Sharpen The Saw

Recap To God be the Glory

We continue with our sermon series on the early church. We have been looking at what it means to be a living sacrifice. We are almost done with our walk through Romans. After this one, we are going to move on to his second recorded letter to the Corinthians. What I love about the early church letters is that we can see the relationships forming across all these different churches.

We have been talking about the need for the folks with the stronger faith to support the believers with the weaker faith. There is the raging debate on what day of the week they should worship and what food was okay to eat. Essentially, Paul says that they might not think something is a big deal, but if one of the people with the weaker faith has a problem with it, it is better to stop doing anything that might cause them to have a lapse of faith. Rather than beat those folks down, Paul reminds them they are to edify one another and have nice speech toward one another. Last week we looked at the reason we do all of these things. The reason we make these concessions to help those out that don’t have as strong a faith is because it brings God glory. The church does not exist to serve itself nor does it exist to just occupy space. The church exists to glorify God. If they ever get to the point that they are more concerned about their comfort, that’s a problem, because they have taken their eyes off what is really important, serving God and making disciples.

We talked about how the church should be a welcoming environment, when everyone walks through the doors, they should feel welcomed. The world is lacking serious authenticity these days. The AI boom is causing all kinds of confusion. I read a staggering report earlier this week that said we are at the point where a teenager will have his or her first relationship with an AI chatbot rather than an actual human being. What people need are real relationships with real people, whether in physical proxy or over digital technology. It’s the relationships that are going to set the course for the church’s future. With church on demand a very real thing, people can tune in from wherever and hear a good sermon. I spend my week listening to some of my favorite theologians. With the sermonizing and other instruction pieces being neutralized by digital technology, real relationships are going to be the draw for people to join a Christian community. Just as Jesus welcomed, we should also welcome.

Throughout the Gospels we see where Jesus is quick to be welcoming regardless of how far away from God a person was. He hung out with the outcasts of society, the people that were written off by the rest of society. He preached love and not hate. Now, let’s not get confused. When He met with these people, He also warned them to turn away from their sin. He told them they needed to repent. But that is not how He first started that conversation off. Instead, it was one of welcoming and then after some semblance of a relationship or at least trust occurred, Jesus would give them the life saving advice to go and sin no more. I think one problem that we run into in modern days is that people will go to one extreme or another. The mentality is that Jesus died because of sin therefore, we must preach hatred toward people that are stuck in sin. Or there is another side that takes the mentality that Jesus hung out with sinners, therefore they can’t be too bad, so we will just say that sin is okay and God is quick to save. There is a problem with both. Again, Jesus never came at His ministry from a standpoint of stern correction and harsh words. Instead, He approached from a perspective of love and helpfulness. On the other side of the coin, while Jesus hung out with sinners, God takes sin so seriously that He was willing to crush His very own Son so that we could be forgiven. I know it sounds harsh, but that is straight out of the Bible. Isaiah 53:9–11 “He was assigned a grave with the wicked, but he was with a rich man at his death, because he had done no violence and had not spoken deceitfully. Yet the Lord was pleased to crush him severely. When you make him a guilt offering, he will see his seed, he will prolong his days, and by his hand, the Lord’s pleasure will be accomplished. After his anguish, he will see light and be satisfied. By his knowledge, my righteous servant will justify many, and he will carry their iniquities.”

All that to say our job as the church is not to change people and their behavior. Only Jesus can do that. Instead, we are supposed to be welcoming and loving. When someone comes to saving faith in Jesus, the discipleship piece starts. In the 80s and 90s, the church universal did a great job at evangelism, but lacked the discipleship piece. The church can do both. They can evangelize and make disciples.

Today we are going to look at Paul’s evangelism efforts in the Mediterranean. One thing to note about Paul is that this guy has the most amount of his letters included in the New Testament. He was also a great church planter. However, none of the churches he established exist anymore. Did that make him ineffective? Absolutely not!

If you have your Bibles, please turn them to Romans 15: 14-21

Romans 15:14–21 CSB

My brothers and sisters, I myself am convinced about you that you also are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, and able to instruct one another. Nevertheless, I have written to remind you more boldly on some points because of the grace given me by God to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles, serving as a priest of the gospel of God. God’s purpose is that the Gentiles may be an acceptable offering, sanctified by the Holy Spirit. Therefore I have reason to boast in Christ Jesus regarding what pertains to God. For I would not dare say anything except what Christ has accomplished through me by word and deed for the obedience of the Gentiles, by the power of miraculous signs and wonders, and by the power of God’s Spirit. As a result, I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum. My aim is to preach the gospel where Christ has not been named, so that I will not build on someone else’s foundation, but, as it is written, Those who were not told about him will see, and those who have not heard will understand.

