I love my computer. I love social media.

Technology offers us great ways to stay connected with people. I have people I met overseas, and then I'm able to stay connected with them because of social media. But when this becomes the primary way of interacting with the world around us, our world becomes reduced to a little what is it, like three by five and a half inch screen.

The people around us fade away. We're behind the screen of the computer - cut off from the rest of the world. And its devastating when we get that disconnected from people, because God built us to be in community. Remember at the beginning of this very long series that I put together, we were looking at Genesis, and we saw that God created Adam and Eve, and he created all of humanity to be in community. That is such an important truth for us to remember.

We are supposed to have close contact with one another. It actually glorifies God, when we live in fellowship with one another. Well, that's one of those things that this gift of techonology can get in the way of when we start interacting behind the screen. I told this yesterday. Katie, her dad, and I went out to a pub to grab a lunch and a beer. We're sitting there enjoying hanging out. And a family comes in with six kids, right?

So what happens? They all sit down and all the kids - pretty much all at once - pulled out a phone. One of them had a tablet. They didn't talk to each other. They spent their entire time in the restaurant like that.

That is not human. That is not what God created us for. He created us to be in community together, to live together and have conversation, to laugh together, to cry together. That is what God has created us for. And this hiding behind a screen is becoming a way of avoiding that. And that's terrible because we're actually harming ourselves.

We're living into a culture that is creating this pandemic of loneliness when we get that disconnected from one another. Now once again, don't get me wrong, this technology is awesome, and it's so good when it's used the right way. This can be used in a God glorifying way. And I don't want to come across as one of those preachers is just always saying, oh, that over there is bad. That over there is bad.

No, that is a type of neo-puritanical approach to things that does not actually glorify God. God wants us to be joyful and to use the things of this world wisely and in accordance with the wisdom we are given in the Spirit.

But there's also another problem, listed among the six things that Surgeon General highlights, and it's that we have cultivated a culture of disconnection, which is also interconnected with our use of technology. But it's also just like grounded in our being over focused on ourselves, right? That we forget that we are called to live for the sake of others.

That is part of the gospel message. We are called to live in a way that reaches out into the world to our family members, to our neighbors, to those we haven't even met yet. One of the things that I have seen in my own life as I went from being a non-Christian to being a Christian was feeling the Holy Spirit convict me of how important it is to just say hi and smile to people. There's so little of that today, right? The other day I was in the grocery store and the girl behind the cash register just trying to make small talk with a guy who's in front of me getting run up.

She was being really sweet, and the guy just completely ignored her.

How often do we go into the world and just ignore the people around us rather than joyfully saying, "hey!" It's so simple just chatting with someone in a friendly manner? But our culture has created such a disconnect in that way where we are so turned in on ourselves that we fail to recognize that we are called to cultivate community. That's actually part of what God wants be like as a people.

And we see Paul living that out for us so beautifully today. In this last chapter, he shares greetings, not just his own greetings, but his fellow pastor's greetings that he's at work with in this other place. He says: "Hey, so and so over here says hi to you. They want to say hi. They love you."

This is what the Gospel does. It transforms us into a people that is community oriented. And we desperately need this, right? It's so simple. Like I keep saying, God made us for community. He has made us for fellowship. But the problem is, sin breaks into our lives and it shatters that. It breaks that way in which we were made to live. And so we need to hear this. And we need God's grace to break into our lives and transform us so that we can live into what God created us to be. We're going to close out this year by turning to the Book of Revelation.

And one of the things we see in the Book of Revelation is that God talks about a new Jerusalem descending from the heavens. He talks about a city descending and what happens in cities, what happens in towns, what happens in communities. It's people who are brought together into one place to live together and have fellowship with one another. This is what God has told us he is going to do, and that is what his grace is already doing. He's already at work remaking this creation.

And that is what the church is right? It's God's kingdom outpost, where his grace is already at work showing the world this is what the kingdom will ultimately look like. He is essentially saying: "As I form the people by My grace, to look the way I desire them to be, to look like a community that cares for one another and glorifies me."

That is what Paul is doing here as well. He's showing us what God's grace does in shaping us into this kingdom that is breaking into this world.

And so when we break open the scripture, we're seeing all that happen as Paul shares all these greetings. But he does something that is kind of unusual here as well. Now, at the end of letters at this time when Paul was writing, it was quite common to include greetings. At the end of letters, people regularly said hi to so and so. What is kind of surprising in this letter is just how many greetings Paul does share.

That's what's kind of shocking. When scholars look at this, they're like, whoa, it's kind of unusual to have this many greetings in a letter. That's not normal back then. But Paul does something that's even more shocking. At verse 16, he says, greet with one another, with the holy kiss all the churches of Christ and greetings.

And then if we're following the historic trend of how letters would end, he would either start another set of greetings or he would just close out the letter at this point. But he then, in between greetings, drops a warning. And this is kind of interesting. Like I said, this just didn't happen in letter writing at this time. And he says, "I urge you, brothers and sisters, to watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned."

He offers a warning. And he says that these Christians are to avoid what is "contrary to the teaching you have learned." But he also highlights something else in there, right. He says, "Watch out for those who cause divisions." And it's that connected with "the teaching you have learned" that we should really take note of people, because what Paul is saying is that this teaching you have learned is about the kingdom of God, the kingdom which is a community.

And when he talks about these divisions that are seeking to break into the life of the church at Rome, he is saying that that is what this heresy is doing. It's seeking to cause fractures, to tear apart the community that God has so powerfully brought together by his grace. We saw last week that as Paul is writing to the Romans, what he's doing is he's talking to Jews and Gentiles, two people, groups who were never thought you would possibly find them in the same room. Right. Remember I forget how many weeks ago it was, but we looked at the Old Testament and the temple worship, and I think it was yeah, it was during my sermon titled Atonement.

And there we saw that, yes, the Gentiles were allowed - kind of - into the temple, right? But they actually had a section in the temple where you just would walk into entryway before you even got into the temple. It was part of the temple, but not really. And it was called the Court of the Gentiles. And they had a little space where the Gentiles were shoveled into, and that's the only place they could go. Even if this was the Gentile who had said, yes, I accept the God of the Jews as the one true God, the one God who can truly save humanity.

The Jews never were expecting that those Gentiles could actually fully participate in the life of God's kingdom. And then Jesus happens, right? And he breaks down the dividing wall. He quite literally breaks down the dividing wall. What do we find in John's gospel?

I think it's John's Gospel, if I'm remembering correctly, where, like, Jesus is on the cross and he dies. And what happens when he dies? The curtain is torn, and people, all people can see right into the very inner holy of holies that only the High priest could go into once a year. And now, all people could look into that holy of holies.

That is the surprise of what God's grace does. It draws all people into one community. That's awesome. Such an awesome truth. That is what God's grace is doing.

And Paul now issues a warning. Because of this work that God has done to bring all the peoples of the world into one community, he says don't give into teaching, which will divide the kingdom that God has made. Don't give into teaching. And when he's saying this, he means false teaching. It's not just any teaching, because there are times that Paul quite clearly says in some of his letters where divisions need to be made because false teaching is causing issues.

Right. He doesn't say, hey, just let anything happen for the sake of maintaining unity. It's unity around the truth of who Jesus is and what he has done.

That is what unites all peoples and all peoples are called into God's gracious, life giving kingdom. And Paul issues a warning, and it says, don't let untruth come in and divide from one another. Because this community that God has made you into is precious. It's too precious to not live into it. Because if we let divisions come in and tear us apart from one another, we are actually failing to recognize the full scope of what God's kingdom is about.

That that is what Paul wants us to see as he closes out his letter. That's the final word of wisdom that Paul gives us. In the midst of a world that's full of isolation, full of loneliness, full of divisions, Paul says God is creating a new community, a community where you will never be lonely, a community where you will never have to worry that you're on the outskirts, right? Because God's grace is transformative.

We need to take that to heart. And finally he closes out with what theologians call doxology, which is very simply fancy term for to glorify God. It's a glorifying word. If you translate that, it's two Greek words, doxo, meaning to glorify, and logi grounded in logos, glorifing word. It means to glorify God.

And what does he do there? He's trying to show that this community that God has formed us into, as we live into it, as we listen to God's grace, as we love one another and share this life of community that itself is already a form of giving glory to God.

That is so beautiful. What we're doing here glorifies God. What we did on Friday night when we gathered around the bonfire, that glorified God because we were rejoicing in one another's company, we were living into what it means to be God's people, the new Jerusalem, the new Israel. When we have gone to a hockey game together, when we have gone to a baseball game together as community, we're glorifying God. We don't even need to say the word God while we're doing it.

We're glorifying god right. Because we're living into what God has created us to be.

So, brothers and sisters, I encourage you to live into this beautiful truth. Let us live into that community that God is forming us into.

I'm going to come up here and grab my notes because I found while I was studying for the sermon, a study that was done, I think this was over in Australia, and in the study they asked people, oh, no, this was not in Australia. This was in Houston, Texas, right here in the United States. I read something else down Australia, but I didn't include in the sermon. But the survey points out that they did this study and they were trying to find out what motivated people to choose the particular church that they chose to go to and they got some surprising answers. 12% chose their church because of prior denominational affiliation.

Like they knew this denomination and they were just like, if we like this denomination, we're going to go there. 12% of people chose for that reason. 8% chose on the basis of the architectural beauty of the building. Interesting. 3% because of the person in the pulpit.

It's actually comforting that only 3% of people chose a church because of who the preacher was. Whew!

18% because of convenience of the location. 21% because of people in the congregation whom they respected. But here is where the shocking number comes in. They write a whopping 37% were influenced by the fact that friends and neighbors took an interest in them and invited them. 37%!

That is what Paul is pointing out to the day. He took an interest in people and that people he knew took an interest in people. They cared about this community. They wanted others to know Jesus, but they also wanted everyone to know in this community that Jesus had formed them into. It was the intimacy of their life together as their paths crossed and they stayed connected.

They took an interest in one another because of what God's grace had done in their hearts.

May God form us ever more deeply into that type of community. That is the type of community that we find written about all through Scripture. It's God's grace forming us in love for one another. That is a huge part of what God's grace does.

Well, that is what the Scripture has to say to us today. Could you pray with me?