Now we have Paul edifying the people reading the letter. He has given them some correction on how they are behaving, but now he is complementing them. However, we should not get confused here. Paul is not flattering them. However, he does have respect for this group of believers. They are doing the work, but there are issues that needed to be addressed. The fact is that there is always room for improvement. We will never be perfected until the day we draw our last breath and are joined with God Almighty. We know that Paul does not pull punches when it comes to correction. Remember at one point, he tells the Corinthian church that they are worldly and infants. However, Paul here points out three commendable things that the church in Rome is doing.

First of all, they are full of goodness. Goodness is a fruit of walking with the Spirit. Galatians 5:22 “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,”. These men and women are good people. What’s more is that they are believers in an incredibly immoral place. When we look at the current state of the United States, I think we can safely say that for the most part, it is amoral. We have shifted from objective truth where God defines what is good and we have moved to defining what is right through subjective means. Nowadays, what is right and moral is framed by what people want rather than through God’s standards of morality. These believers here in Rome were living in similar times. The emperor when Paul wrote this letter was Nero. That guy was a bad dude. He did all kinds of terrible things. Before him, there was Caligula. Caligula also lacked any semblance of morality. He started off with good intentions in mind, but before long, he was corrupted by his power. Sexual immorality was rampant in the empire at that point. Licentious living was encouraged. Yet here are these believers in Rome that are willing to live according to God’s instruction and His standards, not the world’s standards. They are given absolute freedom to do whatever they want and they choose to follow Christ. They choose the better way. There wasn’t a person in Rome that was going to look down on this group of believers for leaving the faith and living according to the pagan licentiousness of the day.

Are we living in similar times? I think so, but maybe not as much here in the Bible belt where cultural Christianity runs amok. In the other places we lived, it was understood that the majority of folks did not go to a church and there certainly was no guilt placed on anyone for not attending. I think in the Bible belt, there is a little difference there because some people feel a level of shame when they do not come to church. Certain things will prevent a person from coming and it is out of their control. I was talking earlier this week about the shift in American culture. One reason the church services are held when they are held is because America used to be an agrarian society. Sunday late morning was the best time for all the farmers and other workers in the field to meet up for worship. Today, there are many that get stuck working on a Sunday morning. That’s one of the reasons we stream the 11:00 AM service every week, so that those that cannot physically attend have an opportunity to plug in and at least see what is going on. However, there are those that just choose to forsake the assembly. Hebrews 10:24–25 “And let us consider one another in order to provoke love and good works, not neglecting to gather together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day approaching.” There is a difference between forsaking the assembly and not being able to attend. Outside of the cultural Christian areas, nobody on the outside of the church cares whether people go to church or not. That’s the kind of culture these believers in Rome were experiencing.

Paul also commends them saying that they are complete in knowledge. This is not Paul saying that “now that you have read this letter, you are in complete knowledge”. Instead, he is referring to their knowledge prior to his letter. That line might lead us to ask why Paul would be sending them a letter then. Well, it expounds their knowledge. As believers, we never stop learning. Before my mentor died, he looked at me and said, “Andy, by now you should know that seminary just gives you the basics on how to conduct proper research. You have to keep studying the word.” He was right, he still is right. He has written this to give them to enhance their understanding.

When I was stationed on the USS Mahan, our deployment consisted of us sitting off the coast of Mogadishu tracking terrorists. We were an independent deployer, so we had no other ships out there with us. It was just us. The way we tracked the bad guys was through a system called Scan Eagle, a drone system. This system was reliant on our Super High Frequency system. I had two trained SHF techs on board. We had all the technical data that the engineers had to provide us. Well, our first month out there off the coast, we lost SHF. My tech goes to look at it and according to the built in test system, the High Powered Amplifier had gone bad and we needed to replace it. This is a big piece of equipment, so we did not have a spare onboard. We put a casrep out and within about a week, we have one onboard. This system doesn’t just control the ability to watch the bad guys, but it is also how we communicate off the ship. It ran our internet, our phone lines, pretty much everything. We needed this system. We get the new HPA in, plug it in and it works for about a month, then it fails. So we order another one because that’s what all the technical data has to say about it. Get the new one in, plug it in and after two weeks, it dies. At this point things are getting rough. I am having meeting after meeting with the captain and XO. We are out here blind from an IT perspective, so it’s a matter of we must get this new part in. This was such a high value asset, the navy air dropped this last one into the drink, it was retrieved by the SEALS and brought onboard. Yeah, pretty crazy that we had to use SPECWAR to get this last part. We put the new one in and I looked at my tech Ronnie and said, “When we get the internet back up, I need you to get on the ET community page on facebook and see if there is anyone else having issues like we are.” Within a week, the system was dead again. Thankfully, Ronnie had done exactly what I told him to. He found there was one other ship in the fleet having this issue. The system said it was not the HPA that was causing the issue. Instead, it was a cable running between the HPA and the TWT. That’s what was killing the system.

Talk about an awkward conversation with the department head, XO, and CO. But after that awkwardness, we cannibalized the part off another ship that was not deployed and the system came right back up. In fact, we put our old HPA back in the system and it worked like a charm. Though we had all the knowledge of the system that was published at them time, it took us looking at information provided by someone going through the exact same problem we were. Here is the thing, the system had not changed at all. All of the technical specifications remained. My tech had been to every school, we talked to every subject matter expert on the system. However, there was one thing that none of us had considered. Thankfully, someone else was willing to give their expertise on the matter.

As believers, we should never assume that we get to the point that we have all knowledge of the Bible. That is one of the reasons I like to do the Bible in a year every single year. It is not just for everyone else, but for me, as well. The message of the Bible never changes, but as we read through the pages or on the screen, something new will hit us. I don’t know about you, but every time I read the Bible, there is always something new that pops out at me. The Bible is a living document. It is living because the very God that inspired the people to write it is still living. We can continue to sharpen the saw, honing our skills and increasing our knowledge about the LORD. The Christians in Rome have a lot of information and knowledge, Paul is simply helping them refine their understanding.

So Paul is simply expounding their knowledge.

Paul’s point is to remind them of their duties. If we are not careful, we can miss it. Paul explains that he is writing this because they are supposed to be carrying out the message of God to the Gentiles. Paul himself is out there doing the work of converting the Gentiles. They should be too. Paul cannot do it alone. Paul is underlining their very serious duty of bringing others to Christ. Before Jesus leaves the earth He gives the Great Commission to the apostles. Mark 16:15 “Then he said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.” In Matthew, there is a further command to go and make disciples. Basically, this is the entire point of Paul’s letter, so that they too will be encouraged to join Paul in the work of making disciples of the world. Paul saw this as his lifelong goal, to bring the message of Christ and His life saving atonement to the lost.

When Jesus confronts Paul on the road to Damascus, Paul is radically transformed. Paul was such a bad guy at this point that when he converts, the Christians are afraid of him and want nothing to do with him. Acts 9:15 “But the Lord said to him, “Go, for this man is my chosen instrument to take my name to Gentiles, kings, and Israelites.” Paul takes that seriously and devotes his life to ministering to the lost. Through his letter to the Roman church he is also encouraging them to have the same fervency for telling the lost about Jesus.

How are we doing with that? We are in an interesting spot. There are many in our community that believe they are Christians. This belief has nothing to do with their actual faith in Jesus. Instead, it is more of a cultural thing. I’ve mentioned before my tour guides in both Israel and Turkey, were only Jewish and Islam by culture, not by faith. Our identity in Jesus is not based on culture. Instead, it is based on the life transforming work He has done in our lives. We see Paul’s testimony here. He is a great man of faith, but notice how in the letter he puts the onus for his salvation on Jesus. Paul does not put any level of his salvation on himself. Instead, he knows that it is Jesus that saved him. When we see Paul do something great, like drive out a demon, or bring someone back to life after they fell to their deaths, Paul gives God the glory, he takes none of it for himself. Paul knows full well that his power and his strength does not come from God alone. So what does he do with that power, he uses it to serve and to bring the lost to him. That same power God gave Paul is the same power given to us. So what do we do with it? Do we go and seek the lost, or do we sit back and wait for someone else to do what God has called us to do?